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
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I think the re-thinking of the relationship of landscape design to infrastructural networks is one of the most fascinating things going in urban design. There has always been a strong tension between the Utopian urban theories that exclude automobiles (infrastructure) altogether (Louis Kahn) and the practical, albeit not innovating, ideas that take contemporary infrastructure as a given (Edmund Bacon). The clash between Bacon and Kahn over planning in Philadelphia is a prefect illustration of this split. The theory and projects about a new relationship between landscapes and infrastructure could be a way to resolve this "clash" between the ideal way a city could exist and how it exists now. I think it is clear that the over-arching, early modernist, Utopian ideas about new cities (Corbusier, Wright, and all those guys) don't hold up because of their sheer audacity. In thinking about emergent intelligence and the city, there are clear implications that we are just parts of a complex organism that works from the ground up. Some of the projects you listed are good examples of re-claiming pieces of the city and re-urbanizing them.
ReplyDeleteMy thoughts, recently, have focused on how it is possible to urbanize landscapes so that passing though space (as a pedestrian) is an event just as passing through architecture or the city is an event. Specifically, how architecture can be more fluidly connected with landscape, because of viewing landscapes (sites) as malleable. They can move vertically - be pulled up and pushed down - to flex with the surrounding urban environment.
I think how we pass through spaces and understand them lends itself to the techniques used in the composition of film (long takes, montage, etc.) I have no idea how all of this thought could be pulled together for a project though.
I have a few examples of landscape projects that are similar that I used last semester that i can post tomorrow along with quotations, thoughts and directions on the film research.