Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...
Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...
Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...
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160<br />
Mobility and Territory<br />
Sanja Cvjetko Jerkovic<br />
PhD Candidate, Faculty of Architecture, Delft University<br />
of Technology, Berlageweg 1., 2628 CR Delft, The<br />
Netherlands (e-mail: s.cvjetko-jerkovic@tudelft.nl)<br />
Abstract<br />
Growing number of world’s population followed by the<br />
decreasing percentage of free, non urbanized land is<br />
forcing us to evaluate every future intervention and to<br />
use it as an occasion to produce benefits within the<br />
territory. The present study aims, not only to recover<br />
the lost relation between traffic systems and territory<br />
that marked the human settlements for centuries, but<br />
mostly to find design tools and methods for reducing the<br />
destructive power that these, especially road systems,<br />
are able to present when conceived as alienated<br />
elements, detached from the environment they cross.<br />
The theoretical framework composed of Gregotti’s<br />
notion of Total environment, Lynch’s Openness<br />
of Open space, and Venturi-Scott Brown and<br />
Izenhour’s non material dominance of Iconographic<br />
architecture, aims to give basis for development<br />
of the concept of Infrastructural Architecture.<br />
Key words<br />
Road, open, interface, border, infrastructural<br />
architecture<br />
Introduction<br />
In different contexts, time periods and civilizations it<br />
is possible to notice the permanence of certain urban<br />
‘elements’ that are constitutive part of the base of integral<br />
urban and architectural expression. Just like the city, or<br />
any environment created by man, these elements are the<br />
result of selective cumulative operations that characterised<br />
the processes of long and conscious modifications.<br />
The process of selection and verification unveiled the<br />
connection between the city and the territory that could<br />
be effectively analyzed through the role of the street [cf<br />
Rossi, A. 1966].<br />
Today’s human environments are characterised by<br />
exchange, flows, communication and connectivity rather<br />
than by fixed settlement. All over the world during the last<br />
two decades infrastructures and mobility have been a<br />
recurrent theme [1]. In the European Union, the number<br />
of kilometres doubled in the period from 1970 to 2000.<br />
New, improved highways, railways and waterways are<br />
put as goals that countries must achieve in order to create<br />
basis for the social and economical development.<br />
In the past, the street itself was not always seen negatively<br />
- it was a mean of control over nature and a way of<br />
tracing the human landscape <strong>–</strong> it was an organizational<br />
matrix of complex but balanced, sustainable environments.<br />
The relation between the street and the surroundings<br />
radically changed in the beginning of the 1900<br />
with the spread of the motor vehicles and the increased<br />
speed.<br />
The road network system, once overlaid on the landscape,<br />
catalyze energies that gradually determine the conditions<br />
in situ. The way it is designed, how it is located in<br />
the territory, its permeability, the kind of relation with the<br />
surroundings <strong>–</strong> are all the necessary information that we<br />
have to consider when designing the project. In relation<br />
to contexts and scales, this information if managed with<br />
intelligence, can induce different ‘dialogues between<br />
subjects’. Various urban parts could be joined in a whole<br />
in which the road could be truly an integral element.<br />
The concept introduced in this essay - the Infrastructural<br />
Architecture relies on the presumption that a certain<br />
communication requirement and therefore a choice on<br />
how to built the road facilities is given, and that it can be<br />
improved in a way that it becomes optimal for the population<br />
and a bearer of the new needs of the contemporary<br />
society.<br />
Material and methods<br />
Through the interpretation of selected theoretical positions<br />
and by reading a series of projects that are symptomatic<br />
for the relation between infrastructure and architecture,<br />
this study is evidencing different visions of the road<br />
project, when strived by the architectural medium.<br />
Theoretical premises pose their roots in the ‘fecund<br />
uncertainty’ of analysis between - Gregotti’s notion of<br />
Total environment, where the all-embracing architectural<br />
domain extends ‘from the spoon to the city’; Lynch’s new<br />
definition of Open spaces, conceived according to the<br />
purpose, accessibility and ownership; and Venturi, Scott<br />
Brown, Izehour’s thesis on supremacy of signs over the<br />
physicality of volumes.<br />
The selected positions have the same belief in the<br />
potential of the open space areas, and discuss the limits<br />
of architecture’s domain, its methodology, language and<br />
form.<br />
Besides the curiosity in exploring the possible formats<br />
of the public sphere, all three authors, share the same<br />
consideration that architecture is not necessarily tied to<br />
the idea of volume, but largely depends on different other<br />
factors in the environment. Their arguments enable us to<br />
reinsert the road typology into the architectural domain<br />
as an urban element that for centuries shaped the environment<br />
and social relations. Roads as such, regain their<br />
validity as an architectural category or a parameter for<br />
the architectural evaluation of the city.<br />
Despite many differences in these positions, what early<br />
emerges in all of them is the idea of the potential seen<br />
in surpassing the conventional concepts in architecture<br />
and urbanity that can result with unexpected spatial so-