Blake is a Canadian landscape architect with a background in geography, landscape and urban design and research. He is inspired by the role that design has in addressing global challenges of climate change, social justice and environmental sustainability.
Landscape architect
Blake Allen
Background
Blake Allen (1991) studied Landscape Architecture (MSc) at the Academy of Architecture Amsterdam and graduated with his project 'Coastal Accretion'. His graduation project focused on Sea Level Rise in Metro Vancouver, Canada and explored the importance of culture and existing natural systems in building resilience for the future. For the past five years, he worked for Gemeente Amsterdam on a diversity of projects, from public space visions and design to climate adaptation and ecology strategies. Prior to living in the Netherlands, he studied a Bachelor of Human Geography at the University of British Columbia.
Focus
Blake has several intertwined areas of interest and focus as a landscape architect that include cultural resilience, interconnected systems and the artistic side of the practice. Cultural and social issues are at the center of many climate challenges, and so he believes that resilience is made through addressing the ways that people experience, inhabit, engage with, and relate to their environments. The environment is also an interconnected system that is connected to all natural processes, conditions and living and non-living beings. Designing within these contexts, using the existing natural landscape as inspiration, as well as designing from different perspectives, he believes allows to reimagine relationships between things. Blake has applied these themes to his work in both urban contexts such as public space design, climate adaptation and urban development projects; as well as on large-scale landscape projects that address the major climate challenges of the future.