Immersive Ecology: March 2009

source: Praxis (landscape), page 13, Charles Waldheim

Describing landscape urbanism Waldheim writes,

"Rather, contemporary landscape urbanism recommends the use of infrastructural systems and the public landscapes they engender as the very ordering mechanisms of the urban field itself, capable of shaping and shifting the organization of urban settlement rather than offering predictable images of pastoral perfection."

Discussing nineteenth-century "landscape urbanism" Waldeim cites Olmsted's Central Park commisioned for New York city in 1857 as well as his Back Bay Fens in Boston which began construction in 1882.

Stan Allen, Praxis (landscape), page 12

"Increasingly, landscape is emerging as a model for urbanism. Landscape has traditionally been defined as the art of organizing horizontal surfaces....By paying close attention to these surface conditions-not only configuration, but also materiality and performance -designers can activate space and produce urban effects without the weighty apparatus of traditional space making."

Rem Koolhass, Discussing OMA's La Villette Submission, Praxis (landscape), page 14

"....it is safe to predict that during the life of the park, the program will undergo constant change and adjustment . The more the park works, the more it will be in a perpetual state of revision.... The underlying principle of programmatic indeterminacy as a basis of the formal concept allows any shift, modification, replacement, or substitutions to occur without damaging the initial hypothesis."

source: U.S. News
"Obama Assembling $850 Billion Infrastructure Spending Plan to Jolt Economy"

First, it is obvious that our infrastructures including the physical manifestations of the necessary networks and machines for our living are embedded within the landscape under question. Thinking optimistically we can hope that future investment in infrastructure will truly result in an investment in ecological landscapes. How does infrastructure relate, interact, adapt, and perform within the landscape or become part of the landscape.

Discussing the future of the landscape profession and landscape designs position within our current environments Richard Weller writes,
source: Praxis (landscape), page 15, Richard Weller
"Postmodern landscape architecture has done a boom trade in cleaning up after modern infrastructure as societies-in the first world at least-shift form primary industry to post-industrial, information societies. In common landscape practice, work is more often than not conducted in the shadow of the infrastructural object, which is given priority over the field into which it is to be inserted. However, as any landscape architect knows, the landscape itself is a medium through which all ecological transactions must pass, it is the infrastructure of the future."
reference projects:
Peter Latz's-Duisburg Nord Steelworks Park
Richard Haag's- Gas Works Park in Seattle

Landscape
Thinking about the landscape generally it is apparent that trees or the tree is an important character in the overall topography and survival of the ecological landscape. Simply, trees convert carbon dioxide and water into oxygen utilizing the sun's energy in a process we call photosynthesis. Key to the geometric origin of the tree is the tree's need for sunlight. Tree's have evolved into erect-expansive-complexity from a basic need to harness as much sunlight as possible for the conversion of carbon dioxide and water. Looking at the landscape and generalizing we observe that the tree is a unique protrusion from the landscape-vastly altering topography and in some cases of geography signifying a healthy landscape.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Landscape Urbanism

Thoughts..........

immersive [ecology] Research Matrix

Philip Beesly - Erratics Net

Philip Beesly

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