Landscape Urbanism describes a disciplinary shift currently underway in which landscape substitutes architecture as the foundations of contemporary urbanism. For many, landscape has develop into both the lens through which the contemporary city is symbolised and the method through which it is created.[1]
James Corner’s ‘Terra Fluxus’ advocates that it is necessary and that we should maintain a ‘paradoxical separateness’ of landscape from urbanism. As neither term is fully fused into the other.[2]
He substantiate this belief through empirical authentication and ethical sponsorship, by stating that the failure of earlier urban design and locally scaled schemes, Modernist tendencies, where oversimplified, a reduction of the unique prosperities of physical life. Corner suggests, it was a neglect of the intimacy and an understanding with the things that characterises ‘rich urban experience’.[3] Corner moral focus is on the experiential body and its relationship, not with, or to, but between an event based urban environment/atmosphere.
To achieve this closeness with the urban, Corner suggests that ‘a good designer’ must be capable of weaving the schema and the approach in relationship to the physical and the poetic. In other words, it is a part to whole relationship, where the coming together of landscape with urbanism assures innovative ‘relational’ and ‘systemic’ mechanism across varying territories. While at the same time, the split of landscape from urbanism acknowledges a level of material physicality, of ‘intimacy’ and ‘difference’, that is always intrinsic within the larger ‘matrix or field’.[4] Corner establishes a speculative dichotomy; to realise a rich urban experience, Landscape Urbanism is to be both union and separateness.
If Landscape Urbanist are to succeed in creating new ecologies in the urban environment, Corner reflects that they must not ignore the essential nature of ‘being and becoming’, of difference, both ‘permanent and transient’, between all ‘matters and events’ that occur in situated moments. As this is the ever-diversifying basis of human ‘enrichment and creativity.’[5]
Essential, this is at the core of satisfying the human condition, the sense of belonging-security, and becoming-stimulation, which bringing us to the cliché word of happiness, that which is good in life, establishing a moral imperative for landscape urbanism. It is this rationale of creative humane urban forms, places for people, that warrants long lasting sustainable effects for people, communities, and societies, to flourish. As Jane Jacobs states in the Death and Life of Great American Cities.
“Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon….Decaying cites, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental”.[6]
Emphasising the importance and influence that the urban and the landscape contribute to our psyche and way of life.
Further more, as theoretical tools for understanding the meaning and use of urban space, where the notions of being and the becoming is reflected in the works of: Deleuze and Guattari’s-smooth and striated space, Franks and Steven’s-loose space, and Kim Dovey’s Becoming Places, which all suggest that it is not one or the other but both, a sort of de-centralisation of things, which connects to Corner’s paradoxical separateness.
How then can this reflect on Dissertation two? What are the possibilities of ‘what if’? How can I utilise the Landscape Urbanist lens to propose propositions, which are not object focused in the sense of the physicality of wallness, the architectural lens? Propositions for becoming spaces.
References
Corner, J 2006, ‘Terra Fluxus’, in C Waldheim, (ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, pp 21-33
Deleuze, G 1993, The Fold, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
Dovey, K 2010, Becoming Places: Urbanism/Architecture/Identity/Power, Routledge, London.
Franck, K and Stevens, Q 2007, Loose Space: Possibilities and Diversity in Urban Life, Routledge, London.
Jacobs, J 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Modern Library, New York.
Waldheim, C (eds) 2006, The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press, New York
Waldheim, C 2006, ‘The Landscape Urbanism’, in Waldheim, C (ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press, New York.
[1] Waldheim, C (eds) 2006, The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, pp. 11
[2] Corner, J 2006, ‘Terra Fluxus’, in C Waldheim, (ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, pp. 32.
[3] Corner, J 2006, ‘Terra Fluxus’, in C Waldheim, (ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, pp. 32.
[4] Corner, J 2006, ‘Terra Fluxus’, in C Waldheim, (ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, pp. 33
[5] Corner, J 2006, ‘Terra Fluxus’, in C Waldheim, (ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, pp. 33
[6] Jacobs, J 1961, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Modern Library, New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment