London’s Natural History

London’s Natural History
22–28 October 2017

London has never accepted master planning and does not accept concepts of any kind. It is disordered, mercantile, opportunistic, at times vulgar but always with an eye for a refined detail. Whether in architecture or in fashion or even in landscapes, unruliness is the natural setting for supremely elegant sequences grafted into the clumsy and the unkempt so easily that a natural order must be hiding in plain sight. London’s tolerance and accommodating character, just like its citizens, is bound together by a perpetual natural history; parks, gardens and river that weave throughout London’s natural history joining humans and architecture to trees, grasses, flowers, birds, insects, clay and gravel, the past to the present, growth to decay, the visible to the unseen.

Walking from the inland west to the maritime east, we shall go in search of London, which despite its best efforts to avoid the singular in favour of the plural, has one body and one heart that can be found in every brick and every blade of grass however carefully or careless arranged.

London, 22–28 October 2017
max. 750CHF min. 12; max 21 students