Interface: Between Landscape and Architecture

good evening welcome thanks everyone for being here welcome to this evenings lecture in the in the GSD series it's the first that's sponsored in this instance co-sponsored by the department of landscape architecture and for those of you who are of a mind to partake in some of our landscape events going forward next Tuesday in this space February 7th I'll be here in discussion with Tom main and the publication of his new book combinatory urbanism and the next Friday February 10th mid mid day 12:30 in Stubbins Pete Walker will join us please come out it's a great pleasure to be able to introduce two longtime friends of mine Joel Sanders and Annabel mori thanks so much for being here Joel is an architect as you know based in New York principle of Joel sanders architect he's also a professor of architecture at Yale University his work has been featured in a range of exhibitions internationally and the work of his practice has been acquired in the permanent collections of a range of leading institutions including San Francisco MoMA the Ernst of Chicago the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and the Museum of Modern Art among others he's won a range of awards and recognition for his design practice and his work has been published and lectured upon widely he's editor among other things of stud architectures of masculinity and more recently in 2005 a monograph on his work Joe Sanders writings and projects Dinah Bell Maury is an internationally renowned landscape architect also based in New York she's principal of Balamory associates over the course of the the last several years she's one run of notable design competitions and has produced some really quite extraordinary public landscapes her work has been published widely she also has taught regularly for many years both in the School of Architecture in the School of Forestry and environmental studies at Yale University she is recently a co-author with Michel Cohen on the notable landscape manifesto and a range of other titles over the course of the last several years and I I've come to know both Joel and Dianna has really truly committed teachers and pedagogues had the chance to see their teaching at Yale over the course of the last several years and the impact that they've had in a School of Architecture absent a department and other apparatus of the discipline is really quite extraordinary they're here to share with us some of their work recently published publication called groundwork I realized when I saw the slide I didn't need to bring the book because it's bigger there it's a really an important piece of work it's a piece of work that hasn't been fully absorbed in the disciplines yet it's still fresh off the fresh off the off the printer in in many ways it's aspirations share something with a publication of over a decade ago inside outside of the project co-authored by our own Anita ABARES vieta and Linda Pollock that book proposed to find a body of work a body of projects a body of cases in which both architecture and landscape architecture might be seen to be if not symmetrical at least equally valent and as a result Anita and Linda came conclusion that a new a new set of terms a new a new discourse was required I think you'll find something similar at work here in over two dozen projects internationally they identify contemporary work that if we take it seriously looking again at architecture and landscape architecture and their relationship propose a whole new set of conceptual schema so it's a great pleasure please join me in welcoming Joe Saunders Diana bell mori thank you very much thanks for that wonderful introduction and on behalf of Diana and myself I want to thank first Nimoy's and most avi as as well as this evening's co-host as Scott Caan and and Charles who gave us that wonderful introduction and last week Charles delivered a terrific lecture at Yale in which he outlined the tenants of landscape urbanism among other important topics as you know here a pioneering field dedicated to the union of two disciplines landscape and urbanism and then our talk this evening Diana and I will champion a disciplinary collaboration as well but in this case between landscape and another overlapping field architecture and this evenings lecture again co-sponsored by two departments architecture and landscape clearly represents another step towards this this this goal so groundwork is not another book that romanticizes nature and bids designers to consult the genius of place instead it's an urgent appeal for designers to pursue a new design approach one that overcomes the false dichotomy between architecture and landscape and our interest in the union of these two disciplines is in part motivated by the by similar or the same ecological concerns that we share with many of our colleagues clearly an integrated practice of landscape and architecture can have dramatic environmental consequences the ecological role of each discipline ceases to be a separate and agenda and allows for buildings and landscapes working together to perform as linked interactive systems that heal the environment for it but the overall objective of our book the promotion of new inventive modes of cross-disciplinary environmental practice can only be achieved by first understanding and then transcending the deep-rooted ideological cultural and disciplinary prejudices that have brought us to where we are today and in my introductory essay to the book I examine what I call the architect landscape divide from a particularly American perspective and from a cultural and historical perspective and I argue that this split can be traced to yet another deep-seated but but similarly suspect Western polarity that opposes humans and nature and as a consequence buildings and landscapes and while these attitudes date back to antiquity one version of the human nature dualism finds its home and an influential body of thought that emerged in 19th century America scholars refer to it as wilderness a first generation of environmentalist thinkers men like Henry David Thoreau Charles Moore and Theodore Roosevelt all of them active during the second half of the 19th century were confronted with an intimidating prospect not that different than that which we face today the disappearance of wilderness and if nature at that time was traditionally conceived of as an unruly woman that needed to be subdued and cultivated through the labor of men wilderness thinking according to this these thinkers was now cast as another kind of woman as a I'm sorry nature was cast as another kind of woman in this case a virgin now in desperate need of male guardianship that needed to be conserved and protected from the ravages of industrial civilization and not only did wilderness wilderness thinking give rise to the birth of the American environmentalist movement but it also shaped the evolution of landscape and architecture in America from the 19th century until today it's dualistic conception of people and nature only that age-old conception of the building as a man-made artifact qualitatively different from its ostensibly natural surroundings and I think again a particularly American concept the kind of house on a prairie and in turn this way of thinking impacted professional conduct reflected in the professional segregation of architects and landscape architects into parallel professional organizations in 1899 at the very height of the wilderness movement a new professional academy the ASL a was was born wilderness core values not only resulted in dual design professions but it also shaped design approaches by positing that the human is entirely outside the natural wilderness presents a fundamental paradox how to reconcile the ideal of untainted untouched nature with the imprint of human design the result I think as a deep and persistent suspicion of designed nature that still indoors today and let me quickly give you three examples consider the pioneering work of Frederick Law Olmsted the founding father of American landscape architecture opposing city in nature he conceived of projects like Central Park as a natural oasis inscribed within the dense metropolis an oasis that that provided or offered the weary urbanite refuge from the onslaughts of the cone of rising industrial city and for Olmsted nature's rejuvenating effects were made possible through the visual contemplation of nature and he's very specific about it being a visual experience but for Olmsted communion with nature depended on exposing people to a simulacrum of natural scenery unspoiled by any evidence of human intervention Olmsted artfully composed topography and trees to screen out the offend the offending urban environment and in projects like Central Park and later here in Boston the Boston River way Olmsted obscured not only the surrounding city but also all traces of human effort the immense art and technology that made the realization of his massive urban infrastructure projects possible he accomplished this by employing a pastoral vocabulary that even today viewers assume to be natural so the point is not to denigrate Olmsted's amazing achievement but to kind of say that I think we've inherited to some extent a kind of default picturesque a vocabulary that masks the kind of way in which we construct and design nature now fast-forwarding 40 years later in 1937 renowned architectural historian Henry Russell Hitchcock curated an exhibition called contemporary landscape architecture and its sources at the San Francisco Museum of Art which is today is SFMOMA and the objective of this show was to do for landscape what the MoMA's 1932 international style show had done for for modern architecture in America to legitimate a new movement by bringing together a range of projects that exemplified what he thought were the tenants of a new landscape style transferring modern architectures famed prohibition against ornament to its sister discipline Hitchcock advocated that designers renounced their inclination to quote decorate residential projects for wealthy clients Commission's that were the mainstay of the profession in the early years of the 20th century and this word decorate comes out over and over and over again not just with Hitchcock but in his peers and of course this perception tapped into an even deeper prejudice that considered gardening now a superficial pastime associated with housewives instead Hitchcock championed works like these quart liqueur buzias Villa Savoye or nitrous level house projects that exemplified the modernist paradigm of the machine in the GART and the garden this image of a pristine sculptural gleaming building isolated in a pastoral setting that leaves nature ostensibly unspoiled undesigned nature is now conceived of as a spectacle frame to the modernist ribbon window and again I think a conception that I think in many ways many are still sort of perpetuate today and let's fast-forward yet another 30 years to the 60 is a similar struggle to resolve the supposed incompatibility between nature and design we know inform the ecological design approach advanced by charismatic University of Pennsylvania professor Ian McHarg and his influential book design with nature and by 69 old SIDS worst predictions had been realized from a car rapacious capitalism aided by remarkable technological advances had now tipped that precarious balance between nature and civilization and it he believed it was the responsibility of landscape architects to correct this result this environmental degradation which was manifested in America's slum ridden cities but how so and well here in Yale excuse me here at Harvard of course all of you know that that McHargue appealed to the Natural Sciences he pioneered an ecological methodology that encouraged designers to consider a range of interconnected environmental factors climate water flora fauna you know a system that is immensely important and influential today but my point is as nethertheless his comprehensive proposals generated through an approach grounded in the supposedly objective logic of the natural sciences I think in a certain way evaded design his regional master plans were often too large too abstract to engage issues a form space and in particular the human body perhaps in a way that traditional gardens designs once once did so Olmsted Hitchcock and McHarg are three examples three figures of influential practitioners whose design philosophies were shaped and I think as they come down to us constrain us by these wilderness inflected themes inherited values that I think continue in many ways to even subconsciously shape design practice today and they are a dualistic way of thinking that views nature as passive as a vulnerable entity that must be protected from the predatory interests of humans including designers like architects and endless gave architects to a professional bias against designed ostensibly designed nature often dismissed as frivolous pursuit affiliated with residential gardening decoration and feminine artifice and three a preference for large-scale problem-solving based on a deterministic design approach justified by science and I think or and I would say we think that one of the consequences of this way of thinking is a mistrust of design nature of the designed environment a legacy I think that's changing but that continues in many ways to haunt professionals to this day so designers clearly must radically readjust their way of thinking and their way of working wilderness values the unexamined foundation that still shapes the perception of what it means for people to live with nature must be called into question relinquish yunus values will allow designers to adopt the more complicated viewpoint advanced by progressive scholars and scientists a recognition that nature and civilization although not the same have always been intertwined and are becoming more so climate change reveals that that there's not a square inch of our planet that does not in some way bear the imprint of humans landscape and architecture allows our landscape and culture landscape and architecture intermix in various combinations while constructed elements seem to predominate in cities and natural elements seem to predominate in rural zones organic ins or Ganic and synthetic operate as a gradient a gradient of differing intensities that form a continuum across the surface of the earth I hope you caught that that in fact the architect is giving a landscape history and that that means that the thing is really working Joe spoke about the need of designers to overcome the long-standing human nature dualism had acknowledged that there is an interdependency building on John's remarks I will argue that one road to overcoming this dualism is to adopt the new definition of nature which can be said the philosophy of our time the change of the definition of nature is the structural system that actually lies behind the idea of interface the interface between landscape and architecture between humans and other species between nature and culture dramatic transformations of nature this concept have left us since 1960 with a nature that is really heterogeneous that is constantly changing that is an evolving system of which we are an integral part Raymond Williams has stated that the concept and the word nature are one of the most difficult in the English language and it has really taken over a century to even be able to begin to define what this new nature that we are living with as a concept to be visible and to emerge we're still mired in an overview that we've accepted certain strengths of the new what follows is a few highlights of the evolution of the movement from an a heterogeneous constantly changing varied and integrated view of the world as the new nature to the homogeneous and Static one before it the new understanding of nature's will exemplified by the figure of Ernst Haeckel in somewhere between 1840 and 1880 you can see the real beginnings of the change and the shift in the concept of nature in 1879 Ernest heckle a marine biologists came up with a concept and the word of echo system and a word and concept that again we did not come to understand as a culture until the late 60s but heckle was with many others in search of a single source for nature's forms and radial areas which you see there we're really in all the multi multiple forms he claimed were all based on one underlying pattern this made it a big great interest of enormous interest to architects and designers as something by which one could get to an original form that structured variety the other thing of great interest are to seek again the single form in a single form of origin was the study of mountains and there were many architects like Mia lately Duke that sought to explain all forms of mountains and their this integration through crystallography there was a series of studies that showed it in different states of this integration through crystallography patterns at the same time there were many naturalness that were giving a slightly more nuanced study of mountains though again mountains were a particular interest to the era and in this particular you can see that what was interesting was the changes of species according to the altitude in the mountains and the kinds of different geology's the different species of trees and of animals that corresponding to them so here we have not a single nature response but some that is beginning to adapt to different conditions and of course Darwin's work eventually put an end to the search for a single generating form with his book are the origin of the species in 1859 but again a book that really did not come into its own to the 20th century completely and to which there are still opposition the study of finches showed that this particular bird indifferent is islands of the Galapagos though very close to each other adapted and changed form adapting to those particular conditions of each particular Island it revealed our nature constantly changing and adapting with no universal blueprint in its forms it was artists not architects or landscape architects who were the first designers to embrace an ecological understanding that these different works produce that I have just mentioned in the 1960s to embrace an ecological understanding of natural processes and really abandoning the fixation that was on copying forms from nature and really copying the performance of nature and this work when you must all know Herbert bias Mill Canyon Creek earthquakes was actually a water management design which retained and saved water in a public park that was being eroded by excessive drainage poured into it from surrounding development and so in the evolution of these ideas by the 20th century we really in the second half we are really beginning to see very clearly now the shift of attention from nature's forms to nature's performance Robert Smithson be at the broken circle albeit the double helix begins to pay attention of how forms disintegrate over time is particularly interested in this disintegration of form and and how they are affected by all of the conditions both of the soil with which it's made with the water the movement of the water and seeing that as a particular condition of nature and and also I should point out that I think why Diane and I are so enthusiastic about those land our project is not only for their ecological understanding of a kind of complex nature but for the fact that they don't resort to a kind of default again picture as vocabulary and are not afraid to kind of have bold design abstract forms on the land but moving forward since 2000 an international group of designers are giving up this outmoded human nature polarity with its corresponding endorsement of a static view of nature and instead are embracing this is more complex view and creating work based on this notion that nature and culture humans in nature are complex and and reciprocal and our book of groundwork attempts to map this trend and while the various perspectives are different and the scales of the projects diverge all of our authors or designers are in some way share this interest in in dissolving traditional distinctions between the object building and its environment and groundwork identifies three design directions that perhaps unites this otherwise very heterogeneous group topography ecology and bio computation and let us show you a few projects from each category that we think exemplify some of these three overlapping design approaches and I and I want to highlight their overlapping some might argue arbitrary but it was an attempt for us to kind of try to kind of find a way of putting them together I don't have time to talk about it but each of the three chapters should you get the book begins with a timeline of precedence we know there's nothing new Under the Sun and a lot of these contemporary methodologies clearly have history but let's talk about topography to Papa graphic designers reject the paradigm again of the object building that sits discreetly on the land instead topographers manipulate the ground to blend building and landscape treating built form as a habitable land form a group of topographers included in ground work including Toyo Ito and zaha hadid confront an increasingly common challenge how to design or deal with flat marginal sites on the outskirts of cities and they respond in a similar way they transform featureless property into constructed landforms landforms with exciting and striking silhouettes that confuse traditional distinctions between man-made and natural in contrast to these projects that manufacture landforms on flat sites several several topographic projects in the book tackle the challenge on a building within steeply sloping sites in their competition competition winning design for the lycée zone with a French designers Duncan Liu escape fashion this comprehensive roofs roof scape for the sprawling school campus embedded in a hillside and classroom circulation and gathering spaces are combined under this immense canopy subdivided into into a series of planted stepped ribbons taking a very different approach to intervening and a hillside Snohetta highlights rather than elides the distinction between building and hillside at the Peter das Museum which is located in a remote coastal town in Norway the the designers a cut a deep trench I into a raised into into a into a deep mound and filled this void with a museum the building slender form capped by a gently art roof mirrors the contours of the surrounding topography but although snow had as topographical insertion clearly differentiates it doesn't blend but differentiates the boundaries between Museum and terrain it nevertheless requires viewers to consider the tensions between them and as you can see these lateral glass walls a capture exterior and interior reflections superimposing images of nature and of architecture the second category that we have is that of ecology and I should say too that in the three categories topographical ecological and bio computational there's a slight shift in time in the sense that the topographical was the earliest sort of work that attempted to see if they could work on this line and it is in the ecological that starts a bit later and finally the bio computation is the most recent but it what is interesting about the ecological the ecological section is that the really in the precedence Landscape Architects were really the earliest and their work was very important and deserves are really looking at the from Hargreaves Guadalupe River Park or to the eastern Shell storm surge barrier of estate or to Richard Haig's Gas Works or to the Duisburg North Park might be the Lots in which really a landscape is being made out of steel architecture sustainable design tends to be product oriented and evaluates materials and techniques on the basis of performance and efficiency often neglecting to consider issues of form and a program ecological designers instead are much more interested in unleashing the potential of sustainability employing brand principles at different scales and whether they are addressing issues of water retention of terrain remediation or energy efficiency the important part of it is that it raises they face them raising both environmental and design standards a few ground work projects employ living walls and roofs we were particularly interested in projects that use them in a way that D familiarize common building types with its facades and roofs entirely covered with plants ven oh heavens CSS Sports Centre in Amsterdam simultaneously merges and yet stands apart from the park that surrounds it power and use tower of stack modularity v8 is transformed the abandoned lot in downtown Boston into a surreal vertical form that cultivates micro algae a renewable biofuel prefabricated models can be quickly assembled disassembled and redistributed to any site Francois Roche of RNC erected this Cavani at the shelter a family of four inside an interior courtyard of a typical Parisian block the modest three-story pavilion is wrapped with steel netting to support a vertical garden of 1200 hydroponic firms that camouflage the new structure from its neighbors the ferns is sustained by a constellation of 300 suspended blown glass vases that cultivate rhizobia a bacterial soup used to provide nitrogen to the ferns without the assistance of soil the projects bacterial feeding process unnerved its neighbors and in all of these projects nature is rendered not as benign but as an ominous force injecting a critical edge to the prevailing feel-good sensibility of most green design there's also this sections also includes projects by designers who work at a larger scale and often use recycled materials that serve as reminders of a former life in the site the abstract circular form of snow heaters tourist route a service area along a scenic highway is made of rocks excavated on the site and of driftwood that's been gathered from a nearby beach as well as kept the remnants of an old radar station influenced by earthworks like Robert Smithson this broken circle we included it for its use of geometry in a natural setting the remediation is another important part of this ecological work some of some designers focus on remediating marginal urban sites like Park Atlantic or battle Leroy conserve Marsh lands on the outskirts of something there Spain they transform and formerly the stagnant water course into public space from a Leonardo's Vitruvian Man 2 core boost modular buckminster fuller domes to fry out those elegant roofs architects have searched for a vocabulary based on geometric forms and proportions that they believe have infused on creation but currently various digital designers are likewise interested in aligning biology and design to tap into the principles governing living things but they subscribe to a concept of nature that is different from the predecessors top-down ordered cosmos instead bio computation designers script digital codes that exploit the computer's potential to emulate living things by using algorithms that reflect the underlying diversity and complexities of biological processes they generate forms and patterns that match a conception of nature has adapted self-organizing and without external control around the lashes contemporary interpretation of the grotto an old landscape tapas exemplifies this technique via computational sequence it assembles four polygonal modules into a non repetitive structure that although it appears random possesses a precise geometrical organization by a competition architects like ecologic studio use computer programs to create performative projects that tackle environmental issues because of their capacity to adapt to the nuances of context and climate over time for example the Northside cop's house vertically patterned facade fabricated out of locally sourced timber was generated by taking into account site-specific environmental forces like wind and solar energy the euro sue oceanic pavilion designed by Tom wisdom proposes a parametric redesigned exterior shell inspired by the morphology of sea life and whisking claims that it's soft transparent membrane reinforced by stiffening vanes replicates not only the look but also the behavior of the skins of sea creatures finally dueled by Magnus Lawson proposes them reverse the certification of this era with a six thousand kilometer Beltway of crystallized sand dunes constructed by using a non fatal genic microorganism bacillus pastelly that turns sand into sandstone the bacillus is deployed on the surface of large balloons whose biomorphic reforms are derived from scripting technologies that were inspired by a phony rock formations they function as positive negative moles which when placed next to the shifting sand dunes harden over a 24-hour period into a fantastic network of inhabitable interiors well we try to practice what we preach at least occasionally when we don't have conservative clients and terrible budgets and groundwork this book stems directly from our own teaching and practice sometimes working together and sometimes working alone our work has been informed by this similar interest in the Alliance again of two disciplines landscape and architecture and Diane and I at Yale in the advance studios we teach we call our integrated design approach interface and for us landscape by definition does not presuppose working with trees and plants this very blurry distinction between landscape and architecture it's not a question of the use of organic versus natural materials but but hinges on degrees of enclosure as you know architects tend to concern themselves with the design of a space is enclosed by sealed membranes while landscape architect's tend to concern themselves with with spaces that are open to the elements and focusing on the threshold where these two zones come together our objective is to come up with a kind of single unified concept one that's programmatic and spatial that treats the interior and the exterior has linked entities that shape human experience most important for us rather than thinking of the landscape as an afterthought in the design process as architects I think still are prone to do from the moment we put pen to paper or keyboard to computer screen we and working with our students we strive we strive to articulate the seam the overlap the interface we're indoors and outdoors meat and as we focus on this kind of intermediate scale between inside and outside materials become important like in this project we recently completed in embed food materials become a kind of connective tissue that enact this passage between landscape and architecture now why are we not moving forward okay so we're going to show you a few projects at a range of scales beginning small and sort of going big these are projects that we've worked on together when our client a Manhattan developer embarked on the renovation of this of his Manhattan penthouse he required a design that would dramatically link at this 3,000 square foot loft with a roof terrace that enjoyed amazing panoramic views of Manhattan and although the project he also said he was a developer and he wanted a roughly a design that would reflect his commitment to a green architecture so although this project employs a carefully researched selection of sustainable materials and systems what we were really hoping to do here was push green design again beyond familiar checklist and to create a design which we thought would impact lifestyle a kind of rethinking of the urban garden the challenge was to was to again vertically connect these two spaces we could resort to the typical modernist strategy of using hard materials from inside out and said we wanted to bring the outside in so this diagram illustrates how in the loft nature moves from exterior to interior the stair the stair bulkhead depicted here and core behaved as a kind of transitional element that facilitates material continuity allowing the IPE wood decking and vegetation on the roof to literally flow into the heart of the loft where it forms this interior green core that separates public from private space and we thought of the green core is a kind of living veil that again separates this kitchen dining area from the master bedroom which can be screened off with with sliding glass panels and our client asks us to he said he wanted a wash and bathe surrounded by lush vegetation so visible through the glass wall that separates his shower from the planted core depicted here and when privacy is desire he desired he can flip a switch on this switch light glass and it goes from clear to translucent and the rear of the bathroom is clad with modular panels that that that come with an integrated irrigation system and surmounted by a skylight this living wall we thought of as yet another element that would vertically link a roof and interior and here's a here's the sort of stair in the heart of the apartment that leads you access to the roof with the cell facing bulkhead and when you reach the top the suspended I pay deck plan again planted with sedum and grasses absorbs water deals with the heat island effect but is an outdoor room for our client to enjoy and then again here's the sort of bulkhead a kind of little maybe the house on a prairie to observe the metropolitan skyline another project we did together this is a competition that diana initiated it was a plan a master plan for a Tenley gearing in Korea it's organized around a circle of circulation pass I'll just very quickly show you that the design was the site plan was meant to create Passard overlook ancient rice fields gardens and open spaces and instead of following the competition guidelines that mandated isolating a series of institutional buildings in a kind of remote cultural district our project attempts to integrate them into the very heart the very fabric of the park a building like this one it's a museum we conceived of as a literal thickening of the path that begins to merge the circulation routes consisting of pedestrians joggers cyclists and museum visitors that are literally sort of captured within the space of the museum and once inside or outside a park visitors or recreationists as depicted in this cross-section become captive audiences as these exteriors circulation routes and interior ones merge and intersect the museum and the section superimposes views of people looking at art as they look at landscape as they're looking at kind of moving people at different speeds and an image of that effect as part of the New York City's bid to host the 2022 Olympic which went to London as you know both both of us were commissioned to design for it an equestrian facility for Lateran Park in Staten Island the remediated site would then leave behind a park for future generations of New Yorkers rather than adhere to the convention of treating stadiums as enormous objects just set into a naturalistic park our proposal treats the Sports Complex as an earthwork the scheme is composed of two principle elements of berm and a ribbon the berm an s-shaped earth mount defines two exterior spaces for spectatorship one is Adam Ultima outdoor amphitheater for 35,000 and an overlook that offers visitor behind-the-scenes look at more map fields where horses and riders are framed against the backdrop of marshland this would would have been the first time that he would have been an overlook for the training of horses spectators assent to the stadium we are one of the three green ramps that lead them to a concourse level that you see there and at the end of the stadium the ribbon falls horizontally to create a pedestrian bridge that leads to the green roof that has a gentle slope to offer you a spectator of the pressure you know as the spectators of view of the practice area value engineering forced us to search for an affordable strategy for integrating the temporary bleachers we arrived as a solution after meeting with a number of Bleacher suppliers who showed us how they typically disguise the structural framework of the bleachers by sheathing it in a translucent vinyl mesh printed with graphics our cost-effective solution let's transfer the logic of printing to the landscape an abstract pattern of dots printed on a scrim that wraps temporary bleachers merges with an identical pattern of planted dots scattered horizontally across the ground it creates a composition that conforms distinctions between the nature and artifice landscape and architecture we now talk about works done individually okay so the last projects as you hopefully can say are or try to use this interesting interface design approach together but we also work independently here are two projects which are again are trying to emphasize this idea of scale that we're really kind of working across scales but in particular this interest on that kind of sort of more smaller more intimate scale where indoors and outdoors meet to very quickly to residential projects at my office the first is this house it's carved into a steeply sloping site in Hudson New York and it was conceived of as a kind of viewfinder to frame the landscape I'm not going to really show you too much about it but you can see in the cross-section it employs a kind of spiral ramp that leads from the top to the bottom of the site and it's designed to capture a series of cinematic panoramic views of the Catskill Mountains a views that were depicted in Hudson River pictures paintings like by 19th century painters like Frederick Church whose house Alana happens to be about a half a mile down down down the road and without taking through the house again the idea was that resting finally at the bottom of the ramp the bottom of the hill a viewers ultimate encounter with the landscape would be framed in such a way that would literally evoke views like that one that that church painted the scenes of the Catskill that were the source of inspiration for the for the project a project currently on the boards that my office is this one up my office was one of eight firms that included Diller Scofidio Renfro low-tech and Jurgen Meyer and we were all invited to participate in the design of a senior community and Palm Springs which was a gear to an underserved demographic LBGT seniors and I don't have the whole master plan here but but we were focused on designing this perimeter block a mixed-use master plan currently again as I said on the boards and typical retirement communities like the one illustrated here employ landscape landscape site plans that include roads and foliage as devices basically to isolate and conceal what are referred to as assisted living facilities basically the place where people eventually go to die and instead our project attempts to use landscape in a way that that that fosters community as opposed to segregating people so no longer banished the assisted living occupies the heart of the community and along with the 24 independent living private homes the developer wanted individual private houses they could be attached but but what we tried to do was integrate all of them around this what we call the Commons a landscaped public public space and the comments is planted with indigenous desert vegetation there's this kind of curve swell it directs stormwater from the mountains to this pool which doubles as a retention Basin but the main focus of the project was sort of contrary to that proverb good fences make good neighbors rather than resort to the use of traditional fences the site section combines hardscape and saw scape - we hope to articulate porous boundaries between neighbors at varying scales so on the west that what we call the garden homes possess these kind of sunken backyards that create privacy but continuity with the communal space at the middle and likewise on the east there's a continuous lap pool it defines their rear yards of what we call the pool homes but it forms a kind of aquatic moat spanned by bridges that again provide both link but sort of separate those people from the common areas this is just an image of the garden homes they're attached houses all linked by these solar canopies made of perforated metal mesh that would provide protection from the Sun but but working at the next Gale we were very interested in making flexible unit types that would accommodate a spectrum of gay lifestyles and we kind of proposed them to the developer in this way sort of thing they were inspired by two famous living arrangements made famous and iconic television and film the first roommates many people really feel that these are it's really a bunch of it's a story about a bunch of gay men living together and the idea what kind of partners with children that kind of as exemplified by the birdcage with Robin Williams so the homes are designed to appeal to residents of both crave interaction with their with their with both or roommates their housemates and their neighbors but also cherishing their solitude so in the garden homes depicted here there's the communal life is organized around a first-floor living area are connected by a bridge to the landscape but as you can see in this section when homeowners require privacy they could descend down to this kind of planted atrium core into one of three private suites that are all outfitted around a private contiguous private gardens and on the other side of the property running the length of the site as this lap pool that I said feeds into private pools that were meant to dematerialize the kind of boundaries of each of the pool homes and this aquatic amenity was inspired by another film in this case a 1967 movie of the swimmer I urge you to see it at features speedo clad Burt Lancaster who engages his suburban neighbors by swimming from one backyard to another and so in our project the lap pool also acts as a vehicle that fosters community interaction by erasing fences that typically isolate domestic spaces and and finally the lap pool terminates in this large swimming pool so mounted by assisted living a cantilevered building that forms a kind of suspended gateway to the rest of the master plan which is quite large and again this decision to embed assisted living in the center of the complex was inspired by my grandmother I don't need to be sentimental but she meant a lot to me and up until her 100th birthday she lived alone independently in South Beach sort of surrounded by the vitality of that district and then she was moved at a hundred to an isolated rural nursing home and she died almost immediately and I'd like to think that if she were alive she would kind of sit on that balcony overlooking the pool and be revitalized by this kind of animated of social condensor the work in this is work in Bilbao which I'm showing because it was an attempt to take a piece of a city that was built from taking a port away and port that was very close to the center of the city and moving it to the to the mouth of the river and being able to use landscape essentially to sew it back into the city it was completed at this December this past December we entered into it first with a master plan for the open space and then for we were commissioned to do a central hub and then an international competition for the rest of the of the other space except for the plus on Scotty which serves as a hub for six of the main streets coming into it the rest is treated as a series of streams running in through the urban fabric and from a linear park towards this edge to a series of paths that come down as ramps there's fourteen meters from this level of the city to here to the side of the river so a series of ramps coming down all along the way and joining the Museum of the Guggenheim at this end and the concert hall at this other end this is the hub where the 6th streets myth meet but their main path through the hub itself indicates that the important path from downtown all the way to the river is straight down here you come down to the river and then you cross it by a pedestrian bridge to cross over to the University on the other side and these are views of all these ramps that come down in between buildings there's a whole collection of buildings by different architects and the landscape comes sort of in ramps in between some pieces are tucked in under the topography this is the Gehry Museum in the back the project is totally built out at this point and one of the other lines running through this was to make green also a system of light light rails which joins you downtown with the main station and all the system Subway's this other project is in Korea we want it in an international competition in 2007 for a new city an administrative city close to Sejong we want it within our Korean firm and this is an administrative City to which half of the ministries in Seoul are being moved to so half of the government will move into it by 2015 I'm showing it here because of the integration of architecture and landscape which has been attempted but what you hear here is the site of the rice fields and the mountains the plan was for a large roof that follows the river the form of the river a continuous roof what is orange is a continuous roof under which are seven buildings separate buildings which are for the ministries the 11 ministries and this roof is at a six story only and we wanted to keep it low under the sort of general Korean way of building which is in towers the villages are really towers a series of towers of 15 to 25 feet and around our hmm it went that okay around this the exterior of this six different villages of high towers are being built as we speak the intention was to have all the ministries connected to overcome their tendency to ignore each other a common disease worldwide among government agencies and keeping it at six floors a flat city in the country everything is tower we wanted to give the feeling that government was accessible so we fought very hard to keep this at six storeys only and that there would be ramps that would allow the public to come to the sixth floor level and have a continuous public space on that roof so the view from the towers would be totally as if this was a continuous green ground although it's at six storeys and this is the city and the construction the first the Prime Minister will move in by the end of this year and the rest of the ministries will be occupied by 2015 no doubt the professional and academic alliances between architecture and landscape that we have champion in our talk still have a long way to go however the projects we've shown you this evening examples drawn from both ground work as well as the work of our own offices represent a first effort towards this goal thank you you guys take a question aah grrr fees you see Incan or Mayan topographies surfacing sometimes in the modern design work not in our minds when we were working on this although certainly the Mayan configurations have been incredibly sort of there perhaps unconsciously if they are there I mean they're very beautiful and they've caused enormous effects on me but I don't think that either one of us have consciously felt that we were referring to those things no of course they were profoundly inspirational to many of the land artists who directly in the 70s sort of look to those precedents but there must be something on your mind what do you that much for you must be thinking of something in particular was really the terrorists there was a slide that had some terracing in it which was similar to the Incan Summer Palace yeah oh maybe yes maybe Duncan Lewis yeah which utilizes striate sharain yeah yeah I don't think it was there anybody else speechless yes um do you have Thank You first of all do you have anything to say about the durability of green roofs and whether or not they're more of a fad or do you really believe in them you seem to use them a lot well there's a lot of research on on that and the Reach's is showing that the life of the roof is extended enormous ly to the green roof is a German study that has been sort of tracing all of the developments and the whole roof structure becomes last much more because it doesn't it's not subjected to the enormous differences in temperature and because of that debris roof I think Diane is being a bit modest because I think you were a very early user of the green roof in this very fabulous project this enormous green roof in Long Island City where they took cover silver Khan studios so look it up and we had some ecologists measure that precisely for a whole year and they took the roof that was totally without anything just black tar and then the other one an ecologist at Columbia and then one at pensively at Penn and they measured it for a whole year and it was extraordinary of how the group performed the temperatures how they were reduced the water that was gathered the cleaning of the water we got some incredible results I didn't quite believe them when we got them yep I was just wondering you talked a lot about this reconnection to nature is something more than anesthetic through topography or ecology or these bio computations how do you as designers take those from-from concepts and research and really bring it down to how the site influences their implementation I'm staying away from the words genius loci because you too many connotations but how do you take them from concepts to actual site designs when you approach a project don't you answer that question well you're asking how do you design and and always with the site in mind undoubtedly but I think that also more and more with very different disciplines coming together I mean we use ecologists you know we use historians we use artists we make very complex teams for working so it's it's a there's a it is a long waiting which is the flowing of ideas from very different fields is enormous ly important but also the social context and the site and it takes an enormous amount of crunching all of that together through here what to come with a design out of it maybe just to build a enter that I guess that first you listen carefully the first reference to the genius of place I think is trying to kind of we're very interested in site specificity but but not but I guess rejecting the kind of more essentialist notion that there's something intrinsic or inherent to the site alone and I think we're again interested in looking maybe like Smithson at the multiple layering of house of both man-made and natural synthetic elements you know come together insights and how they could become fodder for ideas but as Anna said well we realized that if we or trying to kind of address pressing environmental issues there can't be a sort of singular leader the kind of haridwar idea that i at least was brought up with is clearly obsolete and we as diana said we're talking about a kind of big table with with many different specialists and although the talk emphasizes landscape and architects clearly it needs to be urban as psychologists by a computation as engineers you know so many different people but I think the one I would just would emphasize that while we're not formulas and what we're so interested in performativity and ecology I think in a very simple way what we're really kind of least say to our students is that you need to think about buildings not as isolated ideas that are then subsequently decorated by a landscaper but that we really are asking our students and ourselves we try to have to really think about inside and outside spatially right and that although they might be all man-made materials or combinations thereof that's really all we want to do is find one singular concept that shapes basis of human occupation and thinks of them reciprocally and not independently from one another and and oh and also very simply I guess we've said it again and again but we are championing projects that are bold enough to be bold and to be designed and to be unafraid of designing the landscape and it's it's in a funny way as simple as that yes particularly in a large scale for certain kinds of buildings that interiors we occupy very differently than we do outdoor space and I wonder why then really we should think about them in the same way given the kind of way in which we socialize interior space should it really look or be or organize itself in the same way outdoor space does at all times I mean is this a kind of overarching ideological position you're taking that we should integrate into the next year's I know it does do I think that's a very good question but I you know we do a lot of interiors and in my office and I think a lot of this for me at least I can't speak for Diana comes from that but I would sigh I don't think we're saying that the interior and the exterior are the same and should be designed the same way I don't think that we're saying you know a lot of the projects that we show might have a kind of let's a common language or one of course thinks of the great precedent would be case study houses and glass windows and a lot of the projects do that but not necessarily so and I think clearly I mean in fact when a building type of victim recently interested in our data centers they're like bunkers okay but they are in interior spaces but they're in landscapes they need to still be thought about coeval II okay so all we're saying is to think about what is the nature of the interior what's the nature of the exterior they don't have to be necessarily transparent they don't have to employ the same forms but it needs a way of thinking that can't think one without the other and that's what we're asking and I think in so many cases there are thought of separately interfaces somehow deeper than merely to scan the surface that device yes yes yes but I also would say at the same point that I think increasingly we live in a kind of you know clearly a kind of wired digital world and one thing that I'm finding we're doing a number of these kinds of media lounge libraries in different universities right now one at Princeton and one in my you and when I pen and they're all the same idea which actually suggests that people really in a funny way want to work in these sort of polyvalent multi-purpose kind of open interiors that just allow them to either individually or collectively kind of kind of interact with one another and they're almost like interior landscapes and then also you can now wire exterior landscapes and I and I and I can I guess I would slightly disagree with you I think we're I'm going to disagree with you okay okay I think we're moving towards a way in which there is a kind of reciprocity and continuity that bit between these two areas but not always like in a museum for example yeah but at the same time but at the same time they do change scale once you're under the sky they change scale once you're under the sky you can't do things of the same size that you're doing inside so that's the first lesson continuity may exist but they're working at different scales anybody else thank you yeah I have a question I was wondering I'm an architect and I was interested in how you talked about design in correlation to nature and in particular I'm wondering in how far ecological systems really come to they're right in the way you approach design of landscape and I guess this is a question for the two of you so that's one and the second question is how do you escape the danger of using nature metaphorically or let's say I like to call it as a green wash I'll let you answer this yes no we're both handsome I think but the first the first question is - all right I'll start with the second question one of the things that we always tell our students is you know you can't simply paint it green to say that you know you resolve landscape and there is a green wash there is a green wash at work in in lots of projects and it's become a very popular color but the issue of the concept of nature metaphorically I'd like to say that the characteristics of our new nature are very well defined so within that definition of nature you can work very well I think you have to be precise I think the metaphorical use is very dangerous so I think that there is a precision about what nature is today and I think within that realm is where you need to work and it is something that's changing constantly that it is heterogeneous and it is something to which we belong are totally integrated in it and within that framework you can work very well in design but it is an important thing to hold it onto the framework and just to respond to add to the point about green washing I think it's something that's very prevalent and needs to be sort of critiqued and I don't know if it came across in the selection of projects but I think Diana pointed out that we were looking in particular for projects that sort of often had a kind of surreal or slightly unnerving kind of way in which landscape was was incorporated for example they are and see there's some other projects that we didn't show and in fact halloran you know sitting right here I mean we love that project because it because it I think reinterprets the green wall but in a way that I think again is kind of fitting is between sci-fi and maybe something slightly I say this in front of you a little bit kind of creepy and threat threatening so we were trying a little bit to define projects that would not only be that kind of green sentimental approach ecologic interventions so if we let's say face it that nature is just simply a better designer than we are maybe ourselves then I'm curious in how far can we design or do we maybe just plant seeds for ecological systems to emerge or how would we tackle this being a problem because any type of recreation of complex ecological systems as far as I know have failed if the human was too much of the master designer I have some doubts about that but what I'd like to point out is simply that the ecological system you need to understand first of all what is your purpose what is your aim from the point of view of making it sustainable sustainability means that you're able to keep things alive and that you keep cheap things that don't fall apart and so your aim is towards that and within that you do what you can we're moving more and more to sort of reflect or be able to ape living systems in the way that things can form and as much as we can do to make to extend life make life better that is valuable and maybe get a little bit like that and sometimes a little bit like that but it the important thing is that we are able to move in that direction and just it three thoughts related to your question yeah the first is that I think the thinking is that not necessarily nature's is the better designer but I think part of it is that you can't think nature without people and how they are interactive reciprocally and then maybe it's to understand those systems interactively how they work together and maybe how we could sort of readjust them but but I think in the book I think we champion ecological projects and I guess particularly as Diana pointed out in the last chapter bio computation we try to kind of be open-minded optimistic and affirm what some people are skeptical about this claim that through bio computation we actually can do that create performative landscapes due to the computers capacity to kind of be able to not just mimic what nature looks like but how it behaves and that's a tall order and I just think we need to look we wanted a champion that's not what we do but we wanted a champion people that do but lastly I just want to say this that that it all speak more for myself than for Diana but I feel that while the book champions ecological approaches and performativity I feel like our contribution to that in our work but also in particular in the book is not to kind of address your question which is a central question of our time right we're not ecologists and we're not that's not our specialty I think what we're trying to say that you know again that that sustainability needs to think of be thought about reciprocally and it needs to be the kind of embrace design and that we again feel that so many wonderful projects that employ ecological systems they're they're invisible right you go into a house and you know it's the same kitchen counter but it uses you know an ecological whatever or the same thing on the outside and I think what our criteria when we looked at projects was that they needed to sort of be embrace design at this and look at the creative potential of kind of ecological principles to sustain inaugurate what we think is a kind of new landscape architectural vocabulary maybe that's a good time to invite anybody else who wants to ask Joe Landin a question to come down and see them thanks so much for a great evening thank you

Channel: Harvard GSD

Views: 51,276

Rating: 4.9622641 out of 5

Keywords: balmori, HD, 720p, Video, Sharing, copy

Id: SXPohIrivwU

Length: 78min 53sec (4733 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2012