For a Laugh

A friend in LAEP forwarded this:

Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator

Not saying I agree, but it does seem relevant to our discussion of the potential for interdisciplinary conflict over the definition of the term.

multivalence does not equal bricolage

Multivalence through scale
I am a big fan of Marpillero and Pollack’s work, and art of the reason is the way tat the engage he landscape and almost map out the different activities that could happen. This focusing on scale, explains a little it about their methodology.
I believe that, especially when dealing with larger sites, it is important to have a variety of scales. Urban Design seems to be a great victim of scale, ending up with two extremes, the aerial design of simply the house/object in the field. Landscape automatically gives a variety in scales because if has to deal so directly with materiality and time…
As we cannot predict exactly what people’s behavior is going to be, or exactly how they are going to use the space provided, multivalence becomes extremely important. The architect’s/designer’s job is not to dictate but to open up possibilities. I believe a variety of scales is key in this aspect.

Bricolage?
I the second article, Andrea Khan mentions that: “Embedded within, and constructive of, so many framing contexts, such multiscale urban sites open to diverse interpretation […] In terms of their limits and their scales, urban sites present designers with shifting and potentially conflicting identities”. Not entirely agreeing with this comment, it made me think of another statement made Nezar Alsayyad in the introduction his book “Hybrid Urbanism”, Prof, Alsayyad states:
“Hybridity thus does not emerge from the synthesis of different components, but from a space where elements encounter an transform each other (…)”. Although not directly dealing with spatial hybridity but more related to scale, I still think this is very relevant. If we make an analogy to cooking, like anything it’s not about how many ingredients you put it, put how they mix together. As a result, designers, just like chefs, should not be concerned with creating a bricolage, ("make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are to hand (regardless of their original purpose)"), but on the other and should aim for a symphony!

Calibrating the s u b l i m e

These readings coincided beautifully with studio issues of scale and a recent site visit to sublime Big Sur, California. To briefly relate, our site is situated on a voluptuous, rolling mountain scape with views to an infinite ocean/sky horizon in one orientation and boundless mountain range in another. At once we are encountering issues of scale and relating to the sublime as we site our buildings. Pollak suggests that the designer can "bring forth and intensify existing forces by weaving new scales of activity into the site." In an attempt to get another desk crit in before next studio, what else can or should we as designers do with or to a sublime site? I think it is a great description of or protocol for working with the sublime on multiple layers.
I question just one part of the article. Pollak states that none of the projects she mentions blurs the boundary between architecture and landscape. Do you all agree with that? How can Siza's pool project, that extends the water and horizon, not sometimes be considered an ambiguity between architecture, constructed ground, and landscape?

multigrain urbanism with five (5) essential minerals

Andrea Kahn declares the problem of site definition as a "necessarily indefinite task" (79). Is there productive value in debating the multitudinous, multifarious (this week's readings richly expound upon a vocabulary of multi-'s) scales and layers of meaning in a site? Kahn and Pollack make the same point, that thinking about the multiple scales that a site may occupy yields latent potentials in the uses of a site.

What happens when the thought process is reversed: to first discover clandestine urban practices, and then find the appropriate framework for such activities? I believe this process would transform how we think about what is a site. The Cheeseboard median mid-day meal munching mob, for example, practice the semi-public act of a picnic on grounds which are not approved of for picnic-ing by the city. Margaret Crawford suggested an intervention of a pizza-eating apparatus--the scale of the body becomes the site for investigation with this idea. And this is interesting to me, the overlap now of essentially ergonomic design with urban design. Urbanism of inches. Site is boundless, it goes inward as far as it goes outward.

Outward being Burns' domain of site understanding, which she boils down to the desire for building and site as one system made up of many interdependent exchanges. My criticism of her view, while it neatly solves the disconnect between a building and the material it depends upon, is that a site boundary can be a desirable , productive line to draw and to re-present. I'm not sure Burns would disagree, but the emphasis seems to be on dissolution of site boundary to solve a (very pressing) techno-environmental global problem.

seminar 5 with seminar 3's readings; what's in a number?

The most important questions that these readings raise for me pertains to the scale at which architectural interventions take place. How can the scale of a project be measured when, for example, the Trump complex in mid-town Manhattan acted not only on its direct site but also on the sewage treatment and public transportation station that served it? Where does the reach of a project end? How do many projects, operating at many different scales of influence, interact to construct the poche background that planners and architects have traditionally regarded, as Czerniak describes, as a character-less medium for architectural insertions?

I appreciate Czerniak’s call to architects and planners to see architecture as a device, rather than as an object, which can transform the urban landscape and fabric, yet not be in complete control of the varied elements which constitute it, or of the relationship between the user and the space. This view, of the city as a space of differences which operate on multiple scales to create a dynamic fabric of varied interactions, seems to me to be the perfect container for the many publics that we have been discussing thus far. As Kahn discusses, the specificity of an urban site, like Times Square, is made possible because of coexisting, but not coincident, urban operations. This is, indeed, how I understand that the city as a whole is able to exist; through the co-presentness of different, and not necessarily interacting, publics. Attempting to design for all of the publics in a city is a bit like attempting to situate a project at all of the different scales of a site; a noble, and exciting, challenge that will likely continue to occupy the imaginations of landscape urbanists.

Seminar 4: Defining Public Space

Lewis Dijkstra suggests that there is a definition of ‘true’ public space, and critiques various typology based on whether it meets this criteria. This idea is problematic on various levels. While it recognizes various differences in the ‘public’ it fails to recognize that those differences may need to be accommodated by entirely different spaces. While Ruth Glass notes that urban spaces defy definition and cannot be defined by the analysis of poorly and subjectively defined qualities. However, while this understanding of urban analysis identifies the difficulties in defining or analyzing urban space, it does not offer an effective alternative direction.

Kelly Shannon arrives at several conclusions and offers evidence of projects that successfully address contemporary urban conditions. It suggests, counter to the Dijkstra piece, that homogenous, one size fits all approaches to space is neither possible nor desirable. This is true on multiple levels, not just from cultural or social perspectives. To be successful, integration is paramount, but an acceptable integration is not counter to flexibility, but on the contrary is dependent on it.

Nick's Week 4 Response

Recent European landscape projects advocate a reclamation of landscape as a means of introducing urban development. This opposes the traditional method of dozing and erasing a landscape’s identity and returning later to infill with an artificial landscape—green lawns, playgrounds, etc. Other projects such as Andrea Branzi’s “weak urbanism” projects view the landscape as an agricultural, “highly evolved industrial system, capable of adapting to production cycles that change over time and utilize reversible modes of organization” (Shannon 155). Change is loosely planned for in Grether and Desvigne’s Lyon Confluence project: “exterior areas will be born, disappear, shift, according to the evolution of the building and the rhythm of the liberation of land, to make up a sort of moving map, like that of crop rotation” (156). Is the landscape really a figure here, or still the background, a field to be shaped by the architectural and infrastructural forces around it? Is it possible to have a figured landscape at all?

Koolhaas proposes in his Melun-Senart town design that the city’s form is weak and formless, defined by a “system of emptiness” that gives the city its life. Emptiness alone, even landscaped emptiness, does not guarantee use. So how can we design a space to be used by a balanced section of the public realm?

Dijkstra advocates that we must be active in ensuring that we give equal access to all groups at all times. While he admits this is unrealistic, still it is the goal of his idea of urban space. Should we even strive for unity, or should our public institutions plan for flexibility and let the people decide where they want to gather?

Crawford is in favor of James Holston’s “spaces of insurgent citizenship”, where immigrants, people of different economic and cultural background disrupt “normative categories of social life and urban experience”. How can we plan for disruption? What is the best urban fabric to permit user customization without ending up in chaos? Can urban chaos be a good thing, or is that a riot?

a wrinkle in time

Margaret Crawford’s piece brings up many interesting issues for me regarding designing public space. The most provocative issue, I think, is how there are few, if any, good examples of a truly democratic public space, as the ones normally cited, like the acropolis, worked solely because of their exclusionary nature. This, of course, brings up the issue of designing for separate publics, an idea, I think, that many architects are adverse to, but in attempting to design for everyone they often end up designing for no one. I would call for a greater recognition of the exclusionary realities of public design, and for architects to embrace designing for the specific publics that are actually in a position to use the intervention that they are creating.

All of these issues about “democratic” public space and the many different publics one has to consider in a modern urban environment, calls to mind the national mall in Washington DC, perhaps because that is the city which I lived in most recently. The national mall, as do many other parks throughout the US, functions as a space that is co-opted in an almost weekly basis by different groups advocating different causes/events. While the different publics don’t exist in the same space at the same time, I am intensely interested in this layering of public spaces that takes place in this venue, as well as in civic centers and stadiums/music venues. I see such potential for this series of adjacencies through time!

Who defines public space?

Although I am not too knowledgeable on Margaret Crawford’s work, I really appreciate her notion of “everyday urbanism”; celebrating everyday life, seeing over the “banality” and recognizing potential and character.
With that said, I really liked her article “ Contesting the public real. In my opinion, public space has become, more and more, a difficult notion to define. With the integration of Landscape, Urban Design and Architecture, the exterior filtering in and the interior spreading; the celebration of infrastructure (originally seen as the “private” and hidden part of an intervention); etc., these boundaries of public and private have blurred even more. It is no longer black and white, but an array of “grays” (semipublic, semiprivate, etc). It depends on perception, which itself depends on the culture (a half opened door can be an invitation in one culture while meaning the opposite in other).
Nevertheless, in this article, Prof. Crawford focuses on another notion of public. It is a “public” steaming from public action, or more specifically, public reaction. It consists on people (usually minority groups) coming together, protesting on their right of citizenship, and therefore bringing a once private issue put on the table for everyone to see and be aware of. In this case, it is not that much about public space but the exertion of public rights and the appropriation of space to do so. Designed space no longer takes the stand, but it is the “everyday” which gets the spotlight (sidewalks, streets, etc). This brings me back to the first readings we explored, the Harvard Design Magazine discussion; can public space really be designed? Is it defined by the users? Maybe it is both as architecture and design have the potential to created and invite these many public gestures…

“p”ublic the few, “P”ublic the many?

the desire to engage everyone, in terms of fulfilling Dijkstra’s description of public, seems unrealistic, by the nature that we are socially divided by very physical constraints ie. gender, race, income. (these of which may be altered as less commonly occurring examples.) might this suggest there exists a pedagogical rift in defining public, between Public’s necessary inclusion of everyone and all activities, versus an aggregate of smaller, less-all-encompassing publics? rather, could the second school offers at the very least and through the protection of public policy, its availability to be transformed as dependent upon the action of a citizen who may very well not feel welcomed.

perhaps this rift establishes “P”ublic and “p”ublic, regarding respective space potentialities. Could the discrimination of public spaces we find in familiar urban contexts support that these aren’t public “spaces” at all, but public “places.”

Second and first week

Isolation

Most “Modern” cities (in the “industrialized”, “Western” countries) were conceived through the rigidity and the standardization following the paradigm of the “city as a machine”. As Graham and Simon Marvin mention in “Splintering Urbanism”, the city, under economic and geopolitical forces, began to expand rapidly with infrastructure and highways spreading across the landscape and enclaves forming within the city and in its outskirts.
Although, modernism was “noble” in its ideal of equal distribution and unification, this was not necessarily the case in practice. These high- density arteries were very exclusive in their selection of nodes (normally defined by capitalist and political reasons). As a result, they connected specific enclaves while “bypassing” others (to use the term in “Splintering Urbanism”); thus exacerbating the segmentation within the city. It is through the creation of fragments and “voids” that interaction in a city has been brutally limited.
In reaction to the latter, designers and planners have tried to completely separate the automobile (and perhaps the rest of infrastructure). Frampton states that, in desperation to bring back “city life” and to reactivate streets and downtowns, we have run into the problem of making the city look like a “theme park”. Nevertheless, this makes me wonder if, in today’s society, which is becoming more and more isolationist (specially with the immersion of technology that provides us with everything we need; even a simple action as stopping and asking for directions is no longer needed, as GPS systems are extremely available), any attempt made will be seen as a caricature.


“Urban design now”, Harvard magazine
Narcissism in design.

During the interview, Moussavi mentions that “ we can learn from found situations, and we can engineer designs or even design guidelines that produce conditions closer to those spontaneous ones that fascinate everybody else rather than fix a set of principles […]”. This comment highlights the importance of the vernacular as well as the importance of culture and context in the process of design. Through communication and observation of people’s behaviors we understand the true necessities, desires and values of the users and consequently of the community. Unfortunately, few projects reflect this notion in its entirety. Even if well intentioned, designers, tend to gravitate towards the idea of “authorship” and thus place themselves in the center of the project, pushing the end users aside. This Narcissist approach does not involve the community but simply assumes people’s reactions. As a result, the majority results in beautiful but unsuccessful projects. Nevertheless one might oneself, what exactly is success?


“Terra Fluxus”, James Corner
Time in design

As stated by Corner, Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Design are becoming more a hybrid. Though remaining distinct disciplines because of their focus, their use of materials, etc., they all compliment each other and to a certain point depend on each other. This is especially valid in today’s society having realized the importance of “spatio-temporal” interventions, of flexibility and adaptability to the future needs and desires. Between the three disciplines mentioned above, Landscape if the one that has truly embraced the passage of time. It is through the change of the seasons that one truly appreciates the design in its entirety. On the other hand, Architecture and Urban Design have in some ways neglected this aspect of the future. Whether by following a very strict set of rules (with no real relationship to the context), or by viewing the intervention as permanent and preferring the new, untouched and crystallized version of their interventions, they have exacerbated the emerging “voids” that are now so pronounced in many cities.


“The emergence of Landscape Urbanism”, Graham Shane
“Fetishist” voids

I, as most designers, have always been attracted to the “site out of mind”; the edges and gaps resulting from a collision of scales and uses; the leftover spaces under, over and above elevated highways, infrastructural elements, railway lines; the voids and ruined places resulting from abandonment or neglect. Nevertheless, I have often wondered why that is. Is it because these spaces reflect a reality not seen in many if not all new developments (suburban design, “bubble” cities such as Disney’s Celebration, etc.)? Is it because we see potential, and an opportunity to make a change, and make a stance? Or perhaps it is a combination of both? The reason that may be, these spaces and voids created in the city and outskirts should be addressed in a serious and considerate manner, and not simply as a stage for experimentation and “design entertainment”. As Shane states, “a true urban ecology provides such feedback mechanisms to safeguard its future and allows or the response of those who want to climb out of poverty”. The primary goal in the approach should be the people, the potential to help them out, to provide them with more opportunities (places that can be productive, and to give them a little more dignity in their lives).

Park(ing) Day

Shall we charette?

September 21, 2007 - PARK(ing) Day PARK(ing) Day is a one-day, global event centered in San Francisco where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform parking spots into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public parks.

link

Everything is OK

The conflict between Toward an Urban Landscape and the other two writings, Hybrid Morphologies and Representation and Landscape lies primarily in it’s fundamental convictions of what architecture is and what it should respond to, either through a design process or as a methodology for analysis. The relationship of Heidegger, Deluze and Guatari, and other philosophy that it is so fashionable to use as inspiration for architecture, would seem to be unimportant to Frampton in Toward an Urban Landscape. He suggests that political and economic structures are defining the urban landscape while architects discuss irrelevant ideology. In fact, Frampton would suggest that it is imperative that we disregard such ideology.

These essays would seem to embody opposing ends of an ideological spectrum, but there is some commonality to the set. Similar to the overlap suggested in Hybrid Morphologies, there is space in the milieu of architectural discourse for an ideological hybrid. This hybrid is also hinted at in Representation and Landscape, which suggests a place that allows for dealing with both the material realities of design and the abstractions of drawing and philosophy. Corner concedes that even though the drawing is disconnected from constructed space, it is necessary as a place to incubate and experiment with ideas. Similarly, the politics and economies of the built environment from Frampton can be seen as the built reality and the ideology of other texts as the abstraction. Ultimately, they should inform one another.

The New Suburbanism

"New Suburbanism," LTL

The so called New Urbanism is often criticized for failing to extend beyond the relatively affluent and mostly southern resort communities in which it originated. Its association with period architecture and prescriptive rules about paint colors and fence types has largely obscured the original aim of providing a new organizational framework for exurban development. It is interesting to see Frampton advocating for a system of suburban development that seems to be rooted in a similar organizational strategy, albeit one with the potential for employing a very different and less conservative formal language.

The appeal of New Urbanism for me has always been its obsessive attention to the typology of the urban fabric. I am unsure whether “New” Urbanism and “Landscape” Urbanism could ever become aligned, or whether they represent opposite approaches to the problems of the contemporary city. But it does seem as though a truly ecological approach to urban infrastructure and development would require a level of planning, regularity, and efficiency that is difficult to imagine in the ephemeral and shifting urban landscape that Corner describes in “Terra Fluxus.” Cities house human activity, so it is exciting to envision a continuous, flexible, and well staged network of lan-fra-tecture extending to every underused corner of the cityscape and binding it back together. Still, I wonder whether a more modest project involving sensible land use policy, transportation connections, and infrastructural efficiency might achieve many of the same ends much more quickly, with the same opportunity for heightened landscape experience, and at a fraction of the cost.

the shelf life of space

on designing the temporary what does that mean? we may forcase or prescribe programs, potential uses, and functionally fallow seasons. are we weathermen reporting upon potentialities subject to chaos theory fluctuations? (and if so, how do we guide best-case scenarios?)

"self-reliant architecture": where infrastructure / architecture / landscape are open to interact?
open in terms of programmatic morphology of new urbanism's continous surface, blurring inside and outside, responding to environmental inputs. could there be a greater success rate for architecture less super-stylized? ie. blobs, period pieces. (city as smooth)

is new urbanism inventing? (As Frampton feels recent avant-garde endeavors are "guises at new scales.")
are we to borrow from the past? rather, do we not build, should that even be an option? will addressing landscape (urban public spaces rather than outright buildings) help remedy the misdirection of a comfortable, compacent public and ill-planned interfaces of infrastructure-architecture-landscape? (city as aggregate)

I find James Corner's argument at the beginning of his essay "Representation and Landscape" to be a rather bizarre and banal discussion of the obvious. Perhaps I am being naive, but is it not somewhat apparent that a landscape architectural drawing is not a sufficient stand-in for that landscape itself, and further that it is a generative tool rather than a purely representational one? This also begs the question: how is this any different from an architectural drawing?

He states that "the phenomenological qualities of landscape space, time and material present unsurmountable difficulties for drawing and representation”, yet how does this jibe with the oft-repeated mantra in the halls of architecture schools that your idea is only as good as your representation of it? Clearly it is not possible to accurately capture the phenomenological attributes of space in a 2 dimensional art form, be it landscape, cityscape, or enclosed building. Is this not the challenge that we, as designers, most relish and strive to rise above?

It seems that Corner is attempting to put some distance between the profession of landscape architecture and the long tradition of landscape painting in order to give landscape architecture a greater academic and intellectual weight. It seems to me that we could all—architects and landscape architects alike—learn from the manner in which masterful landscape painters are able to evoke poignant sensations through time and space so that they are legible to onlookers hundreds of years later.

hierarchy or not

I agree that this thing we are investigating is really _______ urbanism. (Could it not be infrarchiscape urbanism as well?) I think the value of the juxtaposition of landscape and urbanism is that we reverse the traditional view of the city, as something built on top of a landscape to a re-landscaping of the city. But from that point on, the usefulness of the term drowns out in the noise produced by the very 'definition' of what it is.

Landscape/urbanism resists any nomenclature; it wishes to remain as continuous with other disciplines as possible. However, I find myself cringing when I see the words "hyper urbanism" and "hybrid morphology" and "fluid spatial continuum"--I understand that what is being described lacks form, but we are at risk of being consumed by an endless repetition of something that lacks direction, hierarchy. Possibly by giving a hierarchy, we can begin to see what landscape urbanism actually is (even though some examples without hierarchy may be praised, such as the lack of "compositional order which might prioritize architecture" in Koolhaas' "Dolphins" project). Sometimes an architectural object deserves to stand alone as a figure, a monument--think of orientation devices in cities, or even on our campus--the campanile. Without it our ability to navigate other, less familiar sides of the campus would be severely compromised. By extension, a city fabric without hierarchy is a confounding, sometimes terrifying place to inhabit.

Establishing a hierarchy among design objectives is not about regressing back to traditional roles of the architect, the planner, the landscape architect, etc. I think we all recognize that those boundaries have dissolved. But what happens when you try to re-scribe new boundaries after the melee (or during the melee, if you will)? Are there now new ideas about what is a shelter, new ideas about what is a recreational landscape, and new ideas about what is a gathering space?

"x" Urbanism

New and past readings suggest this course could accurately be called: Landscape Urbanism, Hyper Urbanism, New Hybrid Urbanism, Post Urbanism, Pluralism Urbanism, Site/Non-Site Urbanism, SCAPE Urbanism ... Fill in the _____ Urbanism.

These terms not only reference the various perspectives and multiple fields of study that contribute to the practice of (Landscape) Urbanism, but they also highlight the vast and rich scope, scale, and nature of the work itself. Modes of representation and processes of design hail from architecture, infrastructural, and landscape. As a planner, I would argue that this hybrid phenomenon cannot exist without the policy and implementation from that field/department as well.

In Corner's "Representation and Landscape," there was a real connection, even overlapping, between architecture and landscape representations. As an architect, "The built landscape must be determined in advance and exist after the drawing," spatially, it is all-enveloping," and "bound into geographical places and topographies" are phrases synonomous to architectural representation.

One question I wanted to pose to the group from our discussion last week related to sucess/failure and informalities of a place. Is it possible to measure the sucess or failure of a place that caters to "many publics"? What determines success or failure? Many of these cases we are studying aim at producing urban moments where, at least in the Koolhaas and Zaha projects, the results are unexpected or unknown. We spoke about homeless people in a park and an informal market in Hong Kong. Aren't these informalities part of the nature or essence of ______ Urbanism?

PS. Blogger.com thinks "Urbanism" is not a word!

GIS resource

For those of you interested in layering geospatial data for your site:

GIIF
Geospatial Imaging and Informatics Facility is located on the west side of campus. They have a computer lab with GIS software. The website is really good. Click on resources, then data, and it lists a bunch of websites where you can download data. Though you probably need to learn ArcMap or some other kind of GIS software.