Topos 71

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

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R E V I E W

CHARLES WALDHEIM MODIFIERS TO URBANISM URBANISM

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O F

L A N D S C A P E

ADRIAAN GEUZE SECOND NATURE

ARCHITECTURE

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A R C H I T E C T U R E

JAMES CORNER LANDSCAPE URBANISM IN THE FIELD

FRITS PALMBOOM CONFLATION OR COALITION

K O N G J I A N Y U INSPIRING TRADITIONS

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U R B A N

D E S I G N

Landscape Urbanism

2010

T H E

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MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI ECOLOGICAL

SUSANNAH DRAKE REGENERATING LANDSCAPE

S TO S S L U TOPOS LANDSCAPE AWARD 2010

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S P E C I A L NEW NORDIC LANDSCAPES

LANDSCAPE URBANISM

TABLE

OF

CONTENTS

Cover: Robert Schäfer (photo)

50 The visionary and yet

CHARLES WALDHEIM

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FREDERICK STEINER, DEAN ALMY

Urban Ground” for Lower

On Landscape, Ecology and other Modifiers to Urbanism

Manhattan suggests a new

Responses to the challenges of the contemporary

Recreational terrain as major driver for densification

form of urban landscape

metropolitan condition

in Austin, TX, USA

pragmatic project “New

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Conservation as Catalyst: Lady Bird’s Urbanism

infrastructure that reflects the environment more.

JAMES CORNER

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THORBJÖRN ANDERSSON

Landscape Urbanism in the Field

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Thomas Feys

The Knowledge Corridor, San Juan, Puerto Rico

Landscape Urbanism versus Landscape Design The potential of design must not be neglected

MOHSEN MOSTAFAVI

30 68 Heritage of ancient landscape urbanism:

Why Ecological Urbanism? Why Now?

JAN BUNGE, PHILIPP FELDSCHMID

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Opportunities to define a new approach to urbanism

settlements like Varanasi in India with its

Back to Go Clear and obstructed paths in the planning disciplines

urbanized ghats interact with the territory.

GARETH DOHERTY

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How green is Landscape Urbanism?

TOPOS LANDSCAPE AWARD 2010

Colours and their relation to the city

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dlandstudio

ADRIAAN GEUZE

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Award Winner: Stoss Landscape Urbanism

Second Nature New territories of wilderness for unknown future

CHRIS REED

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colonisation

Landscape Urbanism in Practice Philosophy of the award-winning office

FRITS PALMBOOM

Stoss LU

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Landscape Urbanism: Conflation or Coalition?

Selected Projects by Stoss Landscape Urbanism

Deep connections in the shaping of cities and landscapes

SUSANNAH C. DRAKE

89 Stoss Landscape Urbanism, winner of

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50

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New Nordic Landscapes

Term · Definition · Identity

Landscape projects from the Nordic countries

the Topos Landscape Award 2010, designed

Regenerating landscape architecture in the era of

exhibited at EXPO 2010 in Shanghai

the waterfront in Green Bay, WI, USA.

landscape urbanism

Currents

KONGJIAN YU

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Five Traditions for Landscape Urbanism Thinking

6

News, Personalities, Projects, Competitions, Chile earthquake report

West 8

Inspiring traditions in urban planning, design history

40 The design strategy for Buckthorn City on the Dutch coast

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tion of second nature.

Kjersti Wikstrøm

Jean-Baptiste Labrune

calls for reclaiming land from the sea and an accelerated evolu-

and related fields

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Authors

DOUGLAS SPENCER

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Credits/Imprint

Landscape Urbanism at the Architectural Association Landscape and urbanism as machinic territories

BRUNO DE MEULDER, KELLY SHANNON

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Traditions of Landscape Urbanism Roots of a powerful tool for 21st-century cities

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30 Increased numbers of people and cities go hand in hand with a greater

109 Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant in

exploitation of the world’s limited resources. Ecological urbanism tries to provide

Iceland: the geometry of the pipelines con-

a framework of knowledge, methods and clues for a sustainable urban future.

trasts with the shapes of the soft landscape.

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Charles Waldheim

On Landscape, Ecology and other Modifiers to Urbanism Landscape urbanism emerged over the past decade as a critique of the disciplinary and professional commitments of traditional urban design and an alternative to “New Urbanism.” The critique launched by landscape urbanism has much to do with urban design’s perceived inability to come to terms with the rapid pace of urban change and the essentially horizontal character of contemporary automobile-based urbanization across North America and much of Western Europe. It equally has to do with the inability of traditional urban design strategies to cope with the environmental conditions left in the wake of deindustrialization, increased calls for an ecologically informed urbanism, and the ongoing ascendancy of design culture as an aspect of urban development. The established discourse of landscape urbanism revisited in this issue of Topos is seemingly enjoying a robust middle-age, at once no longer sufficiently youthful for the avant-gardist appetites of architectural culture, yet growing in global significance as its key texts and projects are translated and disseminated globally. One aspect of this middleagedness is that the discourse on landscape urbanism, while hardly new in architectural circles, is rapidly being absorbed into the global discourse on cities within urban design and planning.

The established discourse of landscape urbanism as chronicled in this journal and other venues sheds interesting light on the ultimately abandoned proposal that urban design might have originally been housed in landscape architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design.

One reading of Josep Lluís Sert’s original formulation for urban design at Harvard is that he wanted to provide a transdisciplinary space within the academy. But urban design has yet to fulfill its potential as an intersection of the design disciplines engaging with the built environment. In the wake of that unfulfilled potential, landscape urbanism proposed a critical and historically informed rereading of the environmental and social aspirations of modernist planning and its most successful models.

In so doing, it proposes a potential recuperation of at least one strand of modernist planning, the one in which landscape offered the medium of urban, economic and social order.

Over the past year an emergent discourse of “ecological urbanism” has been proposed to more precisely describe the aspirations of an urban practice informed by environmental issues and imbued with the sensibilities associated with landscape. This most recent adjectival modifier of urbanism reveals the ongoing need for re-qualifying urban design as it attempts to describe the environmental, economic and social conditions of the contemporary city. Equally, it acknowledges that the now well-established discourse around landscape urbanism is ripe for middle-aged reasonableness, a midlife crisis, or both.

With their project “Deep Ground” London based GroundLab won the competition for the regeneration of 11.8 square kilometers of urban fabric in the centre of Longgang, China.

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Gareth Doherty

If green is the color most often associated with landscape, then landscape urbanism might be a move away from green toward a wider spectrum of colors and their relation to the city and each other. Indeed Charles Waldheim seems to imply this when in “Recovering Landscape” he calls for a shift towards an understanding of the image of landscape as a horizontal flatbed infrastructure that does not distinguish between urban and natural, instead of the notion of landscape as green scenery beheld vertically. An aim of this essay is to show that green is urban too.

HOW GREEN is Landscape Urbanism?

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In landscape ecology, landscapes as read from an airplane are mostly a mosaic, and mosaics as Richard Forman points out are colored. Yet as Walter Benjamin reminds us, the power of a country road, and doubtless a city road too, is greater when walking through it than looking at it from above. The vertical transect allows for a more sensual and nuanced reading of landscape than we can get from aerial images alone. A city from above may look gray, from inside it can be dazzling, like Times Square or Shinjuku. Why not do both? Why not behold landscape from above and from eye-level too? Large-scale geographies need to be understood vertically if we are not to lose touch with our audience. The work of Urban Earth, the UK-based geography collective, is notable in this regard for the “(re)presentation” of their public walks through diverse neighborhoods in some of the world’s largest cities.

If landscape is green, then urbanism is presumably multi-colored.

But green is urban too. Green spaces, traditional landscape, clearly add to liveability and consequently to property values and potential for the generation of revenue. Cabe Space, the government body charged with the curation of public space in the United Kingdom, has extensively researched the economic value of green. Cabe Space’s publication Does money grow on trees? demonstrates how green adds to property values and that green attracts inward investment and homeowners to an area.

In New York City, Central Park West and the Upper East Side are desirable places to live because of their proximity to the green of Central Park, and indeed property speculation was an element in financing the green park. The renovation of Bryant Park in the 1990s significantly increased property values and rents immediately adjacent to the green.

No wonder that the High Line has become such a powerful engine for

“Nature Matching System” by the artist Tattfoo Tan, a colored mosaic inspired by fresh fruits and vegetables, was mounted on New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal in 2009.

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Langzhong, a 2,300 year old city in the Chinese province of Sichuan, exemplifies how the feng-shui model was followed to shape an ideal form surrounded by water and mountain.

Kongjian Yu

Five Traditions for Landscape Urbanism Thinking The inspiring traditions in urban planning, design history and related fields may be useful for the development of landscape urbanism thinking to meet the needs and challenges of the ecological and sustainable urban form.

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Over the past 10 years landscape urbanism, an arguably new theory of urbanism and urban design, began to be discussed, promoted and popularized among students in landscape architecture and urban design fields in North America and Europe. The core argument of landscape urbanism is that landscape, rather than architecture, can better define urban forms and experiences. Charles Waldheim describes this as “a disciplinary realignment [whereby] landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of urbanism,” and James Corner considers landscape as an infrastructure of processes and field of operation.

Methodologically-speaking, I prefer to describe landscape urbanism as a “negative approach” as opposed to the conventional (“positive”) approach to urban development, in which

urban growth is defined by built, gray infrastructure comprised of roads and pipes that provide services for the urban development. The negative approach considers the green and unbuilt ecological infrastructure (EI) that provides ecosystem services and acts as a framework to define urban growth and urban forms across all scales. It is a recessional figure-ground.

In this sense, five traditions in both the Eastern and Western planning theories and practices inspire the development of landscape (and ecological) urbanism.

Feng-shui and geomancy The pre-scientific model of landscape urbanism thinking. The pre-scientific model of the negative approach is the Chinese ancient art of geo-

mancy, or feng-shui, which always gives priority to the natural pattern and processes of Qi or breath. Ordered from large to small, the entire national landscape (mountains and water courses) is considered as an interconnected dragon vein and a network of Qi movement. A sacred landscape infrastructure in the fractal form is a given pattern that any human actions must come to terms with. This model was applied to the establishment and construction of villages and cities, roads, bridges and even tombs. All are connected. In this sense, the sacred landscape forms the spiritual backbone or network of the sustaining living environment and becomes the infrastructure that bares genius loci. This tradition still flourishes in rural China and has, for thousands of years, defined the Chinese landscape’s cultural heritage and

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Alejandra Bosch: Responsive Coastline The proposal works on potential new ways of arrangement of artificial archipelagos in the coastline of Dubai, which are

Douglas Spencer

derived from an understanding of coastal dynamics and regeneration of coralline structures. At the larger scale, the series of islands are arranged according to the prevailing currents of the site, in clear contrast with the existing trends of island making in the series of palms already being built.

At a micro scale, the islands are organized utilizing a hybrid system of floating pontoons and artificial reefs that give solidity and material definition to the whole proposal.

LANDSCAPE URBANISM AT THE ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

Jorge Ayala: Eco-Transitional Urbanism The project explores the potential of agricultural economies

A hybrid of urbanism, architecture, and landscape architecture, landscape urbanism has evolved in recent years as

to merge with new touristic developments in the islands

a cross-disciplinary response to the conditions defining the contemporary city.

close to Zhuhai. The proposal studies the ways in which different types of crop production work together ranging from the slopes in the hills towards fish farming and aquaculture along the shores, creating an urban fabric which

AALU (Architectural Association Landscape Urbanism) conceives of landscape and urbanism alike as machinic territories; productions of space through which nature and culture are organised, processed and experienced. If, as geographer David Harvey has claimed, there is nothing inherently unnatural about a built environment such as Manhattan, neither is there anything inherently natural about any landscaped environment. Both the landscape and the urban operate as systems organised around the exchange, processing and distribution of life and matter within contexts which are immanently social, political and economic, and do so interdependently to form larger ecologies which are not only environmental, but also social, subjective and historically contingent.

Rather than being straightforwardly opposed, city and country mutually presuppose and reproduce one another. In Britain, for example, both large-scale agriculture and the landscape garden’s aestheticisation of nature were historically predicated on acts of land clearance and enclosure, driving a once rural population into the workshops and factories of the industrial town. Today a range of globally emergent territorial conditions – rapid urbanisation, informal settlement, social and environmental precarity – produce new patterns of

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migration and intensive juxtapositions of the rural and the metropolitan resulting in phenomena such as the “urban village”.

The remedial strategies developed within approaches to urbanism and planning have typically failed to address the full complexity of these conditions or to engage with their transformative potentials. Neoconservative models of planning and development, for example, have succeeded only in producing a “new urbanism” of mega malls, retail parks and gated residential communities that insulate a small and affluent minority from the supposed pathologies of the city. These developments only serve to exacerbate existing social inequalities and privatise ever-greater areas of the city.

Education at the AA As an educational programme, landscape urbanism was initially developed at the University of Pennsylvania and its approach adopted at other North American institutions including the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Toronto, Columbia and Harvard Graduate School of Design. The graduate programme in landscape urbanism established in 2000 at London’s Architectural Association, under the direction of Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro

Najle, developed its own particular approach to the practice. In addition to the perspectives of its North American variants, the AA’s programme re-assessed the role of architecture (typically a neglected element in landscape urbanism), within the discipline’s approach and practice, and placed greater emphasis too on the role of poststructuralist philosophy within the discipline’s critical perspective.

Under Mostafavi’s successor, Eva Castro, these elements have been further elaborated to produce a distinctive strain of landscape urbanism. Under her direction the programme has sought to extend the reach of the discipline, pushing it into encounters with new and globally diverse forms of urbanism, and gathering around it a range of significant international architects, landscape architects, urbanists, engineers and theorists as contributors to its teaching, research and development.

As with other programmes of landscape urbanism, an emphasis is placed on reading, mapping and indexing urban conditions as a complex mesh of interrelated forces and organisations. More specific to AALU’s method is its emphasis on the development of material organisations that respond to these urban conditions. These formations are typically composed through hybrids of architecture, landscape and

should breed new kinds of urban experiences, linked to emergent ecotourism in the Chinese region.

Fang Chun-Chieh: Living Mine This project investigates ways in which the existing quarrying works on the outskirts of Muskat can be utilized as a productive landscape for the expansion of the city. The proposal begins with a research on quarries and open air mining. It studies the geometries and spatial configurations inherent in the excavation mechanisms to analyze their economic and management mechanisms. It then incorporates other types of functions linked to an emergent fabric that should become the basis for a time-based mode of city planning, where landscapes generated for primary production are formatted so that they can be phased to form a meaningful and critically defined urban ecology.

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