Architekturdebatte: landscape as new urban typology abstract for EAAE conference in Delft
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landscape as new urban typology abstract for EAAE conference in Delft
19.08.04, 13:39
Landscape as new urban typology
(Sub-Theme: B - Research by design)
Our urban design project in Las Palmas showed us, representatively for the contemporary European city, that landscape has to be introduced as a ‘building typology’ into contemporary practice and intellectual discourse, as a generous response to the history of European cities.
The European city was always formed by the close relationship of city and landscape. Both changed with the society in an interdependence state. Landscape was developed from a natural over a cultural to an urban landscape. Today, while the agricultural use of landscape is replaced via leisure and living oriented use, the concept of a compact body of the city is replaced by the concept of heterogeneous and fragmented spaces and forms. Landscape became interwoven with the city.
But it seems, that the average conception of landscape as an ideal and romantic condition does not agree or even not compare it with the landscape of the post-urban condition. Architects, planners and even landscape-architects do not find words for this situation, because of this shift of idealisation and reality.
Landscape shall no longer be understood as mystical or framed nature! Landscape lost its ‘naturalness’ at least since it became technically reproducibly. Landscape is artificial and with this a building typology with the characteristics of a continuous surface, as a programmable medium and as a combining form. (scape)
In the Las Palmas project, the heterogeneous area of the interface port, trade area, living area and “nature” park became interconnected by the surface of the landscape, forming a new heterogeneous unity. The same surface can be programmed by sport, leisure and park facilities as an adequate answer to the vague formulations of the required program of the competition. This strategy makes it also possible to refer to the “unforeseeable” that becomes more and more an important part of urban strategies.
With the ‘landscape as typology’, the question about connecting architectural typologies into an existing environment becomes unnecessary, because the characteristics of the connection are implicit in the typology of landscape. The focus on the connecting part supports a combined reading of the post-urban landscape and the process of the development within the concept of the heterogeneous unity and replaces the reading and the production of objects and fragmentations.
The ‘new’ typology combines the fragmentations and forms a ‘new’ compactness of a combined form, rather forming a conventional ‘compactness of mass’.
stefan kurath