Groundswell

14.00–18.00

Christina Condak Daniela Herold

GLC

GEOGRAPHY LANDSCAPES CITIES

Today, we know that the task of the architect is to work as much as possible with existing conditions and to find the capacity and potential of any site, landscape or building. The desire is to intensify all possible interrelations between the environment, nature, the built fabric and living beings in meaningful and holistic ways. As we continue to be confronted with accelerated urban growth, and all that this entails, we ask: how can urban and suburban areas be “retrofitted” for sustainable, inclusive public life? And how can our communal spaces be prepared for what is to come, for the unknown? To the term Ecological Urbanism, we add Renovative Urbanism. We are looking for an urban framework, a strategy for the future that confronts growth/change and all that involves public life. Our living urbanity, in the best sense, is at risk without repositioning.

Life on the ground, our mobility and freedom before, during and soon after this current pandemic, has changed and revealed the fragility of our sociopolitical and ecological systems. It has also further revealed the importance of open, indeterminate spaces in the city. It was not that long ago that the raised ground of modernism promised to give a platform to its citizens by separating harmful urban functions to create safer, conflict-free environments. And yet, with all the good intentions of modernism – and, as Jane Jacobs has pointed out, its failures – the separation of functions at the city level has inadvertently led to the shrinking of the human scale, sterilizing urban streets and reducing everyday human contact. This is true of American cities as well as European cities.

Our upcoming site investigations will explore themes of the ground (and ground levels) at various scales. The ground is the material connector where people, plants, animals and buildings meet. How do we meet the ground? The projects will probe territories – fragmented sites, neighbourhoods, suburban conditions, leftovers, reserves of urban space and infrastructures – to find weaknesses and potentials for the liberation of the ground, connectivity, restoration and the creation of a public sphere that extends horizontally, inside and outside. Interpretations and the subtle restructuring of a territory through our ensuing definitions of sustainability allow us to focus – and ask what this means for us now, in 2021, and for the next 100 years.

The street, the sidewalk, the ground floor, das erdgeschoss, das mezzanin, the basement, the base, the foundations – all of these elements and materials are part of this thick ground for investigation. In the field of landscape urbanism, at a larger scale, the ground is referred to as the “urban surface”, the “connective tissue”, “terra fluxus”, the “constructed ground”, the “living mat”, the “field”, the “synthetic surface” or a “drossscape”. These terms imply movement, time and a process of transformation. This ground includes architecture, the city, the landscape, open space and nature in continuity and as one interrelated living “surface”.

*Groundswell

– a growth of a strong feeling among a large group of people

– a long, deep wave in the sea, sometimes caused by distant winds

– a broad, deep undulation of the ocean caused by a distant disturbance