European Landscape Architecture Practice 2000

Sanda Lenzholzer
Talking about spatial concepts, the same separationist attitude went for plans that
were made under influence of the CIAM conferences. In the mid of last century
many Dutch cities saw the petrification of that separatist thought with the sprouting
of monofunctional modernist schemes. Most of them were built by one masterbuilder,
and there were many in Holland at that time like van Broek en Bakema, van
Eesteren,etc.
The second approach is an intermediate strategy, which I call passive tolerance.
That means that ‘the other’ – the unknown or unwanted is not forbidden anymore
but is given its own mental or spatial pocket to exist. That pocket is nevertheless
still in very good control of the opposed surroundings and mostly kept out of sight
or in a distance.This strategy is very much an outcome of the strong liberalization
wave following the 1960ies student revolutions, that broke up a lot of structures
and led to the physical manifestations of the tolerance zones like the famous redlight
districts.
The third strategy is fusion or integration
The present composition of society reflects globalization, bringing various ethnicities
together and strong individualization processes. Through the multiple identities and
roles a modern indiviual has developed, he or she belongs to different groups. So
the border between ‘the one’ and ‘the other’ is now overlapping or nonexistent and
the emancipated person would not accept any discrimination based on any of
those relations to different groups. So the only correct answer is in the present
context: fusion and acceptance, a concept being increasingly applied in mixed-use
and flexible space projects. The focus of the lecture is to show new projects that
reflect this integrative concept.
Futhermore a cross-link will be laid of the three forces to be governed: society,
economy and nature with some strategies. The projects shown are all relatively
new so that rather work in process is shown than finished projects. Presenting this
kind of projects does not mean that the general trend is going towards integration.
Still lots of recently developed concepts are based on the separationist thought and
all intermediate forms.
the dutch against god?
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