Klein diagram brief

Klein Diagram Theories of Landscape Architecture Harvard Design School: DES 0324200 2014/3/25 Siwei Gou

In order to create an expanded spatial field for landscape architecture, my version of Klein diagram focus on infrastructure. Instead of digging into figure-ground study and expanding landscape design into the field of architecture or “in-between” spaces, I would like to expand the spatial field into the field of engineering, transportation planning and infrastructure design. “Urban life is sustained by technological infrastructure. Highways, harbors, airports, power lines, landfills and mines largely figure as the dominant effigies of

contemporary urbanization. The sheer size of these elements renders their understanding as a single system practically impossible, yet their operations depend precisely on their continuity to support the flow of capital and cultural mobility.”1 Fully appreciate the idea that urban landscape has everything to do with infrastructure, I divide the expanded field of landscape architecture into four categories includes the landscape for infrastructure, the landscape as infrastructure, the infrastructural landscape and the landscape as “operative ground”. These four concept depicted in my version of Klein group diagram also charts their nonhierarchical relationship to one another in the expanded field of landscape architecture.

Landscape for Infrastructure The Landscape for Infrastructure co-exist with the existing infrastructure, it is more like an intervention or simply an addition for existing infrastructure which people sometimes pass by without noticing. A street, passage, overpass, subway entrance, building entrance (since I’m classifying the expanded field of landscape architecture, I sort architectural related landscape into my category, such as, “building entrance” into “Landscape for Infrastructure” or “plaza” into “Infrastructural Landscape”) or an accessible rooftop. The infrastructures have their own very purposes; the landscape serves as a decorating tool or bringing in additional functions to the existing infrastructure. The infrastructure itself is cold, silent and has a feeling of construction, the “add-on” evokes the feeling, memory and the sense of nature and female.

1 http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/#/events/landscape-infrastructure.html

by Pierre Bélanger

Landscape as Infrastructure The second category is the Landscape as Infrastructure. As part of the urban development, infrastructure itself can be landscape which it creates multiple urban experience in term of both spatiality and emotion, and at the same time serve different purposes. One good example is High Line (New York). Although it is a renovation project, the debate of High Line project is mostly about repurposing the infrastructure. High Line serve as a multi-function platform that had an great impact on real estate development and human activity after it was built. Similar project such as Promenade plantée in Paris was the inspiration for this project.

Infrastructural Landscape When I first developed my version of Klein group diagram, I had a hard time fitting traditional “park” into one of the categories. One reason is that a park is a vague concept, all that gives a sense of picturesque, pastoral or simply a gathering of greeneries could be called a park. It occupies a “void” in terms of figure-ground, and connects discontinuous urban fabric into a concerted whole. Thus, it is the transitional quality of a park that sort it into the category “infrastructural landscape”. It provides routes, shortcuts, open spaces, resting and gathering places, possible remediation function and other purposes.

It is a landscape design with multiple values contribute to urban context. One good example would be central park in New York City. And not only big parks count as infrastructural landscape, small plaza, square, city centers are also under this category.

Landscape as “Operative Ground” Other than saying Landscape architecture expanded its field into infrastructure, I would rather say that it is the redefinition of infrastructure helped broaden the horizon of landscape architects and architecture. Landscape is inherently infrastructural: it mediates, produces, facilitates, and transports. As a network of infrastructural function and flow, landscape (here considered to be a result of human modification of an environment) becomes the operative platform of human existence; where landscape exists, so does infrastructure.2 In Pierre Belanger’s piece “Redefining Infrastructure,” he proposes the replacement of this state of infrastructure with an infrastructural system aligned with ecology and other biophysical systems, recognizing that “the economy is now inseparable from the environment”3. This give landscape architecture a great chance to expand its field into all lands that involves ecological and biophysical flux. Agriculture, remediation, transportation, station, airport, hydrological facilities, urban development and megastructures. Integrate studio 1211, studio 1212’s work which we call it “the operative ground” with ecological urbanism (and landscape urbanism), we understand that landscape architecture is at a critical stage, on which the future hangs in the balance.

2 The Humanity Of Infrastructure: Landscape As Operative Ground

by Dane Carlson Published in Scenario 03: Rethinking Infrastructure Spring 2013

3 Belanger, Pierre. “Redefining Infrastructure,” Ecological Urbanism, Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty eds. Baden: Lars Muller Publishers, 2010. p345.