SESSION 5: Recovering Landscapes

LOOKING BACK AT LANDSCAPE URBANISM: SPECULATIONS ON SITE
By: Julia Czerniak

PREMISE:
To think about landscape is to think about site – To think site is to think landscape.

The full potential of site in landscape is often overlooked. Its specified organisational systems, performative agendas, formal language, material palettes, signifying content - to generate landscape design work.

Reasons - equating sites with building lots, bound by legal demarcations ad property owenership, instead of large complex landscapes, relational network of artefacts, organisation and processes that operate at multiple spatial and temporal scales - neighbourhood, city, region of which the site is a part.

Potential - by drawing from an expanded field of information, impact can be on a larger area - eg. Cleaning storm water before it is released into a watershed - making ecological sense.

Landscape Urbanism – understood here as conceptualisation of and design and planning for urban landscapes that draws from an understanding of landscapes disciplinarity – history of ideas, functions – ecologies and economies, formal and spatial attributes – natural and cultural organisations, systems and formations, and processes – temporality which impact many scales of work. It also suggests a particular culture of and consciousness of the land that refrains from the superficial reference of sustainability, ecology, and the complex processes of our environments in favour of projects that actually engage them. There is a concern of not only how the landscape performs but also of how it appears.

Reference Projects:
1. OMA/ Bruce Mau – Tree City
2. Hargreaves & Assoc. – Guadelupe River Park, Byxbee Park
3. Peter Eisenman/ Laurie Olin – Rebstockpark Masterplan, Frankfurt

Urban Highways and the Reluctant Public Realm - Jacqueline Tatom

TATOM, Jacqueline, ‘Urban Highways and the Reluctant Public Realm’, in Charles Waldheim (ed.) The Landscape Urbanism Reader; New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 2006, pp. 179-195

The realization of limited-access divided highways in the second half of the twentieth century points to many of landscape urbanism’s ambitions, to consider environmental and infrastructural systems as primary ordering devices. Critics on the limited-access divided highways emphasized the urban malaise and impending ecological disaster. The design of urban highways today to provide efficient automobile circulation in cities might be considered an urbanistic opportunity rather than a planning liability. For this to happen, the design of highways needs to be theorized and situated historically within professional design practice.

A critical reconsideration of the Parisian boulevards, the Boston parkways, New York’s Henry Hudson Parkway, and the Barcelona Cinturón yields a set of possibilities for urban highway design and confirms the theoretical robustness of the topic. The following projects constitute, programmatically and morphologically, a complete urbanism that produces new landscapes that are a hybrid of natural and man-made systems.
1. The boulevards of Paris (19th century)
Baron Haussman was the first to formulate a metropolitan-scale response to the function of a main road and to recognize the opportunity it provided to “modernize” Paris. The boulevard system was the master element of an urban renovation that included the provision of water, sewers, parks, and housing, as well as cultural and administrative facilities. Haussman’s new interventions created new networks of boulevards, parks, place and monuments as if they were etched into the solid figure of the city. This is still the case today, as the different morphologies continue to support different uses and rituals. The programmatic breadth of this new urban form, in plan and section, supports the social breadth of experience.
2. Boston’s Emerald necklace
The Necklace’s configuration is determined by site conditions. The Fenway, the first of the “jewels” of the Necklace, was created to manage the tidal reflux of the Charles River into the Muddy River in Boston’s Back Bay. The topographical and hydrological reconfiguration of what had become a wasted swamp provided the opportunity to create parks and parkways that served circulation and recreational needs. In this way the system is both local and metropolitan in its impact.
3. New York’s Henry Hudson Parkway (1938)
Multiple agendas of the original Westchester parkways to upgrade transportation, to sanitize creeks and rivers, and to create parks and cultural and recreational amenities while improving residential development. The striking topography facilitated and inspired the rich association of parkways, railroads, recreation areas, cultural institutions, playgrounds, and residences within a section that reached from the bluff to the water’s edge.
4. Barcelona’s Cinturón (1990s)
This project had to improve the quality of life in one of Europe’s densest cities and it had to position the city as a European player with global economic reach. Besides the plan had to improve public and private transportation and it had to provide greatly needed public amenities. It is located opportunistically to take advantage of marginal sites that remained undeveloped. The central four-lane throughway is depressed, while access roads remain at the surface to distribute entering and exiting vehicles at speeds slow enough to constitute a viable street front for the residential and commercial buildings along its length. Leftover land was subdivided into parcels. In some locations the access road is cantilevered over the depressed section, further reducing the width and noise and facilitating ventilation. The interchanges accommodate programs such as intermodal stations, parking, parks, and recreational facilities.
Local circulation, public transportation, pedestrian strolling, and high-speed traffic are accommodated by the sectional integration of a classic boulevard, a raised promenade deck above parking, a depressed and partly decked throughway, and a waterfront esplanade.

The discussion above reveals that the mobilization of public and private resources, political will, bureaucratic structure, and professional vision for modernization, justified variably for “scientific” reasons of sanitation and efficient circulation, or for boosterism in the form of civic identity, can provide the opportunity for a new road morphologies in the historic city constitutes a complete urbanism that allows for the full expression of everyday urban life.
The section ensures that the pedestrian and the automobile driver receive equal consideration while maximizing the use of public resources. In addition, it re-establishes a morphological continuity of the urban fabric that rapidly overcomes the social and physical disruptions.
These exceptional realizations were all undertaken in dense, well-established historic cities. They nonetheless remain relevant for the far less dense or the new twentieth-century American cities.

SESSION 4: INFRASTRUCTURAL URBANISM_____STAN ALLAN

Stan Allen starts this text by giving three images spanning across the 20th century and explains how the shift from technologies of production to technologies of reproduction and display to mega infrastructure projects and how does the infrastructure incorporates in the discipline of architecture.
Image 1 – bow of and aircraft carrier, which stands for a moment in which technical and the aesthetic formed a unified whole, representing the instrumentality of advanced engineering design and organization of the forces of production.
Image 2 – the linear Andrea Doria(warship), recalling a iconic status of the liner in the theory of modern architecture depicting a modernist project in the postwar era.
Image 3 – B 24 bomber factory assembly line, showing the modernist dream of rational production under the pressures of wartime economy. This factory floor is the ideal space of early modernism, then the museum is the emblematic space of postmodernity.
These images mark a shift from models of formal organization and meaning that work with transparency and depth, to a condition of shallow surfaces, in which meaning resides in graphic information lying on the surface. More than the historical reference it is the presence of this semiotic structuralist model that identifies postmodernism in architecture. But once architecture’s signifying capacity has been opened up, no limit could be placed on significant content. One effect from this shift towards images and signs is that architecture’s disciplinary frame shifts and finds itself in competition with other discursive media-painting, film, literature a field in which architecture often seems to come up short. Architecture’s relationship to its material is however indirect. Unlike activities such as gardening or woodworking where something concrete is made by direct contact with material. In the united states the public investment in civic works is all time low and architects cannot be logically be held accountable for these complex political and economical shifts, it might be argued that by the production of theoretical framework to justify an architecture of surface and sign, architects have, consciously or not, participated in their own marginalization.
The author then argues that even if architects have been excluded from the development of the city(giving example of Foucault) he then says how architecture as a field has to do more than only aesthetic to go beyond deciding guidelines. Architects have themselves retreated from the questions of function, implementation, technique, finance, and material practice. While architects are relatively powerless to provoke the changes necessary to generate renewed investment in infrastructure they can begin to redirect their own imaginative and technical efforts towards a question of infrastructure. Infrastructural urbanism offers a new model of practice and a renewed sense of arcitecture’s potential to structure the future potential of the city. Michel Foucault says “architects are not the engineers or technicians of the three great variables: territory, communication, speed”. As an assessment of the current situation it should be pointed out that historically this has not been the case. Territory, communication, and speed are properly infrastructural problems, and architecture as a discipline has developed specific technical means to deal effectively with these variables. Mapping, projection, calculation, notation, and visualization are among architecture’s traditional tools for operating at a very large scale. Architecture is uniquely capable of structuring the city in ways not available to practices such as literature, film, politics, installation arts, or advertising. Complimenting it the author quotes Walter Benjamin, “construction fulfills the role of the unconscious” meaning that the capacity of certain structures to act as scaffold for a complex series of events not anticipated by the architect.


SEVEN PROPOSITIONS –
1.Infrastructure prepares the ground for future building and creates the conditions for future events.
2.Infrastructure work with time and open to change.
3.Infrastructure give direction to future work in the city not by giving rules and conduct but by fixing points of service, access and structure(bottom up approach).
4.Infrastructure accommodates design also with existing conditions while maintaining functional continuity its default condition is regularity.
5.Infrastructure organizes and manages complex systems of flow, movement and exchange.
6.Infrastructure systems work like artificial ecologies managing flows of energy, resources on site directing density and distribution of a habitat.
7.Infrastructure allow detailed design of typical elements or repetitive structures facilitating and architectural approach to urbanism.

Landscape and Principles in: Landscape Ecology

Forman, R., Godron, M., Landscape and Principles in: Landscape Ecology, New York, 1986, John Wiley and Sons. by BART PLUYM

The text in question is actually the introduction of a book on landscape ecology. It can be read as a synthesis and guideline for the rest of the book, focussing mainly on :
the conceptual framework of landscape ecology;
putting forward a number of principles concerning landscape structure, landscape function and landscape change
the description of the state of the art of landscape ecology, by relating it to other disciplines and by putting it in an international perspective.

The first two parts of the chapter are dedicated to delineating the concept of landscape that is used by landscape ecologists. Given the fact that perspectives on landscape are diverse and multiple, a selective reading is given of the meaning of landscape in a few areas. Several aspects of the artist's approach are relevant for the understanding of landscape ecology: the diversity of landscapes that is presented in landscape paintings, the field of view that is generally similar to what the eye can perceive and the fact that the subject of landscape paintings normally include human and non-human elements. Landscape ecology though is only about the land and not about the water. The meaning of landscape in landscape ecology to a certain extend also has an affinity with the way the word is used by historians to indicate relatively extensive land areas where battles took place or where food was grown, settlements were built, .... But the concept of landscape that is used in landscape ecology finds its main source of inspiration in geography and ecology. Geography uses a concept of landscape that essentially focusses on the dynamic relation between natural landforms and human cultural groups. Landscape ecology distances is itself also in this sense from ecology: whereas ecology over the last few decades has focused on the relationships between plants, animals, water, ... within relatively homogeneous spatial units, landscape ecology focusses on the relationship between spatial units.

So what then makes a landscape from an ecological perspective? According to the authors five characteristics can be discerned across ecological landscapes: (1) a cluster of (visibly discernible) ecosystem types, (2) the 'flows' among the ecosystems of a cluster, (3) the geomorphology and climate, (4) a set of disturbance regimes1 and (5) a certain variation in the number of ecosystems within a cluster. These observations form the heart of the ecological landscape concept, an ecological landscape being defined by the authors as “a heterogeneous land area composed of a cluster of interacting ecosystems that is repeated in similar form throughout. Landscapes vary in size down to a few kilometers in diameter.” Three characteristics of the landscape form the focus of landscape ecology: (1) the structure of the landscape or the spatial relations among the distinctive elements, (2) the way the landscape functions or the interactions among the spatial elements and (3) landscape change or the alteration in the structure and function of the ecological mosaic over time. Landscape ecology studies both the principles concerning these characteristics of landscapes, but also the way they can be used in the formulation and solving of problems.

In the third part of the text the authors conceptualise a number of landscape elements, give a very brief summary of the different chapters in the book and formulate seven statements as principles regarding landscapes that together form an emerging theory of landscape ecology. According to this summary a large part of the book is about the fundamental structure of landscapes: all landscapes, despite their extreme diversity, are entirely made up by a number of patches, corridors or strips and a background matrix. The degree of contrast and the level and type of heterogeneity are also key characteristics of the landscape structure. The book also gives a lot of attention to the changing of landscapes according to natural and human influences and to the functioning of landscapes by looking at the flows of energy, materials and species between landscape elements. In the final two chapters some concepts for landscape applications are introduced.

The seven statements or principles are difficult to summarize without entirely copying what is already written. These principles can be interpreted as a “laws” concerning the structure, the functioning and the changing of landscapes. They bring forward – physical – relations between such things as the heterogeneity of a landscape and the abundance of rare interior species, the flows of energy and biomass across boundaries and the heterogeneity of a landscape, ...
The final part of the text is an overview of forefathers, forerunners and contemporary authors of landscape ecology. They are to be found in geography and ecology, but also in other related disciplines. It ends with a short reading of the state of the art from an international perspective.

1That is the intensity and frequency with which certain types of events cause significant change in the normal pattern of the ecological system.