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

The Oslo Patch investigates a new way in which a large tract of
railway yards and busy railway lines can be inhabited. The location
is close to downtown, but rather barren. Behind it lie some inner
areas of mixed-use; the other side is almost at the edge of the fjord.
A key interpretation is the avoidance of the boring formula of
draping the whole thing with a deck. Rather, there is a lacework of
waving strips of housing, allowing a wide variety of drapes,
parasites and add-ons. Interlaced with these are a series of
vegetated and partially vegetated strips. On other axes are other
strips of walkway. Underneath all of this – yet largely exposed – are
the rail tracks themselves.
The whole is thus a complex series of layered strips. A canal is
brought in under cover into an ‘arcade’ condition. Above are special
high-intensity student dwellings. A small sports and music stadium
is located within the system. Much of the vegetation works itself up
the sides of the housing buildings.
The drawn project parallels a long section through the site and a
‘collage-cartoon’ strip that identifies a series of inspirations from,
and references to, Oslo – inflatables, flags, sports, snow, bridges –
based on my experience of the city since 1968.
Peter Cook, Mound, 1964
A multi-use centre, inward-looking and covered with grass banks.
cities could be absorbed within the natural environment.
Landscape was here represented as a growing, enfolding
aspect of urban expansion, an absorbent city conurbation,
rather than something appropriated by the city.
In 2004 Sponge City re-emerged, at the Design Museum in
London, as the climax to a major Archigram exhibition. Here
Cook pointed clearly to an environment of a totally built but
growing landscape, forecasting, this time in the 21st century,
the ways in which cities, or fragments of cities, will in future
be absorbed into the proactive, recombinant landscape. As he
wrote recently:
‘The new architecture celebrates the fold-over of
contrived surface with grasped surface. The new
sensibility is toward terrain rather than patches or
pockets. There is even a search for peace without escape
– difficult for one to imagine amongst the chatter of the
old city. … For me it becomes even more intriguing if we
pull the vegetal towards the artificial and the fertile
towards the urban but in the end … to find the magic of
a place discovered, now that’s architecture.’ 1
Cook’s prognosis takes society along an irreversible course:
firstly, focusing on the ways people relate landscape and
architecture; secondly, developing these strategies in terms of
‘making place’; and finally, considering the inherent
connections between nature and urbanism. This new
thinking is evident in his proposal for the Oslo waterfront
(The Patch), in which all of these preoccupations dramatically
come together, making place for the capital city in a way
hitherto never anticipated – the built elements displaying a
strong and organically tectonic structure with an enigmatic
shrouding of membrane.
Cook’s work in this area reveals that it is now time to plot
the evolution of a relevant 21st-century preoccupation – the
idea of conjoining landscape and architecture as a single,
collusive environment. 4
Note
1. In Catherine Spellman (ed), Re-Envisioning Landscape/Architecture, Actar
(Barcelona), 2003.
Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Peter Cook
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