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

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