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.

Grid, Casco, Clearing and Montage
Marcel Smets


The end of the old antagonism between country and city has distorted the distinction between landscape, urbanism and architecture. The gradual merging of town and countryside into urbanized territories has also weakened the boundaries between the traditional disciplines, causing them to share a common frame of reference.
The strategies developed to plan these 'urbanized' territories are generally based on empty space. They are clearly embedded in the landscape tradition.
Issues such us: footloose economy based on an omnipresent network of communications and withdrawal of public authority reinforce the idea that investments follow their own logic and the construction of the city becomes all the more dependent on the fluctuations of the real-state market. This situation contributes no to have a real and visible relationship to their physical environment. Due to the isolation within the individual building requirement, the space 'in between' the pockets of development becomes all the more relevant as the site for a potential strategy to build coherence. It provides a way to address the intermediate terrain.


The aim of these paper if the show the way contemporary urban design addresses issues of 'uncertainly', and how to integrate this inevitable condition of 'uncertainty' in the construction of today environment.


To begin, urbanism requires a clear concept of spatial configuration.
There are four Design approaches to uncertainty that are based on spatial concepts:


The grid, can be either a pre-establish form, or a neutral base that is shaped by the architecture. In today's more sophisticated applications, such as the Seine Rive-Gauche development in Paris or the transformation of Poble Nou in Barcelona, the grid is used primarily as a device to attain flexibility. They investigate to what extent its constituent blocks can be disrupted while maintaining the basic character of the overall street plan as an ordering device. They want to establish a coherent and recognizable urban layout that, nevertheless, does not impede future opportunities.


The casco, unlike the grid, which is mostly superimposed on the landscape, the ‘casco’ or hull, is derived from it. It is based on local geological and hydrological conditions. As such, it can be consired the ideal natural frame that adapts to site conditions.
If the basic pattern –of land distribution, plot division, natural vegetation suited to the soil conditions – are maintained, they will also prevail in whatever migh be constructed in the ‘casco’gap. In essence, the device aims to establish order on a large scale for ‘higher’ nature as fundamental to landscape formation so as to allow flexibility for ‘lower’ nature on a smaller scale. (the vision of incremental growth is based on the gradual transformation of a conventional agricultural landscape: the field will change with the alternating crops, but the underlying structure of the land remains the same. To be really meaningful, the approach requires both a talented eye to perform the necessary scanning of existing landscape characteristics and a poetic ability to express them in a synthesizing new proposal.
In this approach, the form and the character of the landscape determine the program. Without exactly spelling out what should be built, they lay down the conditions to which whatever us being built should respond.


The clearing, this design method defines the landscape as a unifying backdrop. The idea of nature as a backdrop to assure the freedom of the intervention is now used as a systematic planning device. In some cases, as in MVRDV’s proposal for ‘light urbanism’, the original low-density settlement is maintained. The magnificence of the surrounding landscape prevails over the ongoing urbanization.
Unlike the ‘casco’ approach, where the landscape sets the conditions for the program, the ‘clearing’ has the program create the landscape.


The montage, principle of layering different levels. (Competition OMA/Rem Koolhaas for Parc de la Villete). The juxtaposition of different blocks, being a continuous sense of merging in thus produced, whereby each element is a part of many others. The montage emails, not only a constantly shifting understanding depending on the use of the area, but also generated a an architectural coherence in the perception of the urban landscape, precisely because it is made up of interpenetrating forms and fragments.

TOWARD AN URBAN LANDSCAPE

Kenneth Frampton
1995

As markets become increasingly global and capital increasingly fluid, the multinational market system disseminates itself over the face of the earth and with it, of course, the ubiquitous megalopolis.

ARGUMENT:
1. Frampton discusses the power of market forces in the global building market versus the relatively small percentage of building activity actually undertaken by architects and planners. He says that this trend is not co-incidental but has been achieved systematically, contrived to further the interests of deregulated land speculation and to sustain larger units of corporate industrial production.
2. Cultural and ecological predicament of the megalopolis is the direct result of conscious political and ideological decisions made at the highest level of the power system.

Example: General Motors Company, North America
Conscious but benign neglect of railroad infrastructure and general elimination of all existing forms of public transport in post war US. Encouragement of clandestine purchase of public transit lines just to later shut them down. GM was directly involved in such operation in Los Angeles where until the 1950’s there was an extensive and highly convenient system of suburban rail transit. This network was closed down and rail lines were appropriated for freeway system. The inevitable result was a high dependence on motorcar and a proliferation of the car-accessed suburban supermarket.
Networks involved: Deregulated land speculation – symbiotic oil and automobile industries.

Deregulation operations such as that of the US were followed in Europe and other parts of the world.

Example: Rotterdam, Netherlands
In 1974, the “physical-plan” for the development of the city was replaced by a “structure plan”. Strategy conceived by Melvin Webber of a non-place urban realm to maximise economic development of the region. Freed large areas of unbuilt reclaimed land for speculation by expanding national road system.

- Evidence of the interests of maximising multinational finance together with the building industry’s to rationalise and monopolise its output through ‘package-deal’ approach.
- Undermining of the architectural profession and the title of the architect; minimise resistance from the profession and to maximise the thrust of free-market development.
- Rise of the builder-developer.

Consequence for the architecture and planning professions:
- Reduction of the art of environmental planning to the value-free, applied science of land-use and transportation management. Planning strategy became logistical and managerial.

Reaction:
Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism,
Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander
- An alternative low-rise high-density courtyard houses, residential land settlement pattern for the US, based on the mass ownership of the automobile.

Other Examples:
1. Rem Koolhaas - proposal for Lille megalopolis
2. Robert Moses - expansion of parkway system into the urban region
3. Alison and Peter Smithson – London Roads Study 1953, concepts of “land-castle” and “mat-building”.
4. Peter Land – organisation of Previ experimental quarter, Lima, Peru.
5. Aktion Schweiz – Swiss National Exhibition 1963
6. J.R. James – linear city proposal for British Home Counties, London
7. John Turner – strategy for housing deficit of the Third World.
8. Doxiades – Dynapolis model
9. Shadrach Woods – pamphlet titled ‘What U Can Do’.

Frampton provides a twelve-point assessment of where we stand as opposed to what we might do. (refer to article for the twelve points)
Key words and phrases: non-place urban realm, 'motopian' city, 'dystopia of the megalopolis, post-industrial 'scar tissue', megalopolis as a new nature, atopy, dystopia, landscaped built forms

Conclusion:
- Call to rethink our unreflecting submission to arcane theories that have no practical or ethical application to architecture and urban design.
- Need to conceive a remedial landscape that is capable of playing a critical and compensatory role in relation to the ongoing, destructive commodification of the man-made world.
- Assertion of the landscaped form as the fundamental material of a fragmentary urbanism is of greater consequence than the freestanding aestheticised object.

Portraying the Urban Landscape: Landscape in Architectural Criticism and Theory, 1960-Present
Christopher Hight
Summary
By Marcelo Rivera Leyton

The Ethos of Landscape.
For Hight Landscape urbanism is not a theory of design but could be an innovate design practice. He says that it’s a design ethic meaning not a moral code, a legal standard or a mantra but an ethos, a way of doing and a mentality of values, norms assumptions and methods and most importantly the way in which questions are asked. It’s a mode of operation. He analyses Michel Foucault’s “disassembly of the self” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “Thousand Plateaus” to explain the particular ethos that landscape urbanism seems to require. Both were speaking of the identity of the self in society which could be applied also to the transdisciplinary project of landscape urbanism and the identity of disciplines: while architecture operates through an ethics of stasis, truth, wholeness and timelessness. Urban planning via control, determinism and hierarchy. Landscape design offers an ethics of temporal, complexity and soft-control. Finally landscape urbanism, as “another potential” (referring to Foucoult’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s disassembly by becoming other) that must be understood as an attempt to constitute a kind of aesthetics of existence.

Landscape as Simulation: The colonial Gaze of Architecture.
There was an odd relationship between architecture and landscape design in the XX century. Landscape was something to either provide relief from urban congestion, humanize it{s rationalism or to soften the cold, hard logic of the architects. It appeared uncultured and wild without rules, logic and methods.
The author analyses Teyner Banham{s iconoclastic example of hawksmoor-the-architect versus Wren-the-nonarchitect and how a designer depicts architectural order but doesn’t operate as an architect at the level of order. For Banham, landscape design was not an art, neither a discipline nor even a profession. He says that it is the mode of operation that defines a discipline, rather than any quality of beauty, function or other such criteria.

The Operative Landscape.
Landscape design has attempted to purge its pastoral and pictorial referents. Alex Wall says that it invokes the functioning matrix of connective tissues that organized not only objects and spaces but also the dynamic processes and events that move through them. And that this approach should be shift, one reason landscape is useful is its emphasis on the plan and the horizontal as an ordering surface. this will allow to access to the reality or new nature or essence of the city and it will recover landscape from its pictorial and pastoralism, while leaving architecture and planning´s underlying assumptions.

Landscape as General Theory.
Waddington´s “epigenetic landscapes”, Kaufman´s “fitness landscapes”, Thom´s “catastrophe landscapes”, Uexhil´s “environmental capture”, etc. These references to these sciences offers an ethos of landscape in which it becomes possible to formalize different types of existence. These conceptualization and specific configuration of concepts, conditions and cross-disciplinary practices makes landscape possible as a mode of urban design. The two cuts described by Walter Benjammin´s analysis of the world´s substance, the longitudinal cut of painting and the transversal cut of certain graphic productions. Could be thought also in landscape design. Again Deleuze and Guattari talk about this distinction modalities, the verticality aligned with the portrait, the face or the mode of representation they call faciality, a mode to be copied. Houses, towns or cities, monuments or factories, they function like faces in the landscape they transform. If the vertical face is aligned with the humanist subject, then the horizontal landscape is the mode for all their processes. If mechanical reproduction and graphic concepts were central to the advent of transversal paintings, the use of digital visualization and information technology in landscape urbanism should be understood as similar transversal operations in design, ones that may perhaps no longer be limited to these two axes and instead suggest as yet authorized as mode of operation. The proposition of landscape urbanism thereby attempts to rotate architecture out of its vertical alignments as a model of order, to deterritorialize in the first instance not the physical space of the city but the discipline’s precepts and ethos.

The Word Itself

Jackson, JB. “The Word Itself” in J.B. Jackson (ed.) Discovering the Vernacular Landscape; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, pp. 1-8

Through this article Jackson proposed a new definition and meaning of landscape. He argued that the given meaning to the word is also gradually changed by centuries. The word itself has the original meaning that could be very different from the given meaning.

The meaning of landscape is firstly known in paintings and painters world. It was a picture of a view, then the view itself. In the practice of 18th century, landscape gardener produces a stylized ‘picturesque’ landscape. Although it is three dimensions they were still pictures. This is continued in 19th century that the gardens were designed in ‘painterly’ terms, using the familiar basic principles of unity, repetition, sequence and balance, of harmony and contrast. In last half century, knowledge of ecology and conservation and environmental psychology are part of the landscape architect’s professional background, and protecting and ‘managing’ the natural environment are seen as more important than the designing of picturesque parks.

Jackson went into the basic meaning of the word landscape after he showed the given meaning of landscape. He put the word into two syllables: scape and land. People use the word scape as if it meant space (like townscape, roadscape, and cityscape). He pointed that we always need a word or a phrase to indicate a kind of environment or setting which can give vividness to a thought or event a relationship, a background placing it in the world. In this sense landscape serves the same useful purpose as do the words climate or atmosphere (page 4 paragraph 3).

The word in all modern European language (Old English version landskipe, landscaef, German landschaft, Dutch landscap) was used not in the English sense (see page 5 par. 3). Jackson also showed the meaning or related meaning from Latin languages. I think he explored this linguistic aspect also to show that anyhow we need a new meaning and definition because the word itself is subjective and the practice of centuries also showed that it has different meaning and scale. He wrote that at all events it is clear that a thousand years ago the word had nothing to do with scenery or the depiction of scenery.

Jackson wrote that Landscape is a space on the surface of the earth; intuitively we know that it is a space with a degree of permanence, with its own distinct character, either topographical or cultural, and above all a space shared by a group of people. The formula of landscape as a composition of man-made spaces on the land is more significant. In the contemporary world, we will eventually formulate a new definition of landscape: a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence; and if background seems inappropriately modest we should remember that in our modern use of the word it means that which underscores not only our identity and presence, but also our history. (ami)

Mohsen Mostafavi 'Landscapes of urbanism'

MOSHEN MOSTAFAVI, 'Landscapes of urbanism', in: Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro Najle (eds.), Landscape Urbanism A Manual for the Machinic Landscape, London: AA Books, 2003, pp. 5-9.


I found this text quiet difficult. After reading it 3 times I will summerize what I have understood from it. If you think you are more intelligent, you can always try to analize it yourself and add some comments.

So basicily the text compares what urbanism (modern) was and what it is today and in the future (landscape urbanism).

Modenist urbanism is characterized by its division in components of the city: housing, work, leisure,... A masterplan holds these functions togheter but ensures at the same time that they remain distinct and apart.
The multilayered, multifunctional city is too complex to manage. Everything should be ordered, implemented in phases and there is little room for flexibility.

This the author puts in contrast to the elements of landscape urbanism:
- the temporality of landscapes renders them forever incomplete, and this incompletion can be seen as an antidote to the implicit finitude of zoning
- as an answer to what the relation is of urbanism to landscape he suggests that urbanism relies as much on the construction of surfaces and voids as it does on the construction of buildings, which makes the literal use of landscape as a material device a necessity.
- the methods of landscape urbanism are operative, they prioritize the way in which things work and the way in which they are used.
I like how he compares it with agricultural fields, this makes his poit quiet clear:
The agricultural field is ploughed, prepared in anticipation of the crop that will (hopefully) appear at a later date. In this way the appearance of the field is always both incomplete and complete, in as much as at each stage of its development it attains a certain degree of temporal finitude.

Waldheim, Charles (2006) ‘Introduction: A reference manifesto’

Waldheim, Charles (2006) ‘Introduction: A reference manifesto’, in Charles Waldheim (ed.) The landscape urbanism reader; New York: Princeton Architecture Press, pp11-18.

‘Landscape Urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently underway in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism. For many, across a range of disciplines, landscape has become both the lens through which the contemporary city is represented and the medium through which it is constructed.’

- the architecture of the contemporary city is based upon leisure and tourism, commodified as a cultural product excelling their architectural differences and identity of each city, but because of this tendency the architecture of cities becomes more and more indistinguishable. Part of the decentralisation, decreasing the density of the north American cities. Landscape refinds its relevance here!
- Reference manifesto: emergent conditions before clarifying sources
- James Corner: intellectual and practical underpinnings of the landscape urbanism agenda: 4 interpractical themes: ecological and urban processes over time, staging of horizontal surfaces, working method, imaginary.
- Grahame Shane: institutions and individuals in the discourse.
- Richard Weller: landscape urbanism in relation to de-industrialisation, infrastructure and rapidly changing commodification of the traditional urban realm.
- Christophe Girot: new modes of representation, time-based media.
- Julia Czerniak: the site! What is the site as complex apparatus for the design process.
- Linda Polak: landscapes according to their social and scalar dimension.
- Kelly Shannon: rise of landscape urbanism in Europe, especially as a tool to prevent the commodification of the urban form.
- Elisabeth Mossop: relationships between landscape and urban infrastructure.
- Jacqeline Tatom: the urban highway as a locus for landscape practice.
- Alan Berger: drosscapes: coming to terms with the enormous left abanodones territories, in broader waste management terms.
- Clare Lyster: changing scale of economy.