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Since The 1970

The document discusses the history and evolution of landscape urbanism since the 1970s. It explores how landscape urbanism aims to integrate ecology and address social needs. Examples are given like the 1982 Parc de la Villette competition in Paris which explored using landscape as a medium for urban infrastructure and public spaces. Contemporary landscape urbanism is described as rehabilitating abandoned and toxic sites while using infrastructure to shape urban development and futures.

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18 views1 page

Since The 1970

The document discusses the history and evolution of landscape urbanism since the 1970s. It explores how landscape urbanism aims to integrate ecology and address social needs. Examples are given like the 1982 Parc de la Villette competition in Paris which explored using landscape as a medium for urban infrastructure and public spaces. Contemporary landscape urbanism is described as rehabilitating abandoned and toxic sites while using infrastructure to shape urban development and futures.

Uploaded by

jackzzen
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Since the 1970’s, the architectural profession has expressed itself with an emerging aspiration for

ecological integration to the urban life through numerous architectural historians, critics, and
architects alike critiquing modern architectural planning “for its inability to produce a ‘meaningful’ or
‘livable’ public realm”, described by Kevin Lynch, “and its failure to come to terms with the city as an
historical construction of ‘collective consciousness’”, expressed by Aldo Rossi in The Architecture of
The City.(38)1 Both architects express a strong concern for the architectural practice and the urban
planning field with a weakness that derives from the industrialized economy of the nation. Less than
a decade later, the 1982 Competition for Parc de la Villette showcased prime examples of what
landscape urbanism was to become. The 125-acre site in Paris served as an urban transformation “in
which landscape was itself, conceived as a complex medium capable of articulating relations between
urban infrastructure, public events, and indeterminate urban futures for large post-industrial sites.”
(40)2 A wide range of architectural figures took part in the Paris competition of which two winners laid
out the strong potential of landscape urbanism and the landscape practice. Bernard Tschumi, winner
of the competition, was able to reinterpret the social approach to landscape urbanism by addressing
though programmatic order that would be adaptable to societies needs over time. Alongside Tschumi
was Rem Koolhaas who strongly followed Louis Sullivans “Form follows function” aspect of design
through “function” that became increasingly popular in the 20 th century. The primal idea behind such
approach to design was to design for human activity which he applied in his entry for the Parc de la
Villette competition. The unbuilt project linked relationships between park programs that would be
adequately adaptable for future use. Both projects approached an urban infrastructure design that
aided for future social changes developing a sense of timelessness to the layout of the projects that
would adapt and thrive throughout time. Rachel Carson, American author and biologist, describes the
agricultural land as soil that “exists in a state of constant change, taking part in cycles that have no
beginning and no end”. (53)3 The adaptation of the landscape Urbanism practice requires more than
the awareness of change in society and needs to address the change in soil life simultaneously. A dual
task that is unique to a rare few professions but contributes greatly to the reintroduction of neglected
spaces.

The ecological approach to many of the sites in todays developed landscape urbanism practice
includes the rehabilitation of abandoned and toxic environments as a useful framework for landscape
practice. Infrastructure can be described as a backbone for landscape urbanism that is gradually
making a greater presence in the built environment. Contemporary landscape urbanism should “use
infrastructural systems and the public landscapes they engender as the very ordering mechanisms of
the urban field itself, shaping and shifting the organization of urban settlement and its inevitably
indeterminate economic, political, and social futures”. (39) 4 Victor Gruen, Austrian born architect,
stated that landscape, for him, is the “environment in which nature is predominant”. (26) 5Practicing
Urban landscaping is described as a new found relationship that aims to integrate a broad range of
professions simultaneously such as civil engineering, real estate development, as well as other design
professions while addressing social factors simultaneously. Alan Berger’s essay “Drosscape” proposes
an analytical framework for de-industrialization (industrial abandonment) similar to the architectural
scene of adaptive reuse that further explores the ecological capabilities of abandoned sites.

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