The next essay in the Landscape Urbanism Reader, following 'Terra Fluxus' and the initial 'Reference Manifesto' is a longer essay by Waldheim exploring the idea that landscape is most suited to the modern metropolis, being "uniquely
capable of responding to temporal change, transformation, adaptation,
and succession... a medium uniquely suited to the open-endedness,
indeterminacy, and change demanded by contemporary urban conditions."
(39) This idea could be considered one of the formative structures on
which landscape urbanism is built, explained by many writers as a
response the failings of architecture and urban design to cope with the
complexity of the urban situation, leading to Waldheim's apt, but
somewhat hyperbolic statement that "the discourse surrounding
landscape urbanism can be read as a disciplinary realignment in which
landscape supplants architecture's historical role as the basic building
block of urban design." (37)
Ironically, this essay explains clearly that landscape urbanism theory
has its origins in the same rejection of modernist architecture and
planning, and the retreat to "policy, procedure, and public therapy."
(39) This is a common refrain from contemporary planners as a way to
distance themselves from top-down, totalitarian schemes of the
mid-twentieth century, which has led to a renaissance of engagement in
both community and context that makes all urban design and planning
better but also a tendency to favor specific strategies. Corner is
quoted as well, mentioning that "only through a synthetic and
imaginative reordering of categories in the built environment might we
escape our present predicament in the cul-de-sac of post-industrial
modernity, and 'the bureaucratic and uninspired failings,' of the
planning profession." (38)
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Landscape architecture, Bercy, photo by La Citta Vita |
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Welwyn Garden City Entrance, by UrbanGrammar
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