How can design be used to challenge the status quo, to interrupt the jargon, to disrupt and redirect ecological and socio-economic flows? LA+ Journal’s fourth international design ideas competition invited designers to take an established place and design something to productively interrupt both its cultural and spatial context. What does this mean? It means injecting something different into a given context to effect new meanings and new functions. It means questioning what design does, who it’s designed for, what it looks like, and what it means.

Issue #17 brings you the results of the LA+ Interruption design competition. As well as showcasing the award-winning designs and a comprehensive Salon des Refusés, LA+ Interruption features interviews with jurors Fiona Raby, Martin Rein-Cano, Mark Raggatt, Rania Ghosn, and Jason Zhisen Ho, and an essay by Katya Crawford, coauthor of the The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture (forthcoming).  

Tatum Hands is Editor in Chief of LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture produced at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. From 2003 to 2013, she was director of a project consultancy specialising in parliamentary reporting on legislative, policy, and institutional evaluation and reform. She was co-editor of a national law journal for 13 years and has worked as a freelance publications editor and as a forensic editor for state and federal courts. Dr. Hands has also held positions as executive officer of the Law Reform Commission (WA) and as judicial associate to the chief justice of Australia. She has published widely in the areas of law and political theory.
Richard Weller is the Meyerson Chair of Urbanism, professor and chair of landscape architecture, and co-executive director of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania. He is former co-director of Room 4.1.3—a design firm acknowledged with a Penn Press monograph (2005) and noted for critical design projects such as the National Museum of Australia. Weller sits on the board of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) in Washington, is a member of the International Federation of Landscape Architect’s (IFLA) Advisory Circle and is the Creative Director of the interdisciplinary journal of landscape architecture LA+.