Bloom: Healthy Spaces is a survey and a provocation. This important exhibition questions whether or not we have enough spaces in Australia that promote healthy lifestyles and explores the design thinking behind exemplar projects.
More than 110 guests, including landscape architects from across Australia, gathered at Canberra’s Gallery of Australian Design on Tuesday 8 May for the official opening of this timely exhibition.
Produced in partnership with the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, Bloom: Healthy Spaces explores the effect our built environment has on public health. Twenty-six Australian landscape architecture projects were on show, with each project grouped into one of the six themes of Play, Heal, Learn, Work, Live and Travel. The projects included encouraging examples of playgrounds, hospitals, detention centres, parks and schools found within different types of communities – urban, regional and rural.
Issue 134 of Landscape Architecture Australia, published in parallel with the Bloom exhibition, includes essays and case studies on the topic of healthy spaces.
At the launch, exhibition curator and landscape architect Gweneth Leigh spoke of the importance of designing spaces that promote healthy lifestyles. “Globally, the number of obese people in the world now outweighs the number of malnourished. Australia is following this trend, where three out of every five adults is either overweight or obese. And growing in partnership with our waistlines are associated medical problems like diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and asthma.”
“This exhibition is about looking at our world from a landscape perspective – where we live, where we work, how we travel – and assess how the design of these everyday spaces positively or negatively impacts our health,” said Leigh.
Leigh also invited year five and six students from several Canberra primary schools to draw healthy and unhealthy spaces. A sample of these drawings was exhibited at Bloom, with healthy spaces depicted as parklands and playgrounds where kids play.
Dr Anthony Capon, head of public health at the Faculty of Heath in the University of Canberra, officially opened the event and was the featured speaker. His speech drew on his background as a public health physician with particular knowledge in health promotion and environmental health, as well as his research into urban health and sustainability.
Bloom: Healthy Spaces is exhibiting at the Gallery of Australian Design, Canberra from 8 May to 9 June 2012.
Issue 134 of Landscape Architecture Australia has been published in parallel with the exhibition. It includes a full list of featured projects, as well as six project reviews – one selected from each of the themes – and essays from public health experts. Order print and digital issues by visiting architecturemedia.com/secure.
