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

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negotiating the relationship between city and park not
only created the kind of urban setting that would benefit
the new park, and the kind of park setting that would
benefit the new development, it also allowed created a
more precise economic model limiting the commercial
development to just 9% of the project site, less than half
of what would have been allowed under the park’s founding
legislation.
Fig.. 4
park entries with “neighborhood” park elements like playgrounds
and dog runs, and deep-range landscape views
while reserving the large-scale recreational elements
and more organized elements for the center of the park.
On the city side, this meant allowing the new buildings
to benefit from the amazing views to the water and the
adjacency to the park, but concentrating the economic
development within envelopes and footprints that were
guaranteed to provide the necessary revenue, create a
constituency for the park, and support the urban evolution
of the landscape as an integrated part of the city.
The 2005 Master Plan relies on the landscape, as expressed
through a range of typologies, to bring form and
activity to the site. (Figures 4 and 5) As with the Lower
Don Lands, the strategy involves not just diverse mix
of activities, but a sophisticated layering of landscape
elements, and connections, and program that include a
fine-tuned orchestration of the stunning views to the harbor
and city, the introduction of the boundlessness and
range of a topographically varied landscape, a sitewide
layer of reintroduced ecologies that addresses marine
health alongside plant habitat, a range of opportunities
to engage a complex rivers edge , a circulation plan that
offers multiple routes through the site, large sports fields
that are well-suited to the structural capabilities of the
site while also providing a regional draw at the center
of the park, and neighborhood connections to create a
vibrant urban life for the park.
In the Lower Don Lands Project as is the case at a
different scale at Brooklyn Bridge Park, the embrace of
landscape typologies is not an anti-urban attempt to reestablish
natural ecologies or even “green spaces” at the
expense of urban function but is instead an attempt to
allow landscape complexity to inform urban complexity.
Using the landscape as the generator of urban form and
program is sometimes the most straightforward means
of creating an intensely urban experience that is supportive
of rather than hostile to human occupation and the
health of the natural environment. Urban design doesn’t
necessarily need to turn to the landscape as a model
that will transform the city into the countryside, because
the city is capable of generating its own unique landscape
typologies. The transformation I would encourage
would be that everybody involved in the design of cities,
be they landscape architects, developers, policy makers,
or urban planners, need to understand the depth
of possibilities within the range of landscape typologies
and their interrelations. This understanding will lead to
an unwavering faith in the landscape as a generator of
urban form that can do the work of urban infrastructure
at the same time that it provides the setting for human
experience.
Fig. 5
Rather than allowing the complexities of building on marine
structure or the need to generate revenue become the
force driving urban design, park space and development
space were recognized as complex conditions rather
than gross square foot areas. Working from an informed
position, the landscape architect’s heuristic approach to
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