Landscape urbanism

Landscape Urbanism is a theory of urbanism arguing that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience. Landscape Urbanism has emerged as a theory in the last fifteen years. Landscape Urbanism describes "the ability to produce urban effects traditionally achieved through the construction of buildings simply through the organization of horizontal surfaces." [1]. The term, "Landscape Urbanism" was coined by architect and current Landscape Architecture chair of the GSD at Harvard, Charles Waldheim, as a means of describing the recent emergence of landscape as a medium of urban order for the contemporary city [1].[2] "The origins of Landscape Urbanism can be traced to postmodern critiques of modernist architecture and planning."[3]

Waldheim, has asserted "Landscape Urbanism was specifically meant to provide an intellectual and practical alternative to the hegemony of the New Urbanism." [2] Waldheim has taken what might be considered a fatalist view about American city planning stating "If you have a culture that is fundamentally automobile-based, then an urban model that is anti-automobile is counterintuitive at best. There’s a strange precept these days that asserts that people will abandon their cars if we simply build cities that don’t accommodate them".[3] [4] Ecology is thus not as important as the liberty of personal transport and that cities and society are secondary to the liberties personal transport. Thus, he is not promoting integrated urbanism and public transport, or medium to high density living; this contradicts the notion of ecological design. The processes of landscape (i.e. time based development) are merely concepts to the landscape urbanist, not an ecological approach to development. There is, hence, reason to believe that this is an open affirmation to suburbanization – low density development. Charles Waldheim, James Corner, Chris Reed, and Mohsen Mostafavi are among the instructors, practitioners, and theorists who have been most responsible for articulating the terms of Landscape Urbanism, but the field is still at a point where architectural graphics take precedence over applied methodologies.

Contents

History

The first event was the Landscape Urbanism conference sponsored by the Graham Foundation in Chicago in April 1997. Speakers included Charles Waldheim, Mohsen Mostafavi, James Corner of James Corner/Field Operations, Alex Wall, and Adriaan Geuze of the firm West 8, among others. The formative period of Landscape Urbanism can be traced back to University of Pennsylvania in the late 1980s, at a time when James Corner, Mohsen Mostafavi, and others were exploring the artificial boundaries of Landscape Architecture, Urban Design and Architecture, searching for better ways to deal with complex urban projects. Charles Waldheim, Anu Mathur, Alan Berger, Chris Reed, amongst others, were students at the University of Pennsylvania during this formative period for Landscape Urbanism. After the Chicago conference, European design schools and North American design institutions formed academic programs and began to formalize a field of Landscape Urbanism studies, including Oslo School of Architecture [5], Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium [6], the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Toronto, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology [7]. In 2000 the London's Architectural Association developed its own Landscape Urbanism program under the direction of Ciro Najle and chairman at the time Mohsen Mostafavi. This was marked by the 2003 publication of the book "Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape" a year before chairman Mostafavi left the AA.

Themes

James Corner, in an essay entitled "Terra Fluxus," describes the main qualities of Landscape Urbanism in abstract rather than practical terms, lending the genre to speculation rather than practice:

Projects

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ Waldheim, Charles (2006). The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. pp. 37. 
  2. ^ Peter Connolly separately used the term ‘landscape urbanism’ as the initial title for his Masters of Urban Design project proposal, presented at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, two years earlier, in 1994. Here he suggested that ‘a language of “landscape urbanism” barely exists and needs articulating’, and that ‘existing urbanisms...are limited in the exploration of the landscape’. He also used the term ‘landscape as urbanism’ in his 1994 essay, ‘101 ideas about big parks’, Kerb: Journal of Landscape Architecture, no 1, Melbourne: RMIT University Press, 1995.
  3. ^ Waldheim, Charles (2006). The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press. pp. 38. 

External links