Urban Research: Fractalled: The Interstitial Spaces And Frank Gehry

Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Fractalled: The Interstitial Spaces And Frank Gehry

by Amy Gilley

The one question rarely examined in landscape architecture practice is the definition of landscape itself. For many architects, landscape is often just "the visual interpretation of the configuration of the land" [1] or as J.B. Jackson argues, "a concrete, three-dimensional shared reality" [2] For many architects, landscape is defined as the space next to the building, space that frames the building but is not architecture. Although landscape is, for many, seen as a composition of water, soil, and plant material, it is also seen as uncontrollable space, space to hurry through to reach the security of one building or another. As suggested later, landscape is the liminal, not merely incidental, experience realized by movement from inside to outside and outside into the inside, through the dimensions of time and movement.

Much landscape architecture relies on the traditional architectural approach using Euclidian geometry to order space. Classical architectural texts by Palladio and Alberti as well as Francis Chings Architecture: Form, Space and Order, which focus on the careful study of the golden rectangles, are required texts for both architects and landscape architects. These strict geometrical models based in a certain philosophy assume an order of the world that comes from without, applied upon the human experience.