Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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and creative innovation that inserts a new ecological
calculus to urban operational strategies, and approaches
to dealing with shifting conditions of marketplace forces
that affect spatial manifestations in the metropolitan
landscape. Neutelings has written: To accept a model of
a “field in permanent evolution… we should aim to strategically
position new programs so as to create a dynamic
equilibrium that enhances the quality of the city as a collage
of fragments “ [Neutelings, 1994: 60]. A landscape
shaped by culture.
Fig. 04: Shigeru Ban Nomadic Museum , Mahattan’s Historic Pier
54, Architecture, 1999.
To extend the line of investigative inquire, what are the
transformative effects of temporary insertions on the city?
How can the urban void be spatially as well as programmatically
appropriated beyond the traditional impulse
of beautification, can the experience and performance
of the city be enhanced? Projects like Shigeru Ban’s
Nomadic Museum on Manhattan’s historic Pier 54 [1999],
[Figure 04]; and West 8’s Schouwburgplein in Rotterdam,
Netherlands [1990-97], [Figure 05] are perfect translations
of insertion scenarios that reflect the nimbleness and
responsiveness that future urban ecologies require. Nomadic
Museum is a landscape insertion with a dynamic
program in a temporary location, while Schouwburgplein
is a permanent urban infrastructure design to accommodate
a succession of “dynamic temporal” activities
ranging from skateboarding events to flee-market
transaction – and the performance-art of social networking
in both real and virtual space. In each scenario
the insertions are objects of art – in both their technical
execution and material translation, but the genius of the
work lays both in its ability to catalyze transformative
shifts within each urban condition that affects normalized
programmatic components – through a kind of interruption,
disturbance, or transposition, which realigns the flow
of transaction between normative and non-normative
spatial and operational conditions within a specific urban
context. The act of inserting – as in conceptual art – propagates
new relationships and pollinates a city’s image
and aesthetic quality through imaginative speculation,
global imagery and visual culture. Projecting the global in
the local and the familiar in the unfamiliar. Sophie Rousseau
has written: “ … After all, the triumph of television
has made our appetites for images grow enormously.
Anything that cannot be made into an effective picture
does not have a chance on the international market.
New technologies have reinforced this trend even more”
[Rousseau, 2002: 88].
Notion of nomadic or peripatetic museum implies an
inherent transience; portability, mobility, adaptiveness,
The dynamism of the city –as a topos of negation– is
fundamentally about disturbance and resistance, which
takes place within and between the figures of architectural
follies. The city is a “counter-landscape/experience”
to the outer-limits of its edgescape; the naturalism and
horizontality of the rural flatlands; and by its very nature
a less contested landscape. Thus, the phenomena of
reading the landscape and [re]casting conditions of spatiality,
presents a complex but fascinating set of situations;
and in this speculation, lies the concept of temporality
as an associated element of spatiality and materiality in
the medium of landscape. This arena of speculation is
predicated on the assumption that temporary landscape
insertions alter preexisting conditions of place and can
open new avenues for conceptualization of adaptive
urban realities, and potentially more visionary conception
of landscape.
Our perceived need for stability and permanence,
bring the discussion of temporality to the [fore]ground –
an idea that merits greater consideration in time of great
uncertainty within the framework possible futures and
future possibilities.
Fig. 05: West 8’s Schouwburgplein/Theatre Square, Rotterdam, 1997.