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Landscape Insertions: Operations
Between Architecture and
Landscape - Temporality as
Mechanism in The Transformation of
Urban Voids
Amaechi Raphael Okigbo
Cornell University, Department of Landscape Architecture,
440 Kennedy Hall, Ithaca,New York, USA (e-mail:
aro6@cornell.edu)
Abstract
As boundaries between artistic mediums become
more blurred, artists, architects, landscape architect
and urbanists are increasingly drawing on other
mediums, and in the process are reconfiguring the
distinct boundaries between disciplines. This emergent
shift represents an evolving philosophy that critiques
transient human conditions affecting lifestyle, mobility,
adaptability, sustainability and communication, and
reframes the context of spatial and territorial operation,
where the notion permanence, or temporary usage
of spatial territory is not a uniquely artistic practice.
Temporary performance, street vending, informal
housing, and the temporary marketplaces throughout
various cultures indicate the spectrum of temporary
conditions, which describe, define, and re-define
character of everyday geographies. However, spatial
appropriation can be an act of public investment as
well as activism that deploys art as an invitation for
new kinds of spatial activity and place-making. This
essay argues that temporary programming lies at the
nexus of [re]writing, or [re]casting landscape, and
attempts to thread a series of important developments
in the expanded field of landscape/architecture.
Key words
Temporality, Urban-void, Spatiality, Programming,
Insertion
“The course of this decade has witnessed a far-reaching
transformation of public space and its projects. The word
landscape has played an unprecedented role in the
transformation, probably because this term express not
only the ever-increasing ephemerality of places, but also
models of scattered cities, the innovation of large formats
and various scales of intervention, the loss of limits
between architectural objects and their surrounding. The
notion of landscape also implies that visual regimes become
active agents in the creation of public space, with
reference to some trajectories being taken from contemporary
art and architecture.” – Rowan Moore, Vertigo:
The Strange New World of The Contemporary City, p.10
This study-project attempts to thread a series of important
developments in the expanding field of landscape
architect through the development and deployment of a
structured set of site-specific installations that address
specific problems of spatiality. As an introductory essay
to an extended investigation, it focuses on the first of five
proposed projects and introduces the polemical context
– within which the projects unfold – for future study-projects
that supports the position that “temporary insertions”
[light architecture and adaptable spatial conditions]
offers new operational models in our thinking about the
landscape and the treatment of urban public areas.
Our impulse as a society has always been driven towards
the physical manipulation of the land – as a canvas for
symbolic inscription. This surface has served as the greatest
medium for the encoding of ideas and metaphors.
Today, it remains the most active topological surface for
creative and intellectual expression – the engineering
of the human environment, or the [re]engineering of the
natural environment [Corner 1992: 246]. But the collateral
effect of this insatiable impulse to build presents one of
the greatest challenges at the beginning of the twenty-first
century – how to repair and preserve the environment,
how to conserve space, and how to build with ecological
sensitivity. This very challenge has also catapulted the
landscape architect to the forefront of the current discourse
on urbanism, environmental planning, and the
programming of large urban fields, including the adaptive
reuse of derelict industrial sites and remnant “urban-voids,”
or “nondescript black holes” [Girot 2006: 99].
In using the term “urban-void,” I am not referring to an empty
space, or space without content. Instead, I am referring
to spaces that are part of the ground in “figure-ground”,
but are not as part of a unified urban framework – these
voids are unstructured and underutilized “antispaces” that
support little or no human activity [Trancik 1986: 09]. Just
as the spring bloom transforms dormant forest landscapes,
these voids have the capacity to serve as event
spaces, filled with new possibilities, stimuli and sensation.
Programmatically speaking, the mélange of urban voids
provide unusual opportunities for catalyzing change within
peculiar metropolitan conditions. The value and meaning
of these urban voids change in relationship to the currency
of the surrounding context, serving as critical indicators of
a city’s economic, social and cultural vitality,
The irony of this condition – between the manifestation
of the urban-voids and the inherent potential that they
possess – can be attributed to a broad range of issues
discussed in Roger Trancik’s seminal publication entitled
Finding Lost Space, these factors include: the zoning