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4 

Landscape 

Architecture: 

Site/Non-Site 

Guest-edited by Michael Spens

4Architectural Design 

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4Architectural Design 

Forthcoming Titles 2007 

May/June 2007, Profile No 187 

Italy: A New Architectural Landscape 

Guest-edited by Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi 

Every five or six years, a different country takes the architectural lead in Europe: England came to the 

fore with High Tech in the early 1980s; by the end of the 1980s France came to prominence with 

François Mitterrand’s great Parisian projects; in the 1990s Spain and Portugal were discovering a new 

tradition; and recently the focus has been on the Netherlands. In this ever-shifting European landscape, 

Italy is now set to challenge the status quo. Already home to some of the world’s most renowned architects 

– Renzo Piano, Massimiliano Fuksas and Antonio Citterio – it also has many talented architects like 

Mario Cucinella, Italo Rota, Stefano Boeri, the ABDR group and Maria Giuseppina Grasso Cannizzo, who 

are now gaining international attention. Moreover, there is an extraordinary emergence of younger 

architects – the Erasmus generation – who are beginning to realise some very promising buildings of 

their own. 

July/August 2007, Profile No 188 

4dsocial: Interactive Design Environments 

Guest-edited by Lucy Bullivant 

A new breed of social interactive design is taking root that overturns the traditional approach to artistic 

experience. Architects and designers are responding to cues from forward-thinking patrons of architecture 

and design for real-time interactive projects, and are creating schemes at very different scales and 

in many different guises. They range from the monumental – installations that dominate public squares 

or are stretched over a building’s facade – to wearable computing. All, though, share in common the 

ability to draw in users to become active participants and co-creators of content, so that the audience 

becomes part of the project. 

4dsocial: Interactive Design Environments investigates further the paradoxes that arise when a new form 

of ‘socialisation’ is gained through this new responsive media at a time when social meanings are in 

flux. While many works critique the narrow public uses of computing to control people and data, and 

raise questions about public versus private space in urban contexts, how do they succeed in not just getting 

enough people to participate, but in creating the right ingredients for effective design? 

September/October 2007, Profile No 189 

Rationalist Traces 

Guest-edited by Andrew Peckham, Charles Rattray and Torsten Schmiedenecht 

Modern European architecture has been characterised by a strong undercurrent of rationalist thought. 

Rationalist Traces aims to examine this legacy by establishing a cross-section of contemporary European 

architecture, placed in selected national contexts by critics including Akos Moravanszky and Josep Maria 

Montaner. Subsequent interviews discuss the theoretical contributions of Giorgio Grassi and OM Ungers, 

and a survey of Max Dudler and De Architekten Cie’s work sets out a consistency at once removed from 

avant-garde spectacle or everyday expediency. Gesine Weinmiller’s work in Germany (among others) offers 

a considered representation of state institutions, while elsewhere outstanding work reveals different 

approaches to rationality in architecture often recalling canonical Modernism or the ‘Rational 

Architecture’ of the later postwar period. Whether evident in patterns of thinking, a particular formal 

repertoire, a prevailing consistency, or exemplified in individual buildings, this relationship informs the 

mature work of Berger, Claus en Kaan, Ferrater, Zuchi or Kollhoff. The buildings and projects of a younger 

generation – Garcia-Solera, GWJ, BIQ, Bassi or Servino – present a rationalism less conditioned by a concern 

to promote a unifying aesthetic. While often sharing a deliberate economy of means, or a sensual 

sobriety, they present a more oblique or distanced relationship with the defining work of the 20th century.

Architectural Design 

March/April 2007 

4 

Landscape Architecture 

Site/Non-Site 

Guest-edited by 

Michael Spens

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C O N T E N T S 

4 

4 

Editorial 

Helen Castle 

6 

Introduction 

Site/Non-Site: 

Extending the Parameters in 

Contemporary Landscape 

Michael Spens 

12 

From Mound to Sponge: 

How Peter Cook Explores 

Landscape Buildings 

Michael Spens 

16 

New Architectural Horizons 

Juhani Pallasmaa 

24 

Recombinant Landscapes 

in the American City 

Grahame Shane 

36 

Urban American Landscape 

Jayne Merkel 

48 

Toronto Waterfront Revitalisation 

Sean Stanwick 

52 

Operationalising Patch Dynamics 

Victoria Marshall and 

Brian McGrath

60 

Recent Works by Bernard Lassus 

Michel Conan 

66 

Deep Explorations Into 

Site/Non-Site: 

The Work of Gustafson Porter 

Michael Spens 

76 

‘Activating Nature’: 

The Magic Realism of 


Architecture in Europe 

Lucy Bullivant 

88 

Landscapes of the 

Second Nature: 

Emptiness as a Non-Site Space 

Michael Spens 

98 

City in Suspension: New Orleans 

and the Construction of Ground 

Felipe Correa 

106 

Impressions of New Orleans 

Christiana Spens 

109 

Is There a Digital Future 

Landscape Terrain? 

Lorens Holm and 

Paul Guzzardo 

4+ 

114+ 

Interior Eye 

Seoul’s Interior Landscapes 

Howard Watson 

120+ 

Building Profile 

Louise T Blouin Institute, 

West London 

Jeremy Melvin 

126+ 

Practice Profile 

The Tailored Home: Housebrand 

Loraine Fowlow 

134+ 

Home Run 

Dosson in Casier, Italy 

Valentina Croci 

140+ 

McLean’s Nuggets 

Will McLean 

142+ 

Site Lines 

Night Pilgrimage Chapel 

Laura Moffatt

Alison and Peter Smithson, Upper Lawn Pavilion, Fonthill, Wiltshire, UK, 1959– 

View through the patio window to the Fonthill woods to the north, 1995, taken after the Smithsons left Fonthill. The 

Smithsons’ placemaking skills are evident in the domestic tranquility that their architecture here evokes. 

4

Editorial 

If the museum was the architectural leitmotif of the turn of the millennium, it has been eclipsed in 

the noughties by landscape architecture. As guest-editor Michael Spens so aptly brings to our 

attention in the introduction to this issue, it is the planet’s ecological plight and the confinement of 

people to an ever shrinking natural world that has jettisoned landscape architecture – within a 

matter of a decade – from a discipline responsible for creating elitist ‘Arcadias’ to that of much 

sought-after human ‘sanctuaries’. Whether situated on urban, suburban or greenfield sites, these 

sanctuaries are very much for public consumption (or at least semi-public when attached to an 

institution or corporation). Certainly they are not like the landscaped estates of the 18th century, 

land that was partitioned off for the appreciation of all but the smallest ruling elite. Whether the 

schemes featured here are situated in Beirut, Singapore, New York, Toronto or Birmingham, they 

engender a sense of place that is precious in its provision of outdoor space for increasingly 

displaced urban populations, but also enriching in terms of a city’s political and socioeconomic 

kudos. The design for Toronto’s waterfront, for instance, led by Adriaan Geuze and West 8, is to 

reclaim a continuous promenade at the edge of Lake Ontario for which three levels of government 

have pledged $20.1 million for the first phase of construction. This is the tail end of the statesponsored 

‘Superbuild’ programme that has commissioned a college of art from Will Alsop, a 

substantial reworking of the Art Gallery of Toronto by Frank Gehry, and a makeover of the Royal 

Ontario Museum by Daniel Libeskind. 

It is all too easy to regard landscape architecture as an entirely new episode – severed from any 

previous tectonic or artistic roots. In his introduction, Spens poignantly corrects this notion by 

tracing the lineage of landscape architecture’s expanded field from the Land Art of the 1970s, 

which effectively dispelled architecture’s obsession with buildings as objects. An understanding of 

the potential of the landscape art of the picturesque for architecture was, though, latent even in the 

postwar period. As Jonathan Hill has pointed out, Alison and Peter Smithson were influenced by 

Nikolaus Pevsner’s promotion of the picturesque. 1 For them, the picturesque placed the emphasis 

on the observer giving meaning. It was about perception and the genius of place making. This is 

most evident at Fonthill in Wiltshire where the Smithsons bought a cottage in the estate of the 

ruined folly. The new house they built there was in no way intended to be authentic; one window 

was displaced to create the garden wall. Life there, though, was described by Alison Smithson as 

‘Jeromian’, evoking with its serenity and air of studious calm Antonello da Messina’s St Jerome in 

His Study (National Gallery, c 1475). It was this triumph of atmosphere over form that was 

prophetic for 21st-century landscape. 

Helen Castle 

Note 

1. I am indebted to Jonathan Hill for his observations in his paper ‘Ambiguous Objects: Modernism, Brutalism and the Politics of the Picturesque’ , presented at 

the 3rd annual Architectural Humanities Research Association International Conference, St Catherine’s College, Oxford, 17–18 November 2006), and also for his 

help sourcing this fascinating photograph from Georg Aerni. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Image © Georg Aerni 

5

Introduction 

Site/Non-Site 

Extending the Parameters in 


As the world teeters on the verge of environmental collapse, landscape architecture has taken 

on a new significance offering a longed-for sanctuary for our increasingly urbanised lives. Here, 

in his introduction to the issue, guest-editor Michael Spens explains how by taking its impetus 

from land art, landscape architecture, as an expanded field, transcends the conventional 

confines of site. This renders it possible to read architecture ‘as landscape, or as nonlandscape, 

as building becomes non-site’ and the ‘site indeed materialises as the work per se’. 

6

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. 

7

The most dramatic case of the expanded field itself where site 

and non-site mediate the urban topography is expressed in Peter 

Eisenman’s masterly design for the extensive range of cultural 

and arts facilities for the historic city of Santiago de Compostela 

in Spain. Eisenman, who has for many years experimented with 

orthogonal grid-planning, overlaid the whole site with an 

undulating carpet thrown over the various functions below, like 

a new landscape. The non-site characteristics are elegantly 

exemplified by this wrap of fully grounded digital renderings 

formulated as an extensive sanctuary for those it welcomes. A 

project such as this draws together all the preoccupations of 

contemporary architects, which have tended to be less easily 

resolved than those of contemporary landscape architects, in 

this new procedure of transition. 

In all of the schemes above, the realm of architectural 

engagement was conditioned by the realisation that landscape 

design and architecture are no longer inhibited by outmoded 

site contextualities. A way had been opened by contemporary 

artists and sculptors to liberate space, in terms of an ‘expanded 

field’. As early as 1970 Robert Morris effectively redefined 

minimalist sculpture in his Notes on Sculpture II, in which he 

‘disposed once and for all with the object as such varying 

conditions of light and spatial context’. 7 Site-specifics, as it 

became known, was equally relevant to architecture and 

landscape, in both public and private spaces, pursuing a clear 

minimalism. What was surprising was the amount of time it 

took for such concepts from art to take root in the associated 

areas of architecture and of landscape. It was in the same year, 

too, that Robert Smithson created his Spiral Jetty project in 

Utah (which actually disappeared owing to variations in the 

water regime locally, and then equally miraculously reappeared 

in the bewildering climatic context of the new century). 

Sculptors as such resented the onset of minimalism since 

the majority still wanted to produce works that were wholly 

Peter Eisenman Architects, City of Culture, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 1999– 

For this planned City of Culture, Eisenman designed an undulating, shrouded landscape, creating for the complex a 

new yet coherent morphology that is entirely complementary to the existing historic city.

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah, 1970 

This seminal ‘site/non-site’ installation sculpture in the bereft landscape of the Great Salt Lake exemplified Smithson’s 

groundbreaking realisations of the late 1960s. Dramatically, in the ensuing decades, it actually disappeared below the 

water surface owing to microclimatic changes in the Great Salt Lake area, but the in 2005 suddenly re-emerged from 

the water as the lake level again subsided. Smithson may not have anticipated this almost apocryphal occurrence, but 

it was timely given global preoccupations with climate change and its effects today. 

engaged with context. By contrast, site-specific works as well 

as land art and earthworks, by refusing object ‘status’, spread 

out the minimalist involvement with site, and as can now be 

observed operated more and more effectively as ideological 

frontrunners for both architecture and landscape. ‘Notarchitecture’ 

coalesced with ‘not-landscape’. A quaternary 

model of opposites was derived (following earlier binary, 

Klein group oppositions) 8 combining site and non-site, 

succinctly exemplified, as it turned out, by Smithson’s Spiral 

Jetty. An axiomatic structure had emerged. The expansion of 

the field was permanent. 

One of the reasons why all this took time to be accepted by 

landscape designers was their detachment as a profession. Even 

more so and equally out on a limb, some architects also had 

difficulty in abandoning the objective of the site-specific 

‘signature’ building. After all, success for architects has 

primarily been measured by the landmark building. In addition, 

the wave of confusion as to what constituted ‘Postmodernism’ 

complicated developments. There were, of course, different 

Postmodernisms: for example, ‘Neo-Con’ Postmodernism 

(which still sputters) was really Anti-Modernist. This was also 

the dilemma of architects and landscape designers, in what 

now, in retrospect, reads as a wholly detached field of theory. 

But of course it was not, or should not have been so. 

For the professions of landscape architects and architects, 

despite pioneering teaching and research at the University of 

Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts and the development 

of a wide-ranging landscape curriculum by the late Ian McHarg, 

by John Dixon-Hunt and, lately, by James Corner, few schools 

made the transformation that was required. It is only in the 

past decade that talent from the such schools, chiefly in the US, 

has begun to take effect in new practice. 

9

Dixon and Jones Architects, Exhibition Road, London, 2005/06 

The project shows how a busy traffic thoroughfare can be diverted into a potential cultural role of major significance. 

This issue of AD specifically recognises the precedent of 

such groundbreaking adjustments in art theory, and so to 

architectural and landscape theory, which engendered the 

transformation whereby architecture has become readable as 

landscape, or as non-landscape, as building becomes non-site: 

site indeed materialises as the work per se. Viewing the work 

of Bernard Lassus, as described by Michel Conan, and taking 

in Gross.Max’s image on this cover, a contrasting parody 

emerges of the larger predicament, containing the just 

perceptible figures of both Mies van der Rohe and Le 

Corbusier, stumbling in the landscape undergrowth like 

discarded souls – which is just where unreconstructed 

Modernism left society. Lassus and Peter Cook emerge as 

longstanding frontrunners in the process of re-envisaging the 

future of landscape design in both the urban and the rural 

contexts, which today have become inseparable. 

In terms of praxis, the two in-depth case studies included 

in the issue – the current work of Kathryn Gustafson and 

Neil Porter in Beirut and now proposed for Singapore, and 

Florian Beigel and Philip Christou in Leipzig and Korea – 

indicate how the application of this ethos in landscapes of 

varying narratives, both archaeological and botanical, 

pursues this quarternary set of objectives, the tapestry of 

both futures and pasts. 

10

Juhani Pallasmaa’s key essay articulates the ways in which 

architects and landscape designers analyse the pretext for 

architecture as a median in remembered landscape, and 

draws out the creative initiatives that persist throughout the 

visual arts as linkages, so refuting once and for all the 

separation and superiority of such a domain once assumed by 

architects for themselves. 

Grahame Shane’s work on the recombinant city landscape, 

as described in his article, has far-reaching consequences. He 

takes up the issue of the American regional cityscape where 

compressed patches have become rhizomatic assemblages of 

highly contrasting urban fragments and landscape parcels, 

the North American city remaining still a patchwork of 

landscape scenarios and codes – the automobile being itself 

the device that recodifies the urban–rural relationship. Shane 

seeks out James Corner’s key role, as successor to Ian McHarg 

at the University of Pennsylvania, and thus of Patrick Geddes, 

whose ecological research early in the 20th century separated 

out rural and urban regional systems by layers, a process that 

was in turn computerised by McHarg. Shane concludes that 

landscapes were created as a scenographic element in plotting 

marketing locations in the global media ecology, rather than 

structurally engaging in a ecological process. 

Following up this clear appraisal, Lorens Holm and Paul 

Guzzardo assess the potential for a digitalisation and reformulation 

of the site/non-site parameters in the prevailing 

urban/rural scenario. They use the metaphor of the 

Mississippian lost or abandoned city of Cahokin, seen like a 

laser\net narrative creation for today. The consequent focus 

on the defoliation of rural cultures and global warming 

epitomises, to the authors, a ‘style’ of today, and accepts the 

end-result possibility of environmental death. Holm and 

Guzzardo anticipate a ‘digital future landscape terrain’, 

utilising laser/net technology, as a synthesis for a new 

awareness. Technology is harnessed to good effect, to protect 

and reformulate landscape ecologies. 

But disasters are already upon us. One catastrophe has 

threatened (but physically also narrowly veered away) 

Gustafson and Porter’s Shoreline plan for the sea edge to the 

historic core of Beirut City. This threat was entirely manmade. 

The second catastrophe addressed, with great 

foreboding but in mind of a future recovery, is described by 

Felipe Correa: the case of New Orleans. After a long pause (the 

human consequences were exacerbated by a protracted 

history of social and physical neglect of ‘The Big Easy’), 

measures are at last being put in place. But meantime, as with 

the early city of Cahokin, the mystery is how half the 

population has literally vanished upstate and beyond. Also 

included in the issue is a short, illustrated eye-witness 

summary of the after effects of the hurricane by a student, 

which brings the experience on site for all to recognise in its 

severity. Is this a paradigm for a new global effect – the 

disintegration of hope? 

The twin surveys of US design and that in Europe by Jayne 

Merkel and Lucy Bullivant provide at last some 

encouragement for the 21st century. Landscape designers, 

architects, engineers and ecologists are increasingly working 

together to define and implement new solutions, working on 

the front line. 

One thing here is certain, that pretext, context and subtext 

have all transmogrified, and architects and landscape 

designers, like the visual artists who have been the 

pathfinders and scouts for this enterprise, need to seek wholly 

different solutions. The surveys here offer new, divergent 

directions, yet both fields are suffused with their own poetics, 

as Pallasmaa has urged. Poetry is alive and well and the 

poetics are not least evident in the major new international 

projects referred to above, the chief abiding hope for salvation 

in the laser\net world of today. 

Notes 

1. Dieter Kienast, in Udo Weilacher, Between Landscape Architecture and Land 

Art, Birkhauser (Basel), 1999, pp 152–4. 

2. John Dixon Hunt, ‘Introduction’ in ibid, pp 6–7. 

3. Michael Spens, Modern Landscape, Phaidon (London), 2003, pp 48–51. 

4. Ibid, pp 92–7. 

5. Ibid, pp 187–91. 

6. Ibid, pp 192–7. 

7. See Hal Foster, Rosalind Kraus, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art 

Since l900, Thames & Hudson (London), 2004, pp 358 and 540–2. 

8. Ibid, pp 543–4. 

Gross.Max, Whiteinch Cross, Glasgow, Scotland, 1999 

A drawn overview of the scheme showing the correlation of various elements. 

Eelco Hooftman of Gross.Max here placed great importance on the weaving 

together, in a tight urban environment, of hard and soft landscape elements. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 6 © DigitalGlobe, exclusive 

distributed for Europe by Telespazio; p 7 © Studio Hollein/Sina Baniahmad; p 

8 © courtesy of Eisenman Architects; p 9 © Estate of Robertson 

Smithson/DACS, London/VAGA, New York, 2007. Image courtesy James 

Cohan Gallery, New York. Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York. Photo 

Gianfranco Gorgoni; p 10 © English Heritage. NMR; p 11 © Gross.Max 

11

From Mound to Sponge 

How Peter Cook Explores Landscape Buildings 

While his fellow Archigram designers were hooked into new 

technologies, Peter Cook was heading his own private 

investigation into landscape. Michael Spens traces 

Cook’s preoccupation with site from the aptly named 

Mound of 1964 through to his Sponge City 

earthscape of 1974. The project continues 

with Cook’s recent Oslo Patch. 

Peter Cook, Sponge City, 1974 

Sponge City, otherwise known as ‘the Sponge 

Building’, provided a dramatic and radical 

intervention in architectural debate when it was 

first presented by Cook in 1975 at ‘Art Net’, his 

architecture gallery in London. The project 

turned on their heads previous 

assumptions about the pre-eminence 

of buildings over the landscape field.

Oslo Patch 

Peter Cook 

The historical trail blazed by the Archigram group (Peter Cook, 

Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, David Green and Warren 

Chalk, plus Michael Webb) through the 1960s and 1970s was 

duly recognised and honoured in 2004 by the award of the 

RIBA Gold Medal of that year. However, Peter Cook has also 

pursued, perhaps as a separate vein of intellectual therapy or 

maybe of inspiration, his own trail of engagement with 

buildings in the landscape, running parallel to the great 

Archigram arc in the sky. Though extremely interesting, this 

work has seldom been exposed to a public dazzled by the 

instant Walking Cities, such as Ron Herron’s Cities Moving 

and Cook’s Plug-in City (both 1964), as well as Dennis 

Crompton’s Computer City (1965). But where was the actual 

landscape, Cook seems uniquely, and privately, to have asked? 

Somewhat hidden from posterity, there emerged from Cook 

a project simply entitled Mound (1964). Cook here followed a 

clear brief, to sink the building into the ground, as a multi-use 

centre, covered with grass banks. The brief included ‘open 

space’, designated external high-up recreational space with a 

coffee shop, plaza, shopping malls, a cinema/auditorium, ad 

infinitum as the grass grew overhead. It was, of course, plugged 

into a monorail, with a station on level 5, and was inherently 

as inward looking as the Archigram projects had been 

extrovert and attention seeking. But this was not the mood of 

the time, however advanced and prescient of contemporary 

trends the scheme has turned out to be. 

His Sponge City project (1974) was another attempt at the 

philosophy of the building as landscape, or the building as 

enveloped by natural site coverage. This was presented more 

dramatically, and exhibited at the privately sponsored ‘Art 

Net’ centre (1975) in central London, which Cook developed 

largely due to his chagrin at not being appointed director of 

the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Six panels, each 5 metres 

(16 feet) long and 2 metres (6.5 feet) high were conjoined in a 

blaze of coloured relief. Sponge City was, of course, influenced 

by Cook’s teachings during the 1970s at the Architectural 

Association, where students such as Will Alsop, influenced by 

Cedric Price, and later by Alvin Boyarsky, were beginning to 

search out a more ‘organic’ community than had been 

portrayed by the mechanistic Archigram dreams now of a 

decade earlier. 

Sponge City represented a dramatic new intervention by 

Cook in contemporary thinking about cities and their 

fragments. However prescient and predictive of the directions 

that land–site–building might follow over the next 30 years, it 

was constructed in the realisation of Cook’s own theories, 

anticipating first and foremost community living, up to seven 

storeys high, nestling in a lush and accommodating 

earthscape. What Cook defined as ‘the Sponge condition’ was 

clearly articulated in plan, with a skin, orifices, ‘gunge’ 

openings, areas of elasticity and an articulate inner core 

structure with elevators and a ‘latch-on’ arrangement 

between hard-core elements and soft sponge surrounds 

designed to incorporate ‘nests’ with the latch-on. Two high 

mounds were integrated within the ‘Sponge’, overlapping and 

incorporating remnant arched colonnades (possibly for 

historical memory traces) and quasi-classical fenestration. The 

elevation also included a collage, descriptive of ‘lifestyles’ and 

realised electronically in billboard form. 

No other late 20th-century design exercise better opened 

up the potential of ‘site/non-site’ – by then a main area of 

interest for artists such as Robert Smithson. Sponge City was 

an environmental projection that was also quite clearly 

divergent from conventional thinking – even tangential 

beyond the pure Archigram mode – in which Cook was 

exploring and forecasting the many possible ways in which 

14

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 

15

New Architectural Horizons 

In recent years, the over-intellectualisation of architecture has detached it ‘from its 

experiential, embodied and emotive ground’. Juhani Pallasmaa provides a template for 

architecture and landscape design that enables a stronger continuum between our outer and 

inner landscapes, drawing on historic and modern artistic inspirations alike. 

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting 

than seeing. 

JW Goethe 1 

Landscape as a Portrait 

We tend to see our external physical landscape of life and our 

inner landscape of the mind as two distinct and separate 

categories. As designers we focus our aspirations and values 

on the visual qualities of our architectural landscape. Yet, the 

physical settings that we build constitute an uninterrupted 

continuum with our inner world. As the cultural geographer 

PF Lewis writes in his introduction in Interpretation of Ordinary 

Landscapes: ‘Our human landscape is our unwitting 

autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our 

aspirations, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form. We 

rarely think of landscape that way, and so the cultural record 

we have written in the landscape is liable to be more truthful 

than most autobiographies, because we are less self-conscious 

about how we describe ourselves.’ 2 

Jorge Luis Borges gives a poetic formulation to this 

interaction between the world and the self: ‘A man sets himself 

the task of portraying the world. Over the years he fills a given 

surface with images of provinces and kingdoms, mountains, 

bays, ships, islands, fish, rooms, instruments, heavenly bodies, 

horses and people. Shortly before he dies he discovers that this 

patient labyrinth of lines is a drawing of his own face.’ 3 

We urgently need to understand that we do not live 

separately in physical and mental worlds – these two 

projections are completely fused into a singular existential 

reality. As we design and build physical structures, we are 

simultaneously and essentially creating mental structures and 

realities. Regrettably, we have not developed much 

understanding of and sensitivity for the interaction of our 

outer and inner landscapes. 

Architecture: An Impure Discipline 

The complexity of the phenomenon of architecture results 

from its ‘impure’ conceptual essence as a field of human 

endeavour. Architecture is simultaneously a practical and a 

metaphysical act – a utilitarian and poetic, technological and 

artistic, economic and existential, collective and individual 

manifestation. I cannot, in fact, name a discipline possessing a 

more complex and essentially more conflicting grounding in 

the lived reality and human intentionality. Architecture is 

essentially a form of philosophising by means of its 

characteristics: space, matter, structure, scale and light, 

horizon and gravity. Architecture responds to existing 

demands and desires at the same time so that it creates its 

own reality and criteria – it is both the end and the means. 

Moreover, authentic architecture surpasses all consciously set 

aims and, consequently, is always a gift of imagination and 

desire, willpower and foresight. 

The Multiplicity of Theoretical Approaches 

Over the past few decades, numerous theoretical frameworks 

originating in various fields of scientific enquiry have been 

applied to the analyses of architecture: perceptual and gestalt 

psychologies; anthropological and literary structuralisms; 

sociological and linguistic theories; analytical, existential, 

phenomenological and deconstructionist philosophies; and, 

more recently, cognitive and neurosciences, to name the most 

obvious. We have to admit that our discipline of architecture 

does not possess a theory of its own – architecture is always 

explained through theories that have arisen outside its own 

realm. In the first and the most influential theoretical treatise 

in the history of Western architecture, Vitruvius acknowledged 

already in the first century BC the breadth of the architect’s 

discipline and the consequent interactions with numerous 

skills and areas of knowledge: ‘Let him (the architect) be 

educated, skilful with the pencil, instructed in geometry, know 

much history, have followed the philosophers with attention, 

understand music, have some knowledge of medicine, know 

the opinions of the jurists and be acquainted with astronomy 

and the theory of heavens.’ 4 Vitruvius provides careful reasons 

why the architect needs to master each of these fields of 

knowledge. Philosophy, for example, ‘makes an architect highminded 

and not self-assuming, but rather renders him 

courteous, just and honest without avariciousness’. 5 

Giorgione, The Tempest, c 1508 

Giorgione reveals a site/non-site panorama occupying the middle ground, but leading the eye of the viewer right out of 

the painting, with the figures almost floating in the foreground, somehow detached from the storm-bound scene beyond. 

17

The Frenzy of Theorising 

In our time, however, theoretical and verbal explanations of 

buildings have often seemed more important than their 

actual design, and intellectual constructs more important 

than the material and sensuous encounter of the built works. 

The uncritical application of various scientific theories to the 

field of architecture has often caused more confusion than a 

genuine understanding of its specific essence. The overintellectual 

focus of these approaches has detached 

architectural discourse from its experiential, embodied and 

emotive ground – intellectualisation has pushed aside the 

common sense of architecture. The interpretation of 

architecture as a system of language, for example, with given 

operational rules and meanings, gave support to the heresy of 

Postmodernist architecture. The view of architectural theory 

as a prescriptive or instrumental precondition for design 

should be regarded altogether with suspicion. I, for one, seek 

a dialectical tension and interaction between theory and 

design practice instead of a causal interdependence. 

The sheer complexity of any architectural task calls for an 

embodied manner of working and a total introjection – to use 

a psychoanalytical notion – of the task. The real architect 

works through his or her entire personality instead of 

manipulating pieces of pre-existing knowledge or verbal 

rationalisations. An architectural or artistic task is 

encountered rather than intellectually resolved. In fact, in 

genuine creative work, knowledge and prior experience has to 

be forgotten. The great Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida – an 

artist who illustrated Martin Heidegger’s book Die Kunst und 

der Raum (1969), by the way – once said to me in conversation: 

‘I have never had any use for things I have known before I 

start my work.’ 6 Joseph Brodsky, the Nobel poet, shares this 

view in saying: ‘In reality (in art and, I would think, science) 

experience and the accompanying expertise are the maker’s 

worst enemies.’ 7 

Architecture as a Pure Rationality 

The seminal artistic question of the past decades has been 

‘What is art?’ The general orientation of the arts since the 

late 1960s has been to be increasingly entangled, in fact 

identified, with their own theories. The task of architecture 

has also become a concern since the late 1960s, first through 

the leftist critique, which saw architecture primarily as an 

unjust use of power, redistribution of resources and social 

manipulation. The present condition of excessive 

intellectualisation reflects the collapse of the social role of 

architecture and the escalation of complexities and 

frustrations in design practice. The current uncertainties 

concern the very social and human role of architecture as 

well as its boundaries as an art form. 

With these observations an opposition emerges: architecture 

as a subconscious and direct projection of the architect’s 

personality and existential experience, on the one hand, and as 

an application of disciplinary knowledge on the other. This is 

also the inherent dualism of architectural education. 

Science and Art 

The relation between scientific and artistic knowledge, or 

instrumental knowledge and existential wisdom, requires 

some consideration in this survey. The scholarly and literary 

work of the unorthodox French philosopher Gaston 

Bachelard, who has been known to the architectural 

profession since his influential book The Poetics of Space was 

first published in French in 1958, mediates between the 

worlds of scientific and artistic thinking. Through 

penetrating philosophical studies of the ancient elements – 

earth, fire, water and air, as well as dreams, daydreams and 

imagination – Bachelard suggests that poetic imagination, or 

‘poetic chemistry’, 8 as he says, is closely related to 

prescientific thinking and an animistic understanding of the 

world. In The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific 

Mind, written in 1940 9 during the period when his interest 

was shifting from scientific phenomena to poetic imagery 

(The Psychoanalysis of Fire was published two years earlier), 

Bachelard describes the historical development of scientific 

thought as a set of progressively more rationalised 

transitions from animism through realism, positivism, 

rationalism and complex rationalism to dialectical 

rationalism. ‘The philosophical evolution of a special piece of 

scientific knowledge is a movement through all these 

doctrines in the order indicated,’ he argues. 10 

Animated Images 

Significantly, Bachelard holds that artistic thinking seems to 

proceed in the opposite direction – pursuing 

conceptualisations and expression, but passing through the 

rational and realist attitudes towards a mythical and 

animistic understanding of the world. Science and art, 

therefore, seem to glide past each other, moving in 

opposite directions. 

In addition to animating the world, the artistic 

imagination seeks imagery able to express the entire 

complexity of human existential experience through 

singular condensed images. This paradoxical task is achieved 

through poeticised images, ones that are experienced and 

lived rather than rationally understood. Giorgio Morandi´s 

tiny still lifes are a stunning example of the capacity of 

humble artistic images to become all-encompassing 

metaphysical statements. A work of art or architecture is not 

a symbol that represents or indirectly portrays something 

outside itself – it is a real mental image object, a complete 

microcosm that places itself directly in our existential 

experience and consciousness. 

Although I am here underlining the difference between 

scientific and artistic inquiry, I do not believe that science and 

art are antithetical or hostile to each other. The two modes of 

knowing simply look at the world and human life with 

different eyes, foci and aspirations. Stimulating views have 

also been written about the similarities of the scientific and 

the poetic imagination, as well as the significance of aesthetic 

pleasure and embodiment for both practices. 

18

Edward Hopper, Second Storey Sunlight, 1960 

Artistic and architectural works are at the same time both specific and universal. Here, the figures and their setting are 

fully intertwined. Landscape, house and human figures are charged with a sense of mystery, drama and anticipation. 

The Power of Poetic Logic 

The logically inconceivable task of architecture to integrate 

irreconcilable opposites is fundamental and necessary. In 

fulfilment of this, the essential aims of architecture are bound 

to be mediation and reconciliation: the essence of an 

authentic architectural work is the embodiment of mediation 

and reconciliation. Architecture negotiates between differing 

categories and oppositions. Architecture is conceivable in this 

contradictory task only through understanding any design as 

a poetic manifestation – poetic imagery is capable of 

overcoming contradictions of logic through its polyvalent and 

synthetic imagery. As Alvar Aalto once wrote: ‘In every case [of 

creative work] one must achieve the simultaneous solution of 

opposites. … Nearly every design task involves tens, often 

hundreds, sometimes thousands of different contradictory 

elements, which are forced into a functional harmony only by 

man’s will. This harmony cannot be achieved by any other 

means than those of art.’ 11 

The Architecture of Painting 

Speaking of the evolution of Modern architecture, Aalto often 

said: ‘But it all began in painting.’ In 1947 he wrote: ‘abstract art 

forms have brought impulses to the architecture of our time, 

although indirectly, but this fact cannot be denied. On the other 

hand, architecture has provided sources for abstract art. These 

two art forms have alternately influenced each other. There we 

are – the arts do have a common root even in our time.’ 12 

Painting is close to the realm of architecture, particularly 

because architectural issues are so often – or I should say, 

unavoidably – part of the subject matter of painting, 

regardless of whether we are looking at the representational 

or abstract. In fact, this distinction is altogether highly 

questionable, because all meaningful art is bound to be 

representational in the existential sense. 

Late medieval and early Renaissance paintings are 

particularly inspiring for an architect because of the constant 

presence of architecture as a subject matter. The early 

19

Giovanni Bellini, The Madonna of the Meadow, c 1500 

Architecture and landscape are ‘the constant presence’ in this typical example of the Renaissance figure in ‘ground’. The 

ground is, however, highly detailed, with minor but ominous traces of discordant potential, such as the trees distorted by 

the wind, and nearby a watching black rook. The buildings in the rear ground are medieval and defensive rather than 

agrarian or even domestic, as one might expect. The innocence and humanity of the key figures is nonetheless reassuring. 

painters’ interest in architecture seems to be related with the 

process of the differentiation of the world and individual 

consciousness, the birth of the first personal pronoun ‘I’. The 

smallest of details suffices to create the experience of 

architectural space: a framed opening or the mere edge of a 

wall provides an architectural setting. The innocence and 

humanity of this painterly architecture, the similarity of the 

human and the architectural figure, is most comforting, 

touching and inspiring – this is a truly therapeutic 

architecture. The best lessons in domesticity and the essence 

of home are 17th-century Dutch paintings. In these paintings, 

buildings are presented almost as human figures – the 

mirrored images of the house and the human body were 

introduced into modern thought by the psychologist and 

analyst CG Jung and have been expressed by countless artists. 

I cannot think of a more inspiring and illuminating lesson in 

architecture than that offered by early Renaissance paintings. If 

I could ever design a single building with the tenderness of 

Giotto’s, Fra Angelico’s or Piero della Francesca’s houses, I 

would feel that I had reached the very purpose of my life. 

The interactions between Modern art and Modern 

architecture are well known and acknowledged, but I have not 

yet seen an architecture inspired by JMW Turner, Claude 

Monet, Pierre Bonnard or Marc Rothko, for example. Painting 

and other art forms have surveyed dimensions of human 

emotion and spirit unknown to architects, whose art 

conventionally tends to respond to rationalised normality. The 

work of numerous contemporary artists – Robert Smithson, 

Gordon Matta-Clark, Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Robert Irwin, 

Jannis Kounellis, Wolfgang Leib, Ann Hamilton, James Turrell 

20

and James Carpenter, among others – is closely related with the 

essential issues of architecture. These are all artists whose 

works have inspired architects and will continue to do so. 

We can also study principles of artistic thinking and 

making in the writings of many of these artists. Henry Moore, 

Richard Serra, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, James Turrell, all of 

whom write perceptively on their own work, have been 

meaningful for me. Artists tend to write more directly and 

sincerely of their work than architects, who frequently cast an 

intellectualised smoke screen across their writings. 

The Architecture of Cinema 

In its inherent abstractness, music has historically been 

regarded as the art form closest to architecture. Cinema is, 

however, even closer to architecture than music, not solely 

because of its temporal and spatial structure, but 

fundamentally because both architecture and cinema 

articulate lived space. These two art forms create and mediate 

comprehensive images of life. In the same way that buildings 

and cities create and preserve images of culture and particular 

ways of life, cinema projects the cultural archaeology of both 

the time of its making and the era that it depicts. Both forms 

of art define dimensions and essences of existential space – 

they both create experiential scenes for life situations. 

Film directors create pure poetic architecture, which arises 

directly from our shared mental images of dwelling and 

domesticity as well as the eroticism or fear of space. Directors 

such as Andrey Tarkovsky and Michelangelo Antonioni have 

created a moving architecture of memory, longing and 

melancholy, one that assures us that the art form of 

architecture is also capable of addressing our entire emotional 

range, from grief to ecstasy. 

Buildings are mental instruments, not simply aestheticised 

shelters. The essence of architecture is essentially beyond 

architecture. The poet Jean Tardieu asks: ‘Let us assume a wall: 

what takes place behind it?’ 13 but we architects rarely bother 

to imagine what happens behind the walls we have erected. 

As we read a poem, we internalise it, and we become the 

poem. As Brodsky puts it: ‘A poem, as it were, tells the reader, 

“Be like me”.’ 14 When I have read a book and return it back to 

its place on the bookshelf, the book, in fact, remains in me. If 

it is a great book, it has become part of my soul and my body. 

The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal gives a vivid description of 

this act of reading: ‘When I read, I don’t really read; I pop a 

beautiful sentence in my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop 

or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like 

alcohol, infusing my brain and heart and coursing on through 

the veins to the root of each blood vessel.’ 15 In the same way, 

paintings, films and buildings become part of us. Artistic 

works originate in the body of the maker and they return 

back to the human body as they are being experienced. 

The Dualistic Essence of Architecture 

My response to the question of whether architecture is or is 

not an art form is determined: architecture is an artistic 

expression and it is not an art, simultaneously. Architecture is 

an art in its essence as a spatial and material metaphor of 

human existence, but it is not an art form in its second 

nature as an instrumental artefact of utility and rationality. 

This duality is the very essence of the art of architecture. This 

dual existence takes place on two separate levels of 

consciousness, or aspiration, in the same way that any artistic 

work has its existence simultaneously as a material, 

disciplinary and concrete execution, on the one hand, and as a 

spiritual, unconsciously conceived and perceived imagery, 

which carries us to the world of dreams, desire and fear, on 

the other. Architecture can be understood only through this 

very duality. ‘A painter can paint square wheels on a cannon 

to express the futility of war. A sculptor can carve the same 

square wheels. But an architect must use round wheels,’ as 

Louis Kahn once said. 16 

Ontological Ground 

The art form of architecture is born from the purposeful 

confrontation and occupation of space. It begins by the act of 

naming the nameless and through perceiving formless space 

as a distinct figure and specific place. I wish to emphasise the 

adjective ‘purposeful’ – utilitarian purposefulness is a 

constitutive condition of architecture. The task of 

architecture, however, lies as much in the need for 

metaphysical grounding for human thought and experience 

as the provision of shelter from a raging storm. 

Architecture as Collaboration 

Architecture, as with all artistic work, is essentially the 

product of collaboration. Collaboration occurs in the obvious 

and practical sense of the word, such as in the interaction 

with numerous professionals, workmen and craftsmen, but 

collaboration occurs as well with other artists, architects and 

Andrey Tarkovsky, ‘Mirror’ (film still), 1975 

This shows the old family house in which the director had spent much of his 

youth. To meet the architecture of memory accurately, Tarkovsky had the 

house painstakingly reconstructed (it had been destroyed by fire – another 

memory). In his films he sought to address the entire emotional range of 

man, ranging from grief to ecstasy. 

21

landscape architects, not only one’s contemporaries and the 

living, but perhaps more importantly with predecessors who 

have been dead for decades or centuries. Any authentic work 

is set into the timeless tradition of artistic works and the 

work is meaningful only if it presents itself humbly to this 

tradition and becomes part of that continuum. Countless 

works made at all times, but particularly today, are too 

ignorant, disrespectful and arrogant to be accepted as 

constituents of the esteemed institution of tradition. 

Aestheticisation 

The Modern Movement arrived occasionally at architecture’s 

boundary as the consequence of aestheticisation, seeing 

architecture as a pure art. Particularly in our time, however, 

the process of aestheticisation has produced projects and 

buildings that have moved outside the territory of 

architecture entirely and turned into objects of art – 

frequently poor art, at that. 

Current philosophical discourse has reintroduced the issue 

of beauty and ethics. The writings of Elaine Scarry, such as her 

small, elegant book On Beauty and Being Just, exemplify this 

new orientation of ethics. 17 I fully agree with Scarry’s 

argument for the primacy of aesthetic judgement – an idea 

that has been also condensed into powerful formulations by 

Joseph Brodsky: ‘Man is an aesthetic being before becoming 

an ethical being,’ 18 and: ‘Aesthetics is the mother of ethics.’ 19 

The poet even makes a thought-provoking statement of the 

evolutionary role of beauty: ‘The purpose of evolution, believe 

it or not, is beauty, which survives it all and generates truth 

simply by being a fusion of the mental and the sensual.’ 20 

At the same time that we see the constitutive value of 

aesthetic aspiration and judgement, we should be critical of 

the dubious practice of aestheticisation. In our consumer 

culture, aestheticisation has turned into the canniest strategy 

Michelangelo Antonioni, Autostrada Landscape, from ‘Cronaca di un amore’, 1961 

Here the director sought to convey the alienation of the road, reinforced by the 

two massive beverage mock-ups for advertising that create a bleak and 

contrasting scene for the love-torn participants. 

of manipulation: violence, human suffering and inequality are 

aestheticised today as well as politics and war. Indeed, our very 

lives are turning into aestheticised products that we consume 

as nonchalantly as the newest material products of fashion. 

Beauty is absolutely an inseparable part of the notion of 

art, but it has a complex nature. Joseph Brodsky even dares to 

criticise Ezra Pound for his tendency to aim directly and solely 

at beauty: ‘The Cantos, too, left me cold, the main error was the 

old one: questing after beauty. For someone with such a long 

record of residence in Italy, it was odd that he hadn’t realized 

that beauty can’t be targeted, that it is always a by-product of 

other, often very ordinary pursuits.’ 21 

In our craft of architecture, also, seductive beauty and 

aesthetic appeal have regrettably turned into a conscious and 

explicit aim. In the very same manner as in poetry, 

enchanting and touching beauty in architecture is a result of 

other concerns: a desire for simplicity, precision or 

truthfulness, and especially for the experience of life and of 

being human in the middle of other human beings. Every 

great building opens a view into the essence of the human 

condition and, most importantly, to an idealised and better 

world. This was the message of Alvar Aalto in his address to 

Swedish architects in 1957: ‘Architecture has a second 

thought … the idea of creating a Paradise. That is the only 

purpose of our buildings … we wish to build a Paradise on 

earth for people.’ 22 

Synthetic Landscape 

In one of his earliest essays, Alvar Aalto praises the image of 

an Italian town at the back of Andrea Mantegna’s painting 

Christ in the Garden (1460), and describes it as a ‘synthetic 

landscape’ or ‘an architect´s vision of the landscape’. 23 The 

idea of a man-made synthetic landscape, an architectural 

microcosm, was, in fact, the guiding idea throughout Aalto’s 

life, and all his buildings can be viewed as man-made 

microcosms steeped in their landscape settings. 

The architectural profession at large might do better if we 

began to think of our buildings as microcosms and synthetic 

landscapes instead of seeing them as aestheticised objects. 

Architecture in our time has been concerned with landscape 

merely as a formal and visual counterpoint, or a sounding 

board for architectural forms. Today, however, buildings are 

increasingly beginning to be understood as processes that 

unavoidably go through phases of functional, technical and 

cultural change as well as processes of wear and deterioration. 

The fundamentally time-bound dynamic and open-ended 

nature of landscape architecture can provide meaningful 

lessons for a ‘weak’ or ‘fragile’ architecture that acknowledges 

vulnerability instead of obsessively fighting against time and 

change as architecture traditionally has done. 24 

The inevitable and overdue ecological perspective, a 

conscious and controlled interaction of nature’s systems and 

human lifestyles and constructions also calls for strategies that 

have been essential ingredients of landscape architecture. The 

nature–architecture relationship must by necessity be expanded 

22

Is there a Paradise? Andy Goldsworthy, Dandelion flowers pinned with thorns to wind-bent willowherb stalks, 

laid in a ring, held above bluebells with forked sticks, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, UK, 1987 

Goldsworthy here epitomises the possibility of the existence of Paradise via the natural beauty of his representation, 

its temporality, and the complexity of its structure. ‘We wish to build a Paradise on earth for people.’ – Alvar Aalto in 

‘The Paradise Idea of Architects’, 1957. See note 22. 

beyond aesthetic considerations to acknowledge the reality of 

physical and biological processes. New areas of research, such as 

bionics and biomimicry in areas that range from material 

sciences to the development of novel computers and medical 

cures, are all early examples of the necessary integration of 

natural and man-made systems beyond visual assimilation and 

aesthetic inspiration. Here the study of zoology, and molecular 

chemistry as well as the philosophy of landscape architecture 

can offer significant stimuli for us architects. 4 

This essay is an abbreviated version of a lecture delivered at the Association 

of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) International Conference, 

Helsinki, August 2003. 

Notes 

1. Source of the quote unidentified. The author received it from Steven Holl in 

the early 1990s. 

2. Peirce F Lewis, ‘Axioms for reading the landscape’, in DW Meining (ed), The 

Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, Oxford University Press (New York), 1979. 

3. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Epilogue from the Maker’, Selected Poems, Penguin 

Books (New York and London), 2000, p 143. 

4. Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio), The Ten Books on Architecture (De 

Architectura Libri Decem), Dover Publications, Inc (New York), 1960, pp 5–6. 

5. Ibid, p 8. 

6. Dinner conversation between the sculptor and the writer in Helsinki, 1987. 

7. Joseph Brodsky, ‘A cat´s meow’, On Grief and Reason, Farrar, Strauss and 

Giroux (New York), 1995, p 302. 

8. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of 

Matter, The Pegasus Foundation (Dallas, TX), 1983, p 46. 

9. Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific 

Mind, The Orion Press (New York), 1968. 

10. Ibid, p 16. 

11. Alvar Aalto, ‘Taide ja tekniikka’ [Art and Technology], lecture, Academy of 

Finland, 3 October 1955, in Göran Schildt, Alvar Aalto: Luonnoksia, Otava 

(Helsinki), 1972, pp 87–8 (trans Juhani Pallasmaa). 

12. Kirmo Mikkola, Aalto, Gummerus (Jyväskylä), 1985, pp 42–5. The origin of 

the quote is unidentified (trans Juhani Pallasmaa). 

13. As quoted in Georges Perec, Tiloja avaruuksia [Espéces d´espaces], Loki- 

Kirjat (Helsinki), 1992, p 72. 

14. Joseph Brodsky, ‘An immodest proposal’ in On Grief and Reason, op cit, p 206. 

15. Bohumil Hrabal, Too Loud a Solitude, Harcourt, Inc (San Diego, New York, 

London), 1990, p 1. 

16. Louis Kahn, ‘Form and design’ (1960), as published in Louis I Kahn and 

Alessandro Latour, Writings, Lectures, Interviews, Rizzoli (New York), 1991, p 116. 

17. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton University Press 

(Princeton, NJ), 1999. 

18. Brodsky, ‘An immodest proposal’, op cit, p 208. 

19. Ibid. 

20. Ibid, p 207. 

21. Joseph Brodsky, Watermark, Penguin Books (London), 1992, p 70. 

22. Alvar Aalto, ‘Arkkitehtien paratiisiajatus’ [The Paradise Idea of Architects], 

lecture given in Malmö, Sweden, in 1957, in Göran Schildt, op cit, pp 101–02. 

23. Alvar Aalto, presumably a manuscript for a book on the art of town 

planning that he was planning to write. Published in Göran Schildt (ed), Alvar 

Aalto in His Own Words, Otava (Helsinki), 1997, p 174. 

24. For a discussion of the idea of a ‘fragile architecture’, see: Juhani 

Pallasmaa, ‘Hapticity and time’, in Juhani Pallasmaa and Peter MacKeith (eds), 

Encounters: Architectural Essays, Rakennustieto Oy (Helsinki), 2005, pp 320–33. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 16 © Galleria dell’ Accademia, 

Venice, Italy/Cameraphoto Arte Venezia/The Bridgeman Art Library; p 19 © 

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the 

Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art 60.54. Photo by Steven 

Sloman; p 20 © 2001 National Gallery, London. All rights reserved; p 21 © 

Andrey Tarkovsky and Olga Surkova 1986; p 22 © Movie Magazine Ltd 1968; 

p 23 © Yorkshire Sculpture Park 

23

Recombinant Landscapes 

in the American City 

24

How are urban actors, such as landscape 

designers, community groups, developers 

and local politicians, actively restructuring 

their environments to meet the challenges 

of the American city in the new global 

context? Grahame Shane outlines the 

approaches to landscape that have been 

emerging since the mid-20th century and 

are set to recombine urban assemblages 

whether they are located in historic city 

centres, postindustrial waterfronts or 

suburban sprawl. 

Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden (1964) describes America’s 

shift from an abundant paradise of natural resources to a 

dispersed pattern of industry across small-town and rural 

America before the age of mass production and the 

development of the modern metropolis. American cities now 

face the challenge of deindustrialisation, shrinking cities, the 

increasing scarcity of energy, global warming and relatively 

little population growth. 

The original enclaves at the core of American cities have 

faced particular problems, becoming unsuccessful business 

districts that must be re-equipped and redesigned for a new 

residential life. The old waterfronts of coastal cities at river 

estuaries that once served as essential portals for trade and 

industry are now being transformed into parks, armatures 

for leisure and pleasure activities. And the mountains, 

valleys, forests and fields of the hinterlands of these cities 

that once provided raw materials and agricultural products 

have now become essential components of a multicentred, 

networked city, often encompassing a huge territory with 

many millions of occupants. 

As energy becomes more expensive, city form in the 

American landscape will mutate once again. What might this 

new recombinant urban landscape look like as urban actors 

begin to restructure their environment to meet the challenge 

of the contemporary Network City? 

Richard Rogers, SHoP and Ken Smith Landscape Architect, Peck Slip, 

NYC Planning Department East River Waterfront Study, 2005 

Reconditioning downtown for new residential use. Peck Slip, a large, paved, 

industrial waterfront plaza in downtown New York, becomes a park for new 

local residents in Ken Smith’s landscape design. 

Recombinant Landscapes in the Historic City 

Like their European counterparts, American landscape 

professionals have played an important role in the recoding of 

historic city streets as new urban attractors, successfully 

competing with suburban malls and megacentres. The 

prominent American mall designer Victor Gruen tried this 

strategy in the 1950s, but was unsuccessful – for example at 

Rochester Plaza (1956) in upstate New York. However, there 

was a huge qualitative leap from Gruen’s impoverished, 

pedestrianised main street to Lawrence Halprin’s landscape 

cascading down through Ghirardelli Square warehouse 

complex, San Francisco (1962–5). And Benjamin Thompson’s 

Quincy Market (1976) in Boston, the first downtown festival 

mall, pushed this logic further. Cooper Eckstadt’s design for 

25

West 8 and du Toit Allsopp Hillier (DTAH), Toronto Central Waterfront, 

Toronto, Canada, 2005 

Reconditioning the waterfront. The Toronto scheme transforms the old industrial 

harbour front into an elegant, tree-lined boulevard with bicycle lanes while 

preserving its streetcars and extending park platforms on piers into the lake. 

It also successfully breaks apart the highway that separates the downtown 

from the waterfront, creating new parklands, streets, blocks and building sites 

that connect back inland. The inset shows the section of the planned methane 

plant that will process gas from the brownfield waterfront sites. 

new landscaped streets in Battery Park City (1978) drew on the 

New York tradition of Olmsted and Vaux’s picturesque Central 

Park and Brooklyn’s Esplanade. In Battery Park, landscape 

architect Lawrence Olin created a new, Retro-Modern street 

hybrid: his pedestrianised esplanade was a huge commercial 

success and set in motion the recoding of the New York 

industrial waterfront. 

Historic America downtowns now represent tiny patches 

within a much larger regional landscape, with many, such as 

Detroit, struggling to survive as a result of disinvestment in 

their centres and vast, automobile-based, peripheral expansion 

beyond their city limits. But there have been some spectacular 

landscaped comebacks, as in downtown Los Angeles, given up 

for dead by Reyner Banham in 1971. Here, the Pei, Cobb, Fried 

Library Tower (1990) looms over Halprin’s cascading Bunker 

Hill (Spanish) Steps (1990) that follow a curving waterfall 

descending from the reconditioned LA public library gardens. 

The steps lead down to the South Hope Street armature of the 

‘New Downtown’ (originally to be landscaped by Halprin). 

Nearby, on Bunker Hill, at the Civic Center, where the 

surrounding empty office towers have been converted to 

residential use, Melinda Taylor and Lawrence Reed Moline will 

design both the widened sidewalks of the tree-lined Grand 

Avenue in front of Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall (2003) and also 

the western garden terraces behind, overlooking the Pacific. 

On the East Coast in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, a 

similar landscaped transformation is taking place. The city 

uncovered the previously buried Woonasquatucket River to 

create an attractive canyon of landscaped terraces going down 

to the riverside, WaterPlace (1994), which hosts the WaterFire 

festival (a free public arts event with torches and riverboats 

held several times a month between May and October). This 

public re-imaging of the activities of the city centre as a 

‘festival place’ led to further investment, as industrial lofts 

and office blocks changed to artists’ and then residential uses, 

making the downtown area appear safe and attractive for the 

enormous Providence Place Mall (1999) beside the river, the 

AmTrak station and the I-90 East Coast highway. 

Recombinant Landscapes in the Postindustrial Machine City 

Many American cities are reconstructing their historic 

business-district enclaves to cater for new residential uses, 

adding new paths through complex three-dimensional 

patches of landscaped amenities as commuters rebel against 

long commutes and high oil prices. In the 1990s, inner-city 

armatures of secondary centres, like North Michigan Avenue, 

26

Chicago, showed how a standard industrial grid street could 

be converted into an attractive consumer paradise, a flowerand 

tree-lined boulevard of high-density, mixed-use towers 

(part office, part apartments, part hotel, with malls and 

department stores in their bases). Midtown New York has such 

a mixed-use, rhizomatic, three-dimensional armature along 

Park Avenue, including the Rockefeller Center roof gardens 

and pedestrianised streets (from the 1930s), and Trump Tower 

(1983) with its waterfall, public roof garden and connection to 

the bamboo-filled atrium of the IBM Building (1983). This 

mixed-use, three-dimensional pattern is spreading back to 

downtown New York, where many empty office skyscrapers 

have become residential. Here, Richard Rogers and SHoP, with 

landscape architect Ken Smith, will transform the dreary 

underside of the raised Roosevelt Highway into a stretched, 

linear urban park armature beside the East River. 

The recoding of the docks as linear waterfront park 

armatures has offered many American cities the opportunity 

to rediscover their buried heritage, creating new landscaped 

networks. Portland, Oregon, began its waterfront park in 1974 

by tearing up the Eastbank Freeway. In New York, community 

activists defeated the proposed Westway (1975) in court for 

ecological reasons in 1985. Quennell Rothschild & Partners (in 

a joint venture with Mathews-Nielsen), then designed the 22- 

hectare (55-acre) linear Hudson River Park with 15 piers, 

which was proposed in 1988 and finally approved in 1998. In 

this project, each pier is treated separately as a platform for 

different events, while the long boulevard and parallel park 

armature is a stretched variation of Battery Park’s pedestrian 

esplanade. Further north, Thomas Balsley designed Riverside 

Park South (1992) to link to Olmsted’s Riverside Park. 

In San Francisco, a waterfront, palm-lined grand boulevard 

armature leading to the Ferry Building (with its farmers’ 

market) replaced the 1960s Embarcadero Freeway after the 

Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. Cardinal-Hardy redesigned 

Montreal’s Vieux-Port industrial waterfront as a park in 

1990/92. And in the mid-1990s Chan Kreiger designed a new 

linear Rose Kennedy Park in Boston, interspersed with 

building sites, to cover the Big Dig (completed 2005). 1 

The linear waterfront armature landscape list could easily 

be extended; for example, Adriaan Geuze and West 8 have 

recently won the competition for the new Toronto waterfront. 

Few American cities have had the political will or 

administrative skill to plan the coordination of the emerging 

residential downtown enclaves and waterfront park 

armatures as a network, as in Vancouver’s consultative 

27

Cooper, Robertson & Partners, Coastal resort community, WindMark Beach, Florida, due for completion 2015 

Cooper, Robertson & Partners’ ecologically sensitive masterplan for a large coastal resort community at WindMark Beach preserves the 

local dunes, wetlands and marshes and relocates a local highway away from the beach. Employing planning principles derived from the 

boardwalk communities along the Fire Island National Seashore (New York) and Radburn (New Jersey), individual house plots face on 

to raised boardwalks and have preservation zones to save existing flora. Houses are raised on piers to protect nearby wetland 

ecologies and to allow existing patterns of hydrology to remain. Vehicles approach from parking courts located at the rear of plots. 

Paths lead back from the beach into the neighbourhoods and surrounding wetlands that will be preserved as parks. 

CityPlan 1996. Here, planners linked the central enclave and 

waterfront armatures to eight planned high-density suburban 

subcentres using regional public transport and bicycle paths 

(all set within a green belt boundary). Nor can many American 

cities match Vancouver’s switch from a predominantly 

automobile city to 40 per cent bike-commuting, with bus, 

subway, rail, ferry and foot traffic also cutting down cars. The 

Canadian city has also pioneered a ‘smart growth’ regional 

planning approach that highlights the local watershed, and 

protects the Rocky Mountains forests and the archipelago of 

islands that make up the city region, using green belts. The 

Economist Intelligence Unit has consistently rated Vancouver 

among the top five most liveable cities in the world (it was 

number one in 2005). Only Portland, Vancouver’s American 

neighbour, comes close with its Calthorpe Associates’ 1990 

Metro Vision 2040 plan for a network of transport oriented 

development (TOD) corridors set within a green belt, with 

dense development clustering around stations along new and 

old railway lines. 2 

Recombinant Landscapes in the Network City 

Recombinant landscapes play a role in the reuse of 

downtowns as landscaped residential districts, in the 

reconditioning of waterfronts or old industrial areas, and in 

28

Mia Lehrer + Associates and the City of Los Angeles Planning 

Department, Los Angeles Downtown River Revitalisation, 2006 

The City of Los Angeles Planning Department undertook a two-year-long 

consultative process to build on local pressure groups’ plans to revitalise the 

entire length of the LA River within the city’s boundaries, utilising funds 

earmarked by the state. Three large new state parks are proposed along the 

river around the downtown on old railway yards, including the re-creation of 

lost wetlands. The downtown riverbed will be stepped to make an inhabitable 

landscape during the dry season, with large ducts hidden in the section to 

carry spring flood run-off. The commercial redevelopment of the surrounding 

land as office and residential blocks will help fund the project. 

suburban networks. Although American cities appear chaotic 

in contrast to their Canadian counterparts, their suburban 

format is based on an underlying, self-organising system of 

giant enclaves of recombinant landscape patches. Global 

corporations have learnt how to manipulate these patches as 

attractors to direct the paths of pedestrians or drivers, using 

spectacular forms of landscaping for marketing purposes. 

Walt Disney demonstrated the power of this approach in the 

Anaheim Disneyland enclave in 1954, with its themed main 

street entry armature and variously styled landscape enclaves 

(Tomorrow Land, Frontier Land, and so on), attracting 12 

million people annually. At Disney World, begun in 1967, 

Disney demonstrated that the same spectacular landscaping 

and marketing strategy could be applied at a global scale, this 

time set within the specially created, tax-exempt, 10,118- 

hectare (25,000-acre) Reedy Creek Improvement District, Florida. 3 

From the outset, Disney World was masterplanned as a 

multicellular collection of thematic, attractor patches. The first 

Magic Kingdom patch (1971) included a replica of the Anaheim 

Disneyland. The second included Disney’s Experimental 

Planned Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT, 1982), where the 

global, multicellular thematic was driven home by the 

arrangement of various representative streets and landscapes 

(from, for example, Japan, France and England) around a 

central lake. A Bucky Fuller dome housing the ATT Pavilion, 

then a global communications giant, towered over the lake, 

seen from and observing all points. EPCOT provided a model of 

the global Network City and the role of landscape in masking 

its machinery. The simulacrum became a huge, global success, 

and is now the largest single employer in the US with 58,000 

‘cast members’ hosting 42 million ‘guests’. Disney’s 

Celebration (1996), a 2,024-hectare (5,000-acre) suburban new 

town designed by Cooper, Robertson & Partners and Robert AM 

Stern, piggybacked on this success. 4 

It is necessary to briefly note here the proliferation of 

enormous, masterplanned and landscaped corporate newtown 

assemblages like Celebration since the 1990s. There is 

Cooper, Robertson & Partners’ ecologically sensitive project 

for the St Joe Towns & Resorts company’s vast Florida 

landholdings (2005–06), and Eckbo, Dean, Austin Williams 

(EDAW) made new-town plans for the 1,900-hectare (4,700- 

acre) Stapleton Air Force Base in Denver, Colorado (2001). Ken 

Smith’s team’s winning entry for the similar-sized El Toro Air 

Force Base in Irvine, California, included the creation of the 

Orange County Great Park (2006) as a vast ‘Central Park’ for 

the surrounding new town. Many of these projects, like 

Celebration, include bicycle paths and lanes for golf carts as 

alternative means of transport. Peachtree, outside Atlanta, has 

9,000 registered golf carts for street use. 

An early example of these giant assemblages is the 404- 

hectare (1,000-acre) Playa Vista (1989) new town initially 

planned by ‘New Urbanist’ pioneers Duany and Platter-Zyberk 

for Maguire Thomas Partners on Howard Hughes’ private 

airport beside the Los Angeles River. However, the project has 

run into complex methane problems, as Hughes used city 

29

Cooper Carry, Mizner Park, Boca Raton, Florida, 1991 

With the support of the Boca Raton City Council, Cooper Carry converted Florida’s Boca Raton Mall, a failing dumbbell 

mall from the 1950s, into the elegant Mizner Park. The council banned all other new commercial development 

downtown. One of the original department stores was retained and remodelled as an art gallery and cultural centre, 

while the 183-metre (600-foot) armature of the original mall and other department stores were demolished to make 

way for a new, landscaped town square. This palm-lined square gave the city a new civic image, creating a mixed-use 

residential, commercial and cultural complex, a hybrid development that succeeded despite the reconditioning of the 

nearby Town Center Mall (1979) that had initiated the earlier mall’s decline. 

garbage to fill the wetlands. Opposition groups have since 

produced beautiful plans to uncover the Los Angeles River 

with restored wetlands and new public parks, plans that have 

ultimately led the City of Los Angeles Planning Department to 

propose ‘greening’ the entire LA River basin in 2006 with Mia 

Lehrer as landscape consultant. 5 

As foreseen by Disney at EPCOT, such spectacular, 

landscaped corporate enclaves have become the global 

standard of development. The story of the associated 

commercial subcentres is well known. Designers shifted from 

single-armature open-air malls to interior, multilevel, airconditioned 

extravaganzas, ending in huge megamalls with 

four or more armatures. More than 40 million people 

annually visit the artificial, interior, phantasmagorical, 

undulating landscape of the Camp Snoopy theme park at the 

centre of the Mall of America (Jerde Associates, 1992). 

Developers have also transformed some older dumbbell malls 

into landscaped urban spectacles. Florida’s Boca Raton Mall 

from the 1950s became the elegant, palm-lined Mizner Park, a 

landscaped town square surrounded by housing above stores 

and an art museum (Cooper Carry, 1991). Designers 

reconditioned even small malls in wealthy suburbs with 

sidewalks, streets, trees, plantings, cafés and cinemas, as in 

Florida’s Winter Park Village (Dover, Kohl and Partners, 1997). 

The 2002 Los Angeles Forum for Architecture & Urban Design 

‘Dead Malls’ competition produced even more imaginative 

30

plans for ‘ecological retailing nodes’. And Stoner Meek 

Architecture & Urban Design turned the abandoned Vallejo 

Plaza Mall in California into a wind farm, a bowling green, a 

small golf range and a bird sanctuary set among the islands in 

the retention pond that partially replaced the parking lot 

(some islands were leased to a car dealership!). 6 

Rhizomatic Assemblages in the Network City 

As the ‘Dead Malls’ competition suggests, there are many 

creative opportunities for new rhizomatic assemblages and 

urban landscape recombinations in the Network City 

unforeseen by Disney. Small bottom-up landscape initiatives 

by citizens take on a new interest, instead of top-down 

investments. The tiny gardens created by volunteer gardeners 

on vacant plots in abandoned inner-city neighbourhoods in 

the 1960s and 1970s, for example, provided the impetus for 

the New York City Park Department’s Green Thumb 

legalisation initiative (1995). These 600 small-scale landscape 

attractors served poor local neighbourhoods deprived of 

parks, drawing pedestrian traffic to their doors. Other smallscale, 

temporary landscape structures could have a similar 

rhizomatic effect. Small-scale antique flea markets on city car 

parks or vacant plots, green or farmers’ markets featuring 

local organic produce, temporary community street fairs, 

seasonal carnivals, flower markets, sidewalk Christmas-tree 

sellers and mobile fruit and vegetable carts have all 

contributed to a green, ‘performative urbanism’ that 

transforms the city for a short time. Robert Smithson played 

with this idea of the short-life mobile attractor that travelled 

through the city in his proposal for a miniature Central Park 

on a barge, cruising back and forth off the shore of Manhattan, 

which was recently re-created by the Whitney Museum. 7 

Stoner Meek Architecture & Urban Design, Pell Mall, Vallejo Plaza, Vallejo, California, 2002–03 

In the 2002 Los Angeles Forum for Architecture & Urban Design ‘Dead Malls’ competition, one of the prize-winning 

entries by Stoner Meek Architecture & Urban Design of San Francisco proposed turning the abandoned Vallejo Plaza 

Mall into an ‘ecological retailing node’. The mall building was taken apart except for a few fragments that were retained 

as isolated pavilions in a new, ecological landscape of windmills on a wind farm, a bowling green, a small golf range 

and a bird sanctuary set among the islands in the retention pond that partially replaced the parking lot. A franchise 

sold eco-cars from some of the islands reached by bridges. 

31

Brian McGrath and Victoria Marshall, Urban Patches, Baltimore EcoSystem Study, 2006 

As part of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, Brian McGrath and Victoria Marshall developed an innovative system for 

identifying the activities of various urban actors on different urban performance ‘surfaces’ in the Baltimore Watershed. 

The surfaces are categorised as patches made up of various percentages of fine vegetation (grass, agriculture), 

coarse vegetation (trees), bare soil, pavement (tarmac) and buildings (with various densities). Patches of one, two, 

three, four and five mixes were identified in the study using remote-sensing devices and up-close observation. With 

this observational tool, urban actors can choose to alter the mixture in their patch to achieve a better environment. 

Robert Smithson, Floating Island, 1970, realised in 2005 

In 1970, Robert Smithson, the pioneering land artist, proposed creating a floating ‘Central Park’ that would move around 

Manhattan on a barge. This project highlighted Smithson’s appreciation of Central Park both as an artificial landscape, 

created by man and Olmsted, as a symbolic counterpoint to the dense city. As landscape comes to play a more prominent 

role as a symbolic intermediary in the remaking of American cities, the Whitney Museum realised Smithson’s project for the 

portable, urban landscape that floated around the city as a spectacular ‘performance’ piece in the summer of 2005. 

32

Farmers’ Market, Broadway and 114th Street, New York 

Ben Benepe founded the Green Market Organization when he got permission 

to form the temporary Union Square Green Market in 1976. The market is now 

open three days a week and attracts 200 local farmers and their produce from 

around New York State. The Union Square neighbourhood houses many 

restaurants that specialise in cooking this fresh local produce. The Green Market 

Organization also now sponsors farmers’ markets throughout New York, 

including this one at 114th Street and Broadway. New York has also legalised 

other such bottom-up local initiatives like the High Line Park in Chelsea and 

the 600 Green Thumb pocket parks scattered across the city in poorer areas 

(saved from being sold off privately by actress Bette Midler in the mid-1990s). 

Time and seasons play their part in programming the 

shifting performative urbanism of urban actors, providing 

space for both everyday preoccupations and spectacular 

events. Jim Corner, the theorist and leading practitioner of the 

Landscape Urbanist movement, sees urban actors opening up 

new public spaces for performative urbanism on ‘commons’ – 

shared space that can be freely inhabited by multiple actors 

for various events and programmes. These commons can 

often be formed in leftover spaces and those created by 

industrial shrinkage. Corner also computerised the layered 

analytical approach of Ian McHarg, his predecessor and 

teacher at the University of Pennsylvania, who adapted Patrick 

Geddes’ ecological reading of the city in its landscape, 

separating out each system in its own layer. Within this 

layered matrix, the shrinking and shifting of American cities 

appeared as clear patterns, opening opportunities for 

rhizomatic intervention in the interstices between the 

sequential assemblages. 8 

Besides short-term performative cycles, Corner and his firm 

Field Operations also work on long ecological cycles, 

remediating brownfields and reconstructing damaged 

ecologies. The Toronto Downsview Canadian Air Force Base 

Conversion competition (2000) was won by Bruce Mau, Rem 

Koolhaas and OMA with their Tree City entry, beating teams led 

by Field Operations and Bernard Tschumi. However, all three 

entries shared a performative urbanism approach pioneered by 

Cedric Price and Archigram in the 1960s and creatively 

reconfigured by Tschumi and Koolhaas in their 1982 Parc de la 

Villette competition entries. Field Operations’ winning entry in 

2003 for the 898-hectare (2,220-acre) Fresh Kills Landfill 

competition demonstrated the flexibility and power of this 

layered, performative systems approach (with its multiple 

feedback loops). The practice planned the succession of flora 

and fauna, as well as the small-scale performative uses of the 

park, over the 40-year duration required to remediate the soil of 

New York City’s giant garbage dump, with its huge methane 

management system that fuels a small power station. 9 

The long-term Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES), funded by 

the US National Science Foundation, takes this approach even 

further, investigating the impact of human settlement over 

time on one tributary of the Baltimore Harbor ecosystem that 

cuts across the old city core, the abandoned inner-city slums 

and then into the wealthy suburbs surrounding a huge forest 

reserve, established in the early 20th century by the Olmsted 

Brothers. The multidisciplinary team, led by Steward Pickett 

of the Institute of Eco-Systems Studies, includes hydrologists, 

urban forestry experts, urban sociologists and economists, 

experts in public health, urban historians and urban 

designers (led by Brian McGrath of Columbia University), and 

focuses on the impact of the stream beds on urban 

morphology and urban abandonment patterns. BES uses 

remote-sensing data and up-close sociological approaches to 

monitor the impact of human settlement patterns on the 

urban forest and also promises to provide, in the long term, a 

precise urban model for measuring the human impact on the 

33

forest in terms of human carbon production, forest uptake 

and run-offs into the estuary. 

The flexibility of the performative urbanism approach has 

also allowed landscape urbanists to creatively engage the 

reprogramming of the city section. The 2006 ‘Green Towers’ 

show at New York’s Skyscraper Museum showed how difficult 

it is to make such big buildings sustainable. High-density 

nodes are ecological in terms of transport and communication 

costs, but even ‘green towers’ like Norman Foster‘s NYC 

Hearst Building, which received the US government’s Gold 

‘LEED’ (Leadership in Energy and Ecological Design) Award, 

can never be fully autonomous. Green roofs, solar collectors 

and wind generators are all features that can help, as can 

reducing waste-water flows and capturing storm-water run-off 

(for example, the Hearst Building’s spectacular 9-metre/30-foot 

high ‘Icefall’ cascading interior waterfall in its atrium, 

designed in conjunction with Jamie Carpenter and Jim 

Garland of Fluidity, uses waste water). 10 

Victoria Marshall and Meta Brunzema, Blue Roof, Westside Yards, New York, 2005 

‘Greening’ the city in three dimensions. In Victoria Marshall (landscape) and 

architect Meta Brunzema’s unrealised project, rhizomatic paths of people, 

activities and water structure a complex three-dimensional ascent through a 

‘green atrium’ up on to the Blue Roof, which connects to the end of the High 

Line and bridges across to the Hudson River Park. 

Corner and Field Operations, with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, 

have shown how the three-dimensional landscaped city of the 

future might work in their winning design for the New York 

High Line (2004), a 2.4-kilometre (1 1 / 2 -mile) long, elevated, 

abandoned railway line, which thanks to private group Friends 

of the High Line has now been designated as a public park. 

This linear armature, wending its way through the city, 

demonstrates the three-dimensional potential of landscape 

urbanism and performative urbanism to inhabit the city 

section and exploit opportunities to create new open spaces. 

The approach might tie into green roofs in dense urban 

settings, to begin to make a three-dimensional park system 

that links into the bases of skyscrapers, as imagined at 

Rockefeller Center in the 1930s. Victoria Marshall and Meta 

Brunzema’s unbuilt Blue Roof project (2005) for the Westside 

Yards, New York, showed how a new formal landscape of 

water and vegetation channels could recapture rain water 

from surrounding buildings and also link to the High Line, at 

the same time providing a three-dimensional performative 

descent with the water running through an atrium inside the 

exhibition centre below to ground level. 

The Weiss/Manfredi partnership’s beautifully conceived 

design for the Seattle Art Museum’s 3.4-hectare (8.5-acre) 

terraced sculpture park (2005) also demonstrates the threedimensional 

urban potential of this layered, rhizomatic 

approach in building a series of platforms and ramps between 

the various infrastructure systems, highway and railway, 

descending to the waterfront in a cascading system of 

pathways. While the performative aspects of the design are 

limited to the display of sculpture and the support of art 

events, the recombinant structure of the design could easily 

be transferred elsewhere in the city section to colonise green 

roofs or other empty surfaces, as in the case of Field 

Operations’ High Line. Both projects featured in the Museum 

of Modern Art’s first landscape show, ‘Groundswell’, in 2005. 11 

Recombinant Landscapes and a New Hybridity in the 

Network City 

In the hybrid Network City, local innovative urban actors have 

become involved in complex, public–private partnerships. The 

problem facing recombinant landscape urbanists as they 

tackle the reconditioning of the city is the creation of the new 

commons in the interstices of the three-dimensional matrix of 

private property. Owners may not want the liability of a 

recombinant, performative, green urban park on their unused 

rooftops. Cities need highly motivated urban actors like the 

well-financed, bottom-up Friends of the High Line to advocate 

for the new urban commons. Such actors, as in the New York 

case, may create strange new public–private alliances and 

zoning variances in their recombinant quests. 

The overall impact of recombinant urban landscape 

projects is to empower a new localism and modern hybridity 

in the global city. Americans can live and work in the new 

downtown enclaves in reconditioned skyscrapers, or in the 

landscaped armatures of boulevards and waterfronts, and in 

34

the large, corporate, suburban landscaped patches. 

Recombinant urban landscapes are the key to a new flexibility 

and will allow American cities to adapt rapidly to the 

changing energy situation. The result will be multicentred, 

heterotopic, mixed-use Network Cities that include local 

ecology, urban parks and agriculture. 4 

Notes 

1. The contract to bury the I-93 raised highway (1959) in downtown Boston 

(the Big Dig) was the largest civil contract ever let in American history. 

Started in 1991, the tunnels of the buried highway system opened in 

December 2003, five years behind schedule and $12 billion over budget. On 

10 July 2006, panels of the highway tunnel concrete ceiling system fell on the 

roadway killing a driver, causing the temporary closure of the system. The 

investigation is ongoing. Associated Press, ‘Boston’s “Big Dig” opens to 

public’, MSNBC, 20 December 2003. For details of the evolving new park 

designs see http://www.boston.com/beyond_bigdig/. 

2. Architect Peter Calthorpe advocated the development of compact, public 

transit-based ‘urban villages’ in the early 1970s, describing this pattern of 

development as ‘smart growth’. He applied these ideas in the Portland Metro 

Vision 2040 plan (1990). See Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The 

Regional City, Island Press (Washington, DC), 2001, pp 139–50. 

3. Beth Dunlap, Building a Dream: The Art of Disney Architecture, Harry N 

Abrams (New York), 1996, pp 24–54. 

4. Ibid, pp 55–61. See also Karal Ann Marling, ‘Imagineering the Disney Theme 

Parks’, in Karal Ann Marling (ed), Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The 

Architecture of Reassurance, Flammarion (New York and Paris), 1997, pp 148–56. 

5. For Playa Vista, see Martha Groves and Roger Vincent, ‘LA’s Urban Model: 

After years of setbacks and controversy, Playa Vista is officially open. 

Planners are studying it as an experiment in high-density housing’, Los 

Angeles Times, 18 October 2003, and for methane see Martha Groves, ‘Playa 

Vista Buyers Will Test Capability of Methane Shield: Critics call high-tech 

safeguards unproven. Courts back experts who devised system’, Los Angeles 

Times, 6 January 2003. For Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan see 

http://www.lariverrmp.org/index.htm, accessed 14 October 2006. 

6. For Mall of America, see John Jerde Partnership International, You Are Here 

Now, Phaidon (London), 1999, pp 98–107, and for the Stoner Meek project 

see Warren Techentin, Dead Malls, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture & 

Urban Design (Los Angeles), 2005, p 37. 

7. Eugenie Tsai (ed), Robert Smithson, University of California Press (Berkeley, 

CA), 2004, and for images and press release see 

http://www.robertsmithson.com/ex_events/ex_events.htm, accessed 14 

November 2006. 

8. See James Corner, ‘Terra Fluxus’, in Charles Waldheim (ed), The Landscape 

Urbanism Reader, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 2006, pp 022–033. 

9. For Field Operations’ Fresh Kills Park, Staten Island, see 

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/fkl/fkl_index.shtml, accessed 14 

October 2006. 

10. For Green Skyscrapers, see 

http://www.skyscraper.org/EXHIBITIONS/GREEN_TOWERS/gt_main.htm, 

accessed 14 October 2006, and for the Hearst Building waterfall etc see 

http://www.hearstcorp.com/tower/, accessed 14 October 2006. 

11. For Weiss/Manfredi, see Peter Reed, Groundswell: Constructing the 

Contemporary Landscape, MoMA (New York), 2005, pp 11–123, and online at 

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2004/groundswell.html, accessed 14 

October 2006. For High Line, New York, see http://www.thehighline.org/, 

accessed 14 October 2006. 

Weiss/Manfredi, Seattle Waterfront Sculpture Park, Seattle, Washington, 2005 

A performative urbanism approach to ‘greening’ the city in three dimensions. 

A series of paths and terraces structures a rhizomatic path for pedestrians, 

punctuated by pavilions and displays, over highways and railway tracks down 

to the seashore. Beneath the path a network of pipes removes methane 

pollution from the brownfield site and provides services for the ramps as 

settings for art installations and performance spaces. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 24-5 © Ken Smith Landscape 

Architect; pp 26-7 © West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture; p 28 © 

Reprinted by permission of the St Joe Company, WindMark Beach, Florida; p 29 

© City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering; p 30 © Courtesy Wikipedia, Elfguy 

personal photo released to public domain; p 31 © Los Angeles Forum for 

Architecture & Urban Design; pp 32-3(t) © Brian McGrath; p 32(b) © Estate of 

Robert Smithson/DACS, London/VAGA, New York 2007. Images courtesy Estate of 

Robert Smithson, James Cohan Gallery, New York; p 33(b) © David Grahame Shane; 

p 34 © Victoria Marshall and Meta Brunzema; p 35 © Courtesy Weiss/Manfredi 

35

Urban 

American 

Landscape

Landscape architecture has emerged from 

the deep sleep it entered during the 

Modernist period and remained in for most 

of the 20th century. Now, valued because 

of the environmental movement, 

stimulated by collaborations with 

architects and artists, and presented with 

opportunities to transform abandoned 

industrial sites, landscape architects are 

enthusiastically producing new kinds of 

parks on brownfields, along waterfronts, 

even on rooftops and in garbage dumps. 

Jayne Merkel here looks at ways the 

designed landscape is creating outdoor 

public space in a country where it has not 

always been valued. 

It is not easy for Europeans, who tend to spend their time on 

visits to the US in cities, to understand how profoundly 

Thomas Jefferson’s desire for every citizen to have ‘forty acres 

and a mule’ affected the country he helped found. The agrarian 

ideal runs deep in America, where most people live on the 

fringes of cities and rarely visit places where people actually 

encounter one another face to face on streets and in parks. 

Although a central green, used for farming and as a 

meeting place, was a dominant feature of early colonial towns, 

the American cities that grew up later, as most did, have very 

little open public space. Older Eastern cities and most of those 

in the Midwest have some large, late 19th- and early 20thcentury 

parks that are often connected by green ‘parkways’ – 

verdant roadways between them that attempted to turn the 

whole city, visually at least, into a ‘park’. But the automobiles 

that the parkways were built to serve soon led people out of 

the cities and into the suburbs, and most of the green space 

that was cultivated from the middle of the 20th century until 

its end was strictly private, in the form of ‘yards’ – small plots 

covered with grass surrounding single-family houses. 

In recent years, however, some of the children from 

families that had fled dense urban areas mid-century have 

been drifting back to the cities, if only temporarily, as ‘loft 

living’ has become fashionable, the number of single-person 

households has grown and commuting time has increased. 

Now the challenge for landscape architects is to help make 

urban areas habitable enough that they stay. 

This is certainly what Diana Balmori is trying to do. 

‘Landscape architecture is a discipline that has been asleep at 

the wheel for a long time,’ she says. ‘It has woken up now 

because there is an interdependence with architecture, which 

the ecological movement has made necessary.’ Balmori thinks 

the scale of current projects is helping the discipline flourish. 

‘When the Modern Movement was in its heyday, the scale was 

too large (that of urban design) or too small (of little urban 

parks). Today there are middle-sized projects of a mile or mile 

and a half, such as the High Line in New York and the St Louis 

waterfront’ – which she is redesigning. 

Ken Smith, who is creating the 545-hectare (1,347-acre) 

Orange County Great Park in California, attributes the new 

energy in landscape architecture partly to artists, such as 

Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, who worked outside 

on a landscape scale in the the 1960s and 1970s to break out 

of the gallery system. ‘There is also another postminimal 

strain – people who were interested in cultural and social 

issues,’ he says, noting that a lot of the urban ‘vacant lots 

Balmori Associates and HOK Planning Group, St Louis Waterfront, St 

Louis, Missouri, Illinois, 2006– 

Hoping to attract people to the riverfront and encourage development up and 

down it – as well as across the Mississippi River in Illinois – the City of St 

Louis, non-profit Great Rivers Greenway District, National Park Service, Metro 

transportation system and Downtown Now organised a competition from 

which this scheme emerged as the winner. It consists of a whole series of 

floating islands and walkways along a 1,219-metre (4,000-foot) long shore, 

with integrated bicycle and pedestrian paths, a terraced riverwalk, event areas 

for large gatherings and docking for riverboats. 

37

Patricia Johanson, Fair Park Lagoon, Dallas, Texas, 1981 

This once environmentally degraded lagoon became a functioning ecosystem when the artist created new concrete 

edges and bridges shaped like native plants. She planted bulrushes, wild rice and tall grasses that root in shallow 

water along the shoreline to provide shelter and food for small animals and birds and, further out, added water lilies 

and irises surrounded by a causeway shaped like the tip of the fern. Paths for people are based on the twisted roots of 

the delta duck-potato; thinner stems rise out of the water to provide perches for birds. Leaf-like elements towards the 

centre of the lagoon form safe islands for animals; other ‘leaves’ along the shore create step seating and overlooks. 

turned into “community gardens” were initiated by artists 

as a kind of guerilla act.’ 

Patricia Johanson’s land and water sculptures, such as the 

Fair Park Lagoon in Dallas (1981), were particularly prescient 

since they restored the ecological balance while transforming 

watery edges into usable places shaped like the flora and 

fauna around them. Johanson, who proposed sculptural 

solutions to environmental problems as early as 1969, is an 

artist with a degree in architecture (earned in order to help 

get her projects built). But there were other landscape 

architects at that time, such as Lawrence Halprin in San 

Francisco and Richard Haag in Seattle, who also did lively, 

usable, transformative urban projects that foreshadow those 

being done today. Haag converted a brownfield site long 

before the term was in popular usage. 

Today, abandoned industrial sites are the most likely 

places for public works of landscape architecture, and they 

take a bizarre variety of forms from waterfronts and railroad 

beds to mines and factories. In New York City, the 2.4- 

kilometre (1 1 / 2 -mile) elevated High Line railroad track which 

stopped carrying freight 26 years ago, and the 898-hectare 

(2,220-acre) Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island – a massive 

pile of garbage that rises to 69 metres (225 feet) at some 

points and is visible from the moon – are both being 

transformed by James Corner’s Field Operations. 

The Fresh Kills site – an intertidal marsh into which 150 

million tons of refuse, mostly household waste, was dumped for 

over half a century – managed to grow forests, create a nesting 

area for herons, and host migrating birds anyway, though it 

often emitted foul odours. In 2001, plans for its conversion to a 

park had been made, a competition held, and closing begun, 

when events on 11 September forced it to reopen to 

accommodate debris from the World Trade Center tragedy, 

giving new ironic meaning to its name, which had actually 

come from the Fresh Kills Estuary. Finally, however, design 

development has begun, construction will start next year, and 

the first $150 million phase of the project will open in 2008. 

Service roads will be turned into public thoroughfares, 

easing traffic congestion on Staten Island and making the 

park accessible by car. A gateway flanked by wind turbines 

will lead to four landfill mounds, each capped and 

transformed into a different landscape. The one on the north 

will have a rounded peak with meadows, but there will also be 

woods, secluded island nesting areas, marshes with an 

interpretive centre, and a memorial garden to those whose 

remains lie within the land. There will be ball fields, boating 

and fishing, picnic spots, horse trails and a great lawn for 

events. The Point will have a dock for a ferry from 

Manhattan’s Battery Park with a promenade of restaurants, 

art installations and outdoor markets at the water’s edge. 

Corner calls the whole place a ‘Lifescape’ that will transform 

suburban Staten Island from ‘a backyard bypass in a larger 

and more vital metropolis’ into ‘a nature-lifestyle island, a big 

spread of lush vegetation, open space, birds, mammals and 

amphibians – an expansive network of greenways, 

recreational areas and restored habitat reserves.’ 

The High Line’s less charged history will be more visibly 

preserved when it is turned into an open-air walkway two 

38

Field Operations (James Corner), Lifescape Park at the Fresh Kills landfill, 

Staten Island, New York, 2001 competition, construction of first phase due 

for completion 2008 

Above and right: This new ecological and recreational park will be created on 

top of one of the biggest garbage dumps in the world, which is said to be 

visible from the moon. The plan for the new park draws on the fact that 

woods and nesting areas managed to develop even when the landfill was 

active. It will add a whole series of wetlands and natural habitats interspersed 

with places for boating, cycling, ball games and outdoor concerts. 

Field Operations (James Corner) with Diller Scofidio + Renfro Architects, 

The High Line, New York, 2004– 

Left: Using a flexible modular paving system that integrates walkways, 

seating, planting and drainage, the designers are trying to preserve the 

character of the old overgrown elevated railroad while creating a new aerial 

urban promenade that will allow pedestrians to walk 22 blocks without 

crossing a street, encountering recreational facilities and new gardens as well 

as established greenery in this unusual ecosystem where the average soil is 

only 23–48 centimetres (9–19 inches) deep. The planting designs were 

created by Piet Oudolf. 

39

flights up extending for 22 city blocks from hip Gansevoort 

Street in the Meat Packing District, through the Chelsea art 

gallery area, to the garment district and Convention Center in 

midtown. Field Operations won this commission with Diller 

Scofidio + Renfro Architects whose principal, Rick Scofidio, 

says: ‘I never thought I’d say this, but I see my job here as 

saving the High Line from architecture.’ Corner also believes 

that his job is to maintain its tough industrial character and 

the stark, almost-surreal landscape of wild meadow grasses, 

wildflowers, weeds and gravel, while adding cultivated 

gardens with vividly coloured fields and birch trees as well as 

recreational facilities, such as a swimming pool and food 

halls. While some of the old railroad tracks and ties will be 

removed, others will be restored to recall the High Line’s past. 

A new, flexible, modular system of concrete planks will be 

installed in parallel bands to create pedestrian walkways of 

different widths that meander back and forth, accommodating 

gardens and other things along the way and ‘peeling up’ to 

form an amphitheatre in one area and seating in others. At the 

southern end, a grand staircase and elevators will lead up to 

the High Line and a new museum for the Whitney Museum, 

which has decided to build its addition by Renzo Piano here 

instead of on the Upper East Side. The $84.25 million in city 

and federal funds already allocated is only the starting point, 

but there is so much interest from developers who see the 

High Line as a catalyst for new housing, hotels and other 

commercial ventures that its raw industrial character may be 

hard to maintain. Already Frank Gehry’s IAC Building straddles 

the High Line at 18th Street. 

Balmori is working on an even stranger site in Long Island 

City, Queens, just across the East River from Manhattan – one 

that is already fully developed. She is creating gardens (or at 

least plantings) on top of small industrial buildings that are 

still used for industry. She began her work there when Gratz 

Industries, a manufacturer of metal furniture including Mies 

chairs, became interested in a small experimental green roof 

she had done for Earthpledge, an ecological organisation in 

Manhattan, and she is continuing because the area contains 

the largest collection in the city of small industrial, flat-roofed 

‘pancake buildings’ – enough of them that she will be able to 

Balmori Associates, Green Roofs, Long Island City, Queens, New York, 2002–25 

By covering the roofs of the large plate, flat-roofed ‘pancake’ buildings in the Long Island City area across the East 

River from Manhattan, Diana Balmori expects to reduce temperatures, filter the air, maximise carbon dioxide, clean rain 

water, delay its entrance to sewers after storms, and absorb 90 per cent of the solar energy. The programme also calls 

for ‘greening’ the acres of railyards in the area. 

40

Ken Smith, Richard Rogers and SHoP, East River Esplanade, New York, 2007– 

The east side of the southern tip of Manhattan, along the East River, is lined 

with big empty piers and cut off from the streets around Wall Street by the 

ugly, elevated FDR Drive. This plan intends to make the area useful and 

festive by creating a series of indoor–outdoor pavilions under the roadway, 

using it as a sun shelter, roof and framework for lighting. The designers want 

to maintain the ‘rough edges’ of the site in the new pavilions and renovated 

piers that will house a variety of activities along this two-mile stretch of 

waterfront overlooking the new Brooklyn Bridge Park. 

cover 1.08 million square metres (11.7 million square feet), or 

55 per cent of the area, with plantings (the rest is taken up 

with roads, houses, small mixed-use buildings, churches and 

parking lots). The plants on top of the buildings, to be 

cultivated over a 20-year period, will eventually equal 

Brooklyn’s FL Olmsted 213-hectare (526-acre) Prospect Park in 

their effect on the area. They will make the temperatures go 

down, filter the air, maximise carbon dioxide, absorb and clean 

rain water delaying it from going into the sewer lines during 

storms, and prevent extreme temperatures on the roof, 

therefore doubling the life of the roof and absorbing 90 per 

cent of the solar energy. Still, what Balmori likes best about 

the new rooftop world of green is the fact that it can create 

new public spaces – places for people to congregate in the city. 

New roofing systems created in Germany and France make 

planted roofs even more reliable than most regular ones, and 

some plants such as fleshy sedum survive with nothing but 

watering the first year. Only a block away from the 

scientifically monitored 1,022-square-metre (11,000-square-foot) 

project for Gratz, Balmori is doing a 3,251-square-metre 

(35,000-square-foot) modular GreenTech roof for Silvercup 

Studios, the largest independent film and television facility in 

the northeast, which is planning a 557,418-square-metre (6 

million-square-foot) mixed-use expansion designed by Richard 

Rogers on its 2.4-hectare (6-acre) waterfront site. That riverfront 

will be designed by the Olin Partnership of Philadelphia with a 

variety of spaces for active and passive recreation. 

Across the East River and a few miles south, Ken Smith is 

creating a 5.6-kilometre (3 1 / 2 -mile) esplanade at the southern 

tip of Manhattan with Richard Rogers and SHoP of New York. 

It will consist of a series of indoor-outdoor ‘pavilions’ under 

the elevated FDR Drive and on a series of piers. 

Underused waterfronts all around New York – and the rest 

of the nation – are being turned into parks and recreation 

areas. New York, which grew up on a cluster of islands and 

peninsulas, got a head start 20 years ago when Battery Park 

41

City, a new mixed-used neighbourhood west of Wall Street, was 

created on landfill. Now its western edge along the Hudson 

River is a virtual museum of waterside parks. Eventually the 

parkland will line the whole western edge of Manhattan. 

One of the most interesting so far is Michael Van 

Valkenburgh’s 0.8-hectare (2-acre) Tear Drop Park of 

1999–2004, which was designed with artists Ann Hamilton 

and Michael Mercil. Inspired by the rocky geology of the 

Hudson River Valley and surrounded by high-rise apartment 

buildings, the park’s children’s play spaces are made out of 

3,000 tons of imported bluestone, interspersed with winding 

paths and a miniature marsh. At its heart, a massive layeredstone 

‘ice wall’ has dripping wet surfaces in summer and is 

covered with shimmering ice in the winter – ‘a choreography 

of unfinished natural materials that assertively represents, 

rather than merely attempts to simulate, nature in an urban 

setting,’ as the designers put it. 

Now Van Valkenburgh, who is based in Cambridge, 

Massachusetts, is working on the much larger and more 

visible 2-kilometre (1 1 / 3 -mile) long, 34-hectare (85-acre) 

Brooklyn Bridge Park, which has spectacular views of 

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Ann Hamilton, Michael Mercil and 

the Battery Park City Authority, Tear Drop Park, Battery Park City, New 

York, 2004 

Inspired by the dramatic geology and woodland ecology of the Hudson River 

Valley, this verdant children’s play area surrounded by high-rise apartment 

buildings has a sandy play space with a water feature and a slide, integrated 

into the bluestone rock formations and connected by winding paths. There are 

shaded areas, prospects for views, a tilted lawn placed to take advantage of 

the sunniest area of the site and a massive layered-stone ‘ice wall’ which is 

dripping wet in the summer and covered with ice in the winter

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn, 

New York, 2006– 

This project will transform the old industrial Brooklyn waterfront into a new 

park with wildscape, landscape gardens and varying edges on the water 

where the rectilinear form of the pier structures will be preserved and 

combined with floating walkways, tidal marshes and a safewater zone for 

kayaking. Entrances to the park, to be called ‘urban junctions’, at the three 

major entry points will be the economic engines for maintaining the park, 

surrounded by new developers’ housing. 

Manhattan from the old industrial waterfront in Brooklyn. 

The landscape architect’s job is much more difficult here, not 

only because parts of the site are isolated from active areas of 

the city, but also because its other parts are adjacent to the 

elegant historic Brooklyn Heights neighbourhood, where 

residents have been trying to get a park built for 20 years but 

some Brooklyn neighbourhood groups are sceptical of plans 

for private development around the new park and have even 

instituted lawsuits to stop it. 

The problem is that in our increasingly privatised society 

there is no government funding for park maintenance, even 

in places like the Brooklyn Bridge Park where the city and 

state have contributed $150 million for design and 

construction. The Hudson River Park, being built in stages on 

the west side of Manhattan, is the first park in the state that 

will have to depend solely on commercial entities within its 

boundaries for maintenance and operation. Now the practice 

is becoming commonplace. 

The Brooklyn Bridge Park will be maintained, at an 

estimated cost of $15.2 million a year, by developers who 

have been given tax abatements for the purpose. Plans call 

for new high-rise apartments, a hotel and other enterprises 

near the park entrances, so Brooklyn Heights residents fear 

the park will become the private preserve of tenants in the 

43

Ken Smith, Mary Miss, Enrique Norten, Steven Handel and Mia Lehrer, Orange County Great Park, Irvine, California, 2006– 

This new park on the site of an abandoned Marine Corps airfield will re-create a natural canyon with cool, semi-arid air, shaded 

with palm trees. There will also be hiking trails, bicycle paths and a variety of other recreational facilities as well as a botanical 

garden, national archive of the West, and a public library in an area where there are few public parks. 

new buildings. The new park actually has plenty of facilities – 

promenades, boat docks, ball courts, a little beach, a 4- 

hectare (10-acre) safewater zone for kayaking, an extensive 

new cultivated and natural green landscape. It will meet the 

water with floating walkways and tidal marshes that will 

contrast with the massive bridges and elevated highway 

nearby. But the political connections of one of the developers 

have aroused suspicion, which is not uncommon when 

there is new development in established neighbourhoods. 

And there is always the possibility of conflict of interest 

with privatisation. 

In Irvine, California, south of Los Angeles, where Ken Smith 

is designing the Orange County Great Park on a former 

Marine Corps airfield, only 545 hectares (1,347 acres) of the 

1,902-hectare (4,700-acre) air station will be devoted to 

parkland. The rest was sold to the Lennar Corporation, a 

developer who is creating new neighbourhoods around the 

park with access to it. Here, to sell the idea of the park to the 

community, the designers have put up a huge orange hot-air 

balloon – the idea of the artist Mary Miss who is working with 

Smith on the park. It has a gondola that holds 25 to 30 people, 

so that classes of schoolchildren and tourists can go up and 

see the park being built. ‘It’s our visitors centre, and the 

converse of that is that wherever you are in Orange County, 

you can see the balloon,’ Smith points out. 

Working with Miss, architect Enrique Norten, the 

restoration ecologist Steven Handel, and LA landscape 

architect Mia Lehrer, Smith brings the same witty sense of 

wonder to this enormous project that he has to many smaller 

ones in New York. But he is dead serious about the 

environmental mission of the park. ‘In Orange County, 

everyone depends on cars, though people actually do spend a 

lot of time outside and at the beach,’ he says. ‘They did a lot of 

surveys out there and what people were really concerned 

about was sustainability. But when you ask them, they don’t 

really know what it is. They mention economy, ecology, 

44

community – and health. We’re talking about a model made 

up of concentric circles, with the person at the centre, 

because on a personal level people know what health is.’ 

Smith and his colleagues plan to get people out of their cars 

as soon as they enter the park. There will be orange bicycles 

that they can use and just leave somewhere for someone else 

– ‘the Zip Car idea’. For larger distances there will be golf carts 

that people can secure with a credit card. The idea is to 

encourage natural locomotion to explore a man-made 

environment based on the restoration of natural elements. 

The designers are creating a 4-kilometre (2 1 / 2 -mile) long 

canyon 21metres (70 feet) below ground. ‘The natural canyons 

in the West are oases, semi-arid, cool and shaded with palm 

trees. They have been a place of retreat for Californians,’ 

Smith explains. There will also be a botanical garden, a 

national archive of the West and a public library in the park. 

Smith says that some people have teased him about the 

arrogance of the name ‘Great Park’, but he points out that 

when New York’s Central Park was created it was anything 

but central. ‘It was way up there. New York wasn’t nice then, 

and the reformers saw parks as ways of dealing with the 

health crisis. When Olmsted was thinking about Central Park, 

what people needed was respite. They worked six- to seven-day 

weeks, with their bodies. I’ve been thinking about what a 

21st-century park should be. Today we don’t have much 

physical activity. We have an obesity epidemic, so you don’t 

produce a park in traditional form. We need those bikes.’ 

Since landscape architecture is suddenly able to play a real 

role in educating the public, it is a good thing that most new 

parks are being created by teams composed of people from 

different disciplines. In Santa Fe, Ken Smith is working with 

Mary Miss and architect Frederic Schwartz on a new 5.3- 

hectare (13-acre), $7.5 million park on an old downtown 

railyard site. The park will have a restaurant, cottonwood 

bosque, circular arbour, children’s play area, picnic grove, rail 

gardens, performance terraces and an open field, all watered 

by 400-year-old Acequia Madre, an ancient irrigation ditch. 

At Queens Plaza in New York, where several lines of 

elevated trains intersect with a tangle of subways, roads, 

sidewalks and stores, Margie Ruddick/WRT landscape 

Ken Smith, Mary Miss and Frederic Schwartz, Santa Fe Railyard Park, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2007 

This new park, tree-lined promenade and plaza on the old downtown railyard site, paid by for the Trust for Public Land 

and the City of Santa Fe, will have a restaurant, cottonwood bosque, circular arbour, children’s play area, picnic grove, 

rail gardens, performance terraces and an open field. The water for all these facilities will come from the 400-year-old 

Acequia Madre, an irrigation ditch on the site. 

45

46

Margie Ruddick/WRT landscape architects, Marpillero Pollack Architects (MPA) and Leni Schwendinger, Queens 

Plaza, Queens, New York, due for completion 2009 

Opposite and above: This project will reorganise a confusing fragmented site where several elevated trains, subways 

and roadways collide with residential neighbourhoods and commercial services by adding new seating, lighting 

shelters, pathways, hydrology and plantings that will create a sense of place 

architects is working with Marpillero Pollack Architects (MPA) 

and lighting artist Leni Schwendinger. They are adding new 

lighting, seating, shelter, paths, water and plants to tie 

everything together and create a sense of place. MPA is also 

doing a number of small urban interventions, such as 

landscapes around libraries and recreation areas at housing 

projects. And Diana Balmori has formed a partnership with 

her Yale teaching colleague, architect Joel Sanders, to do 

projects that cross traditional interdisciplinary lines. 

Balmori believes that landscape now has better tools to 

communicate with the public at large than was the case in the 

past. She thinks models, which can represent buildings 

effectively, are poor tools for landscape, especially the kind 

she wants to create. ‘It is really space at a bigger scale than 

architecture. We are using dot matrix so that we can dissolve 

the objects more in order to talk about space. I want to 

dissolve the landscape so that it becomes what is contained, 

not the container.’ She also likes to use animation because 

‘whatever you do in the landscape is changing constantly’. 

The system of floating islands Balmori has designed for the 

St Louis waterfront, near Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch will 

change not only with the seasons but with the movement of 

the river itself. The project is intended to extend the park 

where the arch is located up and down the river, connect it 

with the land across the Mississippi River in Illinois, and 

create places for gatherings and active recreation, such as a 

skating rink, restaurant and excursion boats, as well as 

pedestrian access to the river. It also resurrects history, if 

unwittingly. After proposing the floating islands, which 

resemble some of Johanson’s works, Balmori saw some of the 

drawings Saarinen had submitted to win the competition over 

half a century ago that her colleagues had resurrected at Yale, 

and in one of those unpublished, unknown drawings there 

were walkways and islands like those she had envisioned. 

History plays a different role in landscape architecture than 

in building or even urban design. As Smith notes, it is a longterm 

enterprise: ‘When a piece of architecture is completed, it 

begins its decline. When a piece of landscape architecture is 

done, it is just beginning. It takes time to grow a landscape.’ 4 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 36-7 & 40 © Balmori 

Associates; p 38 © Patricia Johanson; p 39(t&c) © Field Operations; p 39(b) 

© Joel Sternfeld 2000; pp 41 & 44-5 © Ken Smith Landscape Architect; pp 

42(t) & 43(t&c) © Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates; p 42(b) © Michael Van 

Valkenburgh Associates, photo Paul Whar; p 43(b) © Michael Van 

Valkenburgh Associates, photo Stan Ries; pp 46-7 © City of New York 

Department of City Planning and New York City Economic Development 

Corporation. All rights reserved 

47

Toronto Waterfront 

Revitalisation 

Sean Stanwick, the co-author with Jennifer 

Flores of a new defining book on Toronto – 

Design City Toronto, published by John Wiley 

& Sons – describes how West 8 and 

Canadian practice du Toit Allsopp Hillier 

(DTAH) are reviving the city’s engagement 

with its waterfront. Could the lakeshore 

scheme be aspiring to a new waterside on a 

par with those of its North American 

neighbours such as New York and Chicago?

The fabric of Toronto is literally changing daily. With the city 

in the midst of a burgeoning architectural renaissance, a 

number of international star architects, including Frank Gehry 

and Daniel Libeskind, have landed to create an exceptional 

collection of fashionable iconic works. Of course the addition of 

contemporary architecture is an important element in 

reshaping any city’s urban fabric. But what is important is also 

what is happening in between those dramatic architectural 

moments, in the continuous space of the city. 

Collectively, Toronto is by and large an enlightened 

metropolis that recognises the value of quality public space. 

With this in mind, the fires are lit yet again on its ongoing 

waterfront revitalisation initiative. With the selection of the 

competition-winning scheme by Rotterdam landscape 

architect Adriaan Geuze of West 8, in a joint venture with 

local architects du Toit Allsopp Hillier (DTAH), the stretch of 

lakefront at the city core is poised to be infused with a lively 

mix of recreational and pedestrian amenities, cultural 

facilities and private condominiums. 

Toronto’s civic awareness of its waterfront can be traced 

back to the city’s founder, John Graves Simcoe, who in 1793 

advocated the preservation of the water’s edge for the benefit 

of all citizens. The name Toronto is actually a Native American 

term for ‘trees in the water’, though it is often mistakenly 

translated as ‘meeting place’. Once home to shipbuilding and 

military operations, some remnants of the city’s heritage still 

remain, including the former Tip Top Tailors Building, 

Toronto’s most significant Art Deco structure now repurposed 

as premium lofts. 

Large-scale urban planning began in earnest in the late 

1970s. Yet with only a few isolated spurts – such as the recent 

Music Garden which interprets in landscape Bach’s ‘First Suite 

for Unaccompanied Cello’ and was co-designed by landscape 

West 8 and du Toit Allsopp Hillier (DTAH), Waterfront Revitalisation 

Initiative, Toronto, Canada, 2006 

A floating bioremediation reef in the form of the iconic maple leaf adds a 

touch of folly to the scheme. 

Speaking the vernacular of the Canadian north, the scheme features several 

heavy timber bridges that run the length of the boardwalk and provide a 

continuous pathway along the water’s edge. 

49

Running the entire length of the scheme is a significant wooden boardwalk, 

which is 18 metres (59 feet) wide so as to allow trees to produce a dense 

green promenade. 

The existing Queens Quay Boulevard will be pedestrian focused with its 

southern lanes reconfigured as an animated granite esplanade. 

To re-create what Geuze affectionately calls the city’s ‘green foot’, the 

designers envision multiple rows of maple trees to celebrate the original 

summer greenery and autumn colour spectacle of the waterfront. 

50

Not all development is parallel to the water’s edge. At the intersection with the major northward avenues, several 

designed elements celebrate the city’s ‘lines of culture’. 

designer Julie Moir Messervy and musician Yo-Yo Ma – a 

cohesive waterfront design strategy has consistently failed to 

materialise. The intent of the West 8 scheme is to create 

continuous public connections to the city. Running the length 

of the waterfront is the ‘public row’, an 18-metre (59-foot) 

wide wooden and maple-treed boardwalk with seven 

undulating heavy timber bridges that leap over the existing 

slipheads. The bridges give pedestrians uninterrupted access 

along the water’s edge, but more importantly they speak the 

vernacular of the heavy timber railway bridges that once 

dominated the Canadian north. 

The major parallel artery of Queens Quay Boulevard will be 

devoted equally to the pedestrian and cars. Reduced from four 

lanes to two, the southern lanes will be configured as an 

animated granite esplanade connecting new landscaped 

moments (such as the Rees Shoreline, reshaped as the rocky 

Canadian Shield) to the already successful Queens Quay 

Terminal. But the notion of connection does not solely run 

parallel to the water’s edge. Celebrating the city’s ‘lines of 

culture’, several signature moments are created at the foot of 

major northward boulevards. The most whimsical is at the 

base of University Avenue, where a floating bioremediation 

reef in the form of the iconic maple leaf will tip its hat to 

Queen’s Park, the city’s political seat. Additionally, the 

boardwalk will connect to the extensive Martin Goodman 

ravine trail system and tie into the West Donlands 

community, a new mixed-use development for 100,000 people 

on reclaimed brownlands at the mouth of the Don River. 

What West 8 also does is force the city to deal with another 

festering legacy: the Gardiner Expressway, an elevated 

highway that severs the city core from the water’s edge. No 

doubt Toronto is somewhat timid when it comes to large-scale 

urban design projects, so the suggestion of demolishing the 

elevated expressway and replacing it with a Champs Élyséesstyle 

boulevard will certainly take some strong political will to 

enact. While the initial budget of $20 million falls short, there 

are urban precedents such as Boston and its equivalent ‘Big 

Dig’ initiative – a multibillion-dollar megaproject to reroute 

and bury the city’s central traffic artery. If, however, removing 

the Gardiner is a nonstarter, Geuze has not left the city 

wanting as the team also plans to plant thousands of new 

maple trees to re-establish the original summer greenery and 

autumn colour spectacle of the waterfront – or as Geuze calls 

it, the city’s ‘green foot’. 

Throughout its history, Toronto has shown some 

commitment to urban parks. One notable example is Cloud 

Gardens, a small urban park in the financial core that features 

a cluster of trees, a crescent lawn and a small greenhouse that 

re-creates the damp conditions of the coastal mountain 

ecology. But the waterfront has unfortunately been plagued 

by promises, spurts and perpetual disputes over land 

ownership. Hopefully, Geuze’s design will have the teeth to 

finally become a reality. The timing could certainly not be 

better given the recent wave of civic exuberance and private 

patronage sweeping through the city. If nothing else, the 

project has proved itself as legitimate, as some of the most 

innovative designers, including London’s Foster and Partners 

and New York’s Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, responded to 

the original competition call. Ultimately, the West 8 scheme 

addresses many of the same urban issues that plague cities 

also facing lakefront challenges, but the bigger civic issue still 

remains: will the city deliver on its promise and create a great 

waterfront on a par with those of Chicago or New York, or 

will our new lakeshore vision dry up yet again? 4 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © West 8 + DTAH joint venture 

51

Operationalising 

Patch Dynamics 

Victoria Marshall and Brian McGrath have developed and transferred the ecological model 

of ‘patch dynamics’ to urban landscape design. It is an approach that stresses the resilient, 

flexible and adaptable nature of cities, interacting with a ‘notion of disturbance ecology 

rather than a benign nature’. Here they apply their design approach to Hoboken, on the New 

Jersey Gold Coast, which, only a hop and a skip from Manhattan, directly across the Hudson 

from the Financial District, remains culturally and economically diverse. 

52

Turbulent and Responsive Environments 

Ignoring the chill in the air and the official end of the 

summer season, the kids on the 16th floor immersed 

themselves in the rooftop thermal bath until late November. 

Most autumnal swimmers noted that the neighbourhood 

groundwater temperature-signature reinforced their own 

observations: swimming lasted a few weeks longer this year. 

Networked into geothermal piles, the roof-garden swimming 

fountain offers water temperatures distinct from ambient air. 

Set by the buried meadow-mat, a legacy of the marshy history 

of the neighbourhood, it affords exposure of the area’s 

concealed watershed. 

Sunset stretched the shadow of the Palisades on to the 

parking lot as the crowd waited for the first film of the 

summer to begin. The creative folks once again gradually 

emerged from their studios. A remnant industrial concrete 

slab is recycled as the garden’s surface facing the big screen. 

Gathering unobstructed south and west sunlight, its reflective 

heat is mitigated by an etching of mini runnels of rain runoff. 

Through the toes of the visitors these mini streams are an 

immediate request that even the smallest bit of water be 

negotiated as a public actor in the emergent urban watershed. 

When Hoboken’s backstreets flood, the easiest way to get 

from the light-rail station is via a crown-of-the-road zigzag, 

skirting the block-long reflecting pools held by the street kerbs. 

This navigational detour extends long after the downpour ends, 

as the Hudson Estuary’s tide needs to recede before the 

neighbourhood can drain. Two roof gardens and two fountains 

offer horizontal and vertical volumes for water storage to 

mitigate this water surplus. The gardens are embedded with 

varying material surfaces for multiple recreation opportunities, 

whereas the fountains are contained within a compacted and 

sealed surface for dining, play and commerce. When the rise in 

sea level increases the duration and frequency of the flood, 

these upper and lower surfaces afford reprogramming by the 

next generation of owners and stewards. 

TILL (Victoria Marshall, Brian McGrath, Mateo Pinto, Phanat Xanamane), Monroe Center for the Arts Watershed and 

Energy Management Plan Phase One, 2006 

The roof garden is part of a networked system of public spaces including the mixed-use complex’s front and back yards. Two 

slowly percolating fountains, elm trees and hammocks dominate the main public space, while a temporary garden located on a 

future construction site serves restaurant diners, informal picnics and night-time cinema events. 

TILL, Thermal Rooftop Fountain, Monroe Center for the Arts, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2006 

Connecting to groundwater temperature by geothermal piles, and rain water through retention vaults, this resident amenity 

garden offers a microclimate that extends the seasons and brings climate-change awareness to its high-rise condo-caretakers. 

53

TILL, Monroe Center for the Arts Watershed and Energy Management Plan Phase One, 2006 

This temporary garden at the foot of the Palisades has a vegetated screen wall, a restaurant terrace, lawn, and a fountain made by 

scoring the industrial concrete floor with tiny rivulets. Other artefacts from the industrial structures are reused as benches. On 

summer evenings this space is used for outdoor film screenings. 

Unlike rural immigrant populations who carry with them 

knowledge of how to reinvent their urban environment, 

lifestyles are marketed to intracity suburban refugees. The 

Hoboken West Coast watershed offers a lifestyle based on the 

urban ecosystem approach, where the highest- and best-use 

development practices are joined with a belief that urban 

development can help connect people more directly to natural 

resources. For most new migrants, a change of address 

requires only a minor adjustment due to the repetition and 

recombination of familiar urban elements such as strips, 

malls and downtown leisure and cultural districts. The 

integration of responsive environments into amenities aims 

to offer greater transparency, legibility and agency into the 

consumer development model. Development is not just a 

process of addition, but rather reveals the multiple hidden 

sites and time scales that would allow new residents to 

process, in the time they have available, all the information 

necessary to effectively interact with the complex dynamics of 

the urban system as a whole. 

Patch Dynamics and Resiliency 

Patch dynamics is a core concept in contemporary ecosystem 

science that seeks to explain complex systems within which 

biological components – including humans – interact with 

physical environments over time. 1 Scientists develop models 

based on theoretical frameworks within physical limits in 

order to test core concepts, such as at the Hubbord Brook 

experimental forest in New Hampshire, where small watersheds 

on nearly impervious granite slopes have been monitored for 

the past 40 years. 2 This process of monitoring small watersheds 

has been transferred to urban models in the Baltimore 

Ecosystem Study (BES), a long-term ecological research project 

funded by the US National Science Foundation. By transferring 

ecosystem science concepts and models to cities, the 

researchers sought out the translation expertise of designers. 

Urban patch dynamics models involve the identification of 

patch areas based on distinct land-cover compositions. 

Defined by patch boundaries, these land-cover signatures 

modulate the flows of people, information, materials, water 

and nutrients. Patch dynamics is the operation between these 

patches in time, and as an urban design model it is a way of 

understanding the heterogeneity of the contemporary urban 

landscape. The BES patch dynamic approach overlapped with 

current work in modelling the temporal patterns of phase 

change in urban design, 3 and an interdisciplinary team was 

created to develop a patch dynamic urban design model based 

on both the small watershed and human ecosystem 

frameworks. Working with plant scientists Steward TA Pickett 

54

urban-interface (Brian McGrath, Victoria Marshall, Phanat Xanamane) with plant scientists Stewart TA Pickett and 

Mary L Cadenasso, Patch Signature Mixing Matrix, Baltimore Ecosystem Study, Baltimore, Maryland, 2006 

HERCULES (High Resolution Classification for Urban Landscapes and Environmental Systems) classifies the physical 

structure of land-cover patches in Baltimore’s Gwynns Falls Watershed, and is based on the various possible combinations 

of different percentages of five land-cover types. The numerical prevalence of patch classes results in a distinctive signature. 

The left margin of the drawing shows a section of the various patch classes to illustrate how patches modulate flows. 

55

56

and Mary L Cadenasso, and social ecologists, this is a landcover 

rather than land-use urban design model, focused on 

the city of flows and cycles – people, information, energy, 

water and nutrients – and marked by extreme heterogeneity 

in built and vegetated forms. 

The understanding of time and scale in the ecological 

model of sustainability is misguided. Van Der Leeuw and 

Aschan-Leygonie state: ‘The noble ambition of those 

proclaiming a sustainable development seems difficult to 

realize, and is a long-term project which necessarily implies a 

general change in prevailing attitudes at all levels in most 

societies, the individual and the governmental level, as well as 

all levels in-between.’ 4 Unlike the ecological model of 

sustainability and even adaptation that presumes social 

systems are the dominant dynamic, the urban ecosystem 

approach stresses the reciprocity between the social and the 

natural dynamics, and underlies the importance of change as 

a means of survival. According to Holling: ‘[Resilience is] the 

capacity of a system to absorb and utilize or even benefit from 

perturbations and changes that attain it, and so to persist 

without a qualitative change in the system’s structure.’ 5 The 

important concept here is to change the drifting location of 

our understanding of where design has agency. 

In a resiliency framework, Van Der Leeuw and Aschan- 

Leygonie continue: ‘There are two – closely related – aspects of 

“resilience” that we must consider. The first concerns the 

behavior of a system, due to the structure of its attributes and 

the interactions between them, due to voluntary management 

or depending both on the inherent characteristics of the system 

and on human effort. The other aspect concerns the perception 

of perturbations and change, and notably of unexpected or 

even unforeseeable future events.’ 6 The patch dynamics city 

must therefore develop within a notion of disturbance ecology 

rather than a benign nature. Cities must be resilient, flexible 

and adaptable with bottom-up systems of monitoring flows and 

developing new surface-management tools. 

Urban Grain and Flows 

Hoboken was once an island in the Hudson River. Its western 

slope modulated a shifting tidal wetland terminating in a 

small stream at the base of the Palisades. An early lithograph 

reveals a commuter boardwalk linking the island to Patterson 

Plank Road at the top of the Palisades cliff. Industrial landfill 

coupled Hoboken to the mainland, and more recently its 

extended shoreline, the New Jersey Gold Coast, has been 

further interconnected by a north–south light-rail transit 

spur paralleling the Hudson rather than crossing to 

Manhattan. The shallow backwater territories housed 

industrial uses and government housing projects with 

residential dwellings occupying the higher ground to the 

east. A decrease in industrial production, and proximity to 

Manhattan, is repopulating the former tidal wetland as a new 

residential neighbourhood. Older residents enjoyed 19thcentury 

parks anchored by schools or churches and now 

newer parks and private landscapes are linked to shopping 

centres or are on shipping piers. 

The former industrial complex of Monroe Center became a 

creative catchment for Hoboken artists as the city was 

gentrified by Manhattan commuters. This social flux is placed 

in proximity to the retention of water flows to create the 

possibility of new socio-natural relationships. Such turbulent 

patches and flows are located in an anomalous territory 

where hybrid land uses and land-covers offered a challenge to 

existing planning categories. Unable to fit the graded 

classification categories of metropolitan, suburban, fringe, 

rural or environmentally sensitive, the New Jersey Office of 

Smart Growth gave the linear city stretching from Bayonne 

to the George Washington Bridge its own special designation: 

the Urban Complex. Embedded along the ridge between the 

Hudson and the Hackensack rivers, the urban complex is 

laced with geological, topographical, industrial and social 

legacies. With sea levels rising, lowland and upland dynamics 

will increase in complexity as the oily manufacturing 

heritage floats to the surface and railway commuter 

interconnectivity continues to diversify this densely 

inhabited, multicentred territory. 

The New Regional Landscape 

The design and management tools of masterplanning, zoning 

and land-use controls grew out of the productivity and health 

needs of the industrial city a century ago. The ecological city 

demands new design and management tools. Also, our image 

of the city in relation to nature is changing. The old city 

model of a dense city centre ringed by green suburbs, 

agricultural land and a wilderness fringe is no longer 

operative. The contemporary city in both automobile- and 

agricultural-oriented societies tends to be much patchier with 

spots of high density scattered throughout a low-density 

urban/nature matrix. There is no longer a gradient from city 

to nature, but instead a heterogeneous mix of buildings and 

vegetation – both coarse and fine – pavement, soil and surface 

water. The ecologically managed and designed city is 

beginning to respond to current trends in urbanisation and 

globalisation, such as emergent and self-organised structures, 

informal urban settlements, loosely regulated edge cities or 

regenerated older centres driven by new lifestyle choices. 

urban-interface, Thick City/Thin City, Baltimore Ecosystem Study, 2006 

Using the patch signature chart to analyse the Gwynns Falls Watershed, coarse vegetated and built dominated patches 

constitute the bulk of the thick city. Fine vegetation, pavement and bare soil dominated patches constitute the thin city, 

with transit routes linking the dense city of forests and buildings. 

57

urban-interface, Megalopolis Now, Boston/Washington urbanised corridor, 2006 

Forty million people inhabit the East Coast Megalopolis, a vast hardwood forest structured by watersheds. Across the 

Hudson River from Manhattan, the New Jersey Urban Complex – a large, densely populated conurbation, stretches 

along and under the ridge of the Palisades. The Gwynns Falls Watershed, a 168-square-kilometre (65-square-mile) 

subwatershed, meets the Patapsco River and Chesapeake Bay near downtown Baltimore, and is home to 250,000 

people and 24 distinct commercial centres. 

58

TILL, Three Water Flows, Existing Patches and Projected Patch Change, 

Hoboken, 2006 

Monroe Center sits in the former tidal-fed marshland at the base of the 

Palisades. A new light-rail line is creating a new waterfront for Hoboken, in 

marked contrast to the gentrified Hudson River waterfront that faces 

Manhattan. Here brownfields and public-housing projects face the sheer cliff 

of the Palisades with its immigrant neighbourhoods above, with the New 

Jersey Meadowlands, and the rest of the continent, beyond. 

The inhabited hardwood forest of the American East Coast 

Megalopolis connects the Hoboken Urban Complex and the 

Baltimore Gwynns Falls Watershed. Gwynns Falls, the study 

area for the BES, stretches from dense enclaves surrounded by 

highways and farms to partially vacated urban neighbourhoods. 

A vast strip parallels the Gwynns Falls Stream Valley crossing 

the old city boundary, the ring road, and new exurban spurs. 

Hoboken’s Urban Complex follows a narrow ridgeline parallel 

to Manhattan, draining into the New Jersey Meadowlands and 

the Hackensack River to the west and the Hudson River Estuary 

to the east. These two kinds of urban landscape transects – 

ridge and valley – are repeated countlessly along the Atlantic 

seaboard, and their design and management are dictating how 

the 40 million inhabitants of the megalopolis manage the new 

challenges of the 21st century. 4 

Notes 

1. STA Pickett and ML Cadenasso, ‘Meaning, model and metaphor of patch 

dynamics’, in Brian McGrath and Victoria Marshall, Patch Dynamics, Princeton 

Architectural Press (New York), in press. 

2. Brian McGrath, Transparent Cities, Sites Books (New York), 1994. 

Manhattan Timeformations, 2000, www.skyscraper.org/timeformations. 

3. GE Likens and FH Bormann, Biogeochemistry of a Forested Ecosystem, 

Springer-Verlag (New York), 1995. 

4. SE Van der Leeuw and C Aschan-Leygonie, A Long Term Perspective on 

Resilience in Socio-Natural System Resilience Workshop Paper, 2000, p 8. 

5. CS Holling, ‘Resilience and stability of ecological systems’, Annual Review 

of Ecology and Systematics, Vol 4, 1973, pp 1–23. 

6. Van der Leeuw and Aschan-Leygonie, op cit, p 9. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 52-4 & 59 © Victoria Marshall; 

pp 55-8 © urban-interface.com 

59

Recent Works by 

Bernard Lassus 

At the forefront of innovative French landscape design, Bernard Lassus has developed a 

uniquely modern ethos. Working in the context of a multicultural society, he sets out to 

create ‘rational approaches that anchor the lives of men and women in nature and history’. 

Michel Conan describes how this is played out in his projects for the new town area of 

Sarcelles, the landscaping of the French motorways and in the gardens of an international 

headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris. 

60

Bernard Lassus works to defend and illustrate a new 

modernity for the 21st century. While Modernist artists are 

members of an avant-garde and produce blueprints for a 

modern world, Lassus sees the artist as one among many 

actors who search for a modern ethos. Within a multicultural 

environment he strives to develop rational approaches that 

anchor the lives of men and women in nature and history, 

while also making room for individual agency. Thus his own 

work belongs to several distinctive series of experiments 

involving housing, city planning, public parks, motorways and 

private gardens, to name some of the domains to which he 

has contributed in recent years. 

A Landscape Approach for the City of Sarcelles 

In 2000, Philippe Panerai – the newly appointed city planner 

at Sarcelles, near Paris – called upon Lassus to propose a 

landscape design that would unite the community in both a 

practical and a symbolic sense. Sarcelles has attracted a great 

deal of public attention since its rural landscape became the 

site for a housing project of 8,000 apartments, increasing its 

population from 9,000 in 1954 to 52,000 in 1970. Such 

enormous growth turned the city into a symbol of the hopes, 

fears, achievements and failures of modern housing policies 

in France. It also divided the community into two parts, the 

large-scale housing project physically isolated from the rest of 

the city and governed by a housing manager rather than by 

the elected mayor. 

Lassus proposed making the community’s links to nature 

highly visible. He transformed a large field area, still under 

cultivation, into a living museum of farming, and uncovered 

and opened to the sky the Little Rosne Creek that had once 

run through the community. For the length of the 

reconstructed natural banks of the valley he designed a 

bicycle and pedestrian pathway that leads from existing ponds 

Bernard Lassus, Project for a citywide landscaping of Sarcelles/Planting scheme for the citywide Park Alley, France, 2000 

The proposed Park Alley would become the major pedestrian avenue through the city, transforming it into an imaginary park. It would 

present a large path meandering between tree alignments planted on coloured ground echoing the colours of the leaves, fruits or flowers. 

Bernard Lassus, Colouring of the warehouses, Bordeaux Harbour, France, 2004 

Inauguration of the warehouses showing how colour can bring a sense of difference and community to a large group of industrial buildings. 

61

Bernard Lassus, motorway landscapes, Loire Valley, France, 2005 

This excerpt from the French national scheme for motorway construction 

shows in green, continuous and dotted red lines motorway landscapes by 

Lassus that are already finished, under construction and at the project stage. 

Landscape of the bypass of the city of Puy en Velay as it skirts along Polignac 

(1996), showing how the motorway becomes part of the rural landscape as 

seen from the medieval city in Auvergne, and the city a landscape to be seen 

and desired from the motorway. 

in the northwest to the ‘Park of the Meadows (extending) 

under the City’. The pathway clearly establishes his primary 

intention: to give local inhabitants the chance to imagine the 

landscape as a valley covered by meadows prior to the 

construction of its villages and housing. 

This constructed perspective is not a representation of the 

past, but rather a stepping stone towards visualising the 

history of the city’s growth. The heterogeneity of the city 

landscape – with its agricultural fields, industrial sector, 

original village, loose urban sprawl, sports fields, garden 

plots and large modern residential area – gives rise in a 

thousand places in France to dreams of village harmony or 

of utopian Modernism. But for Sarcelles, Lassus wanted to 

make this heterogeneity into a testimony to history, 

attracting attention and curiosity without imposing any line 

of interpretation. Thus he suggested highlighting the 

distinctive character of the traditional village by offering a 

colour scheme for the facades of its houses. Again, this is not 

intended to re-create an image of the past, but – exactly as 

he did for the warehouses on Bordeaux’s harbour – to 

highlight differences within the community. 

Imaginary encounters with the history of the local 

landscape provide a sense of belonging to a place, but they do 

not unite the city as a whole. Lassus noted the large number 

of gardens and trees in Sarcelles and created a network of 

park-like pathways, turning the community into a distinctive 

park, its entrances, highly designed grandes allées and other 

promenades giving the impression they are the result of 

private initiatives. The municipal government was invited to 

increase the number of streets, with tree alignments 

matching the tree species found in the neighbouring gardens, 

as if private planting had spilled out over the streetscape. 

Planting would be avoided in some areas, thus allowing 

glimpses of exceptional trees in private gardens. 

Landscaping the French Motorways 

Lassus sees the landscape artist as a creator of locales in 

which a greater number of individuals will be able to engage 

creatively – as workers, engineers, elected representatives, city 

inhabitants, or in any other capacity. He is one of the very few 

artists who have renewed motorway design in the 20th 

century. Over the last 10 years he has devoted much of his 

energy to the development and implementation of a new set 

of design principles, refusing to limit the activity of landscape 

design to cosmetic improvements to civil engineering sites. 

His works dwarf the largest Earthworks projects and promote 

a new ethic of motorway design that allows neighbouring 

farmers to contribute to the design and maintenance of the 

motorway landscape. 

For Lassus, shaping the land is the main contribution of 

landscape architecture to motorway design. Thanks to the 

computer programs he has helped create, civil engineering 

landforms can now reside in perfect continuity with existing 

contour lines, and the finished product invites automobile 

passengers to take tantalising glimpses of the landscape at 

wide angles and away from traffic. He has also worked closely 

with the bulldozer drivers on site, helping them to develop 

their skills in shaping landforms. Lastly, he sought to make 

the motorways fit snugly into the landscape, become a source 

of pride for their neighbours and invite motorists to 

rediscover their region. 

The Suspended Gardens of Boulogne-Billancourt 

In 2001, the chairman of the multinational Colas Corporation 

invited Lassus to create gardens for his newly built 

international headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt, near 

Paris. The brief was to design terrace gardens that required no 

maintenance. Another challenge was that, under the influence 

62

The overpasses in the Solognote forest on motorway A85 between Angers and Tours (1993–7) were designed and 

planted to mimimise disruption by the motorway of forest paths used by wildlife. 

of local residents who had failed in their attempts to prevent 

the construction of this Modernist building by Pierre Riboulet, 

the municipality now demanded that the white building be 

transformed into a verdant hill. 

The Colas Building was separated from its neighbours by a 

small municipal playground. Lassus proposed enlarging the 

playground in the direction of the building, and softening the 

contrast between the two areas by redesigning the 

playground’s hedges and using the same pattern to frame the 

long cruise-ship gangways along the building – an 

arrangement that hid the reception terrace behind the trees 

in the playground. In addition, a colourful flower parterre was 

planted on a service area that was visible from some of the 

neighbouring apartments. 

As a result of Lassus’s changes, the local residents began 

to adopt a new attitude towards the corporation and to 

develop an interest in its engagement with Modernist 

architecture and contemporary garden art. The lower terrace 

was designed to receive large groups of guests attending 

conferences or events organised by the corporation. Lassus 

transformed this space into a green room in a bosquet 

animated by a fountain. And to invite guests to participate 

in debates about nature and modernity, he made an abstract 

rock cascade out of wood, abstract hedges and trees out of 

perforated metal slabs, and abstract flowers out of painted 

enamel. He also gave the owner the chance to play with the 

seasons by changing the trees at will. 1 

The great success of the Garden of Seasons among its 

visitors encouraged the chairman to ask Lassus to take on 

another project in the autumn of 2006, this time to create two 

zero-maintenance gardens on the upper terraces of the 

corporation’s neighbouring office building. The main terrace – 

63

View of the upper terrace of the old office building at the Colas Corporation, presenting the winter view of the orchard 

with trees in a meadow as it could be shown at the CEO’s request. 

Bernard Lassus, The (expanded) Garden of Seasons, Colas Corporation, 2006 

View of the lower terrace of the old office building at the Colas Corporation, showing the Grotto on the stage of the Théâtre de Verdure. 

64

Bernard Lassus, The Garden of Seasons, Colas Corporation, Boulogne-Billancourt, France, 2002 

The garden on the lower terrace of Riboulet’s building as seen from the Exhibition Hall at the Colas Corporation. 

accessible only for security purposes – extends in front of the 

chairman’s office on the seventh floor and, just above the 

office, the second terrace in front of the board’s meeting room 

provides space for board members to relax and gaze at the 

main terrace below. Given this vantage point, Lassus decided 

to pursue his exploration of garden abstraction, and proposed 

turning the main terrace into an abstracted baroque garden 

theatre (the Théâtre de Verdure), the sole performer being a 

picturesque garden grotto sheltering a minimalist fountain – 

all made from perforated metallic slabs. The allusion to 

Versailles with its bosquets and the grotto of Apollo, a few 

miles away from the building, is transparent and intriguing. 

Yet this garden theatre points beyond Modernism. Its artificial 

grotto engages in a dialogue with Noguchi’s stone sculptures, 

and its fountain of neon tubes interacts with Dan Flavin’s 

installations. These aesthetic exchanges raise questions about 

change and continuity in French gardens, materials and 

technologies, arts and patronage. 

Members of the board will discover this garden from the 

upper terrace beyond the abstract foreground of a colorful 

orchard and flowery meadow, which contrary to the main 

theatrical garden terrace will be open to seasonal changes at 

the CEO’s request. To enhance the conceptual contrast 

between the fixity of time on the lower terrace and the passing 

of time on its upper counterpart, Lassus has introduced a very 

strong visual contrast between the two spaces. On the lower 

terrace the hedges, topiary trees, and even the rocks of the 

fountain appear flattened, as if at a great distance from the 

viewer, while on the upper terrace the highly tactile presence 

of trees, fruits and flowers underscores their proximity. Such a 

vivid experience of aerial perspective stimulates board 

members to philosophise about change through time, tradition 

versus modernity, and art versus nature. 4 

Note 

1. For a more detailed presentation of this project, see Michel Conan, ‘The 

Garden of Seasons by Bernard Lassus: Coming to terms with a de-centered 

world’, in Contemporary Garden Aesthetics, Creations and Interpretations, 

Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture XXIX, 

Dumbarton Oaks & Harvard University, Washington DC, in press. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 60-4 © Bernard Lassus; p 65 

© Michel Conan 

65

Deep Explorations into Site/Non-Site 

The Work of Gustafson Porter 

Light and water are generally regarded as the signature elements of Kathryn Gustafson’s 

work. Michael Spens highlights here how in recent projects with London-based partner Neil 

Porter, Gustafson has also developed a particular sensitivity to the specifics of site and 

context. This has led to strong narrative interpretations that are most apparent in the use of 

memory and history in their two projects for Beirut and their evocation of natural ecosystems 

in the Gardens by the Bay for Singapore. 

66

Kathryn Gustafson’s practices today include architect and 

landscape architect Neil Porter and Mary Bowman in London, 

Sylvie Farges in Paris, and landscape architects Jennifer 

Guthrie and Shannon Nichol in Seattle as working partners. 

Gustafson graduated from the École Nationale Supérieure du 

Paysage in Versailles, France, in l979, and first established her 

practice in Paris. She defines herself fundamentally as an 

artist as much as a landscape designer. It has been said that 

she uses landscape as a medium, with figured terrain, 

activated by light and water, to produce a new narrative and 

commentary that is both site specific and far reaching. As 

such she is at the forefront of contemporary landscape 

architectural practice. 

One of Gustafson’s earliest site-specific schemes (in 1991) 

was that for Square Rachmaninov (as it has now been renamed) 

at the Quartier de l’Evangile in Paris. Here she revealed her 

skill at amending ‘explicit’ geometries in creating a park 

structure that was harmonised with a long ‘canal’ linking 

divergent elements such as a partial bosco (a a small wood) 

and a squeezed ellipse, with usable and user-friendly elements. 

These include a playground and a grand lawn, circumscribed 

elegantly yet functionally by seating steps that automatically 

indicate a communal area. Gustafson had here breached 

existing conventions regarding geometrical, constraining 

layouts, and had literally liberated the site, as well as its users. 

A more recent parkland is Gustafson Porter’s Cultuurpark 

Westergasfabriek on the Haarlemmerweg, Amsterdam, which 

she completed with Porter in 2004, on a site previously 

inhabited by a gas plant. At the same time it became possible 

on what was essentially a brownfield site to retain ‘hotspots’, 

as part of the decontamination programme, which avoided 

the wholesale removal of all soils from the site. The 

masterplan for the project, entitled Changement, focused on a 

major axial canal that provided a kind of skewer along which 

various public uses could be orchestrated. The success of this 

scheme enabled Gustafson and Porter to open their London 

office (Gustafson Porter), and take on new work 

internationally – for example, in Beirut and Singapore. 

The practice’s current project, at Swiss Cottage in London, 

exemplifies on a relatively small scale Gustafson’s approach to 

site. Here, careful investigation of the contour variations by 

sectional analysis is coupled with an interactive water feature, 

in which a ‘rippling sheet’ is created through water emitted 

by jets that courses naturally down a granite-based plane to 

form a shallow pool. Lush vegetation defines this event, again 

creating a sanctuary distinct from the broader public gardens. 

The whole project literally sings when the water is flowing. 

The work of Gustafson and her partners has had a 

continuing impact on the inherited concept of the nature of 

landscape design, characterised by some 35 projects around 

the world, many of which have literally redefined the very 

nature of landscape itself. Their projects encompass especial 

qualities of water and light wherever possible, together with 

an assiduous concern for the particular narrative to be 

discovered about or around particular sites. Their work is 

certainly in no way formulaic, but is bespoke to the urban or 

rural landscape in which it will be grounded. 

Beirut is a city with a turbulent past. Following the 

conflict of August 2006, when thousands of shells and 

missiles showered down upon the civilian population of 

southern Beirut and south Lebanon, all reconstruction of the 

historic core, upon which Gustafson and Porter had been 

working, came to a halt. Fortunately, their site was spared 

immediate physical damage. 

Gustafson Porter, Cultuurpark Westergasfabriek, Haarlemmerweg, Amsterdam, 2004 

Left: The long ramp running through the site. Right: The masterly use of water, a Gustafson trademark. 

Gustafson Porter, Hadiqat As-Samah (Garden of Forgiveness), Beirut, Lebanon, 1999– 

Overview of the model incorporating explicit ‘traces' of previous civilisations and their religious shrines and routes via 

archaeological remnants and existing places of worship. The new water gardens and planted layouts are also shown. 

67

Aerial photo of the site showing the extent of this central urban park site. 

Note also the skilful and delicate handling of the trees on site. 

Gustafson Porter, Cultuurpark Westergasfabriek, 

Haarlemmerweg, Amsterdam, 2004 

The site layout. 

The practice’s projects in Beirut – their early design for the 

beautiful Hadiqat As-Samah/Garden of Forgiveness (1999), and 

the subsequent Shoreline Walk (2003), both currently under 

construction – offer a shaft of light for this rich and exotic 

city firmly and also realistically directed at the future. 

The motivating force behind the Hadiqat As-Samah project 

was its founder Alexandra Asseily and Solidere (the Lebanese 

Company for the Development and Reconstruction of Beirut 

Central District). Asseily maintains (despite the recent debilitating 

and brutal conflict to the south of Beirut) that ‘forgiveness is a 

liberating act that gives humans the capacity for peace’. 

Wisely, to make progress without delay, the design team 

excluded themselves from the pressing religious and sectarian 

issues of the region to try to identify a common ground. The 

starting point was the Lebanese commitment to their own 

country and its stupendously beautiful, but hard-won, terrain. 

The entire Hadiqat As-Samah site was deeply layered in 

terms of the traces of previous civilisations. In the design 

competition, others sought the easy way out, by ‘floating 

over’ or framing up such remnants, which were construed as 

obstacles to development. Gustafson Porter did the opposite. 

68

Gustafson Porter, Swiss Cottage Open Space, London, 2006 

Landscape masterplan clearly showing how Gustafson Porter has woven together trees, park elements and water to 

create a haven from the nearby traffic nodes that is fully accessible to pedestrians. 

Their scheme included the overlaying of two conceptual 

approaches: the materiality of place (that is, the regional 

landscape) and a firm engagement and interaction with the 

past as well as the present. They promptly hired an 

archaeologist as part of the team, so setting a design agenda 

that fully recognised the ancient remains that had been 

excavated 5 metres (16 feet) below ground – a process that 

revealed a richness of texture and content, from its medieval 

foundations up through its Roman street grid and the 

retaining walls of the Hellenistic period that ran along the 

immovable contours of bedrock. As a result, no less than 

three mosques, three cathedrals, and the Mary (Nourieh) 

shrine (visited by both Muslim and Christian females in turn) 

emerged, looming over the deep traces of Lebanon’s history. 

This initial excavation meant that the fragile zones to the 

southwest could be protected, but in other areas to the 

north the past was reinterred, preserving the archaeology 

and allowing for new garden layouts. 

This is not a memorial garden, yet the initial, motivating 

concept shared by both the clients and the designers was ‘the 

idea of Lebanon’s journey from a fragile puzzle shattered by 

war to a country gaining unity and peace under the will of its 

people’. These ideals still hold today, and are more relevant 

than ever, though badly impaired, not least of all in the 

collective mind of the communities that sought to build a new 

future for Lebanon. The Hadiqat As-Samah garden is thus a 

source of major healing for all. No singular, prioritised view is 

forced upon visitors – sectional variation is used to 

manipulate light and shade creating an overwhelming 

impression of serenity and even of the sublime. 

In 2002, Gustafson Porter was commissioned by Solidere to 

develop a concept design for the landscape of Beirut’s Old 

Shoreline Walk. A year later they were invited to proceed to 

design development. The underlying principles of the concept 

design were retained. A dynamic, evolving, linear experience 

runs along the path of the Old Shoreline Walk, leading 

through a series of new open spaces (four squares: All Saints 

Square, Shoreline Gardens, Zeytoune Square and Satiyeh 

Garden) that evoke memories of the old city that have been 

forgotten or destroyed, yet all set within the framework of a 

modern city space. The old shoreline had become submerged 

and lost, reducing the urban fabric and its meaning. The new 

69

Gustafson Porter, Hadiqat As-Samah (Garden of Forgiveness), Beirut, 1999– 

The proposed 'placement' of pools and new plantings. 

The archaeological layering as expressly revealed and duly incorporated in the planned garden and pool overlays. 

70

Plan of the gardens showing the interaction of existing places of worship with 

archaeologies abutting, and now to be integrated with, new gardens.

Gustafson Porter, Shoreline Walk, Beirut, Lebanon, 2003– 

The Shoreline Walk reveals the engagement of tree planting and water. 

The shade ‘pavilions’ are planned around the actual plateau, and take the form of contemporary curved structures. 

72

Masterplan. All Saints Square is shown top left, and a tree-lined avenue leads to the Shoreline Gardens. 

Section D-D, showing the level changes in All Saints Square. 

73

Gustafson Porter, Gardens by the Bay, Singapore, 2006 

Skyline view of the business district of Singapore and the waterline. 

Rendered image showing the fluent forms of the leaf grid. 

74

line, marked by a continuous line of white limestone and 

accompanied by a wide pedestrian promenade lined by an 

avenue of royal cuban palms, is intended to reawaken such 

aspects of the buried city fabric as well as connecting the new 

squares, stimulating the cultural meaning of the city centre. 

The connectivity of the city is also emphasised by the 

enlightened tree planting and implemented further by 

carefully contrived lighting. At All Saints Square (originally a 

space on the edge of a headland occupied by All Saints 

Church), an intimate space has been created, lowered down to 

the original ground level adjacent to the church. Views are 

thus channelled upwards towards the sky, and the space is 

enclosed by soft, green textured walls. The square is terraced 

in black granite with large white benches that evoke the 

crashing of waves against the headland. At street level, a raised 

route linking the Shoreline Walk with the corniche (re-created 

after its wartime destruction), allows direct passage through 

the space, enhanced by views into the gardens below. 

The Shoreline Gardens are on the site of the historic Avenue 

des Francais, Beirut’s original corniche. In the Santiyeh Gardens, 

a former medieval cemetery, the concept of an urban green 

oasis has been developed as a contemporary Arabic Paradise 

Garden. Water wells up within moulded stone plinths that act 

as a sombre counterpoint to the surrounding contemporary 

lush planting before cascading down to a more open public 

plaza. Situated south of the Shoreline Walk, Zeytoune Square 

is a key link to the surrounding city, and will become a 

celebration of modern Beirut that will host cultural events. 

The effects of force majeure may dictate that it is a long 

time before Gustafson Porter’s ongoing programme for 

Beirut’s Shoreline Walk is fully realised. However, the projects 

are clear evidence of the deep commitment of the 

professionals involved to match the aspirations of their clients. 

In September 2006, the practice was announced as a joint 

winner of a competition to design one of three garden areas on 

Singapore’s waterfront, part of the Gardens by the Bay urban 

redefinition of the city. The redefinition is to be achieved by reconceiving 

the entire idiom of the city, as a city within a 

garden. While Singapore has become a global leader in 

expansion and innovation, the pressures that have impacted 

on the central business district have forced a major revision of 

where Singapore is going, and indeed where it will not. Its 

maritime history as a great port has left the waterfront 

exposed to environmental blight and decay, and it is now time 

to capitalise on its potential, as has been the case in cities such 

as Sydney, Vancouver, Boston, San Francisco and Shanghai (all 

of which have had a head start in recasting their identities). 

There is clear recognition of a new phenomenon in the 

21st-century city – the yearning of the population, and of 

visitors, for recreational activities such as museums and 

science centres as an accompaniment to the highly proactive 

nature of the business district, characterised by its growth of 

the so-called knowledge-economy industries. Urban 

connectivity is also a key issue, as a response to expanding 

mobility within the city core. It was not hard for Gustafson 

Porter to envisage the potential of Singapore in such a way. 

But the emergent landscape needs to be based on the 

cultivation of recognised ecosystems. The architects’ solid 

understanding of landscape systems incorporates a ready 

familiarity with the time frames imposed by urban 

development, as well as the need to incorporate new 

infrastructures without marginalising potential recreational 

growth. The detail of the landscape design, from planting 

schemes and ‘groundforms’ to the whole waterfront 

structure, is key to the future pattern of Singapore life. 

Gardens by the Bay, as proposed by Gustafson Porter, 

emerged as a richly textured, multilayered environment, 

allowing a subtle interweaving of numerous meshes and 

networks of paths and activity nodes. The surrounding 

apartment blocks and offices have to be closely interlinked 

with such systems, not cut off. The three waterfront gardens 

are linked together to form a coherent, well-codified 

circuitry, yet each is different and clearly readable as such. 

Gustafson Porter recognises that such differentiation can be 

a result of the manipulation of light and shade, breeze 

patterns and natural drainage channels expressed in an 

environmentally pleasing manner. 

It could be said that Singapore has, over the past century, 

already achieved the status of a ‘garden city’. But the pressure 

is now on to create a garden containing the city – a very 

different delineation. Points of arrival, departure or re-entry 

here become critical in terms of the landscape design. And it 

is this landscape language, the vernacular of the new form, 

which must be clearly developed. 

Based on the emblematic landform of ‘tropical leaves’, the 

landscape features here offer two hierarchies. The palm leaf 

throws its fronds outwards from Marina South to Marinas East 

and Central, drawing their shorelines together, and so 

emphasising the bay. The three undulating leaves of Marina 

South are then collaged over its surface, establishing a threedimensional 

hierarchy and a distinctive layering. At Marina East, 

terraces have been created to characterise the whole feature. 

The Gardens by the Bay have the potential to become a kind of 

horticultural paradise of enduring beauty. Rice paddies, pools 

of water chestnut and lotus run down to the water’s edge. 

As with many of Gustafson’s landscape projects, in the 

Singapore proposal water plays a critical and central part. 

Natural drainage is carefully monitored and directed, with water 

channels and rills, cascades and waterfalls running to the actual 

edges of the ‘leaf forms’. As she has shown in many other 

schemes, water provides a stimulating and refreshing sound, 

running over a variety of textured surfaces and changes of level. 

With both Beirut and Singapore, Gustafson Porter is 

literally transforming the contemporary image of what 

landscaping is all about. This could be the salvation of many 

more urban knots and seemingly unresolvable dilemmas. 4 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 66 © Richard Davies; p 67 © 

Hélène Binet; pp 68(l), 69, 70(t&b) & 71-4 © Gustafson Porter; p 68(r) © Rob 

Feenstra; p 70(c) © Solidere 

75

‘Activating Nature’ 

The Magic Realism of Contemporary 

Landscape Architecture in Europe

The redefinition of European cities has 

created new opportunities for the greening of 

public urban spaces. Lucy Bullivant 

describes how three young practices in 

particular – West 8, Gross.Max and Mosbach 

Paysagistes – are leading the way with their 

highly dynamic and inventive narrative 

approaches to history, culture and the 

emergent city. 

In recent years, landscape architecture in public spaces has 

undergone a remarkable ascendancy. In Europe, the 

metamorphosis of cities’ identities has been triggered by the 

expansion of commercially driven activities. Economic change 

has enabled urban parks and gardens, building/public amenity 

landscapes and former industrial areas in remedial intensive 

care to undergo transformation and be thrown open to the 

tumultuous footfall of the wider public everywhere. Landscape 

architecture, previously seen as synonymous with garden 

design as a small-scale afterthought, is now an urban 

commodity in the eyes of commercial developers, almost as 

attractive as coffee bars on every street corner. 

Public and private clients in European cities large and 

small are increasingly keen on the idea that landscaped 

improvements to the urban fabric lie in revealing what is 

already there and creating legibility, rather than imposing an 

alien form of picturesque. Many European cities, apart from a 

few that are shrinking, are rapidly becoming more 

multicultural, and in response there has been a paradigm 

shift by professional landscape architects and urban designers 

towards a multiple and flexible informal use of space by a 

wide range of user groups. 

Allowing for spontaneous behaviour, intimacy, playfulness 

and exploration rather than its constraint through 

reproduction of past historical styles, the new European 

landscape architecture is urbanist through and through. Its 

commitment is to the creation of visual landmarks, but also 

spaces that are inviting to allcomers. Landscape architecture’s 

former reliance on picturesque or, indeed, Modernist tactics 

of old has evolved into a more hybrid, narrative form of urban 

design expression. Most landscape architects in Europe are 

not polemicists, but the injection of narrative and art-based 

Gross. Max, Bullring, Birmingham, 2003 

The informal character of the limestone steps and terraces acts as a magnet 

for the public to use the new shopping centre. 

Gross. Max, Vertical garden, London, 2005 

View of the vertical garden created with artist Mark Dion near Tower Bridge. 

77

Collage of the Garden for a Plant Collector, from the Gross.Max competition book. 

techniques into contemporary landscapes is an activist 

antidote to the slippage in meaning of urban places. Detached 

from industrial history, and being overlaid by the nonplaces 

of retail, the junk spaces they spawn when commercialism 

becomes the sole motor for their development needs a holistic 

landscape urbanism to bring a sense of direction. 

Defining a sense of place in a contemporary European 

context is an activity that the younger generation of 

landscape architects have leverage to carry out at a 

fundamental level. They do not do spur-of-the-moment 

‘guerrilla gardening’ (although the London-based movement 

of the same name has made rapid headway, and recently 

received an award for the ‘greening’ of Elephant and Castle 

from Southwark Council). Rather, their work is developersanctioned 

aesthetic activism, and in activating nature they 

78

Gross. Max, Garden for a Plant Collector at the House for an Art Lover, Glasgow, Scotland, 2005– 

View of the Garden for a Plant Collector at dusk. 

are commanding the strongest, yet most aggravated, force 

there is – bar the markets – to play a leading role in 

contemporary society. 

Added to this, recent climate change in Europe (the green 

open spaces of London’s parks were reduced to scorched earth 

as the city went Mediterranean in the summer of 2006, and 

world-standard UK wine-growing became a hot prospect for 

the future) has not only prompted future opportunities for 

radical changes in the ways buildings are constituted, as 

ecosystems. It has also led to urban environmental novelties 

such as urban (Paris) and tropical indoor (Berlin) beaches, and 

year-round indoor ski slopes with ‘real snow’ (Scotland). 

For the Edinburgh-based landscape architecture practice 

Gross.Max, narrative is a vital component of contemporary 

landscapes. ‘We like extremes, otherwise the whole world 

becomes lookalike,’ says Eelco Hooftman, who founded the 

practice with Bridget Baines in the Scottish capital in 1995. The 

firm first attracted public attention for its informal 

landscaping of the Bullring, Birmingham’s central shopping 

area, in 2003, and has since completed schemes for Zaha 

Hadid’s BMW plant in Leipzig, Germany, and the public spaces 

at the refurbished Royal Festival Hall in London. Though as yet 

still relatively unknown even within the architectural world, 

Gross.Max has injected an optimistic breeze of fresh air and 

exuberance into UK urban design. For the architects’ proposed 

environment for the House for an Art Lover, Glasgow, an 

unbuilt MacKintosh project that a Glaswegian group recently 

determined to make real for the first time, they presented the 

client with a book of computer-generated imagery focused on 

Des Esseintes, the fictional protagonist of JK Huysmans’ 

79

Zaha Hadid Architects and Gross.Max, BMW Leipzig, Germany, 2005 

Courtyard with a grove of apple trees. 

The dynamically geometric car-park layout was created to give the impression 

of ‘accelerating’ rows of poplar trees, with water-retention pools.

Gross. Max, Rottenrow Gardens, Strathclyde University, Glasgow, 2003 

Aerial view of the public garden. 

The central core of the public garden has become a popular urban location. 

Gross.Max, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, Scotland, 2003– 

View from the Edinburgh Gateway centre towards the new biodiversity garden.

Mosbach Paysagistes, Le Jardin Botanique de Bordeaux (Botanical Garden of Bordeaux): stage 1 (garden), 

2001–02; stage 2 (museum and greenhouses), 2004–05 

On a site adjacent to Bordeaux’s Garonne River, on its left bank, the thin wedge (600 x 70 metres/1,969 x 230 feet) of 

botanic gardens is in the centre of an urban redevelopment project by Dominique Perrault. The brief was to create a 

botanic garden exhibiting the particular characteristics of the natural and cultural character of the Aquitaine bioregion, 

something Mosbach Paysagistes has fused as a powerful dialectic in the form of a public landscape. 

decadent novel Against Nature (1903) and a plant lover who 

tends a glasshouse of rare specimens. The 150-page book 

bursts with proposals for ‘a heterotopia of plants blurring the 

boundary between the natural and the artificial’. 

Hooftman wants landscape architecture to return to 

experimentation on the level it reached in 17th- and 18thcentury 

Britain, radically reshaping nature according to fashion 

and taste as dandies, hermits and poets were liable to do. 

Such a revival, he feels, is especially necessary after a period 

grossly lacking in landscape design creativity at the end of the 

late 20th century, when it became a mere afterthought tacked 

on to the end of the construction process. Smaller cultural 

projects, such as the House for an Art Lover and the vertical 

garden against a blank wall near Tower Bridge in London the 

practice is completing for the American artist Mark Dion, 

offer valuable opportunities to intervene in the public realm. 

Landscape design as the ‘physical and rational 

manipulation of an objectified reality’ is already intrinsic to 

Dutch urban design, borne of the need to create 

comprehensive and efficient use through polders and dykes of 

land below sea level. ‘In the Netherlands there is the idea that 

you can make land, make nature, which explains our 

grassroots politics,’ says Hooftman. ‘We are about a new 

picturesque.’ Pressing him on what that is, he answers that: 

‘It’s just the old, reinvented. We still believe in aesthetics.’ 

Which explains the kinship between Gross.Max and Zaha 

Hadid, for whose intensely wrought aesthetics Gross.Max has 

completed a number of successful landscape schemes. For her 

new 200-hectare (494-acre) BMW site in Leipzig, its landscape 

architecture, inspired by agricultural landscapes, combines a 

response to the radical nature of Hadid’s architecture, 

functional use of the site and ecological considerations. A row 

of ‘accelerating trees’ planted increasingly close together 

along the side of the car park provides orientation and a 

dynamism to this normally mundane environment. 

Hooftman believes that landscape architecture can serve as a 

testing ground for urbanism. Society’s colonisation of 

landscape is a complex phenomenon, and now the bigger 

developers are coming to see art and architecture as a 

commodity, which encourages a contextual approach to 

82

The multitextured panorama of the field of crops has 49 elevated beds in six 

rows, some of which are surrounded by thin steel planters, set among grass, 

with open water-tanks at the end. Inside each planter is a series of 

longitudinal trenches in which agricultural species from the Aquitaine region 

are grown. They encompass all the ethnobotanical uses, and can be eaten, or 

used as cut flowers or for their medicinal uses, as detailed on the signage.

Mosbach Paysagistes, Le Jardin Botanique de Bordeaux (Botanical Garden of 

Bordeaux): stage 1 (garden), 2001–02; stage 2 (museum and greenhouses), 2004–05 

The environmental gallery is a series of mounds that are elevated simulations of the 

geomorphological strata and soil profiles of the Aquitaine region in two rows, representing 

the two banks of the river, with the five mounds of clay, gravel and sandstone to the north 

representing the right bank.

flourish. This is evident in the design of a number of new urban 

parks, for example, making them characterful yet culturally 

porous urban additions rather than merely generic backdrops 

to buildings. Gross.Max’s terraced Rottenrow Gardens, for 

Glasgow’s Strathclyde University, fulfils this role, functioning as 

the outdoor social centre of the university for students and 

staff, and a hub in a network of routes linking the campus. 

In France, a radical reinvention of the hitherto largely 

hermetic archetypical typology of the botanic garden was 

undertaken in 2002 by Catherine Mosbach, of Mosbach 

Paysagistes, for the district of Bordeaux on the right bank of 

the Garonne River. Instead of creating a hermetic garden or a 

public park, Mosbach has forged a new hybrid of urban 

parkland overlaying the historic grid of the agricultural land 

of the La Bastide district here and the old downtown area on 

the left bank. Her design includes a water garden, an 

environmental ‘gallery’ of botanic and agricultural landscapes 

laid out in a field of wide strips the public is free to wander 

through and study – the ecological part of the project – and 

an ethnobotanic field of crops on long irrigated strips of land. 

A fourth element is a neighbourhood garden for new housing. 

The first is a geometric space planted with aquatic species 

set above the adjacent road. The gallery is an overly artificial 

cross section of the Aquitaine Basin region’s natural 

classifications – sand dune, water and dry meadows, oak 

woodlands, heath and limestone – yet they bring the reality of 

the region to this urban site. Botanic gardens mostly try to 

outdo each other with exotic species, but this one plays a 

different game, promoting landscape as cultural heritage. 

Mosbach describes her vision as a philosophical rather than an 

ecological one, using natural flows to draw human movement. 

Her largest urban project to date has been a new 7- 

kilometre (4 1 / 3 -mile) long walkway along the canal of St Denis 

from La Villette to the island of St Denis in Paris, and she is 

currently developing the park for the Louvre’s new regional 

museum at Lens in Nord-Pas-de-Calais (a group of nine 

buildings) on a 20-hectare (40-acre) site, together with 

Japanese architects SANAA and New York museum designers 

Imrey Culbert. An open relationship between the museum, 

nature and the landscape will be achieved through a circuit 

taking visitors out of the buildings and along glazed paths 

winding through a clearing. Jack Lang, the former French 

Minister of Culture, has described the scheme as ‘a project 

that starts from the earth and reaches for the stars’. 

Dutch urban designers and landscape architects West 8, led 

by founder Adriaan Geuze, established its reputation in the 

1990s with projects at home – the Rotterdam 

Schouwburgplein and, more recently, the Borneo Sporenburg 

docklands development in Amsterdam. The best known of the 

younger generation of landscape architects, the practice, in 

stepping aside from the age-old opposition between city and 

nature in favour of their fusion, has a disciplined, contextbased 

methodology. This underlies a frequently surreal, 

heterogeneous and often humorously tongue-in-cheek 

The water garden is an irregular grid of basins 

separated by paved walkways.

West 8, Luxury Village, Moscow, Russia, 2004–06 

The 500-metre (1,640-foot) long street uses Dutch clay bricks, a paving material rarely seen in Russia. 

approach: ‘Public space must reinforce a city’s existing spirit,’ 

says Geuze. Palm trees grow from lamp posts, concrete is 

given an illusory, ‘wild’ nature, watercourses loosely suggest 

Leonardo da Vinci’s canal system, and the design of public 

parks is given a music- or dance-like syncopation. No 

distinction is made between urbanism, landscaping, 

architecture and botany, whatever the scale, from street 

furniture to squares, parks and urban masterplans. 

Geuze is inspired by the potential mobility of landscape. 

The passage from Shakespeare’s Macbeth that describes 

Birnam Wood moving appeals to him; thus winning such a 

large and – when it is realised in 2010 – transformational 

European urban scheme as the Parque Lineal del Manzanares 

in Madrid in autumn 2005 gave him a real frisson. With the 

M30 freeway being taken underground, West 8, working with 

local architects Burgos & Garrido Arquitectos, Porras & La 

Casta Arquitectos and Rubio & Alvarez-Sala Arquitectosis, will 

transform the 80-hectare (198-acre) valley on the Rio 

Manzanares over the next four years into a vital site of 

mediation for the city, at a cost of 6 billion euros. Brandishing 

the slogan ‘Mas rio – mas Madrid’ (More river – more Madrid), 

this will reorient the city towards the river, with a park with 

five illusionistically designed water streams, and a boulevard 

of pine trees that connects almost all of Madrid’s parks, 

creating a new green ‘spine’. 

In typically deft West 8 mode, the Madrid design employs 

more than a touch of magic realism, each stream representing 

a certain mood – ‘The River of Passion’ and ‘The Creek of 

Moonlight’ are just two – and distinguished by its own kind of 

vegetation and materials. A spectacular grass-covered land 

bridge will connect the historic Royal Garden and the Casa de 

Campo (the former royal hunting grounds). And not only will 

a group of former slaughterhouses be converted into the 

Centro del Artes, a new district created from scratch for 

culture and arts, but 22 new bridges will bring both sides of 

the city closer together than ever before. 

Despite West 8’s enormous international credibility and 

track record in creating new communities that are profoundly 

contemporary yet not Disneyfied – for example, the Borneo 

Sporenburg docklands and, in the UK, the Chiswick Business 

Park – ‘in England clients didn’t want to recognise that we 

worked between architecture and urban design’, Geuze 

observed in 2005. This narrow-minded attitude has clearly 

shifted since then. The architects’ masterplanning role in 

Stratford is advancing (but shrouded in secrecy at the client’s 

request), and winning the competition for Jubilee Gardens on 

London’s South Bank promises to provide a conclusively 

creative yet practical statement for this heavily contested 

riverside site. Organic, lush and green, with softly undulating 

hills and ‘a botanical ambience’ the area has previously 

lacked, it will have fluid paths, and prime lookout points 

framing panoramic views of the Thames, the London skyline 

and the South Bank, as well as intimate spaces to relax. At 

night, the lighting scheme will subtly animate and play with 

the new ‘weaving landscape’. 

For Luxury Village, a pedestrian shopping street in a new 

urban development in the forests just outside Moscow, West 8 

had the audacity to use Dutch clay bricks, and especially 

86

custom-cut bricks, a paving material rarely seen in Russia. The 

500-metre (1,640-foot) street is laid with two intertwined 

patterns, the second in two colours cutting through the first. 

The street surface is perforated in several places by pockets in 

which pine trees are planted along with seasonal flowers. Pine 

trees can not only withstand the severe temperatures in 

Moscow, but create a visual connection between this most 

cosmopolitan street lined with Prada, Gucci, Rolls-Royce and 

Yves Saint Laurent and the birch pine forest surrounding it. 

While such a prestige project has opened West 8’s 

markets to luxury developments (and one wonders about the 

prospects of a future hermetic world of gated communities 

landscaped by the practice), the sheer heterogeneous range 

of the architects’ work will avoid typecasting. Winning the 

Waterfront Innovative Design competition in Toronto, a 

highly public project, represents the side of the practice’s 

work that reclaims the water’s edge of cities. An 18-metre 

(59-foot) promenade with a wooden boardwalk, floating 

‘finger’ piers and a series of bridges transforms Queen’s 

Quay, described as the city’s Achilles Heel, into a space 

‘where the city kisses the lake’. In an almost unprecedented 

performance, in the summer of 2006 West 8 realised a 

prototypical chunk of the boulevard at 1:1 scale for a long 

weekend to see how people reacted, adding ‘a Bike de 

Triomphe’ constructed from old bicycles. 

The work of West 8, Gross.Max and Mosbach Paysagistes 

demonstrates that younger landscape architects are taking a 

wider social responsibility in response to complex urban 

needs for redefinition of space, whether it is industrial in 

origin or public areas around new buildings. They are working 

in a context of privatised land-use yet the huge pressure for 

cities to redefine their identities is opening up new 

opportunities for creativity concerning the design and role of 

green spaces. One facet of urban identity that has become 

topical is the concept of integrating the countryside into the 

fabric of the city in order to create a common habitat. This 

has been discussed but rarely implemented in Europe. There 

are fears in a relatively small country like the UK that urban 

growth is bringing a tarmacking over of the countryside, and 

that a sense of synergy between the urban and the rural is 

lacking. The traditional European urban scenario has been 

that whenever the city has grown in size, nature and 

agriculture have disappeared as the urban has become two 

opposing and ever more entrenched concepts. A rurban 

(rural–urban) hybrid, working with a territory’s agricultural 

origins, not denying it, typifies the Sociópolis urban scheme 

for the outskirts of Valencia, led by Vicente Guallart, which 

integrates the huerta, or market garden, into a new residential 

community alongside public amenities. 

Wider interest in the three practices discussed above has 

clearly been fostered in part by the effervescent yet relatively 

highbrow public celebration of nature and ‘bio-visions’ of the 

biannual Bundesgartenschau (Federal Garden Exhibition). This 

event – part exhibition, part trade fair – has opened minds to 

potential synergies between urban design and landscape 

architecture. The last event, attended by 3 million people over 

165 days, was staged in Munich. Its focus straddling leisure 

and culture complements a larger push in Germany towards 

integrated developments harmonising economic, local leisure 

and ecological requirements, including the preservation and 

use of open spaces in an ecologically interconnected system. 

An example of this is Berlin’s development as a European 

urban district. Potsdam, which is over a thousand years old, is 

set, island-like, in a landscape of parks and lakes, much of 

them the legacy of the Prussian kings from 1657 who created 

palaces and gardens there. A UNESCO-protected site, its urban 

development adheres to three principles: the integration of 

former military bases now being converted to civilian use; 

emphasising the park and garden character of the town while 

maintaining its world cultural heritage; and integrating its 

varied environments into a historically formed, mixed-use 

system. Here, the Dutch landscape architects B+B (Bakker en 

Bleeker) have transformed a former Russian training camp 

dating from the DDR era into the Waldpark Potsdam. 

The programmatic possibilities arising across European 

countries in this postindustrial era require nothing less than a 

holistic narrative approach to history, culture and the future 

identity of the city. The strategies of West 8, Gross.Max and 

Mosbach Paysagistes show immense lucidity and intellectual 

leadership – and more than a dose of humour – when it 

comes to the complex issues of nature and urban culture, and 

their combined potential as sustaining forces. 4 

The brick paving of the Luxury Village is perforated in several places with 

round tree areas called ‘pockets’, containing pine trees also found in the 

surrounding birch pine forest. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 76-81 © Gross.Max; p 81(tl) © 

Gross.Max, photo Peter Iain Campbell; pp 82-3 & 85 © ADAGP, Paris and 

DACS, London 2007; p 84 © BMA APPA; pp 86-7 © courtesy of West 8 

87

Landscapes of the 

Second Nature 

Emptiness as a Non-Site Space

For Florian Beigel and Philip Christou of the Architecture Research Unit 

(ARU), based at London Metropolitan University, an experimental project 

in Leipzig proved formative in the gestation of ideas for a much largerscale 

project in South Korea. The Paju Book City near Seoul is nothing 

less than a city of publishers, encompassing production houses, 

printers, warehouses and editorial offices on a wetland site surrounded 

by mountains. Michael Spens describes this remarkable project here 

and finds its only conceivable precedent in the narrative-based poetics 

of place evoked by Italo Calvino in the fable of Invisible Cities. 1 

Architecture Research Unit, Paju Book City, near Seoul, South Korea, 1999– 

View of Paju looking from the Simhak Mountain to the Han River in 1999 before construction began.

The recent work of Beigel and Christou has developed through 

the research they carried out for an experimental project for a 

site in eastern Germany, at Cospuden, close to Leipzig. The 

purpose of the Second Nature Landscape project was to lay out 

a carpet of specifically landscape terrain, as a kind of generator 

of form, so providing the basis for an emergent architectural 

landscape – laying out the rug, but not the picnic. 

Research was carried out into the evident natural and 

occupational memory traces offered by the landscape, 

ranging from its geological origins, through prehistoric times 

and primitive 17th-century flood preventive schemes and the 

l8th-century manor house and estate that developed, to the 

despoliation of all this as a result of large-scale coal-mining 

operations. Now the rug contains an overlay of incipient 

ecological measures. The deep scars of the open-cast mining 

are being flooded, which over the next 30 years will permit 

the formation of a postindustrial city on a recreational lake – 

a city of dreams. 

In a purely landscape reclamation context one is reminded 

of Geoffrey Jellicoe’s 50-year-long project for the Hope Cement 

Works in Derbyshire, England, in the Peak District there. But 

ambitions at Leipzig embrace a whole city scheme. The 

extreme horizontality of the new landscape opens many 

possibilities, which Beigel and Christou have envisioned and 

to which the Leipzig authorities have given their support. 

The site stretches over a 50-kilometre (31-mile) radius south 

of Leipzig and will eventually be transformed into a postindustrial, 

recreational, city lake landscape. The Cospuden 

project has become a prototype design for the meanings of 

the new lakes and for the different ways the city is 

approaching its new lake shores – the revalidation of so-called 

‘emptied sites’ in the words of ARU. 

A long, straight lake includes promenades and the 

retention of the straight edges of the coal-dust protection 

forests planted at right angles to the dams. The plan 

designated the soft lake shore as a wilderness and the straight 

shore as the new urban terrain, having a hard edge. 

This is, as a whole, an ecological terrain which has now 

become an urban wetland, but it is crossed with care by a 

timber jetty. The wetland acts as a catchment field, part of a 

surface-water management strategy in which the relatively 

unclean surface water flowing down the sloping suburban 

territories towards the new lake is retained separately from 

the clear groundwater of the lake itself. 

The project as a whole could be described as a landscapescale 

architectural infrastructure that will provide a spatial 

framework for buildings in the future. 

Architecture Research Unit, Second Nature Landscape, Cospuden, Leipzig, 

Germany, ongoing 

Urban design plan from June 1998 showing, left to right: the public wetland 

next to the lake; new ‘lake villas’ and ‘longhouses’ in blue-grey on a new 

territory forming a straight edge to the wetland; and the new village repair 

strategy in the old town, with buildings of historic importance in black. 

The city’s gods, according to some people, live in the depths, in the 

black lake that feeds the underground stream. 

Italo Calvino 2 

While working on this venture, Beigel and Christou had time 

to think and perhaps to reconsider the landscape-generating 

role that as architects they found themselves developing, and 

90

The mining landscape at Cospuden, transformed into a mining memory landscape as a framework for development. 

were shortly invited to visit Seoul, close to which a 

remarkable concept had been envisioned – ‘Paju Book City’. 

Along the edge of the Han River northwest of the South 

Korean capital, Seoul, before a distant prospect of mountains 

and close to the sea, the architects realised that here was a 

client that possessed a clear, if not fully defined vision of what 

a 21st-century technologically based city might comprise. 

When a man rides for a long time through wild regions he feels the 

desire for a city. 

… Isidora is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The 

dreamed of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora 

in his old age … Desires are already memories. 


In the spring of 1999, Florian Beigel and ARU were 

commissioned to design the urban landscape plan of Paju 

Book City. The ARU plan was used as the basis of the Paju 

Design Guide, produced in August 1999 by a team comprising 

the architects Seung H-Sang (co-ordinator), Florian Beigel, Min 

Hyun-sik, Kim Jong Kyu and Kim Young-joon. A range of 

architectural typologies emerged. One extended below the 

defining Freedom Expressway (formerly the Ja Yoo motorway 

and today also a major 10-metre/32-foot high flood barrier 

along the east bank of the river). Called Highway Shadow, this 

was to contain mostly mass-production facilities such as print 

shops, publishing houses and factories, buildings, restricted to 

two storeys, that would have green roofs and would not 

exceed the height of the highway. Another architectural type 

was dubbed Bookshelf units – a series of ‘chopped volumes’, 

yet giving the working inhabitants unrestricted views of the 

Han River and the Simhak Mountain. Other poetic concepts 

included Stone units, with massive forms akin to geological 

rock, and a ‘Canal Loft’ running out rhythmic lines along the 

length of the waterway. An Urban Island would be recognised 

from the roads surrounding all four sides of the site. This 

91

Structures on the new harbour ramp. The platforms emphasise the horizontality of the new landscape of lake and shore. 

92

Early design sketch of the lake looking north, showing wetlands and 

allotments on the left side of the lake, new ‘urban forests’ as long strips 

perpendicular to the lake edge, the new straight lake edge on the right side 

of the lake, and the new town edge to the lake with ramping harbour. 

The Cospuden mining excavation process has uncovered 50 million years of 

geological history. This aerial photograph shows how the process has turned 

the area into an apocalyptic morass of waste and water. 

mass was then to be fragmented by alleyways for easy 

pedestrian access. Thus an infrastructural framework was 

created overall to play host to human settlements, themselves 

unconstrained by urgent time-framing. 

ARU’s architecture here includes completed buildings of 

an exemplary quality. Beigel’s ethos has been to conceive 

buildings of a clear, tectonic, but simple profile, which 

respect the existing and reclaimed landscape. As 

demonstrated by their Stone units, and already realised 

offices for the Youl Hwa Dang Publishing House, which act 

as a bridge across the wetlands, this allows definitive aspects 

of the architecture to relate naturally to the site terrain and 

ecology, as well as to distant views. 

One of ARU’s major breakthroughs at Paju Book City has 

been a recognition of the high ecological value of the residual 

wetlands that characterise the original site. These were, 

according to an outmoded plan, to be filled in and gravelled 

over. However, Beigel’s defining decision was to reverse this 

implementation, and so to save the natural ecology of reeds 

and grasses that could now take the form of the ‘picnic’ on 

the rug. According to ARU: ‘It is necessary to tread carefully in 

this delicate land, in a way a giraffe would walk through high 

grass.’ Essentially, the architects therefore prepared a plan of 

‘where not to fill the land’. This aspect of the overall plan 

remains but, as Beigel says, is always at risk of despoliation by 

commercial or governmental bodies, though some progress in 

enlightening such bodies has been made. 

By autumn 2000, when architects were starting to be 

commissioned to realise individual buildings according to the 

Paju Design Guide, Mr Yi Ki Ung, President of the Youl Hwa 

Dang Publishing House, commissioned Florian Beigel and 

ARU, London, in collaboration with Kim Jong Kyu and MARU, 

Seoul, to design his own building. This building was to act as a 

prototype, a built demonstration of the urban concepts in the 

Paju Design Guide. The building is best described as a cluster 

of studio houses around courtyards, or ‘madangs’. The principle 

of ‘a house of good rooms’ (in Beigel’s words) was followed, 

whereby one goes from room to room. This is not a house with 

an open plan, or of corridors and separate rooms, it is a house 

of rooms without corridors. But this clarity also reflects the 

way the city is laid out, allowing for an unusual degree of 

coherence through each and every scale of living and moving. 

The colours of the studio houses, their walls and bookshelves 

are painted consistently in a palette similar to that developed 

by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi – soft and subtle, with 

equal emphasis placed on the spaces between elements 

(houses, rooms, shelves) as on the solid or transparent 

volumes. One of the walls of every room in the studio houses 

is a wall of light, created using light-diffusing materials. 

Turning again to the landscape form, Beigel found that the 

site reflects a strong north–south linearity, as read from the 

Han River’s long, but wide, impact on the land itself. This is 

emphasised by the Simhak Mountain in Paju, which seems to 

guard the city. It was this linearity that generated the whole 

concept of the book city, as a kind of built landscape text. It is 

also hoped that the Freedom Highway, which connects Paju 

City to the centre of Seoul, will one day become the direct 

connection to North Korea. The land and flood plain of the 

Han River was the site of extremely bloody battles during the 

Korean War, thus the highway has more than just a 

topographical significance. 

Paju Book City, in Beigel’s words, is conceived as a territory 

of coexistence: ‘We called it urban wetland. In more general 

terms we call it a “citylandscape”. Paju Book City will be 

neither a city nor will it be a built-up landscape. It will be 

both. In this way it will be a classical example for the 

contemporary urban condition. It is not a landscape design 

project, and it is not an urban design project. It is an 

93

Architecture Research Unit, Paju Book City, Seoul, South Korea, 1999– 

Time traces of the site at Paju (drawn in 1999). Small fields and drainage 

channels have been constructed by farmers illegally using the wetland 

between the motorway and the mountain. 

The architects meticulously surveyed the reed-bed extensions and growth pattern. 

Sketch of the mountain wetland with a large sloping book storage and 

distribution building. 

Paju Book City Phase 01 Urban Landscape Design Plan, ‘Paju Landscape 

Script’. The road plan was previously determined by others. 

a. Highway shadows: Factories partially with grass roofs (height 8 metres) 

similar to the ‘Freedom Highway’, shown by the long curved lines next to 

the factory buildings. 

b. Bookshelf units: publishing houses. Street buildings with car parking in 

courtyards (height 8 metres). Riverview buildings above, naturally 

ventilated (height 7 metres). 

c. Spine units: publishing houses. High-density buildings with courtyards 

(height 15 metres). 

d. Canal lofts: canal wharf buildings. Publishing houses with oblique 

views of canal, with shallow pitched roofs. Building height less than 15 

metres where possible. Parking in every other interval space. 

e. Wetland stones: publishing houses in the wetland (two-storey buildings). 

f. Central storage and distribution facility. 

g. Urban island buildings with wetlands gardens/atria ( height 15 metres). 

h. Canal/biotope territories with surface water management system. 

Building height less than 15 metres where possible. Parking in every 

other interval space. 

94

View from a bridge over the wetland at Paju Book City looking north. 

95

ARU design model of Paju landscape script including mountain, long urban 

structures, drainage channel, motorway embankment and river. 

Sketch layout by Beigel showing the Stone units inserted into the existing 

wetland area as conceived for the purpose of creating a distinctive group of 

office buildings. These were to be closely related to the existing watercourses 

of the immediate wetland area, linked by connecting bridges. 

Sketch of the view from the horizon strata of the ‘bookshelf’-type buildings 

from which one can see over the motorway to the river and to the mountains 

on the horizon. The ground strata of this type consist of courtyard buildings 

communicating with the street. 

The Youl Hwa Dang Publishing House at Paju Book City looking towards the 

Han River. 

96

The Youl Hwa Dang Publishing House at Paju Book City. East elevation. 

View of the Youl Hwa Dang Publishing House along Bookmaker Street. 

infrastructural architectural project at the large scale, just as 

the table is at the small scale of architecture. Paju is a vague 

territory at the periphery of the city, a bit eery, attractively 

enigmatic. It has a certain wilderness, artificial and natural, 

and one gets the feeling one should tread carefully here and 

not do too much. Our method involves taking a step back and 

reading the history of these sites, suspending judgment.’ 

As seen in plan, Paju has, curiously, the form of a reclining 

female, possibly in traditional Korean dress, containing 

within her head folds the ‘built collective memory’ that 

focuses outward on the wide floodplain of the Han River at 

the base of the Simhak Mountain, as if she is lying in a 

meadow: the mountain protects. 

Part of the narrative here is today based on the valued 

existence of extensive wetlands. These are now conserved, and 

run between buildings emphasising the natural coexistence of 

nature and the man-made – an urban wetland where the reed 

beds have survived. 

There are now four long urban structures here, which pick 

up the traces of the landscape running parallel to the Han 

River. The Highway Shadow buildings lining the inner side of 

the Freedom Expressway establish what is, in effect, a long 

chain of goods yards restricted, as mentioned earlier, to two 

storeys in height. The four-storey buildings of the publishing 

houses look across and over the numerous two-storey storage 

and service units. Thus great care has been taken to preserve 

and respect the overall texture of the landscape. One cannot 

imagine such a book city springing up in England, say at 

Hatfield or Harlow. It is altogether something born of global 

aspirations, but deeply rooted in the Korean soil. 

Though it is painstakingly regimented, the city’s life flows calmly like 

the motion of the celestial bodies and it acquires the inevitability of 

phenomena not subject to human caprice. In praising Andria’s 

citizens for their productive industry and their spiritual ease, I was 

led to say: I can well understand how you, feeling yourselves part of 

an unchanging heaven, cogs in a meticulous clockwork, take care not 

to make the slightest change in your city and your habits. Andria is 

the only city I know where it is best to remain motionless in time. 

They looked at one another dumbfounded. ‘But why, whoever said 

such a thing?’ 

And they led me to visit a suspended street recently opened over a 

bamboo grove. 


In developing Paju, the ethos of the Beigel and Christou team 

has remained phlegmatically realistic, even optimistic. The 

time frame is protracted, yet it was crucial to establish the 

first buildings and define the topology to maintain the 

principle of a sustainable community. Of fundamental 

significance in the architects’ philosophy is their 

interpretation of the Korean idea of ‘emptiness’ as a positive 

design characteristic, which relates directly to the construct of 

site/non-site as developed from the l970s onwards that is reenergising 

landscape thinking today. 4 

Notes 

1. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Martin Secker and Warburg (London), l974. 

Trans W Weaver. 

2. Ibid, p 20. 

3. Ibid, p 8. 

4. Ibid, p 150. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Philip Christou: pp 88-9 & 91 

photos Philip Christou; p 90 drawing Architecture Research Unit; p 92 photo 

Daniel Mallo Martinez, February 2000; 93(t) drawing Philip Christou; p 93(b) 

photo Marion Wenzel, 1985; p 94(tl) drawing Chi Won Park, Architecture 

Research Unit, 1999; p 94(cl) drawing Architecture Research Unit; p 94(bl) 

drawing Florian Beigel; pp 94-5(t) © Philip Christou, September 2006; p95(b) 

drawing by Architecture Research Unit, July 1999; p 96(tl) model Architecture 

Research Unit; p 96(bl) drawing Florian Beigel, June 1999; p 96(tr) drawing 

Florian Beigel, May 1999; pp 96(b) & 97 photos Jonathan Lovekin, April 2004 

97

City in Suspension 

New Orleans and the Construction of Ground 

Underfoot, 

obscured from 

view, ground is 

the most 

fundamental 

material of 

construction and the 

urban landscape. As New 

Orleans has proved, we 

forget it at our peril. Shaped 

by the mound, the levee and 

most recently the pump, the 

ground of the Crescent City was 

neglected and overlooked even in 

areas of new development. Felipe 

Correa describes how, in the 

aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, 

the thorough re-evaluation 

of the city’s ground is a 

prerequisite to urban 

reorganisation.

Delaminations of water catchment, flood plain and settlement in the Lower Mississippi River Basin. 

A sectional cut through New Orleans easily distinguishes all of 

the different fragments and membranes that in summation 

construct the city’s ground, and freshly reveals an intrinsic 

desire for parchedness. At its deepest level, the city contains a 

network of tubes and conduits that partially appropriate the old 

canal infrastructure. These are powered by 22 pump stations, 

which are continuously pumping excess water from the city 

over the levee and into the river and lake, keeping the city’s 

water table artificially low. Above the drainage and sewerage 

infrastructure sits the city’s primary road network. Capitalising 

on the old existing ridges – the Esplanade Ridge, Gentilly Ridge 

and Metarie Ridge in particular – the primary navigational 

system remains fairly constant in elevation, oscillating between 

1.2 and 1.8 metres (4 to 6 feet) above sea level and establishing 

an extreme sectional difference with the lowest areas in the city 

of approximately 2.1 to 2.7 metres (7 to 9 feet). 

Containment infrastructure follows. Composed primarily of 

levees and flood walls, this groundwork flanks the river and 

lake, rising twice as high as any natural formation. On the 

lake side, the levees crest at a height of approximately 1.8 

metres (6 feet) above sea level. On the riverfront, the levee 

along with elevated platforms and the flood wall can go up to 

6.7 metres (22 feet), creating a generous distance from the 

river current that flows above the level of the city but below 

the top of the dyke. High above the perceived ground, a 

system of freeways and elevated roads seems to be floating, 

delicately anchored by slim pylons that register the highest 

layer of infrastructure hovering at approximately 9 metres (30 

feet) above sea level. On average, 12 metres (40 feet) is the 

sectional difference of the multiple forms of infrastructure 

that make up the ground of New Orleans, a city that at first 

sight appears as flat as a Midwestern plain. 

New Orleans can be conceptualised as a thick 

infrastructural field – one that has resulted from the 

amalgamation of discrete material fragments, the outcome of 

numerous constructs of ground that have been materialised 

and deployed in the city throughout its history. These 

constructs, all different in scope, ambition and action, share 

one common aspiration: to form a ground independent from 

water, in a territory with an intrinsic desire to return to a 

liminal state that is neither water nor land, but an overmoist 

sludge where a city has been circumspectly placed in 

suspension. Primarily grounded by construction techniques 

favoured in soft lands, the city, which at first might be 

perceived as firm ground that keeps a distance from the river 

and lake, is actually an infrastructural Î le Flotant in an 

unremitting state of unrest. 

This ground, which has been in a constant formative 

process throughout centuries of settlement, has transmuted 

slowly from natural flood plain to an artificial system of 

conduits, allowing for a transition from a sectional 

understanding of ground into a horizontal mode of occupying 

it. The mound, the canal, the levee and, most recently, the 

mechanical pump have been the key shapers of ground in the 

Crescent City, moulding an imprint defined by the ubiquitous 

geometries of each. 

Mounds: Nomadic Topographies 

Initial settlers in the area subsisted mostly from fishing. 

Their specific patterns of inhabitation required a direct 

relationship with the fluctuations of the flood plain, 

resulting in nomadic settlements along the edges where 

fishing was most productive. Perhaps the most significant 

evidence of initial forms of ground construction can be seen 

through archaeological episodes. Mounds, found in the area 

between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, were 

constructed from leftover shells and debris. The specific 

construction of these mounds still remains unclear, but the 

general attitude towards their immediate environment is 

evident – the need to manipulate the ground condition 

through vertical build-up in order to achieve a greater 

sectional difference with the wavering water levels. From 

The relayered Lower Mississippi River Basin. 

99

the start, settlers had to construct a unit of measure, 

qualitative and subjective at first, that would allow them to 

establish a relationship between the different entities in 

oscillation. This vertical build-up, which shifted in relation 

to the fishing cycles, was a first attempt to establish a 

differentiation between natural processes and the first 

imprints of human settlement. 

Canals: Striated Topographies 

Upon the arrival of Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville and his brother 

Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville in the early 18th century, 

a new ideology about the way this territory could be handled 

began a slow, but steady, process of transformation. For the 

French, the biggest challenge in taming this territory entailed 

preparing ground suitable for agricultural production and, 

more importantly, finding a way to introduce the plantation 

model into this land. With this purpose, it was essential to 

develop surveying techniques and a parcel structure that 

would alter the swamp into the agricultural gold mine the 

French had envisioned. If initial settlers in the area had 

established a vertical condition that allowed them to 

sectionally distance themselves from the flood plain, the new 

model aimed for a striation of the territory and lines that 

would serve as both geopolitical demarcations and drainage 

infrastructure. This provided a new horizontal skeleton that 

would induce an agile figure for the terrain, one better 

attuned to the new economy of lower Louisiana and one that 

provided confidence for the settlement of future outposts. 

Levees: Contained Topographies 

Through the development of the agricultural carpet, land 

stripped of original cane and vegetation became weaker and 

more prone to spillages and crevasses. The never inert 

strength of the water became an even more muscular 

antagonist in the relentless process of forming ground, at a 

point in time where the already permanent agricultural 

settlements were much too prosperous to simply pick up and 

go. The dilapidated state of the existing levees – sporadic and 

ill-constructed walls of soil and sand – put in place by 

individual landowners, combined with a need to further 

100

Plantation lines defining the urban–agricultural 

morphology of the Lower Mississippi basin. 

The fracturing process of agricultural fields as they transform into urban parcels. 

extend the agricultural carpet towards lower marshes, 

catalysed another very precise construct of ground: one that 

superseded the striated configuration of drainage canals with 

the construction of massive levees that would systematically 

transform the flood plain into a single conduit, and contain 

most, if not all, of the water away from the claimed tract of 

land between the river and the lake. 

This newly contained landscape allowed for an intriguing 

process of urban fragmentation that was carefully layered 

over the 17th-century agricultural silhouette. The original 

plantation lines that for approximately a century served as 

drainage canals were systematically covered and transformed 

into navigational conduits that made up a maxi-grid that 

would carefully frame the urban block and parcel structure 

to come. A constant square block, similar in dimension, but 

not in grain, to that of the French Quarter, was 

systematically traced throughout the entire river bend, 

creating a new ground condition that negotiated between the 

idiosyncrasies of the tangential plantation lines and the 

regulatory rigour of the top-down grid. 

Pumps: Mechanical Topographies 

As New Orleans constantly transformed from an agricultural 

field into an urbanised mesh, the massive levees constructed 

along the river throughout the 18th century had shifted the 

natural water levels of the flood plain and forced them to rise. 

The city was pressured to build another set of levees flanking 

Lake Pontchartrain to prevent high lake tides from backing 

into the lower quarters of the city through the existing canals. 

This resulted in two artificial higher edges that allowed for a 

dry concave surface to be fully urbanised. Granted that this 

new infrastructure had proffered a much more secure ground 

for urban development, it also blocked all possibilities of 

removing rain-water overflow through existing canals. The 

new lake and river edges were too high for run-off to flow 

naturally into either body of water. 

Local engineers worked for many years to conceive a 

mechanical system that would effectively drain water 

against gravity. The challenge was extreme. As the city’s 

topography decreases as it moves away from the river, the 

strength of the pumping mechanism had to be gargantuan 

101

in order for water to pour into the river, over the levees. The 

device invented by local engineer AB Wood in the early 

1900s transformed New Orleans into a new mechanically 

choreographed ground, where dryness was the result of a 

simple mathematical equation. 

If indeed this highly mechanical system had provided a 

controlled environment that was unprecedented in the history 

of New Orleans, perhaps future development took these 

implementations too much for granted. A thinly woven carpet 

with a generic suburban pattern colonised the lowest areas in 

the city. New development paid no attention to the highly 

delicate condition of ground and ignored all the axioms that 

effectively shaped the initial swathes along the riverfront. 

Topography was neglected even at the scale of individual 

buildings, where the raised first floor of the shotgun house 

had been substituted for sectionally mute ranch-style homes. A 

technologically overconfident city ignored the time-honoured 

sectional condition and its agency in shaping this terrain. 

Speculations on a New Construct of Ground 

A look at Hurricane Katrina through a more ample historical 

lens frames this recent devastating event less as an isolated 

tragedy and more as the result of a cyclical condition 

inherent to New Orleans. The threat of the storm and its 

occurrence has been ubiquitous to the city and a significant 

shaper of its distinct forms of urbanism. Hurricane Betsy in 

the 1960s, the floods of 1884 and 1927, among others, have 

been critical moments in the city’s history, and substantial 

views about how to engage this land have repeatedly 

emerged from such tragic events. The devastation brought by 

Katrina in August 2005 has raised a wide array of operative 

issues that must be tackled through the re-evaluation of the 

city’s ground and the conception of new organisational 

coalitions that could better respond to New Orleans’ current 

urban problematic and, at the same time, establish a revised 

attitude towards its unsubstantial soil and the infrastructure 

required to make it ground. 

Throughout the 20th century, New Orleans has focused on 

securing a fixed and dry urban imprint through the use of 

extreme mechanisms. Until today, a relatively dry concave 

surface, the exact opposite of the original mound, had been 

artificially constructed through a well-choreographed system 

of levees, spillways and pumps. Katrina’s magnitude 

obliterated the secured urban imprint guaranteed by the 

gargantuan infrastructural initiatives of the last 200 years, 

and the city transmuted from established settlement to a new 

frontier zone that must be reinterpreted and repossessed. 

The city’s quotidian infrastructural practices must be 

provisionally suspended to allow for the emergence of a new 

construct of ground. For one thing, the golden age of public 

works in the city has reached its built-in expiration date. The 

forms of containment still operative in the city were conceived 

The amalgamation of infrastructure that makes up New Orleans’ current ground. 

103

Current sectional analysis of New Orleans comparing topography to land use. 

View of the city from the river. 

for an era in which infrastructure was the backbone of 

development. Levees, drainage canals and pump stations that 

traditionally safeguarded the city’s ground have been neglected 

for many decades, and the moment is ripe for devising new 

ways of negotiating differences between wet and dry. 

The water’s erasure of a large percentage of the urban 

carpet also hints at the potential of redefining the city’s urban 

imprint and establishing diverse mechanisms to contract its 

thin, but overextended, dimensions. In the last 40 years, New 

Orleans has been subject to a massive decline in population. 

Not unlike many other American cities, many dwellers have 

migrated to adjacent suburbs bringing down the numbers 

from 630,000 inhabitants in the 1960s to approximately 

480,000 today. This decrease in population can be directly 

contrasted to a considerable stretch in the urban carpet into 

the lowest areas in the city. New Orleans’ surface has grown 

from 260 square kilometres (100 square miles) in the 1960s to 

466 square kilometres (180 square miles) today, infilling the 

newest areas in the city with thinned-out infrastructure, illdimensioned 

parcels and highly diluted grain. 

In addition, port activities and warehouses that had 

colonised the highest swathe of land along the river edge have 

been subject to major shifts, freeing up a large percentage of 

prime land. The already reduced port operations lean towards 

more compact and compartmentalised cargo mechanisms 

that require less operating space and do not rely as much on 

adjacent storage areas. This has resulted in a long and fairly 

continuous tract of high land as well as a series of more 

discrete parcels adjacent to it, which could conceivably 

become available for development and provide a significant 

104

An empty lot on high ground. 

View of the freeway infrastructure from the river. 

dry surface that could accommodate a large percentage of the 

programmes and uses that today are on the most liable areas. 

Given today’s situation, the primary task is to conceptualise 

an urban framework that is informed by the city’s most 

intense pressure systems: physical, social, economic and 

environmental factors can define a working diagram for the 

reconfiguration of the obsolete infrastructural networks 

altered by the turbulent nature of the storm – one that can 

hint towards a process that goes beyond the casual patching of 

broken levees, and easily explores multiple relationships 

among the diverse oscillating figures currently at play in the 

city. In turn, this will provide an exploratory point of 

departure that allows for the possibility of coalition and 

contestation, and supply a reference point for the unfolding of 

a new construct of ground. 

The possible sources for a tentative framework are infinite, 

and can come from a multitude of contradicting backgrounds. 

It is perhaps the city’s time-honoured idea of using the section 

as an active mechanism that can drive the development of a 

well-attuned reconstruction process. New Orleans, the 

amalgamation of assorted constructs of ground, has resulted 

in a metropolis with a hyperartificial terrain condition where 

discrete stratifications have coalesced into a highly operative 

consolidated entity. It is perhaps in the recognition of this 

thick sectional field as something much more animate and 

operative than a mere historical palimpsest, that the greatest 

potential of reconstruction lies. It is through inventive 

representations and interpretations of this dynamic domain 

that we will be able to rethink relationships between the city 

and the much broader fluid environment that partially owns 

it, and finally conceive strategies that move beyond the 

sectionally mute development practices that have driven the 

urbanisation of New Orleans for the last 50 years. 4 

The preliminary research from which this essay is generated was conducted 

by Joan Busquets and Felipe Correa at the Harvard University Graduate 

School of Design during the 2004–05 academic year. 

Diagram showing the city’s urban imprint before and after Hurricane Katrina. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Felipe Correa 

105

Impressions of 

New Orleans 

106

In August 2005, 80 per cent of New Orleans 

was devastated by flood damage precipitated 

by Hurricane Katrina. Christiana Spens was 

on a college exchange in Memphis when the 

hurricane hit. Here she gives her impressions 

of the city in the wake of the storm. 

One night in a sorority house at the University of 

Mississippi, where I was visiting a friend of a friend during my 

year in Memphis as an exchange student, I heard plans about a 

trip to New Orleans to help clean up the wreckage caused by 

Hurricane Katrina. I signed up and in March we set off on a 

road trip down to the Gulf Coast, into a place torn up by 

natural storms and left to rot by a disengaged government. The 

hurricane had blown by six months ago, and yet the place was 

still a sprawling mass of devastation, a chunk of a metropolis 

no more than broken asphalt and bent foundations. Probably 

the greatest shock was the sense of time halted, as if 

progression had died late last summer. When we arrived at the 

camp there was a lot of talk about the Book of Revelation, 

much preaching and blues of a fundamentalist kind, a whole 

lack of jazz. But a rhythm took hold subtly, with each beat of a 

brick laid down, each scrape of a dig, and the music began to 

play softly in the near-motionless air of New Orleans. 

There is a Dead End sign that may as well be a street sign 

for the strip of devastation it represents. Even the palms are 

dead. Never before has ‘cul-de-sac’ seemed such a profoundly 

literal and depressing term. 

It is early morning and we drive by this particular Dead 

End and a string of others. I sip 50 cent coffee as I see with the 

new clarity of daylight the wasteland in my midst. 

There are structures, but no walls – broken bones but no 

flesh. Billboards and signs are gone, though iron frames 

remain, twisted, entangled in wires. I see a broken piano in a 

wild dry garden, its wood shattered. A boat balances in a 

dead tree. There are driveways but no houses; there are 

roads but no towns. 

Slabs of concrete are hanging, dangling from electrical 

wires. We drive past absent facades, amber lights in lines 

from the street lights that are at last up again, but which 

illuminate not houses but their remains, or their altogether 

absence. We pass school buses wrecked and lying trashed, a 

limousine bathing in mud, and a house where only the 

wooden frame and a staircase remain, with scattered items 

such as faded ID cards, a kitchen knife coated in dry mud, 

broken glass, a typewriter. I wonder what town existed under 

the palm trees six months ago, when August was shining hot. 

I go out driving, one day before dusk, and find a house 

where three white steps and a concrete floor remain. There is 

a memorial altar of a water-damaged photo album, a 1976 

tennis trophy and silk flowers. We realise from one intact 

photo that a family of a couple and their teenage son must 

have died here. 

Inside the square of concrete that marks the definition of 

the house are the remnants of the home. I step carefully over 

a microwave, tools, a toilet, a bath, cabinets, broken bureaus, 

plates, vases. On one table lies an open accounting book, and 

close by a book of local business cards for enterprises that no 

longer exist. A smashed telephone sits on the dusty ground 

amidst papers wrinkled by dried water, lying still in the 

motionless air. I notice an old record, one side bent but the 

label still visible – ‘The Last Waltz’. 

107

The lasting impression of New Orleans is that it still has 

spirit. One student comments on his impression of the 

trashed city: ‘We went into one house and it was awful – 

there was alcohol everywhere!’ There is a kind of Southern 

Comfort to this Revelation. 

We stay in Elysian Fields for a while before receiving orders 

to clean up a cemetery close by – a smaller territory of this 

aptly named district. I cannot help but feel that the remnants 

of New Orleans – its names and rum bottles, its jazz playing 

softly from the food tent – are playing a joke against their 

great abuser, Katrina. Like spirits in a graveyard, everything 

left in Elysian Fields laughs in the dark. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons. Images: pp 106-7 © Christiana Spens; 

p 108(t) © Erich Schlegel/Dallas Morning News/CORBIS; p 108(b) © Ted 

Soqui/CORBIS 

108

Is There a Digital Future 

Landscape Terrain? 

Lorens Holm and Paul Guzzardo speculate on a future landscape enriched by digital 

culture. Rather than provide sanctuary or comfort zones in the event of global environmental 

collapse, laser\net is a model for exploring landscape terrains that establish ‘agora’-like 

meeting places as a basis for electronic exchange and progression. Re-mix platforms thus 

become collaborative sites for all who seek to engage in this rurality. 

Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its 

surfaces for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful grand objects, like 

they hunt cattle in South America, for their skins and leave the 

carcasses of little worth. 

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr, Essay on Photography, 1859 

Landscape Lessons 

Analogue came first. Then there was the digital. But before 

both there was landscape. Media and landscape go back a long 

way. The Cahokia Mounds (Mythographic Station or World 

Heritage Site) formed a city of earthwork platforms where 

urban development, communication and mythology converge. 

Occupied between 800 and 1400, it was the only city north of 

the Rio Grande, home to the Mississippian people, and to over 

120 mounds. The biggest, Monk’s Mound, is the largest-ever 

man-made earthen plaza. With a series of terraces, and at over 

30 metres (98 feet) high, it rose above a cityscape with a 

population of 20,000. This media platform is where the 

arbiters of the Mississippian myths, the high priests, ran it all, 

and ran it into the ground. We do not know why this city 

collapsed and what happened to its residents, but it is 

speculated that it was due to unsustainable development, the 

overplanting and mismanagement of corn, rather than war. 1 

This was how a media platform from our preliterate past 

was supposed to work: a communication node on top of an 

earthen pile. The Mississippians’ myth cracked. We imagine it 

was a spectacular media collapse, one that walked shoulder to 

shoulder with ecological mis-step. Now undeterred and looking 

to the long view, the following is a brief on remythologising 

our landscape by inserting digital media into that terrain. 

Setting the Brief 

laser\net 2 explored narrative-building within the space of an 

interactive installation, and created a re-mix stage. Sound and 

visual images were pulled from an outside ecology: the big 

eye, the big mouse, the big boob. These are the props that 

seeped inside us. 

Re-mix is resistance, representation as resistance, 

resistance to someone else’s media spectacle. Re-mix is the 

way that media artists take ‘culture’ or the ‘outside ecology’ 

that is spewed out everywhere by everyone around us, from 

university lecturers to those ‘el globo’ businesses: Disney, 

Apple, and so on. In a world that is always coming to us 

already emptied, stripped, re-mix breaks it up and circulates it 

again, and sends it back down the road to become our 

mythology. From numbing spectacle to a whispered voice, 

creativity is dependent upon, and cannot escape from, the 

media environment within which it works. Re-mix is the 

ecology, where media environment and natural environment 

converge. Re-mix is an aesthetic of reuse, an ecology of images 

in its most literal form, a sustainable development of sound 

and visual images. It is the brownfield site of visual/aural 

culture. We remythologise the landscape by sampling it 

(sampling the natural environment is different from sampling 

the media environment). 

laser\net is a model for a kind of platform, a screen, upon 

which jane and joe look at each other. It divided one space 

with a two-sided screen. The left side saw the right side on the 

screen, and vice versa. As soon as jane understood she was 

looking at the projection of a space, she started to wave at the 

screen. She saw joe on the screen wave back. ‘I see you seeing 

me’ is the paradigm of subjectivity, the architecture of 

consciousness and its re-mix slippages. Why look at a 

projection of jane when you can see jane? The screen was 

deliciously redundant – as redundant as any art. This is the 

framework for any narrative. When you re-mix narrative, you 

insert yourself into the picture. Narrative becomes a vehicle 

for the identity of the speaker and listener. It becomes a 

feedback loop, in which the narrator sees and hears him- or 

herself. Voice changes: when joe sees jane see him (active), 

they quickly become a group seeing itself (reflexive). laser\net 

made clear the architecture of reflexivity born in any 

narrative environment. 

And What the Alchemist Didn’t Have 

Will Alsop remarked that the countryside is now completely 

plumbed in. In an economy increasingly based on information 

transfer, we can live and work anywhere because we can 

transfer from anywhere. The ubiquity of services 

notwithstanding, there are huge differences between 

living/working in the country and the city, the biggest 

difference being – simply – the difference between country 

109

Cahokia 

and city. The narratives by which we fix ourselves within the 

coordinates of our desire are different. 

What myth of landscape would the Cahokia Mounds speak 

to us if we could reanimate them? What are the narratives of 

the farmer in Fife, the hound hunter in Derby, the plantation 

manager in Argyll, the seaplane constable of the Highlands 

and Islands? Platforms are for modern-day tricksters and 

shamans to tell our stories and their vicissitudes, the story of 

our speaking landscape, the land that could speak for us to us, 

if only we could tell its stories. What are the narratives of the 

land? Digitize it. 3 

Collapse 

We are today hemmed in by stories of environmental collapse. 

A recent issue of the journal Nature headlined ‘Ecological 

complexity untangled: the architecture of ecosystem fragility’. 

A recent Guardian had a full page on water scarcity. Al Gore’s 

documentary on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, plays 

everywhere. If the ecosystem is an architecture, it ought to be 

possible to make its networks visible in ways that most people 

can understand. The asymmetric, intricate nested networks 

that link species into food chains ought to be made visible so 

that we can see how they shift and change when we insert 

ourselves into them. 4 

We all know the world is heating up, we all know we are 

losing our rural culture: yet we are incapable of doing anything 

about it. Most of us don’t wake up in the morning and say 

‘Hmmm, I think I’ll pave a few more acres today. I think I’ll 

drive a few more species to extinction.’ But we do it anyway. It 

is our ‘style’ – lifestyle that is. Remember the truth of jokes? 

Remember ‘I love the smell of napalm in the morning’? The 

environment will be destroyed unless we find the platforms 

from which to mediate our stories about the landscape. 

In ‘The effectiveness of symbols’ Lévi-Strauss describes how 

a shaman is called to attend to a difficult birth. He is called, 

not because he can, but because he cannot, offer medical 

assistance. The horizon of the shamans’ science had not yet 

expanded to encompass what we recognise as natal care. This 

woman is in the hands of the larger order of nature. The role 

of the shaman – like the psychoanalyst – is to fix this event 

that they cannot otherwise understand into the coordinates of 

their symbolic universe, so that what was traumatic and 

frightening becomes assimilable and understandable. 5 

It may be that our fate is environmental death. The digital 

landscape may be our efflorescent Cahokia before the 

collapse. Like the shaman’s myth, narrative explains my world 

to me so that I am able to bear what would otherwise be 

unbearable. A speaking land is about how we can create the 

narratives that allow us to understand our role in our own 

destruction, and by so doing, to take responsibility for it. The 

only way we can take pleasure in what we are doing to 

ourselves is to take responsibility for it. But we pretend not to 

know, and feel victimised by what is seemingly out of our 

control. This project for a future digital landscape terrain is 

laser\net 

110

not therefore about averting disaster by reversing the path of 

unsustainable development (it is, after all, our market 

capitalism). It is about averting disaster by averting denial. We 

need the platforms to write our own stories about the 

landscape, so that we can begin to think about it. And if we 

could think about it, maybe we could do something about it. 

The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name 

We never billed laser\net as the prototype platform to ban 

numbness. It was a rough copy. We are suspicious of the 

capacity of spectacle to aestheticise reality so we can slumber 

in our private narcissisms. It must celebrate darkness 

(nowhere, it seems, do we allow country and city to get dark 

any more). But in this rough copy we know what we want. We 

want landscape terrains as agoras for synthesis and 

awareness. We want to foster participation and criticality. We 

propose re-mix platforms as the sites for collaborations 

between farmers, milkmen, managers, constables, 

contractors, builders, designers, artists, social scientists, even 

anyone with an interest in the land. We need a social science 

practice (what we did not have for laser\net) that will survey 

rural vox popular with the same statistical rigour as we use 

for soap–sex–war, to incorporate vox in the re-mix platform. 

We need a future technology that will sensor the environment 

– imagine crop-dusting the land with microsensors – to 

monitor environmental shifts in food-chain ecology, in 

biodiversity, and make visible how these are effected by land 

use. Without aestheticising them. Make the networks readable 

so that we can insert our stories into them, and so make them 

landscape stories. Let the landscape speak, let the landscape 

become the screen and platform for our stories. 4 

Notes 

1. Cahokia is UNESCO World Heritage Site No 198. Stonehenge, another 

preliterate platform of mytho-astronomical significance, is Site 373. See 

http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=198) 

2. laser\net was an installation commissioned by the Geddes Institute for 

Urban Research, University of Dundee, as part of its AHRC-funded 

interdisciplinary workshop ‘Exploring the Digital City’. It was installed at 

Centrespace at DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts). Designed and installed by 

a collaboration including Lorens Holm and Paul Guzzardo, and John Bell and 

Adam Covell, principals of FXV Ltd London. 

3. We have borrowed ‘speaking land’ from Karen Forbes and Kathryn Findlay 

and Fieldwork, the design research unit founded by Findlay at the Dundee 

School of Architecture in 2005. 

4. See ‘Ecological complexity untangled: the architecture of ecosystem 

fragility’, Nature, Vol 442, No 7100 (20 July 2006), including the following 

papers: Loreau et al, ‘Biological diversity for policy-makers: diversity without 

representation’; Holt, ‘Ecology: asymmetry and stability’; Montoya et al, 

‘Ecological networks and their fragility’; and Rooney et al, ‘Structural 

asymmetry and the stability of diverse food webs’. See also John Vidal, ‘Cost 

of shortage: civil unrest, mass migration and economic collapse’, Guardian, 

17 August 2006, p 25. 

5. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology 1, Penguin Books (London), 

1993, trans Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Images and video stills by 

Lorens Holm and Paul Guzzardo 

111

Contributors 

Lucy Bullivant is an architectural curator, 

critic and author who works internationally. 

Her publications include Responsive 

Environments: Architecture, Art and Design (V&A 

Contemporary, 2006) and Anglo Files: UK 

Architecture’s Rising Generation (Thames & 

Hudson, 2005). She writes for Domus, The Plan, 

a+u and Indesign, and was guest-editor of the 

4dspace: Interactive Architecture (2005) and Home 

Front (2003) issues of AD. She has curated 

exhibitions for the Milan Triennale, Vitra 

Design Museum and the British Council, and 

is consultant curator for the Science Museum. 

Michel Conan is a sociologist, and is currently 

the director of Garden and Landscape Studies 

at Dumbarton Oaks. His research has focused 

on the cultural history of garden design, and 

publications include Quarries of Crazannes by 

Bernard Lassus (Spacemaker Press, 2004) and 

Essais de Poé tique des Jardins (Olschki, 2004). He 

is also the editor of the last nine symposium 

volumes published at Dumbarton Oaks in the 

Colloquium Series on the History of Landscape 

Architecture (Harvard University Press). 

Peter Cook currently leads the Olympics 

Design Group for the London Olympics 

2012. An influential architect and teacher in 

Britain since the 1960s, his impact has been 

truly global. He was a tutor at the 

Architectural Association from 1964 to 1990, 

and is currently a professor of architecture 

at the Bartlett, University College, London, 

and at the Royal Academy of Arts. He was a 

director of ICA (1961–71) and Art Net, London 

(1972–9), and a visiting professor at UCLA 

(1968–9), and has also held several similar 

positions across Europe. He received the Royal 

Gold Medal for Architecture (RIBA, 2002), and 

the Commandeur, Ordre des Arts et Lettres 

France, 2002). He also led the pioneering 

Archigram Group from 1961 to 1976. 

Felipe Correa is currently a design critic in 

urban design at the Harvard University 

Graduate School of Design where he teaches 

in the core urban design studio, as well as 

faculty research seminars on diverse topics 

in urbanism. Among his current research 

projects is ‘Cities – 10 Lines: Approaches to 

City and Open Territory Design’, a faculty 

research initiative in association with Joan 

Busquets that explores the most salient lines 

of work being deployed in the contemporary 

city. Correa received his BArch from Tulane 

University and a Master of Architecture and 

Urban Design from Harvard’s GSD. 

Paul Guzzardo is a lawyer and media 

activist, and a director of MediaARTS 

Alliance. For the last 10 years he has used 

theatre and new media praxis to probe the 

consequences of emerging digitalinformation 

archives on the design and 

occupation of public space. 

Lorens Holm is senior lecturer and director 

of the History/Theory programme at the 

School of Architecture, University of 

Dundee. He has taught at the Architectural 

Association, the Bartlett and the 

Mackintosh, and is a director of the Geddes 

Institute for Urban Research. His 

forthcoming book on architecture and 

psychoanalysis is entitled Brunelleschi Lacan 

Le Corbusier: Constructing Subjectivity. 

Victoria Marshall is a landscape architect 

and urban designer, and founder of TILL, a 

resiliency based practice. She is adjunct 

assistant professor of architecture at 

Columbia University’s Graduate School of 

Architecture Preservation and Planning, 

where she teaches urban design with a focus 

on the North East Megalopolis – translating 

the urban ecosystem approach to urban 

design models. 

Brian McGrath is a co-founder of urbaninterface, 

which explores socio-ecological 

change through urban designs and new 

media. His Manhattan Timeformations 

(2000) (www.skyscraper.org/timeformations) 

has received numerous awards from 

international arts, architecture, educational 

and science organisations. He recently 

completed an artists’ residency and digital 

installation in New York City’s World 

Financial Center, and is currently working 

with an interdisciplinary team on the 

Baltimore Ecosystem Study. 

Jayne Merkel, a contributing editor and 

editorial board member of AD, is the author 

of Eero Saarinen (Phaidon Press, 2005). She 

also writes for Architectural Record and the 

Architects Newspaper, both in New York, and 

other publications. She was previously the 

editor of the New York AIA magazine, Oculus, 

and the architecture critic for the Cincinnati 

Enquirer. She has also taught writing and art 

history at various colleges and universities. 

Juhani Pallasmaa has been practising 

architecture since the early 1960s and 

established Pallasmaa Architects in 1983. In 

addition to architectural design, he has been 

active in urban planning, product and 

graphic design. He has taught and lectured 

widely in Europe, North and South America, 

Africa and Asia, and published numerous 

books and essays on the philosophies of 

architecture and art. He was previously a 

professor at the Helsinki University of 

Technology, director of the Museum of 

Finnish Architecture and rector of the 

Institute of Industrial Arts, Helsinki, and has 

also held visiting professorships at several 

universities in the US. 

Grahame Shane received a Diploma in 

Architecture from the Architectural 

Association, a Master of Architecture in 

Urban Design from Cornell University, and a 

PhD in architectural and urban history from 

Cornell University. His book Recombinant 

Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, 

Urban Design and City Theory was published by 

Wiley-Academy in 2005. 

Christiana Spens was educated in St 

Andrews, Scotland, and Hutchison School in 

Memphis, Tennessee. She currently works as 

a researcher, author and painter in London. 

In 2004/05 she went to Memphis on an 

English Speaking Union Scholarship. She 

has contributed to Studio International 

(www,studio-international.co.uk) and music 

journal rockfeedback.com. During her year in 

the US she travelled and worked in New 

Orleans with a group from the University of 

Mississippi to alleviate the devastation 

caused by Hurricane Katrina. 

Michael Spens qualified as an architect at 

Cambridge University, and has received 

several design awards. He focuses on the 

engagement of architecture with landscape. 

Whilst researching Alvar Aalto, from 1993 

he worked in support of a restoration 

programme for Aalto’s Viipuri Library in 

Russia that involved professionals from 

Russia and Finland, and published Viipuri 

Library 1927–1935: Alvar Aalto (Academy 

Editions, 1994). Knighted by the President of 

Finland, in 2002 he became University Reader 

in Architecture at Dundee University. Other 

publications include Landscape Transformed 

(Academy Editions, l996) and Modern Landscape 

(Phaidon, 2003), and he also contributes to 

AD, Architectural Review, Architectural Research 

Quarterly and Topos (Munich). 

Sean Stanwick is an associate at Farrow 

Partnership Architects Inc in Toronto. With 

a particular interest in contemporary urban 

design, he is a frequent contributor to AD. 

He has written for numerous architectural 

journals worldwide, and recently coauthored 

Wine by Design (2005) and Design 

City Toronto, to be published by John Wiley & 

Sons in March 2007. 

112

C O N T E N T S 

4+ 

114+ 

Interior Eye 

Seoul’s Interior Landscapes 

Howard Watson 

120+ 



West London 

Jeremy Melvin 

126+ 


The Tailored Home: Housebrand 

Loraine Fowlow 

134+ 

Home Run 

Dosson in Casier, Italy 

Valentina Croci 

140+ 


Will McLean 

142+ 

Site Lines 

Night Pilgrimage Chapel 

Laura Moffatt

Interior Eye 

Seoul’s 

Interior 

Landscapes 

Universal Design Studio, Lotte Department Store, 

Seoul, South Korea, 2005–07 

A sculptured wall, made up of individual ceramic 

tiles, runs along the length of the 50-metre (164-foot) 

gallery space to create a sense of cohesion.

The shop floor of the department store has 

increasingly become a cluttered no-man’sland, 

no more than a space between 

competing branded concessions. 

Howard Watson describes how at Lotte, a 

department store in Seoul, South Korea, 

Universal Design Studio has applied its 

subtle decorative design style – first 

launched internationally in the Stella 

McCartney stores – to unifying effect. 

Following the acclaim of the Stella McCartney store designs, 

London-based Universal Design Studio was approached by 

Lotte to help redesign the interiors of its five-storey 

department store in the Myeongdong district of Seoul, South 

Korea. At the same time as understanding that a modern-day, 

upmarket department store must compete with boutiques 

while offering its own cohesive, curated and branded 

experience, the practice addressed one of the major problems 

that have long compromised department store interiors: how 

to explore the drama of a large space while resisting the 

visual monotony that beleaguers the genre and makes it the 

poor cousin of fashion retail design. 

The collaboration with Lotte began in 2005 with the 

commission to redesign just half of the 1,000-square-metre 

(10,764-square-foot) fifth floor, but Universal’s success in 

introducing a type of retail experience quite foreign to Korean 

fashionistas has led to the redesign of the third floor, 

completed in winter 2006, followed by the second half of the 

fifth floor, which is due for completion in spring 2007 and will 

include a café/restaurant area. 

Fashion retail in Seoul is very brand led and, previously, 

Lotte had followed the established template of dividing the 

department store into brand-orientated boxes. The 

operations of Lotte are so diverse – it is as famous for its 

mineral water as it is for selling clothes – that it is virtually 

a ‘non-brand’: in contrast to Virgin, it successfully traverses 

genres by stepping back from a forceful, cross-sector identity. 

Consequently, the department store had little identity 

beyond the franchises it housed, and this suited the local 

retail mindset: wealthy Seoul shoppers expect branded 

boutiques rather than a desegregated, multibrand experience 

where they can graze. Unusually in an era where the 

motivation of much high-profile retail design is to create 

individual pockets of experience as a reaction against the 

homogenous whole, Universal Design Studio needed to 

break down the barriers and extend some idea of 

The design of the luxury accessories section on the third floor, completed 

in 2006, is highly geometric, with almost all elements based on a 

triangular form. The Corian shoe displays tilt up towards the customers.

Beetle-ipos 

12. 1"m onitor 

key board 

key board 

Beetle-ipos 

12. 1"m onitor 

pr in ter 

pr in ter 

pho ne 

tissue 1000 x 700 

tissue 1000 x 700 

pho ne 

C L 

Plan of the first phase of the fifth-floor development, with Universal 

Design Studio’s new gallery, including three screened rooms, in the 

lower central section. 

DN 

UP 

UP FROM 4F 

DOWN TO 4F 

DN 

UP 

mirror 

This spread and overleaf: Two of the ‘rooms’ in the fifth-floor gallery, with 

the same irregular, crisscross pattern used for very different effects.

Render of the three types of screen, using the same cross-hatched 

pattern in different materials.

Render of the third-floor design. The white, triangular shoe display units are 

freestanding and can be regrouped for a variety of formations. 

homogeneity into the fifth floor, creating a ‘Lotte 

experience’ beyond the women’s luxury labels. 

Jonathan Clarke, director of Universal, infused the concept 

with his preference for ‘a space that was much more about 

curation’, whereby an overarching intelligence actively places 

potentially diverse objects together to create a unique, 

layered environment. This approach was blended with Lotte’s 

own desire for a design that combined ‘elegance’ and 

‘garden’, which it called ‘Eliden’, a rather clunky composite 

of the two words. 

Part of Universal’s success is based on its creation of 

textured space through the use of pattern in a variety of 

materials and scales. This has been used to great effect in 

smaller retail spaces, but the breadth of the Lotte project 

allowed the idea to be taken further. The individual 

concession boxes were cleared out and replaced by three 

distinct areas, which nonetheless remain visually connected 

within a 50-metre (164-foot) long gallery. The same, irregular 

crisscross pattern emerges in a series of screens in different 

materials that delineate the three areas: fret-cut, blacklacquered 

timber; screenprinted glass; and fabric. Combining 

transparency and separation through the use of screens 

obviously draws upon oriental design and also satisfies a local 

cultural leaning towards physical privacy. 

Adding to the overall cohesiveness is a timber floor and, 

running the entire length of the gallery, a wall of threedimensional 

ceramic tiles, similar to those used in the 

McCartney design, but here drawing upon the traditional 

Korean interest in textiles and pattern-making. Display 

systems include perforated sheets of vertical glass (with the 

clothes hangers inserted into the holes), suspended rails and 

clear glass units. 

The third-floor accessories department has also been 

redesigned by Universal. Again, the rabbit warren of 

concessions has been cleared out to create a dynamic, central 

space. Clarke used the privacy of screens once more, as 

‘accessories are highly personal’, while also lending the space 

a feeling of transparency. The screens and the displays 

become one within floor-to-ceiling glass cases, inserted with 

underlit metal shelves. However, the most striking aspect of 

the display system is a series of low-level, triangular Corian 

units that can be placed together in different formations. The 

Corian surfaces are tilted to display shoes at an angle, and 

Clarke says this is a response to the fact that shoes are rarely 

displayed in the way that we usually see them. The triangular 

units pick up on the hard geometry of the design: regimented 

triangles also form the pattern of the flooring, the black 

Plexiglass ceiling and the screens. The masculinity is softened, 

though, by the shadow pattern of dappled leaves (inspired by 

the stained impression of leaves on pavements) visible 

through the top layer of Corian. Initially, further moderation 

was to be provided by columns clad in living moss, but this 

idea proved unworkable, giving way to a green marble. 

On both floors, Universal has managed to create a balance 

between the identity of the store and the brands, using 

pattern and texture to offer a sense of event while also 

bringing a refreshing intelligence to product display. 4 

Howard Watson is an author, journalist and editor based in London. He is coauthor, 

with Eleanor Curtis, of the new 2nd edition of Fashion Retail, Wiley- 

Academy, March 2007, isbn 0470066474, £34.99. See www.wiley.com. Previous 

books include Bar Style (2005), The Design Mix: Bars, Cocktails and Style 

(2006) and Hotel Revolution: 21st-Century Hotel Design (2005), also 

published by Wiley-Academy. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Universal Design Studio 

119+



West London 

The borderlands of Notting Hill and Shepherd’s Bush – at the very fringes of the Westway – 

have become the site of London’s largest new privately owned artspace. A nonprofit 

foundation funded by Louise T Blouin MacBain, the Canadian CEO of a global media 

business and an arts philanthropist, the institute has been designed both as a home for the 

Blouin Foundation and as an effective showcase for the work of newly emerging and 

established artists. Jeremy Melvin describes how architects Borgos Dance have used the 

‘intriguing’ exterior of an old coachbuilder’s workshop to their advantage, in hewing out a 

‘compelling’ new interior. 

120+

As long as some people want to make art and others want to 

experience it, there will be fervid debates about the best 

circumstances in which this experience should take place. If 

the only consensus is that there is no ideal or perfect way to 

appreciate art, the recent clutch of new, small-scale and 

sometimes specific venues in various locations in London’s 

central fringe is very positive. In both design and curatorial 

ideas they can take risks that state-funded institutions like 

Tate, the South Bank and Covent Garden never can, rather as 

small shops provide an essential counterpart to large 

retailers. They are opportunities to see both different work 

and the same work in different circumstances, whether Bill 

Viola’s installation at the Haunch of Venison, the Siobhan 

Davies Dance Company in their new studios, or the James 

Turrell exhibition that launched the Louise T Blouin 

Foundation’s programme. 

This institute, in a building converted according to the 

designs of Borgos Dance, is only a few blocks away from the 

stuccoed terraces of Notting Hill in west London. On the welltrodden 

route between home and work at Shepherd’s Bush for 

senior BBC executives, it has seen a slow influx of creative 

activity. Chrysalis Records and Marino Testino’s studios are 

nearby as the traditional industrial businesses have moved on 

or folded, and Monsoon Accessorize is moving to a new built 

headquarters next door to the institute in 2008. However 

creative they are, these organisations are essentially private 

1 

2 

1 Olaf Street 

2 LTB Institute 

Borgos Dance, Louise T Blouin Institute, London, 2006 

Site plan. The institute is in a formerly industrial area of west London, where residential communities are making a 

comeback, and not far from Notting Hill’s stuccoed streets. 

A former coachworks for luxury cars, the new design strips the building of its industrial essence. 

121+

1 Entrance lobby void 

2 North stair core 

3 Open-plan space 

4 Offices 

5 Butler station 

6 South stair core 

2 

3 4 

5 

1 

6 

Second-floor plan. Structural gymnastics give the exhibition space 

on this floor the possibility of top daylight. 

In the second-floor gallery, the roof lantern conceals the steel 

trusses that run lengthways and support the first and second 

floors, leaving the ground floor column-free. 

122+

7 

1 Entrance lobby void 


3 Open-plan space 

4 Offices 

5 CEO meeting room 

6 CEO office 

7 CEO terrace 

8 Butler station 


1 

2 

8 6 

3 4 5 

9 

First-floor plan. There is further exhibition space and more 

administrative offices on this floor. Note the window in the bottom 

left corner of the gallery space which looks into the entrance 

lobby’s triple-height space. 

6 

8 

3 

1 

4 5 

7 

2 

9 10 

1 Entrance 

2 Entrance lobby 


4 Exhibition space entrance 

5 Exhibition space 

6 Courtyard café 

7 Meeting room 

8 Kitchen 


10 Car park 

Ground-floor plan. Much of the ground floor is a clear, but 

fully serviced space sandwiched between two service riser 

walls that can be adapted to a wide range of exhibitions and 

presentations. The entrance space is triple height. 

123+

7 6 7 

5 

4 

1 

2 3 


2 Courtyard café 

3 Storage 

4 First-floor open-plan space 

5 Second-floor open-plan space 

6 Skylight 

7 Roof-level plant enclosure 

Cross-section. A long, thin lantern runs down the centre 

of the top floor. On the right, adjoining the ground-floor 

gallery, is the courtyard café. 

9 

8 

6 

4 

8 9 

7 

5 

1 

2 

3 

1 Entrance lobby 


3 Meeting room 

4 First-floor open-plan space 

5 Offices 

6 Second-floor open-plan space 

7 Second-floor offices 

8 Skylight 

9 Roof-level plant enclosure 

Long section. Though similar in plan, the three levels of 

gallery space have different characters, lighting 

conditions and ceiling heights. 

and not open to the public. The Blouin Institute, though 

entirely privately funded, is open to the public and not a 

commercial venture, and so adds a new dimension both to the 

character of the immediate area and to the possibilities for 

presenting art in London. 

The institute draws both on the area’s building stock and 

its changing character. Dating from the 1920s, the building 

originally housed a coachbuilder for luxury cars, but was 

converted into studios, workshops and offices in the 1980s in 

a way that compromised its utilitarian qualities, which are 

often appropriate for contemporary arts venues. Covering 

about 3,250 square metres (34,983 square feet) over three 

floors, enough of the original character remained, however, 

for Louise Blouin MacBain to spot its potential as a 

permanent London location for her art foundation when she 

saw it in 2004. She turned to Borgos Dance, who had 

designed several stands at international art fairs for her, to 

design the conversion. 

As Simon Dance explains, the aim was not just to re-create 

the old coachbuilding workshops where Rolls-Royces, Bentleys 

and Daimlers were turned out to the specification of rich buyers, 

but also to intensify the buildings’s essential character. On the 

outside the designers not only cleaned up the London stock 

brick facades, but also rationalised the openings, eliminating 

both later alterations and the abnormalities that practicality 

may have rendered necessary. A significant number of piers and 

arched windows were rebuilt, all in load-bearing masonry. The 

implication of an industrial building pared down to its essence 

and then transformed into ‘what it really wants to be’, as Louis 

Kahn might have said, is made explicit in the permanent 

lighting installation designed with James Turrell. This highlights 

the windows at night, turning the building into a beacon that 

the BBC executives can see from their Television Centre 

fortress across a cityscape that includes the motorway linking 

Shepherd’s Bush with the Westway, the vast new White City 

shopping centre and a site on which Rem Koolhaas has designs. 

124+

The courtyard café lies outside the main wall, an escape from the intensity of 

an exhibition but also allowing views back into the gallery. 

In the entrance lobby, the powerful, three-storey diagonal wall leads to the 

reception desk, which itself points towards the way into the gallery. 

If the exterior is intriguing, the interior is compelling. 

Behind a full-height door in the northern wall is a triple-height 

entry space with a diagonal wall running from the door to the 

reception desk and a waiting area in the right angle of this 

triangle. White-painted and grey-floored, its texture comes 

from a multiplicity of light and shadow, and depending on the 

institute’s programme sometimes includes displays. The main 

exhibition space lies behind the desk. Sandwiched between 

two deep walls, which contain the mechanical and electrical 

services, it is an essential part of the design strategy to keep 

the gallery space as open plan as possible. 

This also called for some ingenious structural engineering 

from Arup. In the centre of the building, running parallel with 

its long axis, is a rooflight that brings daylight into the top 

floor. On either side are 27-metre (89-foot) long deep beams 

from which the top and first floors are hung, leaving columnfree 

space on the ground floor of 465 square metres (5,005 

square feet) and 4 metres (13 feet) high, with the loads 

brought to the ground on columns at either end of the beams. 

For its opening exhibition, the Turrell retrospective, it has 

been divided into a series of cellular spaces whose limits and 

shapes are called into question by Turrell’s lightworks. In one, 

a deep-blue light seems to be a screen, but trying to touch it 

reveals that it is actually a space. Others play with the notion 

of the actual limits and shapes of spaces. 

These effects obviously require the windows to be blanked 

out. Though this configuration shows one aspect of the window 

detailing, which includes blinds for filtering or blanking out 

daylight as well as artificial lighting, the possibility of being 

entirely open and daylit appeals to Dance as it shows off the 

architectural concept more clearly. The institute’s remit, he 

explains, includes performances and film showings as well as 

exhibitions, implying a sense of interaction. 

Central to this aim is a long, thin café, carved out of what 

was an irregular and derelict courtyard between the building 

and the site perimeter. A long, subtle curve conceals the 

irregularities and a store alongside the boundary, giving the 

illusion of space, while the ultra-clear glass gives the 

impression of being outside. The full-height openings in the 

original facade could potentially give views into the gallery. 

Even with such views blocked out, the café is a congenial 

space, and by breaking through the building’s surface 

provides a restful and slightly detached area which recognises 

that looking at art can be physically and mentally demanding, 

but may also benefit from the possibility of refreshment and 

social contact. The offices are concealed behind the southern 

service wall on the first and second floors, with a meeting 

room below them on the ground floor. 

In diagrammatic terms the design concept is simple, but 

it demands a high degree of technical skill to achieve such 

effects with deceptive ease. What is really impressive, 

though, is not the technology, but the concept, which shows 

a sensitivity to the area’s history and future possibilities and 

to the experience of looking at art. In this sense, 

architecture and art are very close: the concept treats the 

building as a found object, but one that has inherent 

qualities that can speak to us precisely for its apparent 

ordinariness. What the design does is to find them, make 

them manifest, and use them as a subtle background to 

whatever display or event may take place within them. It 

will be interesting to see what happens as the institute’s 

programme unfolds. 4 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 120, 122(b) & 125 © Hélène 

Binet; pp 121, 122(t), 123 & 124 © 2006 Borgos Dance 

125+


The Tailored Home 

Housebrand 

Loraine Fowlow describes how in Calgary, Alberta, Canada’s fifth biggest city, John Brown 

has established Housebrand, a practice that is notable both for its innovative approach to 

residential design and for its adeptness in understanding its client base and the particular 

context of the Calgary housing market. The company has masterfully matched its own skills 

and services to customer demand in a way that is almost unprecedented within the 

architectural profession. 

126+

We need to build homes with care, not cookie cutters. 

Housebrand’s Tailored Home philosophy 

John Brown and his unique form of residential design are 

transforming the rules of engagement for architects and 

clients while expanding the sustainability of established 

neighbourhoods. Housebrand expands the services of an 

architect beyond design to include property acquisition, 

construction and interior design. The result is a vertically 

integrated, one-stop shopping experience that makes the 

process of creating a new home in an established community 

less stressful and more cost effective. 

After architectural and engineering studies at the 

universities of Manitoba and Texas, as well as Columbia 

University in New York, John Brown returned to his home 

town of Calgary to launch his own practice and a teaching 

career with the architecture programme at the University of 

Calgary’s Faculty of Environmental Design. In addition to his 

architectural registration, he obtained his licence as a realestate 

agent. In collaboration with principals Carina van Olm 

and Matthew North, his relatively normative practice has 

morphed within the last five years to become Housebrand, an 

innovative approach to residential design that has garnered 

national recognition from the Royal Architectural Institute of 

Canada in the form of the 2003 Award of Excellence for 

Innovation in Architecture. Brown also takes the firm’s 

approach to audiences beyond Calgary, with publications and 

lectures aimed at both students and practising architects. The 

unique approach of Housebrand is nothing short of a complete 

renovation of the manner in which residential design and 

construction occurs – and its influence is spreading. 

Within the typical North American city, housing accounts 

for the single largest land use, and constitutes the largest 

investment most people will ever make. Combined, these two 

facts delineate the enormous impact of housing on the 

design and construction industries, and yet fewer than 7 per 

cent of all houses constructed in North America involve the 

use of an architect. Therefore, architectural practice has little 

to no involvement in the primary, contemporary formation 

of North American cities – a fact that should be deeply 

troubling to the profession. 

But the variables involved in this scenario include factors 

that lie beyond the profession itself; these include the process 

for land acquisition for residential purposes, the residential 

construction industry and municipal development practices, 

as well as the architect–client relationship. And it is these 

additional aspects to the process of residential construction 

and design that Housebrand has brought into the realm of the 

architects’ consideration. 

Calgary is the fifth largest metropolitan region in Canada 

with a population of 1,060,300 (2005), and the largest between 

Toronto and Vancouver. Occupying an area of 721 square 

kilometres (278 square miles), it is mostly composed of 

postwar suburbs centred on the downtown core of high-rise 

development. Although the Calgary area is greater than the 

land areas of both Toronto and New York City, it is mostly 

made up of vast swathes of single-family dwellings. Suburban 

construction continues apace today, fuelled by the now 

consistently buoyant oil and gas industries, stretching the 

city’s limits further into the countryside each year. 

The normative context for new residential development in 

Calgary involves the purchase of large undeveloped areas by 

private development companies who either sell parcels to 

smaller developers or develop the entire area themselves. 

Although developers may include architects within their 

employment ranks, the process of buying a new house in one 

of these developments is more akin to purchasing a kitchen at 

Ikea than it is to hiring an architect. Focused more on the 

process of constructing and selling homes than on the 

product itself, the development industry has formulated a 

process that essentially bypasses meaningful involvement in 

design for the home buyer. 

Should a buyer wish to purchase a home in an older, more 

established neighbourhood, closer to the city’s core and with 

established amenities and mature landscaping, the options 

are limited. Existing homes can either be renovated, 

demolished or removed, raising the overall costs well beyond 

the base price normally found in a new suburban 

development. Often the value of the land in these 

neighbourhoods is far greater than the house itself. The 

additional costs of design and construction of either a 

renovation or new home on an established plot places this 

option beyond the means of many buyers, particularly young 

families. The normative renovated home option also brings 

further complications and costs in the form of plot purchase 

and bridge financing required to cover accommodation during 

time of construction. 

Market research undertaken by Brown’s firm in 2002 

revealed that the average price at the time for a new 

suburban home was $240,000, with 65 per cent of the Calgary 

housing market, new or used, in the price range between 

$180,000 and $375,000. An additional analysis uncovered the 

fact that 61 per cent of Calgary’s existing housing stock is 

over 25 years old and therefore can reasonably be assumed to 

be in some need of ugrading. 

Coupling the statistics of average new-home price range 

with the housing stock prime for renovation, the conclusion 

reached by the firm was that there was a potentially 

significant portion of the new-housing market that may be 

interested in the alternate choice of a desirable inner-city 

neighbourhood, as opposed to the distanced sterility of a new 

suburb. The detailed analysis concluded a possible annual 

Bungalow to Two-Storey, near central Calgary, 2006 

Rear view. 

127+

Front and back elevations. 

Bungalow to Two-Storey, near central Calgary, 2006 

The renovation of this 232-square-metre (2,500-square-foot) home 

consisted of a second-floor addition to a 1945 bungalow located 

on the edge of the centre of the city. The main floor of the 

bungalow was converted to bedroom space, with the living areas 

located in a single loft space on the first floor. A band of glazing 

on the rear facade opens the first floor to a city view. The simple, 

sloped roof massing and metal siding is designed to create an 

emblematic silhouette on the ravine edge. 

Original house. 

128+

market of 5,600 properties fitted within the parameters of 

average price range, plus eligible housing stock – a not 

inconsiderable potential. Specifically, young couples purchasing 

their first or second home, plus retirees interested in 

downsizing but still looking for the amenities of an established 

neighbourhood, were deemed to be the potentially strong 

market for a new approach to renovating existing homes. 

The real attraction, however, of moving into this area was 

the possibility of offering this market segment architectural 

opportunities not currently available. In other words, to 

explore the potential of dramatically increasing that 7 per 

cent of the housing market not currently utilising the skills of 

an architect. Thus, the Tailored Home was born. 

The development of the Tailored Home approach involved 

revisiting the architect–client relationship as well as 

streamlining the process, while maintaining the individual 

attention to client needs that architectural services usually 

offer. Although framed against the backdrop of the 

traditional architect–client relationship, Housebrand’s client 

involvement actually begins prior to the commencement of 

design proper. The process begins with discussions with 

clients focusing on the identification of needs, abilities and 

priorities. A target pro-forma is developed that allocates 

project funds to the base house purchase, the architectural 

improvements, and any required furnishings. The approach 

also includes the rule of thumb of not generally adding any 

square footage, as well as reusing only a portion of the 

original house. Therefore, finding the right house is 

extremely important to the success of the Tailored Home. 

One stumbling block faced by many families who are 

interested in renovation is the task of finding the right 

location and property and arranging suitable financing. In 

addition to architectural and construction services, 

Housebrand also acts as real-estate agent and assists clients 

with finding an appropriate location as part of the Tailored 

Home process. Housebrand negotiates the purchase, and times 

initial occupancy for the construction start. Financing is 

arranged to include the purchase price of the house, the firm’s 

professional fees and cost of all anticipated improvements and 

the carrying costs required to allow the client to remain in 

their current home until completion of construction. 

Beginning the process with the acquisition of the land 

itself, taking it through to designing the interior of the 

completed house and providing furnishings and fixtures was a 

logical development. The firm has transformed its traditional 

architectural office, located in downtown Calgary, into a 

publicly accessible demonstration centre, which serves four 

functions. As an exposition pavilion the centre is open for the 

general public to browse and discover the latest developments 

in residential design, as well as the option of redeveloping an 

inner-city property. As a showroom it is a place for potential 

clients to meet Housebrand sales staff and learn about the 

firm’s collection of residential products and comprehensive 

set of services. For clients and staff it is a working studio 

environment in which design and specifications can be 

developed. Finally, the centre is used for free monthly public 

architectural lectures delivered by Brown. 

The underlying key to making the Tailored Home approach 

work is solving the economics, and this includes locating 

savings that traditional suburban developers discovered long 

ago: for example, using similar detailing across projects and 

hiring the same tradespeople who are familiar with the firm’s 

approach and details, thereby saving time and money. 

Other savings can be found in supplying furniture and 

fixtures, which actually contributes to the consistency of 

design quality across projects. Products carried by Housebrand 

include those by Canadian furniture company BENSEN, 

Canadian lighting company BOCCI, and US fireplace 

manufacturer VISION, and the firm also has its own customdyed 

carpet manufactured in New Zealand through a local 

supplier. Practice principals travel to trade shows in Paris, 

Milan, New York and Los Angeles and import furniture, tiles, 

plumbing fixtures and accessories that are unique to 

Housebrand. The firm also manufactures limited runs of its 

own products, such as mailboxes, beds, tables and assorted 

built-in furniture pieces. 

Several custom homes each year, significantly larger and in 

a far higher price range, both feed the firm’s bottom line and 

provide a working laboratory and testing ground for the 

Tailored Homes in terms of design aspects such as details, 

materials, finishes and products. Housebrand, at present, 

produces approximately 40 Tailored Homes per year, but 

demand is far higher. The firm consciously sets a limit on the 

number in order to ensure sufficient attention and care for 

each project. The market for the Tailored Home is typically the 

young professional couple, as well as the empty nesters 

looking to downsize their accommodation. Calgary’s largest 

demographic at 25 per cent consists of 25- to 45-year-old, 

primarily university-educated professionals, with a median 

age of 35 – the lowest of Canada’s six largest cities. Half of 

these are aged 25 to 35, and this percentage is growing at a 

rate of 3 per cent per year. Therefore, the Tailored Home 

market is only growing as the city’s population continues to 

expand at a rapid rate. 

The Tailored Homes design approach has evolved over the 

last few years, but really began with the primary belief that 

everyone deserves good design, as well as the opportunity to 

work with an architect towards fulfilling their residential 

aspirations. Therefore, the actual architectural approach to the 

Tailored Home is really the same as with a far more expensive, 

new custom home. The same uncompromising aesthetic is 

applied, but within a far more streamlined process of design 

and construction. Although Housebrand now regularly fields 

requests to open offices in other cities, the firm has, to date, 

refused to entertain the possibility, given the pointedly 

localised focus of its work. In order for the Tailored Home 

129+

Entry detail. 

130+

Bungalow to Loft, southwest Calgary, 2005 

A postwar bungalow, the original 111-square-metre (1,200-square-foot) home and attached garage 

occupied an L-shaped plan. The renovation extended the living space into the original single-car 

garage, and added a double-attached garage in the corner of the L-plan. A single pitched roof was 

added over the entire structure. The original floor plan of the bungalow was opened up into a loft-style 

plan, and the exterior was refinished with a combination of stucco and cedar. 

Front elevation. 

Original front elevation. 

131+

Loft area. 

Split-Level to Loft, southwest Calgary, 2004 

This renovation of a split-level in a 1960s neighbourhood primarily involved removing walls in order to 

open up the main floor into a loft-like space, using furnishings, fittings and free-standing walls for 

space delineation. The kitchen and dining areas changed places, and the original oak flooring was 

matched and extended throughout the main floor. Creating a drywall bulkhead over the fireplace 

instead of a mantle, and massing a smaller amount of more expensive tile on the wall area below, is a 

stylish but cost-saving move. New dark-stained cherry cabinetry and composite granite counters 

contribute to the overall modern aesthetic throughout. 

Living room. 

132+

concept to work as a process, designers must both understand 

and work within the limitations of local construction practices, 

climate, municipal code issues and politics, as well as 

materials and product availability. In other words, Italian 

marble will not be specified for a Tailored Home when there is 

a locally available stone. Likewise, understanding the 

normative local practices of the various construction trades 

helps enormously in ensuring the realistic achievement of 

design details. Thus in the interests of economics, many design 

decisions with the Tailored Home are actually driven by these 

local processes and constraints. 

The professional approach adopted by Brown and 

Housebrand is really based on the desire to architecturally 

resist the normative new suburban development, and this, the 

firm’s principals concluded, meant creating a design and 

construction process that was as easy for the Housebrand 

home buyer as the process for a typical suburban home. 

With the dual goals of providing a residential architectural 

service that is as easy as that offered by suburban developers, 

and expanding the architectural development of established 

Calgary neighbourhoods, Housebrand is providing a 

meaningful alternative to the process of designing and 

renovating residential properties. The practice is also 

expanding the demographic that is able to hire an architect 

and engage in personalised design within a reasonable budget. 

Loraine Fowlow is Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Architecture 

in the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary, Canada. 

She is an award-winning writer with a focus on the area of the (in)authentic 

environment, and her writing on this subject has been presented in Oxford, 

Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Portugal and numerous American cities. She is coauthor 

of the book Wine by Design (Wiley-Academy, 2005), and her work 

has appeared in the Design Journal, Canadian Encyclopedia and many 

other publications. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Housebrand Construction Ltd 

Resumé 

John L Brown 

1980 

BSc (Civil Engineering), University of Manitoba 

1983 

MArch, University of Texas 

1984 

MSc (Building Design), Columbia University 

1997–2000 

Co-director, Architecture Programme, Faculty of 

Environmental Design, University of Calgary 

2000 

Founded Housebrand 

2002 

Prairie Design Award, Alberta Association of 

Architects, for Housebrand’s Millennium 

Landmark structure, Millennium Park, Calgary 

2003 

Award of Excellence for Innovation in 

Architecture, Royal Architectural Institute of 

Canada 

2006 

Prairie Design Award for the Housebrand’s 

Rothney Astrophysical Observatory Visitor 

Centre, Calgary 

1984–5 

Hellmuth Obata Kassabaum Architects, Dallas, 

Texas 

1985 

Professor of Architecture, Faculty of 


1985–6 

Andrishak & Sturgess Architects, Calgary 

1987 

Founded Zeug Design 

1990–3 

Director, Architecture Programme, Faculty of 


1995 

Founded Studio Z 

Housebrand principals Matthew North, Carina 

van Olm and John Brown. 

133+

Home Run 

Dosson 

in Casier, 

Italy 

Valentina Croci describes a sensitive local housing scheme at Dosson in Casier, near Treviso 

in northeastern Italy, by Amaca Architetti Associati. Designed jointly with adjacent green 

spaces in a system integrating housing units and the countryside, it is a perceptive piece of 

urban planning that is as responsive to the natural landscape as the existing architecture. 

134+

At a time when architects’ work is increasingly national, if not 

global, the designers of the housing units at Dosson in Casier 

are extraordinary for their determined locality. Amaca 

Architetti Associati is based in Treviso, in the Veneto region of 

northeastern Italy, only 4 kilometres (2 1 / 2 miles) from the site 

of the housing scheme. This is how the architects have chosen 

to develop their practice. 1 Their work is primarily based 

within the Veneto, and their main interests are in housing 

and the relationship between architecture and the landscape. 

Their approach is one that is particularly relevant given the 

context within which they work. 

In the Veneto, the natural landscape has become precious. 

A historic area that was once known as the terra firma, or 

agricultural base, of the Venetian Empire, it is now made up 

of a succession of tiny towns. These were built up primarily 

after the Second World War close to the thoroughfares and 

industrial areas that define the ‘urbanised countryside’. 

Lacking a metropolitan centre, the area is neither truly rural 

nor urban. The Veneto can best be characterised as urban 

sprawl with low-density residential development, punctuated 

by a few breaths of open countryside. 

The housing scheme at Dosson in Casier gave the Amaca 

studio the unique opportunity to configure a large plot of 

undeveloped land that had the virtues of overlooking a fairly 

open countryside and being located near a historic village. 

Featuring a church and a partially reconstructed 19th-century 

village centre, Dosson in Casier also includes an 18th-century 

Venetian villa with a pretty north-facing garden. In 1998, 

Amaca (G Arch studio at the time) took part in a competition 

to build up the area, and in 2000 drafted an executive plan 

that included both configuring the residential area and 

connecting it to the main road network. 

The project consists of three rows of residential blocks (the 

one in the middle is still under construction) placed parallel to 

one another and with declining residential density and height 

as they move towards the southern countryside. The block 

nearest to the village is subsidised residential housing, but all 

the blocks have been designed jointly with the adjacent green 

spaces in a system integrating housing and the countryside. 

Here, land development and housing development become one. 

Differing from the previous development plan approved by 

the city planning department, in which it was intended to 

run a small waterway underground and build a road that 

would have cut the area diagonally from the centre of the 

village to the countryside, Amaca proposed moving the public 

road to the village to the west of the site and locating only 

private roads within the area, differentiating between vehicle 

and pedestrian paths. The new plan retains the waterway, 

which is important for the hydrogeological balance of the 

area, which is prone to flooding, and organises the southeast 

area, which includes an existing sports centre, so that it is 

accessible from the historic centre. However, the idea of 

running a public road to the west of the residential site was 

rejected in favour of a new ‘green passage’ between the 

sports centre and the three blocks that connect the 

countryside to the historic centre and the centre to the 18thcentury 

villa’s garden. This hierarchical organisation of the 

road network is important, and sets the project apart from 

the usual simple planning of residential developments. 

Another aspect of the project that makes it stand out from 

the usual is the placing of the subsidised housing block near 

the historic centre, as this type of housing is usually placed 

outside of the centre because of its typically high density and 

lower value. In contrast, the idea here is to decrease 

residential density in the surrounding countryside. The 

subsidised housing scheme is made up of three residential 

units covering a total area of 8,050 square metres (86,649 

square feet). Simple parallelepipeds, the three units have the 

unique feature of patio houses which appear as if ‘inserted’ in 

their bases. These single-storey volumes emerge from the 

ground floors of the parallelepipeds, unifying the units in a 

continuous front towards the pedestrian entrance. In 

addition, the staggering of the horizontal feature of the 

patios, coming out from the geometry of the parallelepipeds, 

creates shared green courtyards, all with different depths. The 

differentiation between the ground floors with patios and the 

parallelepids towering above is also highlighted by the use of 

The project includes three rows of residential blocks, one of which is subsidised housing, with the heights and 

densities of the blocks decreasing towards the countryside. Within the scheme, pedestrian and vehicle entrances are 

differentiated. Contrary to usual practice, the high-density building is located near the historic centre. 

135+

The subsidised residential housing consists of staggered horizontal buildings with south-facing entrances. On the ground floor, 

single-storey volumes, emanating from the parallelepiped towering above, create a common facade and shared courtyards. 

The ground floor of the subsidised buildings consists of projecting entrances and a continuous exposed-brick base 

that help to define a unified facade to the south. 

136+

On the first floor of the subsidised housing complex, the facades are screened by continuous terraces and projecting 

balconies on the upper storey that are overlooked by the living spaces. Sunbreakers are used to create more privacy. 

different finishes for the walls: plaster for the horizontal 

buildings, and exposed brick for the patio houses. All the 

horizontal buildings face south for greater sun exposure, and 

offer views over the surrounding countryside. 

Amaca’s subsidised housing optimally differentiates, with 

just a few clever design elements, a residential type whose 

nature does not allow for much compositional creativity. For 

example, in order to increase privacy in the apartment blocks, 

the firm designed a series of sunbreakers that screen the 

continuous terraces overlooked by the living spaces. On the 

upper storeys, the terraces become balconies, varying the 

continuity of the facades, and some of the south-facing 

apartments feature small, covered roof terraces rising above 

the roof – a feature typical of Venetan architecture. Every 

apartment has its own character, avoiding the usual 

homogeneity of this kind of speculative building. 

The layout of the row of residential buildings nearest the 

countryside is more complex. Here, two units of five terrace 

houses each cover 4,017 square metres (43,239 square feet). 

The first three houses of each unit have the same 

distributional and volumetric layouts, with internal patios 

and gardens at the front connected by a small pergola-covered 

walkway. The layout of the fourth houses mirrors that of the 

first three, while the houses on the outer edges of each unit 

are single storey, with a patio that opens to the countryside. 

For this residential complex, Amaca started out with a local 

scheme for the row house with a north–south arrangement, 

3 to 4 metres (9.8 to 13 feet) of garden to the front, a 7-metre 

(23-foot) deep housing body and a back garden. This layout had 

the obvious problems of an introverted floor plan and limited 

privacy. However, the introduction of a small interior patio 

creates greater sun exposure and an intimate space screened 

by the sunbreakers on the windows of the houses opposite. 

The entrances were resolved by modulating the volumes of the 

facades, which are visually connected by an exposed-brick 

continuous base. The brick base also generates shared 

courtyards at the front of the buildings, where garage 

entrances alternate with the entrances to the houses, set in 

recessed niches. Likewise, in the subsidised building units, the 

first storey of the houses is a parallelepiped volume (the 

137+

In the complex next to the countryside, the view from the back gardens shows the compositional variation 

of the local scheme for row houses. 

The row of buildings facing the countryside consists of two units of five 

houses. The first three houses have the same floor plan, which is mirrored in 

the fourth house. The last house has a patio layout on a single floor that 

opens to the countryside. The ground floor adds some single-storey volumes 

that help define a small courtyard in front of the houses. 

138+

The two units of five houses that form the complex next to the countryside are unified by a continuous 

exposed-brick base, within which are set the garages and the entrances to the houses. A projecting 

structure, clad in copper, houses the stairs to the first floor. 

bedrooms face on to this), and the ground floor is made up of 

low structures that contribute to defining the interior patio 

and the rear garden. The patio exposure is favoured by the 

proportions of the adjoining house’s roof. The privacy of these 

spaces is guaranteed by full-height sunbreakers on the upperstorey 

windows of the adjoining house. 

Minor variations in the use of materials help avoid 

homogeneity in the housing in this scheme. With limited 

resources (bricks, plaster and copper for the finishing elements), 

Amaca chose to use exposed brick, and blue for the window 

blinds rather than the green typical of the Istro-Venetian 

housing model. In the complex next to the countryside, a 

honeycomb window, set into the brick wall, was used to 

screen the ground-floor bathrooms and to avoid the common 

use of window awnings. The roof tiles are cement instead of 

brick, and the projecting volumes of the stairways are clad in 

copper to break up the monotony of the white plaster. 

Amaca’s housing units in Dosson in Casier demonstrate 

how it is possible to design effective compositional variations 

with limited financial resources, and show how small touches 

can reinterpret traditional codes without departing too far 

from the geographic and cultural context in which the new 

buildings are set. The Dosson project is an example that 

speaks the local language and responds to the real problems 

of ordinary architectural practice in Italy. 4 

Translated by Miriam Hurley 

Valentina Croci is a freelance journalist focusing on industrial design and 

architecture. She graduated from Venice University of Architecture (IUAV), and 

gained an MSc in architectural history from the Bartlett School of Architecture, 

London. She is currently a PhD student in product and communication design 

at the IUAV. 

Note 

1. Amaca Architetti Associati was founded in 2002 in Treviso. It is small studio 

with six employees, four of whom are partners: Monica Bosio, Martina Cafaro, 

Marco Ferrari and Carlo Zavan – all graduates of the Università di Architettura 

di Venezia (IUAV). Projects include the redevelopment of Piazza Indipendenza 

in Badoere, and theme-based itineraries in the Colli Berici. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 134-6 & 138 © Amaca Architetti 

Associati; p 137 © Alessandra Chemollo; p 139 © Francesco Castagna 

139+


Learning from the Locals 

The end of 2006 saw the publication of the Stern Review, 

the British government’s long-awaited report on the 

economics of climate change. Solar panels and wind turbines 

go on sale in Europe’s biggest DIY chain. A frenzy of 

excitement/opportunism grows around renewables strategies. 

Impending puritanical tax initiatives are mooted, ready to 

punish you for that big car or sun-seeking holiday via lowcost 

airlines, and the mayor of London considers outlawing 

the incandescent light bulb. Meanwhile, prominent 

environmental campaigner George Monbiot writes what 

seems a less than useful article about the nonbenefits of 

small-scale renewable power generation. In an article 

entitled ‘Low-wattage thinking’, in New Scientist magazine, 

he states: ‘In almost all circumstances, micro wind turbines 

are a waste of time and money.’ His chief concern appears 

to be that such homespun solutions are actually a distraction 

rather than a solution to our future energy needs. 

Within the context of this mix-messaged environmental 

age, the usefulness of the comprehensive (I struggle to 

include the rather ‘new-age’ holistic) thinker/designer seems 

increasingly useful. John-Paul Frazer is able to span the 

unhelpful distinctions between architect and environmental 

designer. In an ongoing research and embryonic construction 

project, ’Mrittikalaya’ (Abode of Earth), Frazer is proposing 

a new kind of highly tunable architecture situated in the 

extreme climate of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, India. For 

six years he has undertaken a study of desert organisms, 

revealing a diverse range of extreme heat adaptation that 

can be harnessed in ‘human technological or behavioural 

analogues such as seeking shade and shelter underground’. 

In a recent lecture at the University of Westminster, Frazer 

described this process as ‘learning from the locals’. Like 

Bernard Rudofsky in his seminal book of 1964, Architecture 

without Architects, Frazer does not make a distinction 

between the evolved disposition of an organism and the 

evolved disposition of the artefacts of that organism. We 

have evidently as much to learn from local clothing, 

vernacular architecture and behaviour (customs) as we do 

from local flora and fauna, insect and animal life. 

Working with Andy Ensor, Yonca Ersen and Jyrki Romo, 

Frazer has recently designed a two-bedroom house for a 

research scientist couple in this extreme environment, 

utilising some of his empirical research. The building is 

largely buried underground, using the temperature 

stability that a subterranean (below 3 metres/9 2 / 3 feet) 

environment can afford you: 27°C (80°F) in this instance, 

which is considerably less than summer highs of 50°C 

(122°F) – (surface air temperature) – and considerably more 

than the freezing winter nights. Other design strategies 

include additional Shade-Scoop-Sails (or ‘Chiks’), the 

‘fissured morphology’ of the self-shading Cactus Render, a 

Wind-Scoop Tower with evaporative cooling ‘Mist 

Chandelier’, and a substantial network of Coolth storage 

tanks, cooled by a night-time radiative cooling system. This 

cooling system comprises a series of radiators on the roof, 

covered with deployable insulated petals, opened and 

closed by novel actuators/pistons made of bamboo and 

mustard oil mix. Add a Suck-Stack chimney over the central 

core of the building and the innovation of the insideoutside-rotating-thermal 

mass of the Eco-Orifice wall 

completes the new palette of environmental control 

mechanisms for the ‘Sailable-restorative’ architectures that 

John-Paul Frazer is so keen to promote. 

John-Paul Frazer, Andy Ensor, Yonca Ersen and Jyrki Romo, Detail of a 

deployable insulated-petal actuator mechanism, Mrittikalaya project, Thar 

Desert, Rajasthan, India, 2006. 

140+

Social-Physiological Evolution: Thumbs Up, Sit 

Down and Shut Up 

Self-styled cyber-feminist and technological futurologist Dr 

Sadie Plant first identified the Oya Yubi Sedai (the thumb 

generation) while researching the impact of hand-held 

technologies such as mobile phones and computers on the 

young. A report in the Observer newspaper (24 March 2002) 

stated that a ‘physical mutation’ had taken place in the 

under 25s, with the thumb replacing the index finger as 

the pre-eminent control digit. Meanwhile, in a less 

evolutionary body/mind development, the Police Authority 

in Lancashire, in partnership with the local Primary Care 

Trust, has been exploring a no-standing policy in Preston’s 

pubs. The police are concerned that standing, ‘vertical 

drinking’ and its related physical interaction causes 

violence to flare up. Reported in the New York Times (28 

August 2006), Jack Turner questioned whether this new 

social control initiative could sober us up, citing several 

other failed experiments in design puritanism. One 

wonders how this legislated posture proposal might 

develop, with overexuberant gesticulation discouraged and 

the ‘elbows up’ pint-downing of the seasoned drinker 

outlawed due to health and safety concerns. Sadly, I must 

also report the slow demise of social whistling. Judith 

Eagle, writing in the Guardian (11 October 2006) asks: ‘Why 

don’t people whistle now?’ Dr Stephen Juan, an 

anthropologist at the University of Sydney, cites two 

possible reasons: one, that popular music is less 

‘whistleable’, and/or two (more plausibly) that the 

proliferation of portable music devices has (temporarily) 

curtailed our own mobile tune-making capabilities. 

Robot Care: Robots Care 

Writing in the Guardian newspaper (11 October 2006), 

Christopher Manthorp (operations manager for older 

people’s services at Kent County Council) describes his 

disappointment with the future. In this fledgling 21st 

century he does not think that technology has serviced 

society with the kind of transformative potential that so 

much science fiction predicted. This, however, may be 

changing, especially with the increasing use of assistive 

technology (AT) in the care of the elderly. Presently 

consisting of clunky remote alarm systems indicating the 

patient’s well-being, Manthorp speculates on a future 

where robots ‘will stalk the Earth, gossipping gently to 

isolated older people while cleaning the carpets and 

making the tea’. This sentiment certainly resonates with 

Paul Judge’s assertion that ‘good technological design can 

make us all happier’, given during the Royal Society of Arts 

250th anniversary conference in 2004. ‘Design must play a 

central role in ensuring that people will not be isolated or 

reduced by the technology revolution.’ Richard Greenhill of 

the Shadow Robot Company (http://www.shadowrobot.com) 

has long believed in the social use of the robot and its 

associated technologies, arguing that the 

anthropomorphism of the Shadow Biped research project 

(no longer operational) is clearly justified by staircases and 

their mechanical negotiation. Likewise with their current 

research project, the Shadow Hand, which controls 24 

degrees of freedom with 40 air muscles. It could certainly 

handle a cup of tea. 4 

‘McLean’s Nuggets’ is an ongoing technical series inspired by Will McLean 

and Samantha Hardingham’s enthusiasm for back issues of AD, as 

explicitly explored in Hardingham’s AD issue The 1970s is Here and Now 

(March/April 2005). 

Will McLean is joint coordinator of technical studies (with Peter Silver) in 

the Department of Architecture at the University of Westminster. 

The Shadow Robot Company, Shadow Hand air-muscle-actuated robot 

hand with 24 degrees of freedom, 2006. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 140 © John-Paul Frazer; 

p 141 © Richard Greenhill 

141+

Site Lines 

Night 

Pilgrimage 

Chapel 

Laura Moffatt describes how 

Gerold Wiederin’s chapel in 

Locherboden, Austria, has been 

built as a focus for nocturnal 

Masses, giving architectural 

expression to a pilgrimage spot 

that was previously no more than 

a clearing in the forest. 

142+

The openness of Wiederin’s design is engaging, evoking intimacy and seclusion. The strip lighting spreads an 

even light as well as marking out a simple cross. 

Places of pilgrimage are often in far-flung rural locations, 

where the remoteness from civilisation or proximity to nature 

seem to contribute to the journeying, the arrival, and the 

genius loci of the place in question. One such site, at 

Locherboden in the Tyrolean Upper Inn Valley, owes its 

pilgrimage status to a miracle of the Virgin Mary in 1871. The 

number of Christians coming to this place for a pilgrimage 

that is walked by night six times a year has reached over 

2,000. The apex where pilgrims would remain for a candle-lit 

service was once simply a clearing between trees and a rugged 

cave in the rocks. Now, at the end of the path leading up from 

the valley, a low open chapel sits at the foot of the caves, 

luminescent at night, deliberate and poised in its form. 

The Austrian architect Gerold Wiederin, whose design was 

chosen as a result of a countrywide competition, did not seek 

to glorify or enhance the natural environment of the site, but 

simply to provide ‘the framework for a religious observance in 

the midst of unformed nature’. Equally, the chapel does not 

shy away from a strong architectural statement, borrowing 

heavily from Modernist themes and incorporating a vivid 

piece of glasswork as its central motif. 

Wiederin also follows a traditional cross formation as a 

structural element in the rectangular roof, with two 

intersecting tramlines of poured concrete beams stretching 

the length and breadth of the ceiling, visible both from within 

the chapel and from above it. One central bar of the cross is 

missing, relieving the symbol of an overobviousness (the 

beams can look merely functional), so that on the underside, 

where fluorescent strip lighting is set into the beams beneath 

semitransparent glass, one light is omitted and light from the 

coloured glasswork given priority. 

Four square pillars, the floor, the furniture, the sacristy 

and the ceiling are all cast in exposed concrete connecting 

visually with the grey rocks and increasing the sense of 

functionality and, with that, a kind of determination. The 

pillars’ corners fall flush with those of the ceiling and there is 

an unarguable purity in the structure, like that of a Greek 

temple or a 1950s garage. 

One step up raises the chapel from its grassy foundations 

and defines its boundary. The altar is centred, and only the 

lectern, set to one side, disrupts the symmetry of the chapel’s 

other components, including the central glasswork by the 

artist Helmut Federle. Out of the clarity of Wiederin’s geometry 

comes an explosion of fragmented glass, falling (or rising) in a 

riotous river of colour. Welded branches of iron support the 

stacked lumps of glass in green, blue, red and yellow, like 

factory leftovers, but none the less attractive for it. On 

pilgrimage nights the glass is backlit, and is as opulent to the 

distant gaze of gathered pilgrims as it is at close quarters. 

With the cross set into the ceiling like an overseeing and 

protecting sign, Wiederin has also incorporated symbols for 

the Virgin Mary and the papal cross on the front of the 

concrete altar, deeply inscribed and handled with a sense of 

abstraction. The small sacristy, with doors at either side, is an 

essential adjunct where priests can gather and prepare, the 

baldachino effect ensuring they are at least sheltered from the 

elements during worship. The chapel is thus set, not unlike a 

theatre stage, for a nocturnal Mass in front of the pilgrims 

and between the woods, mountains, neighbouring churches 

and the aura of past miracles and saints. 

Laura Moffatt is acting director of the Art and Christianity Enquiry and is 

currently studying the theology of 20th-century church architecture. She is coauthor, 

with Edwin Heathcote, of Contemporary Church Architecture, Wiley- 

Academy, £39.99, isbn 0470031565, published in March 2007. See 

www.wiley.com. 

Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Gerold Wiederin, photos 

Christian Kerez 

Gerold Wiederin, Pilgrimage Chapel, Locherboden, Austria, 1997 

Helmut Federle’s glasswork is a brilliant slice of colour and irregularity, bringing the natural forms around the chapel 

into sharper focus and contrasting the otherwise organised geometry of Wiederin’s structure. 

143+

4 Architectural Design 

Landscape Architecture: Site/Non-Site 

Guest-edited by Michael Spens 

Charting the latest advances in thinking and practice in 21st-century landscape, this 

edition of AD looks at the degree to which landscape architects and architects have 

rethought and redefined the parameters for the interaction of buildings, infrastructures 

and surrounding landscape. Landscape Architecture: Site/Non-Site defines key 

moves effected in the revision of landscape, using a compilation of some of the most 

current work in the field. Featured designers include: Diana Balmori, Florian Beigel 

and Philip Christou of the Architecture Research Unit (ARU), James Corner of Field 

Operations, Adriaan Geuze of West 8, Catherine Mosbach, Gross.Max, Bernard 

Lassus, Gustafson Porter, Ken Smith and Michael Van Valkenburgh. There are contributions 

from Lucy Bullivant, Michel Conan, Peter Cook, Brian McGrath and Victoria 

Marshall, Jayne Merkel, Juhani Pallasmaa and Grahame Shane. 

4+ 

Interior Eye Seoul’s Interior Landscapes 

Building Profile Louise T Blouin Institute, West London 

Practice Profile The Tailored Home: Housebrand 

Home Run Dosson in Casier, Italy 

Site Lines Night Pilgrimage Chapel 

ISBN 0-470-03479-3 

9 780470 034798

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

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