topic - urban-design-group.org.uk

BOOK REVIEWS
ARTSCAPES - ART AS AN APPROACH TO CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE
LUCA GALOFARO
WALKSCAPES - WALKING AS AN AESTHETIC PRACTICE
FRANCESCO CARERI, EDITORIAL GUSTAV0 GILI BARCELONA 2002/3 C. £20 EACH
ISBN 84-252-1841-1
These two books form part of a new
Land&Scape series presenting issues
involving landscape in the widest
sense of the word, narrated as a rich
and complex theory rather than merely
the physical entity. The text is in both
Spanish and English interspersed with
pages devoted to specific theories or
projects and using a single colour in
a positive and imaginative way. Both
books are on the edge of what would
be defined as urban design and I found
Artscapes to be the more satisfying as
it covered aspects that more directly
related to public space.
Artscape is defined as “intervention
in the landscape based on an artistic
approach” and the six chapters refer to
examples including the work of Koolhaas,
Whiteread, Christo, Eisenman, MVRDV
and West 8. The chapters examine
different approaches such as ‘A space
to be discovered’, ‘Art and architecture
as context’ and ‘Programming the land
surface’. The book provides a vivid
illustration of different approaches to
the landscape and seems to suggest that
architecture and an artistic approach
can be brought back together; in this
comment the term architecture would be
better replaced by urban design.
Walkscapes starts from a more
theoretical base examining the nomadic
background to settlement and seeing
walking as an aesthetic tool “capable
of modifying metropolitan spaces to be
filled with meanings rather than things”.
It looks at artistic movements such as
Dada, Surrealism, Minimal art, Land
Art and the Stalker Group. It suggests
that “architecture can transform the
path from anti-architecture into a
resource... taking a step in the direction
of the path”. The chapter on Land Walk
demonstrates the ideas of Richard Long
and Robert Smithson but the chapter on
Transurbance describing the development
of the modern city failed to register with
me how the theories could be applied.
John Billingham
QUANTUM CITY
AYSSAR ARIDA, ARCHITECTURAL PRESS 2002, PP 257, £20.99
Ayssar Arida has clearly spent a lot of
time coming to grips with quantum
theory. Yet, like any other scientific
analogy applied to the built environment
and its evolution - it may be overambitious
to apply complex quantum
theory to urban design.
One wonders if his definition of
urban design is as complex and far
reaching as quantum laws. He conceives
it as ‘a multidimensional interdisciplinary
interface, with the responsibility to
manage and transform the interactions
of the different aspects of urban life
into a physical form; to provide society
and the individual with the settings
relevant to its current worldview, and to
be positively active in its dissemination
and adoption’. In a graph he opposes
the linear design and planning process
practised by modernists who can only
deal with the past and the present with
a fluid strategy to keep options open for
future change at any point in time and
space. Unfortunately, he quotes Shell
as a successful scenario builder able to
adjust to OPEC’s surprise strategies in
the 1970s -although quantum theory
seems to have led it astray more
recently. It is questionable, therefore,
whether laws which apply at subatomic
scale are still relevant to the urban scale
and its material objects.
He dismisses mechanistic,
reductionist scenario elimination or
‘funnelling’ in favour of an iterative
process between scenarios and
strategies informed by ‘regret analysis’.
Curiously he reverts to indicators (ie
static predetermined quantities of
measurement) to identify which scenario
is being enacted. He concedes that this
is not practised by the private sector,
but could be applied to the public realm
by engaging designers, builders and
users (the latter unknown by definition
in quantum terms?) throughout the
process of implementation. Strangely,
he approves of the ‘charrette’ approach
to produce inspired proposals ‘far from
equilibrium’ by bringing together a
‘quantum’ team of specialists without
specifying the make-up of its members.
In his chapter on the quantum
analysis of the urban realm, he resorts
to Hillier’s arguably deterministic space
syntax and equally mechanistic systems
theory. He opposes duality with dualism;
the latter a set of opposites and the
former a continuum of complementary
descriptions ranging from urban to rural,
and from urban design to ‘quantum city’
and ‘res publica’ city.
The book comes over as an earnest
effort of a good student with a lot
of time on his hands and a perhaps
immature appetite. Who else would
attempt to race through worldviews of
cities and science, summarise quantum
physics, link mathematical chaos to
urban complexity, with some social
sciences thrown in and, for good
measure, branch out into feng shui,
Tao, the cinema and the Cold War, and
then try to link all these strands of
philosophy, science, ideology and simple
empirical and anecdotal observations to
the built environment and its design? As
usual for such all embracing attempts,
their weakest part is the production of
new recipes. In this case they resemble
a mechanistic application of elements of
quantum theory taken out of context and
applied to the built form and its design.
He proposes Legoland composition rules,
albeit of the quantum variety for public
space or public realm, without really
clarifying the distinction between them.
As the author says himself, his mindset
is permeated by all these ideas. The
problem is how to make some order at
some time in some space – or in simple
terms a realisable urban design – out of
so much chaos?
Judith Ryser
40 | Urban Design | Autumn 2004 | Issue 92