Charles Waldheim – Landscape as Urbanism
Landscape is a model and medium for the contemporary city. This book provides a set of diverse backgrounds including historical, theoretical and cultural ones. Instead of providing another “manifesto,” this book aims to provide a general theory of thinking (or rethinking?) the urban through landscape.
Urbanism is itself a term distinguishing from urban planning as well as social sciences, and between the academic and professional realms. Despite its various definitions, urbanism mainly aims to study and experience the processes of urbanization, and also to generate interventions upon those processes. Landscape, as the author states, adds another quality to the term urbanism, or more specifically offers a specific perspective in thinking urbanism, that is, through the lenses of landscape.
These lenses are themselves versatile. Landscape could be understood as cultural production, human perception, or medium of design, depending on cultural contexts or disciplines. The author of this book aims specifically to situate landscape as a medium of urbanism. Arguably, in the West, landscape urbanism finds itself useful in investigating complex sites that cannot be comprehended by strict, conventional architectonic model of city making. In the East, however, landscape urbanism might take on an even more serious role in dealing with rural and urban phenomena. It might as well precede architectonic thinking, in many instances, since the “architectonic boundaries” in many places tend to be ambiguous or “weak.” The multiplicities and complexity of sites represents for Waldheim a kind of “collective spatial project,” which necessitates new media and models, able to understand it. This understanding is one of synthetic nature, making connections between “social, ecological, and economic terms.”
Landscape is seen, through the lens of the author, not as stylistic or scenographic disposition, but as a medium of “remediation,” capable of articulating different spatial and macroeconomics models that have governed city over time. In particular, this theory offers a new structural relationship between urban design and planning through the medium of landscape architecture. It traces the many origins and antecedents of the field, from the work of Ludwig Hilberseimer (whose interest centers on ecological function and social equity) or Andrea Branzi (which generates political and cultural critique) to more recent ecological planning theories.
By so doing, in Chapter One, it also traces the many projects, theories and key figures of the design world like Stan Allen , James Corner (operational field of contemporary urbanism), Kenneth Frampton (megaform as urban landscape), Lars Lerup (zoohemic canopy), Bernard Tschumi (open work) or Rem Koolhaas (congestion without matter) during the 1880s and 1890s.
Chapter Two is preoccupied with the potential of landscape urbanism as a critical tool to read ecology as “equally autonomous, open-ended, and indeterminate.” This chapter discusses the post-modernist reaction against modernism as well as avant-gardist figures like Peter Eisenman and their reflection on architectural culture (Eisenman’s 1976 essay “Post-Functionalism). The concept of “open work” is carried out further to discuss the phenomenon of ‘Self-Organization,” with influences from disciplines such as literary criticism and linguistics.
Chapter Three situates landscape urbanism at the complex intersection between ideological shift in urban planning in the United States and the progressive architectural culture as well as the rise of landscape planners and theorists such as Ian McHarg, with renewed concern for the environment and interest in spatial planning of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century, after a period of inclination towards the social sciences in planning practice.
Chapter Four accounts for the economic shift from industrial, Fordist economy to the postindustrial economy of consumption. This transition entails landscape urbanist solutions such as David Harvey’s concept of “spatial fix.” According to the author, in the 21st century, landscape urbanism is expected to play a role to mitigate negative impacts of the transition between economic models. It could play a role in economic structuring in terms of remediating postindustrial site or unlock the potential of urban ecology in derelict sites, for example.
Chapter Five and Six digs deeper into the topics of the relation between economic structure and spatial order, discussing the renewed interest in landscape painting (like Claude Lorrain’s drawings) and the concept of the “ruin,” or ‘disabitato,’ representing urban abandon sites in the “post-Fordist” city. Chapter Six takes a close look at Hilberseimer’s planning concept for Lafayette Park in Detroit, as a way to mitigate negative environmental and social impacts of spatial restructuring issues in shrinking cities.
Hilberseimer’s “New Regional Pattern” continue to influence the Chapter 7, in reading spatial setting and “urban” life through economic and ecological orders. This methodology views space as continuous and disregard the conventional view of urban-rural dichotomy.
Chapter 8 takes the airport as one of the most important sites in the “horizontal field framed by infrastructure.” The airport landscape is an example of spatial representation by using the method of “Aerial Representation,” preferred by many landscape architects, since it represents well the “horizontal field of urban operations,” while allowing for mutation of cross design cultural aspects like photomontage, flatbed painting and axonometric depiction.
Chapter 9 draws a continuous development of landscape urbanism from the renewed model of the Francophile’s “architecte-paysasiste,” most notably embraced by Frederick Law Olmsted in his major work Central Park in New York City, to the contemporary ecological urbanism and landscape practices like Kongjian Yu’s Turenscape, which places ecological concerns and city building through infrastructure and ecological function at its core.
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works cited:
Melun-Sénart, OMA
Logistical Activities Zone, Stan Allen, 1996
Igualada Cemetery (1986–89), Enric Mirailles and Carme Pinós
Archery Range (1989–92), Enric Mirailles and Carme Pinós
proposal for the Bridesburg neighborhood on Philadelphia’s Delaware River Waterfront, James Corner
Delaware Waterfront project, James Corner
West 8’s 1995 proposal for the Dutch coastal new town of Buckthorn City
