DEEP GROUND PROJECT: RELATIONAL URBAN MODEL

For the purposes of this project, a relational urban model has been created which can control simultaneously built mass quantities as well as 3D model of the built fabric. The model is based in sets of urban relationships which connect one another, hence the name of relational. One of the advantages of this working methodology is that it enables the generation of different options with a relative minor effort, as most of the drawing gets automatically produced, while there is potentially the chance to evaluate the overall built volume before the volume is even generated. It also enables the combination of variables related to density with variables related to typology. This can be used to produce varied and diverse urban patterns with simple controls. The volumetry of the proposed built fabric shown in the final drawing and renderings has been modelled to suit the quantity of land use calculated in the Transport Chapter (around 9,000,000 m2).

http://www.groundlab.org/

DEEP GROUND PROJECT: OPTION GENERATION

The result of this work is a series of options which allow us to study simultaneously the effects of different massing options in terms of GFA (m2) and spatial arrangement as well. The image shows the type of iterations that the model allows to do, evaluating options where the centre of intensity of the model as well as the overall quantity of buildings are modified in order to get a totally different, yet related, urban configuration. This leads to the concept of Adaptable Design applied for the Longgang masterplan, where changes on different variables (location and number of density nodes, particularities in building catalogue, etc) can be added into the design almost in real time so that further discussion on the urban fabric and architectural qualities can be put forward during the decision making process.

http://www.groundlab.org/

FORGETTING URBANISM

Sébastien Marot will give a view of the territories which Landsape Urbanism has traditionally dealt with, outlining current research on a tale superimposing the trajectories of architects, artists, writers, geographers and geologists who somehow crossed paths in a little city in upstate New York, and which confronts the different ways in which they related to that particular landscape. Among the characters of the tale are Colin Rowe, O. M. Ungers, Rem Koolhaas, Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark and Vladimir Nabokov.

FIGURES, SWARMS AND MULTITUDES: THE SUBJECTS OF LANDSCAPE URBANISM

The question then became whether molecular or atomic “populations” of all natures…would continue to bombard the existing people to train it or control it or annihilate it—or if other molecular populations were possible, could slip into the first and give rise to a people yet to come
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
The conditions addressed by the AA’s Landscape Urbanism programme — the nascent tourist economies of the United Arab Emirates, sites of environmental and so-called ‘natural disasters’, and the phenomenal scale and speed of industrialisation and urbanisation underway in China — invite other formulations of urban morphology, environmental dynamics, and socio-economic process to those employed in the decampment model by Charles Waldheim in his account of a post-industrial, post-Fordist North American city like Detroit.
These other sites are not abandoned and depopulated zones produced in the wake of mobile capital, but territories in the thick of the turbulent conditions of urban transformation and realignment it produces as it moves across the planet. In these zones mobile capital runs head on into the resistance and friction of existing ecologies, which are always, as Guattari has outlined, environmental, social and subjective. As such they render questions of building, architecture, inhabitation and populations a place of importance absented from other currents of Landscape Urbanism.
If such conditions, and the opportunities they present, are to be addressed through the medium of landscape, in its fullest sense, then some account of how landscape can be thought in relation to the subject and the built environment is required.
This lecture addresses these conditions through their historical precedents and a critical account of how they have been modelled and how they might be thought and practised.

LANDSCAPE URBANISM AS RESISTANCE

Although landscape urbanism is most often referenced with regards to post-industrial sites of the West, an argument will be made for landscape urbanism as a strategy for the new colonization of territories in the poorer, developing world. It will explicitly confront the ‘generic city’ discourse of Koolhaas and – through several projects in Asia – reveal how landscape urbanism strategies can serve as a form of resistance to the otherwise homogenizing forces of the prevailing ad-hoc project modus that is driven by the near-universal endorsement of the neo-liberal urban development paradigm. The projects will reveal how urban visions and strategic urban design projects can make more evident the area’s inherent qualities and creatively marry ecological, infrastructural, flooding and programmtic issues by solutions that cut across sectoral divisions. They underline the present-day possibilities for landscape urbanism and point to a basic challenge for designers – to recognize and build upon the existing landscape intelligence and nuanced micro-logics and develop (infra)structures that can guide urban growth.

QUESTIONS ON LANDSCAPE

AA Landscape Urbanism design tutor Eduardo Rico chaired an event on contemporary design practices dealing with the landscape of large scale infrastructures. The event took place in Huelva, Spain, and brought together a group of worldwide experts linked to Landscape Urbanism work, including Charles Waldheim (University of Toronto), Chris Reed (StossLU), Marcel Smets (KU Leuven), Martin Basdevant (Michel Desvigne Landscape Architects) amongs others.

The event, sponsored by Andalusian Government, was recorded and will be made availible shortly online

FORD'S FIELDS

Across a range of disciplines, landscape has become a lens through which the contemporary city is represented and a medium through which it is constructed. These sentiments are evident in the emergent discourse of “landscape urbanism.” Landscape urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently underway in which landscape supplants architecture as the basic building block of city making. This lecture presents an introduction to practices of landscape urbanism and locates the recent emergence of landscape in the context of decentralizing industry and the emergence of a distributed global economy. The brownfield sites of abandoned industry and the greenfield sites of new exurban development invoke the landscape medium as uniquely relevant to the pressing environmental and social conditions in the wake of industrial economy. Citing Detroit as a special locus for the exploration of these topics, Ford’s Fields describes the conditions for urbanism in the “motor city” as among the most legible of examples in the region. The lecture references Ludwig Hilberseimer’s “New Regional Pattern” and partially realized plan for Detroit’s Lafayette Park as exemplary of a critically engaged, proto-ecological urban planning practice.

Thursday 17 January, 37 Bedford Square, FFB, 14:00

IS LANDSCAPE URBANISM?

The joining together of landscape with urbanism is sometimes compared to the combination of two extremes. While this may be useful from a rhetorical point of view, this lecture will suggest that far from being polar opposites landscape and urbanism are in fact very similar. Borrowing from the field of landscape ecology we can see that both landscape and urbanism deal with complex networked systems arranged over kilometers wide areas. While in the popular imagination landscape has the edge ecologically and environmentally, urbanism has a focus on economics, infrastructure and political structures. The two joining together is a coming together of allied, rather than opposing, disciplines.

After reviewing some of the key concepts of landscape urbanism, the lecture will focus on examples in Bahrain, Brazil, Ireland and UAE to put forward the case for landscape as more than just beautification of urban spaces. The lecture will present landscape as an essential component of the city, and will outline some of the techniques and strategies that a landscape approach offers for urban architecture.


Frdiay 11th January, 18:00, Studio 1, Architectural Association

LANDSCAPE URBANISM LECTURE SERIES

This Friday gareth Dohrty will be opening the Landscape Urbanism Lecture series.


These lectures will try to explore different questions posed as the discipline of Landscape Urbanism gathers momentum. Issues like the political implications behind the use of the term landscape, relationships between process and scale, or its critical position in the building of the iconography of the city will be brought into debate by the different speakers.

AALU - Groundlab in the Hong Kong - ShenZhen Biennale

The work of AA Landscape Urbanism 2004-2007 altogether with Groundlab Collective is shown in the c-6 pavillion on the Hong Kong - ShenZhen Biennale until March 2008. The work features panels and models of research work by student works as well as design work undertaken under the Groundlab Collective, linking academic to professional realm.