LA463 Senior Seminar Booklet

SANTA CHIARA LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE STUDY

ABROAD

WALKING

IN

THE

SHADOWS

MICHAEL YU |

CPP

LA463 | SENIOR SEMINAR FALL 2017

| RENNIE TANG

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 01

THREE CITIES CONSTELLATION MAPPING

03 - 08

CITY ONE: CASTIGLION FIORENTINO, ITALY 05 - MAPPING

06 - WALKING NARRATIVE/REFLECTION + WALKING ALGORITHM 07 - DIAGRAM 08 - READING NARRATIVE

09 - 14

CITY TWO: BERLIN, GERMANY 1 1 - MAPPING

12 - WALKING NARRATIVE/REFLECTION + WALKING ALGORITHM 13 - DIAGRAM 14 - READING NARRATIVE

15 - 20

CITY THREE: AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS 17 - MAPPING

18 - WALKING NARRATIVE/REFLECTION + WALKING ALGORITHM 19 - DIAGRAM 20 - READING NARRATIVE

21 - 23 PHOTO

ESSAY

24 CONSTELLATION

NARRATIVE

Works Cited Cocker, Emma. “Skirting the Centre.” The Yes of the No, 2016.

Giannetto, Raffaela Fabiani. “The Use of History in Landscape Architectural Nostalgia.” The Use of History, 17 Jan. 2013, pp. 102–114.

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03

“Considered from the perspective of the centre, the margins describe an outer limit...Or maybe those places that somehow fail to make the grade, that fall below some tacitly accepted standard...This centre has no visible boundary; its margins are mercurial.”

- Emma Cocker, “Skirting The Centre”

CASTIGLION FIORENTINO ITALY

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05

06

07

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“It is obvious that the instructions were not motivated by historical accuracy, but rather driven by a hastily put-together historicism and sustained by ideological nostalgia; their goal was to achieve a generalization...a common, national, cultural patrimony...an image of a shared artistic past...always flawless, always consistent. Thus, what the fascists promoted was not just a form of nostalgia toward the past...Rather, the fascists’ nostalgia was unsentimentally directed toward the meanings that had been previously attached to the forms of the Italian Renaissance garden...”

- Gianetto, “The Use of History in Landscape Architectural Nostalgia”

BERLIN GERMANY

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11

12

13

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“Marginal places are those marked by their distance from the privileged sites of action or official scene, seemingly behind the the times or somehow out of sync with metropolitan life, with its fast pace and faster lives and unceasing flows of production.”

AMSTERDAM THE NETHERLANDS

- Emma Cocker, “Skirting The Centre”

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PHOTO ESSAY

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PHOTO ESSAY

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CONSTELLATION NARRATIVE CASTIGLION FIORENTINO + BERLIN + AMSTERDAM

In the fall of 2017, I traversed through the European landscape while studying abroad.

Having never set foot in the Euro sphere before, I was a foreigner in those lands and everything around me was a seeming mystery. In the face of the unknown, it is our tendency to make sense of it using whatever existing knowledge we already have.

This is true of many things in life, and is particularly true of when we travel to new places that have a preceding reputation. We can sometimes formulate opinions on a place based on outside opinion, and before even visiting the place we have already made certain expectations for it.

In a series of three walking experiences in three separate European cities I attempt to start to look at the urban fabric from a new unbiased perspective. The cities walked were Castiglion Fiorentino in Italy, Berlin in Germany, and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. According to the French philosopher Michel de Corteau, a city is like an urban text that unfolds as you traverse through it. One reads this text through the act of walking, the language of the city. He believed that when one walks, one also created experience in spaces where none were before.

All different in terms of geography, scale, culture, and identity, I unite them under the context of a walking algorithm, a set of rules I had laid for myself while walking based on the passage “Skirting the Centre” by Emma Cocker in her book “The Yes of the No”. Also, in reflection of my walking experiences, I analyze the theme of Landscape Nostalgia within the three different cities. Based on Raffaela Giannetto’s, “The Use of History in Landscape Architectural Nostalgia”, I talk about how the feeling of nostalgia plays a role in the evolution of a city.

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