Global Theory, Local Practice____Richard Weller

Richard Weller talks about the way landscape urbanism is seen in practice and the way its seen in the academic perspective by giving examples of the eponymous course in Architectural Association in London 2003. he starts his explanation with the term ‘ism’ associated with J Corner who says “just when the arts have pretty much given up on them, landscape architecture offers its ‘ism’ to the world. and it would be too late to complain that landscape architecture-already weakened by fault lines between landscape planning, landscape design and landscape ecology-shouldn’t subdivide any further. such a complaint only misses the crucial point that landscape urbanism has emerged and positions itself so as to bind together these branches of the broad landscape architecture. he attempts to see at the students projects and see how they try to answer this critical discourse of landscape urbanism, with the help of the landscape urbanism mantra by the Ciro Najle ‘…..it stimulates environmental, social and economic processes in abstract systems of relationships, attempting a shift from teleological programming to open programming. landscape urbanism is holistic and therefore interdisciplinary. he sees the mantra by Ciro full of portent and he is not sure of what is been said and also mentions that J Corner also falls prey to this. whereas most of the writing on landscape urbanism seemed to get carried away on the Koolhaasian tide which concisely fix its coordinates by listing some of its defining characteristics.

he mentions few points that landscape urbanism claims and rejects to-

landscape urbanism claims to-

1. align itself with contemporary scientific paradigms.
2. emphasizes the creative and time-developmental agency of ecology.
3. include within the purview of design all that is in the landscape-infrasturctural and buildings etc. bridging between the landscape design, ecology and planning.
4. experiment creatively with computer driven methods of mapping social and ecological forces.
5. aim for structural efficiency and instrumentality by design and apprehend both site and program as creative subjects.
6. foreground landscape as the ultimate system as a template for urbanism.

landscape urbanism rejects to-

1. the garden(paradise) replacing it with the city.
2. the landscape as urbanism’s as a repressed gendered and passive layer.
3. a puritanical nature that needs to be reinstated between nature and culture.
4. designing towards fixed and final objects or aesthetic intuitions regarding formal compositions.
5. style, image, scene, and symbolism as dominant aspects of design.
6. neo-conservative new urbanism on the one hand and avant garde originally on the other.
7. architectural and landscape architectural design as the production of isolated objects.
8. modernist planning and its pretence to control and contemporary planning which is devoid of the creative processes common to design processes.

in the end he talks about the key principles in a set of ambitious projects-

1. Metropolis 2050

the first project by Jon Everett is a strategy for the densification of the CBDand related environs of the Perth by avoiding further sprawls and accepting that increased wealth means increased desire for access to premiere landscape amenity. his method is datascaping unlike the Koolhaasian idea of mapping and proving that he worked with facts and aesthetics of the place.

2. Sandwalls

Perth has already sprawled too far and destroyed too much pristine bushland in middle of what is classified as one of the world’s few biodiversity hotspots. this was made possible by initially deciding to relocate the working port of Fremantile, recreated dune systems then fill up against these walls and the industrial relics form the past are allowed to be pushed through the present.

3. Park

this final project is not concerned with urbanism but its scale and time-developmental method align it with landscape urbanist principles and techniques.