contenido

itácora arquitectura + número 31
BITÁCORA, Born in 1999, is a peer-reviewed academic journal
of the School of Architecture at the Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México. It specializes in the critic, theoretic and
historic study of architecture, industrial design, landscape architecture,
planning and art from multiple disciplines.
BITÁCORA requests unpublished research articles to be published.
Submitted manuscripts are subject to double-blind
peer review. The Editorial Board will review the articles and be
forwarded to two experts in the specific field of the proposed
topic to be evaluated. They can be approved, approved with
reviewer’s feedback or declined. Evaluation criteria are based,
exclusively, on the importance of the article’s topic, originality,
contribution, clearness and relevance of the full-text submitted.
Submissions must follow the Instructions for Authors.
The journal grants, at all times, confidentiality of the evaluation
process: anonymity of reviewers and authors as well as
the evaluated content. At accepting and agreeing with the
terms set by our journal, authors have to guarantee that
the article and the material related to it are original and do
not violate copyright laws. The articles content is the sole responsibility
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
point of view of Editorial Board or the Architecture School at
unam. You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt the
work, as long as the source and the authorship are attributed
and copyright laws are not infringed. This does not apply to
images and figures.
BITÁCORA appears in the following indexes: Avery Index to
Architectural Periodicals/ Periodica /Latindex. It is also available
on line in the website: www.revistas.unam.mx.
We have done out best effort to find the copyright's owners of the
images published in this issue. In some cases this was not possible,
therefore we kindly ask them to contact the journal
Hemos puesto todo nuestro empeño en contactar a aquellas personas
que poseen los derechos de autor de las imágenes publicadas en la revista.
En algunos casos no nos ha sido posible, y por esta razón sugerimos
a los proprietarios de tales derechos que se pongan en contacto con la
redacción de esta revista.
Editorial
In this issue of Bitácora, landscape architecture –a topic that
along with architecture, urbanism, and industrial design makes
up our content–for the first time takes up the whole issue. It
is a necessary critical reflection given that thirty years ago landscape
architecture was established in Mexico as an independent
university degree.
Today, we live in a world that focuses its efforts on the irrational
exploitation of natural resources and, because of this, it
becomes more relevant to have an ecological consciousness to
arrive at a better future. The consequences of climatic changes
are evident as well as the inability of governments and societies
to establish better relationships between humans and their
natural environment. One key way to achieve these is to find
a solution to the paradoxical tension between the megalopolis
and green space. Landscape architecture proposes real alternatives
to the problems caused by our industrial societies.
From the point of view of more autonomous disciplines,
to think about landscape architecture allows us to abandon
the outdated notion of design as an abstract subject-object
relationship that does not consider place –in the broad sense
of the word– nor the essential collaboration with other disciplines.
In contrast to other fields of study that use technology
and scientific thinking to conceptualize their works in an
isolated way, landscape architecture applies the same methodological
tools and technology in an integrated way to the
whole context.
The design of the landscape implies to act on the environment
with the precision of a scalpel; to think about regions
instead of cities or buildings; communities instead of individuals.
The focus of the landscape architect is surprising in the way
that it is simultaneously aware of how the large surfaces of our
planet interact with climatic changes but is also capable of distinguishing
small biological specificities, such as the important
work of insects in spreading plant species and in our well-being
on the planet; from the macro-scale, such as the landscape of
the Mixteca Alta region, to the micro-temporality of the “Flor
de Mayo,” which blooms for just a few days once a year in the
black lava rock of El Pedregal.
In contrast to the traditional idea of architecture, landscape
architects don’t think about the design of a building
whose most important moment is its inauguration – and the
photographs that will memorialize it forever. For them, instead,
the work is considered within large timeframes. They are conscious
of seasonal changes, of the consequences of each plant
and animal species in relationship to one another, and of the
erosion caused by water or wind. They imagine equally the
significance of the seed in the subsoil as they do of whole generational
shifts of landscape elements that constantly mutate.
Their work is to observe from a distance the geographical evolution
of a region, of the soil, of its living beings in order to make
careful adjustments to them. They work with the memory of
the territory, with the knowledge of what has been lost and
what can be rescued and, at the same time, they propose a
new way of being in the world. The beauty of the landscape is,
then, just an effect of wide-ranging considerations.
Landscape architecture is one of the few academic disciplines
that develop professionals who, as soon as they become
part of the labor workforce, can transform the traditional and
predatory way with which one intervenes in material reality.
There is an urgency to this, but there are also opportunities:
cities and, even more, our own planet need to be considered
from this point of view.
Cristina López Uribe
The history of architecture and habitation cannot be considered
without landscape architecture despite the fact that it
wasn’t until the end of the nineteenth century that Fredrick
Law Olmstead declared it as an academic discipline at Yale
University.
At the unam, we have been awarding that degree for
thirty years with the belief in the importance of the design,
planning, construction, and management of open space. We
understand that it is more than an indicator of the quality of
life according to the United Nations; more than a relationship
between the built and the natural world; more than a multi-,
inter-, and trans-disciplinary relationship between design, social
commitment, and environmental sciences. In addition,
the concepts of cultural and Mexican landscapes have been
consolidated in the same way that the tangible and intangible
heritage has. We even see the twenty-first century as the century
of landscape architecture in response to the deterioration
of the environment, the impact of climatic changes and natural
disasters in our planet, and as necessary for the identification
of zones that are at risk.
However, landscape architecture can also be defined in
scope as the lasting and indispensable relationship between
humans and nature. We perceive the urban scale today as the
public space within which we live; the space of the collective.
Urban space is designed and built from the relationship that
urban design establishes with landscape architecture and urbanism
so that in the field of urban-environmental studies,
such as those in our Architecture degree, we have made our
students aware of the relationship that exists between the architectural
object and its context in order to direct it towards
a more sustainable direction linked to the regional scale.
Landscape architecture has evolved from the poetics of
the garden to the genius loci of the Romans, to Kevin Lynch’s
reading of society, to the design with nature of Ian McHarg,
to social theories and participatory design, as well as, to the
systematic basis of landscape that ties it to the processes of
how it is managed, used, and conserved.
In thirty years, we have trained more than two hundred
landscape architects in the Department of Landscape Architecture
of the unam. The seed that was planted thirty years
ago has yielded fruits; however, not enough since the deterioration
of the landscape is an important theme that must be
taken up throughout our country with the rigor and depth
that it deserves.
This issue of Bitácora differs from its traditional format because
we sought to gather the voices of landscape architects who
were trained at the unam and at other institutions in Mexico
and abroad and who speak about their professional, academic,
and research experiences. Without a doubt, this is an invaluable
testament to three decades of academic work.
Marcos Mazari Hiriart
Founding Professor of the Landscape Degree in 1995
fe de erratas: Página 0125. “Mapping Ideological Resonances”. Dice: Javier Sordo Madalenoo. Debe decir: Javier Sordo Madaleno. Contraportada, solapa. “Call for papers”. Se agregó 'submission deadline date' equivocada