Making Space

Landscape Architecture is playing an increasingly central role in the development and redevelopment of the built environment. This places the consideration of the landscape and landscape related ideas in a leading position. Projects from around the world demonstrate how making space for landscape happens in a diversity of settings and contexts. In all of the projects presented a thread of commonality runs through: the leadership of landscape architects in the creation of new spatial situations.

 

excerpt from the article

Bruno Latour suggests that we have never been modern as the ongoing project of modernity falls short of its own premise. He argues we need to acknowledge that within notion of progress and distancing the modern project form the past, it continuously demotes loosers of modernization as well. Early on Landscape architects as Olmsted and Lenne have assumed a critical role in mediating the process of modernization and urbanization.  After the recent series of real estate bubble busts in the US, Dubai and Spain we also come to acknowledge that we will not be able to assume a growth environment in all times and places. In a post-fordist society progress needs to re-interpreted in qualifying the transformation within the existing.  More so –we need to turn to the neglected, marginalized and bring them to the foreground.

Managing the increasing rates of transformation of urban landscapes in a truly ecological sense appears to be more urgent than 15 years ago, at the same time the promise of landscape urbanism has lost momentum and struggles with credibility due to a lack of accountable accomplishments.

In order to fully engage this critical agenda leadership in landscape architecture requires a theoretical foundation to inform a design/research practice that couples urbanist with landscape architectural expertise. In order to be truly innovative and go beyond the surface of conventional problem fixing, design needs to be undisciplined in a critical and a holistic way. A reflexive practice iteratively applies and tests theory in design. To address more explicitly the ambivalence and unresolved hybrid condition of landscape and urbanism, I came to introduce the concept ParadoXcity. I am interested in identifying the neglected implications that are often buried below the surface. Undertaking the examination of essential questions should  be understood as a disposition that avoids treating the symptoms only. The outcome of the work is twofold as it produces both design solutions and insight about larger questions.

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