Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

To assume a critical standpoint in landscape design today
requires the jettisoning of all inherited precepts, necessarily
in the global context where environmental design is
transformed into a form of disaster management. Our 21stcentury
confinement, where humanity becomes increasingly
entrapped, enclosed and endangered, marks a tragic
condition. In the late l990s, the Swiss landscape designer
Dieter Kienast appropriated from a Latin tomb text the phrase
Et in Arcadia, Ego to illustrate the dilemma facing landscape
designers. ‘I equate Arcadia with the longing always to be
somewhere else. … I am sure this longing to escape from all
our problems exists in all of us.’ 1
Sanctuary has now replaced Arcadia as a destination, and
without the dreams. Land art has now elaborated the
conceptual vacuum of the l980s, as John Dixon Hunt claims,
bringing as process ‘its invocation of abstraction and its
confidence in its own artistry.’ 2 In this issue of AD, Juhani
Pallasmaa demonstrates how ideas come to haunt the cultural
appropriations of terrain, and in Dixon Hunt’s view this representation
of land as art is now a fundamental ambition of
the landscape architect today. We are wise to abandon all such
Arcadian visions, aware as architects, landscape designers and
land artists that we inhabit a fragmented disaster zone. New
Orleans, post-Katrina, shows how it remains both the butt and
the paradigm of this tragic condition.
In the past decade, the role of landscape design has
experienced a veritable global transformation. While
‘environment’ has become the flag of convenience under
which a wide variety of proprietorial and intellectual vessels
sail, this usage has tacitly recognised the occlusion of
buildings with landscape architecture, for its predominant
role in designing on a particular site. The recent 2006
International Architectural Biennale in Venice revealed full
well the confusion that reigns. Director Ricky Burdett’s focus
on urban landscapes as such demonstrated the absence of
architecture itself from its historically predominant position,
notwithstanding such successful ventures as the upgraded
spaces in Bogotá. This is a dilemma that has been forming
stealthily for most of this decade.
A number of key markers have pointed towards fresh
directions for the recovery of the urban landscape. For
example, Hiroki Hasegawa’s Yokohama Portside Park in Japan
(1999) was quick to exploit its waterside location. 3 In this city
zone of mixed-use development, earthwork berms were
designed to run along the full length of the waterfront, thus
‘oceanic’ identity was merged with the purely urban
connotation of the site. Hasegawa created a series of
sequential layers that gave the location a strong identity.
Very small-scale landscape detailing, such as cobbles, setts
(granite paving blocks) and larger pavings, was combined
with steel elements, wooden decking and brick open spaces,
Hans Hollein, Museum of Vulcanology, Clermont-Ferrand, France, 2005
Architecture of the underground, looking down into the museum from ground level.
worked in with grassed lawns and mounds. Materiality was
clearly conceived and expressed.
A number of the later schemes reviewed in this issue
demonstrate similarities with Hasegawa’s groundbreaking
project; for example, Gustafson and Porter’s urban
redefinition of Singapore. And the completely landlocked
Museum of Vulcanology, by Hans Hollein, in northeastern
France, 4 expounds a philosophy of building a landscape
concept on site, where the key elements are located
underground. But as Hollein has always said: ‘Alles ist
architektur’. This building is nothing if not architecture. He
also explored well the ramifications of such deep engagement
with the site in previous projects, such as the Museum
Abteilberg in Mönchengladbach, Germany (1980)and the
proposed Guggenheim Museum in Salzburg, Austria (1985).
In 1993, Juhani Pallasmaa, at Aleksanterinkatu (the famous
street in the centre of Helsinki), activated this small interstitial
site with his own structural inventiveness using new
installations, again focusing on their materiality to infuse a
degree of poetics into a wind-blown pedestrian space between
high blocks. 5 For a very much more expansive urban space,
that designed by Dixon and Jones for London’s Exhibition Road
(‘a key cultural ‘entrepôt’ adjacent to the Victoria and Albert
Museum), there can be no limit, other than the constraints of
civic bureaucracies, to the insertion of a wholly different,
vehicle-free urban perspective where people can actually jog
and walk unimpeded. In a similar mode but on a far smaller
scale at Whiteinch Cross, Glasgow Green (1999), Gross.Max
coordinated installations of varying materials with carefully
judged tree planting 6 and secluded seating areas.
The urban spaces of Bogotá remain endemically detrimental to normal urban living criteria, and as purely temporary
shelters have lasted for decades.
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