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The
Landscape Urbanism Reader, edited by Charles
Waldheim and Large
Parks, edited by Julia Czerniak and George Hargreaves.
As issues of environmental degradation,
urban overcrowding, and other global concerns push landscape
architecture and the more recent field of landscape urbanism
into the spotlight, books responding to the landscape on
the large scale are more and more common. These two books
by Princeton Architectural Press collect essays and projects
on the field of landscape urbanism and the phenomenon of
large parks, just two aspects of how designers are approaching
the shaping of brownfields, suburbia, and other "leftover"
sights.
Landscape urbanism can be generally
defined as the notion that the contemporary city is represented
and constructed by landscape, rather than architecture.
Editor Charles Waldheim's assertion carries through the
fourteen contributions to his reader on the theory, from
landscape urbanism's "father" James Corner to
Alan Berger's embrace of the "drosscape."
What permeates is a view that the landscape can be the glue
that ties urban constructions together, by approaching the
city inclusive of its region, by seeing landscape as process,
and by incorporating natural resilience into designs. Basically
it is a view of the landscape -- and henceforth the city
-- as dynamic and fluid, rather than static and stable.
Gone is the traditional notion of landscape as solely gardens
and parks. By seeing landscape as process and the horizontal
network in the city's verticality, landscape urbanism embraces
those places, like industrial sites, that typically weren't
considered as sites for intervention.
This isn't to say that parks and
gardens are no longer an important part of the landscape
profession. But how these more typical pieces of the landscape
are now addressed and seen in the context of the city is
the subject of Czerniak (a contributor to The Landscape
Urbanism Reader) and Hargreaves's collection. While
focused on a narrower topic, this book shares many traits
with the reader on landscape urbanism, mainly the view that
landscape can help the city; the large scale of the urban
park can do more than provide recreation, it can be an important
public and ecological place for the city. What separates
these two collections is their approach to history. While
the reader sees (primarily modern) history as something
to be overcome, Large Parks sees history as something
to be learned from, mainly because the greatest time of
urban parks was the era of Frederick Law Olmsted and other
designers tackling the urbanization of the 19th century.
While places like Central Park and Golden Gate Park cannot
be done today, due to the impracticality of displacing individuals
and families to create centralized parks, they nevertheless
offer lessons that contemporary landscape architects embrace
and mold to today's concerns.
Certainly different in focus and
content, these two books are valuable collections of how
to approach the design of the urban landscape, from parks
to industrial sites and other infrastructure. Overlap exists
in some of the themes and the personalities involved, illustrating
how the flow of ideas and approaches on the urban landscape
mirrors the (design of the) landscape itself.
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