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

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Fig. 1 (left above): IaN+, Sportcity
Fig. 2 (left below): Bernard Lassus, Landscaping of the
A.85 Angers-Tours motorway
Fig. 3 (right): Smaq Architects, Stop and Go Vending
lutions and with substitution of the dualistic commitment
(typical for Modern movement). With this approach rigidly
separated spaces that are characterised either by inclusion,
or exclusion, affirmation or negation, become areas
of fusion; ‘another kind of space’ that help the reducing
of the urban rigidity and its negative effects. In this way
traditionally conceived spaces with recognisable design,
together with firmly defined areas of pertinence, become
polygons for new forms of urbanity. During this process
their conceptual and physical borders are not being cancelled,
but shattered, rethought and frayed – transformed
into a larger margin where differences could take place.
Border areas of the infrastructures, are like any area of
passage between two systems, spaces where conventional
rules aren’t applicable anymore, a sort of a wild land
where different possibilities rise. Starting from this natural
and stimulating disorder we can start thinking the infrastructural
borderline in a creative way, by transforming it
per example into space for knowing the ‘other’.
Vittorio Gregotti’s Territory of architecture
First published in 1966 this book knowingly synthesises
various historical facts along with theories on design and
environmental planning, giving a significant contribution to
the definition of large scale interventions. Today Gregotti’s
work is particularly interesting and actual, because it presents
a cultural model. It is epitomized in the elaborated
notion of Total environment that embraces all scales; aiming
to give the esthetical sense to all the present things:
the geographical of the territory, topographical of the site
as well as the scale of the single object. Concept that
derived from the ideology pronounced by the universal
slogans ‘Dal cucchiaio alla città’ [2] and Continuità [3].
The application of design to ‘Total territory’ as suggested
by Gregotti, could seem a sort of execution of what
Virilio called ‘the policy of disappearance’ – an utopian
tentative of ‘public reconciliation’ through removal of everything
that could upset the ‘social security’ – an operation
unsustainable on the long run.
The answer to the problem of organisation of the
environment, differentiation or articulation in order to
assume new senses, affronted by the author is not to be
confounded with the bricolage (Strauss, L., 1964). In this
hypothesis the materials of the new project, do not deposit
their sense in the original functionality, but in the new;
different one, that depends of the new inter-relations.
Admitting the limitation of the architectural intervention
in practice and the importance of the dimension when
coming to specific, Gregotti suggests deciding ways of
establishing new relations inside the traced structure and
with other systems. Not only area of interventions is unlimited,
but the entire process is left opened for the future
design interventions.
The difficulty of defining the operative unity of reading
environment within the theory of Architecture of Territory
is solvable through the use of concept of the field and
the group (Gregotti, V., 1977: 83). For Gregotti a field is
an area where human signs create formal, circumscribed
group. It can be wide or a macrostructure containing
more fields. It can contain several groups of elements
that can be pointed out by analyzing different layers and
sections. The levels can relate geometrically and define
sequences, polarities; they indicate the distribution/position,
quantity, types of grids, densities, use, symbolic value
of places.
The only possible way to operate is through the open
design process with a variable number of points / fields
within the structure, defined by series of relevant points
(strongly characterised and defined) or by the relation/
connection itself, that becomes the ‘regulator’ of the
environmental quality (Gregotti, V., 1977: 90). Considering
that the first human interventions implied minimal
intervention and resulted in environmental transformations
leaving light traces that characterised the whole,
we could deduce that in order to operate today, one
should make an effort towards the individualization of the
sensible points and minimal operation in order to obtain
maximum creativity with minimal interventions.
Papers