The Landscape Observatory of Catalonia and Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona are organizing the International Seminar Creative Landscapes. Art and the Reinvention of Places, which will take place online on June 16 and 17, 2021.
How does artistic creation may contribute to remake emotional and affective links with the territory? Can art reinvest obsolete dynamics? Could it encourage dialogue between different actors, stimulate self-esteem for the place, or reactivate community action in favour of the landscape? How can creative or artistic practices help to transmit values in the landscape, raise awareness, transformation and, ultimately, bring it closer to the population?
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We are facing global and local challenges that force us to rethink the territories where we live. A great diversity of landscapes, both urban and rural, need new ways of approaching them, demanding a change of perspective and a reworking of their stories.
In this context, different artistic practices emerge transforming the territory and reinterpreting the landscape. These are a wide range of initiatives that, linked to specific spaces, challenge our relationship with the territory and generate new places, often far away from official and hegemonic narratives.
Creative landscapes: Transformation and revitalization
The Seminar, organized by the Landscape Observatory of Catalonia and Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona, will explore the potential of creativity to generate dynamics of transformation and revitalization of landscapes. It will also explore issues of territorial planning, heritage activation and local development.
Presentations will be given in the language stated in the programme. Simultaneous translation will be provided for the speeches between 3:00 pm and 4:45 pm on the 16th.
Registration: free but compulsory by sending an email to inscripcio@catpaisatge.net.
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Text Credits: International Seminar Creative Landscapes
The creative use of space, objects and time is a hallmark of Christo, who passed away on May 31, 2020. Together with his partner Jean-Claude, he evolved the idea of wrapping objects, buildings, and landscapes, transforming them into an art form. Our author Wolfram Höfer, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, reflects on his personal encounters with Christo’s art. A personal farewell.
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For me, as a landscape architect, Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s art is important because it forced the viewer to see places and landforms differently – and so to discover new qualities. My first personal encounter with their work was the “Wrapped Reichstag” in Berlin in 1995. I had just graduated from college and was working as a landscape planner. Their “Project for Berlin” became my summer event. Christo and Jeanne-Claude transformed the not very architecturally exciting Reichstag building (Wilhelm II-style: over-decorated, clumsy, fat, loaded with a lot of bad German history) into an aesthetically exciting object and created a completely new space. It was fascinating to see how thousands of people were enjoying it every day: examining, discussing, arguing. To me, Christo’s art often shows a witty (and wise) sense of humor that seemed to shine through from under the veil of cloth.
“The perception of the building in Berlin’s urban space has been sustainably changed by Christo”
Today, the “Wrapped Reichstag” is history and the building again serves its original purpose as Germany’s parliament. But since then, the perception of the building in Berlin’s urban space has been sustainably changed by Christo. His veiling was a revelation for many, taking away part of the building’s historic encumbrance and creating unforgettable images.
In 1999 and in 2013 I had the opportunity to see Christo’s installations at the Gasometer in Oberhausen. During both projects, his playful dealing with space and scale were remarkable and memorable. The 1999 “Wall of Oil Barrels” and the 2013 “Big Air Package” delivered a sublime perception of three-dimensional space inside this former industrial building. Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s installation made it possible to experience what “absolutely great” really feels like. As a footnote – these two projects were their only land-art installations inside an exhibition venue. On all other occasions the artist couple only used exhibition spaces to present objects from the preparation of their projects – these objects pointed at the final ‘product’, but did not physically show it.
“I was blown away by the beauty and spatial experience.”
In 2005, when I walked the “Gates” project in New York City’s Central Park, I just loved their work (as before in Berlin and Oberhausen). I was flirting with the idea of moving to the U.S. and was blown away by the beauty and spatial experience moving through their perfectly placed orange gates and the shiny orange fabric. The paths they chose for the “Gates” modeled a landscape out of Central Park in wintery light that was beautifully sublime. It created a joyful walking experience and cast Central Park in a completely different light. Today, another layer of appreciation adds to my relationship to Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s oeuvre. After 15 years of working in the tristate area surrounding New York City (NYC), I now see a new dimension of their art: making projects become reality. Bureaucracy is a global phenomenon, but in this respect as in many others, NYC is exceptional: political minefields and trench warfare render decision making a debilitatingly slow snail-paced race. Only a stellar mix of stamina, patience, wit, and stubbornness could bring the city administration and Central Park Conservancy (who were extremely critical of any installation because they feared for damage to the park due to the bracings for the gates) to one table that lead to the installation – eventually.
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In the aftermath, “The Gates” was an amazing success for Central Park. No damage was done to anything in the park, amazing public relations were generated worldwide, plus a generous donation to the Park Administration by Christo and Jeanne-Claude made the decision to allow this exception a wise move. It took Christo and Jeanne-Claude 25 years to implement “The Gates” – but this kind of stamina was an essential part of their artistic work. Without their endurance all their ideas would have remained just nice dreams.
“He sees himself as an educated Marxist who knows how to use the capitalist system for his art.”
Finally: Who has paid for all this? Christo and Jeanne-Claude! Through the sale of posters and other merchandise related to their studies for the different projects, they were able to finance their projects without any public or private support from third parties. From Jeanne-Claude’s perspective, their projects became particularly powerful because they were available to everyone, but only temporary and could not be purchased or owned. The New York Times wrote, quoting Christo, that he sees himself as an educated Marxist who knows how to use the capitalist system for his art.
“Certain components of landscape architecture can take inspiration from Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s work”
Landscape architecture is no ‘free art’, but certain components of landscape architecture can take inspiration from Christo’s and Jeanne-Claude’s work. Their design always referred to a spatial context; interventions were never only self-reflecting – they always turned into a new meaning for each space that went beyond the transient physical art itself.
Today, when I remember the artworks of Christo and Jeanne-Claude that I personally had the opportunity to witness and experience, it seems to me that they both look at the viewer through their art – with a twinkle in their eyes – saying: Enjoy life and allow yourself to see things differently! Discover the new in the seemingly well-known!
For the first time, the Danish Architecture Center (DAC) presents a Danish exhibition that uses everyday life as a way to understand architecture. Hello Denmark celebrates Danish architecture and design and explores what makes Denmark and Copenhagen popular around the world: a healthy and happy everyday life.
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Denmark is often highlighted in international contexts as a role model when it comes to creating optimal living conditions for the population; conditions that contribute to a high quality of life. Denmark has been named the world’s happiest country several times, and before the coronavirus left its mark on the world, the New York Times included Copenhagen as one of its of recommended places to visit in 2020.
What are the ingredients in the Danish people’s coveted recipe for the good life? Can it be linked to the architecture and design traditions?
The exhibition Hello Denkmark shares the common narrative about Denmark as a world-class design and architecture nation. This narrative bears witness to a design tradition and strong set of values that permeate all of Danish society, shaping the life – every day – from the smallest teaspoon to an entire city plan.
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In this exhibition, one will experience six installations, each representing an element from the everyday life the Danes value so highly and that influence how they build, reside and live. It is about a close relationship to nature; the trust upon which the society is built; the insistence on hygge; the unique bicycle culture; the design-infused society; and the need to live near water.
Hello Denmark opened on June 8, 2020, in Copenhagen at the DAC. The exhibition is supported by the philanthropic association Realdania and the Knud Højgaard Foundation.
In military strategy and global trade, the chokepoint is one of the most interesting ways in which geography can be used to mess with the powers that be.
In the Ancient Battle of Thermopylae, a small army of 300 Spartans and 700 Thespians led by Spartan King Leonidas made a heroic last stand against the much larger army of Persian King Xerxes I. Though they were vastly outnumbered, the Greek forces were able to inflict heavy casualties on the Persian army through the effective use of the hoplite phalanx within the narrowest part of the Thermopylae Pass.
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The Thermopylae Pass is perhaps the most famous example of a choke point, a geographical feature on land or at sea which an armed force is forced to pass at the risk of reducing their relative combat power against a numerically inferior opponent. In the case of Thermopylae, the choke point was a valley, but the term also traditionally describes straits or bridges. In the Battle of Stirling Bridge, for example, the Scottish forces led by William Wallace defeated a much larger English Army by luring the English forces across a narrow bridge.
From battles to trade
From its original use as a term in military strategy, the choke point has evolved to describe a whole host of geopolitical features which act to limit the smooth flow of trade. This still includes areas of the map which are difficult to navigate. The Caribbean, for instance, was a popular place for pirates and buccaneers in the early stages of Western expansion into the Americas because the geography made it easy to ambush merchant ships. A similar problem is presented by the Strait of Hormuz, the entrance to the Persian Gulf, which receives 20% of the world’s oil traffic, making it an area of huge strategic importance to Western economies, and therefore, unsurprisingly, an area that has seen quite a lot of conflict over the last century. But the term also applies to aspects of various forms of transit. For instance, train lines can be major choke points since they confine goods to a fixed linear route for long distances, meaning that they are difficult both to maintain and defend and easy to sabotage. Similarly, busy seaports can be chokepoints due to the high concentration of goods flowing through them, which can often cause a bottleneck. It has also come to embrace more abstract geographical features, such as hard borders, protective tariffs and high concentrations of criminal enterprise, piracy, worker militancy or social movement activism.
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To a certain extent, these last few “abstract” chokepoints all fall under the umbrella of national and local politics. Read in this way, they bring up an important (or, more specifically, fundamental) problem with our contemporary global economy. In this “just-in-time” or “lean” economy, time is of the essence: things need to move from place to place with minimal friction. If national and local politics are in opposition to this model, if they are seen to be “choking” the frictionless flow of commodities, then this model is in turn opposed to national and local politics (i.e. they’re opposed to popular democracy).
Brexit Chokepoints
This has been made starkly clear in the recent case of Brexit. Through its membership of the Single Market, the UK currently enjoys trade deals with 40 other countries. In the event of a No Deal, these agreements would disappear overnight. As Tom Kibasi, Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, writes in a recent article for The Guardian, that would require “67 deals to be signed just to stand still.” Kibasi explains that the gravity of this scenario means it is unlikely to happen, but the very prospect of these new chokepoints emerging has already led major companies to move their operations elsewhere, including Nissan’s recent decision to move production of its new X-trail from its factory in Sunderland.
As this scenario illustrates, the fact that a democratic decision can act as such a major chokepoint should make us question how comfortable we are with subordinating everything to the smooth flow of trade.
Interestingly, if we want to challenge this state of affairs then one of the best ways is through these very chokepoints. For instance, the power that port workers, delivery drivers and other logistics workers have in slowing down or stopping the flow of trade, gives them enormous leverage in the global economy. Similarly, popular democracy, through its very control over the levers of national power, can also put checks on this flow. Read in this way, the chokepoint represented by the British people’s democratic power over a territory containing probably the most connected financial centre in the world, could be seen not as a risk but as an opportunity.
Alvar Aalto’s Cultivated Landscapes is an exhibition co-produced by the Museum of Finnish Architecture and the Alvar Aalto Foundation looking at previously unexplored aspects of the famous architect’s work. The exhibition, which runs from 25 September 2019 to 12 April 2020, is highlighting how Alvar Aalto’s architecture connects with landscape.
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As for the Finnish landscape, I have always been immersed in it. When I began to appreciate the balance and harmony it exudes, I also began to understand how we humans should treat out natural surroundings. – Alvar Aalto, 1972 –
Landscapes form an inseparable part of Alvar Aalto’s (1898–1976) architecture. He viewed them through the lens of an architect, in terms of how they could be reshaped and refined. He began his design process by considering the spirit of the place, both as a physical location and as a site of social interaction. Aalto treated the building’s surroundings as an extension of the interior, just as he viewed the site itself from a broader, landscape-focused perspective. Here he possessed deep insight, masterfully designing everything from small-scale gardens to large-scale landscaping projects.
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The new exhibition opening at the Museum of Finnish Architecture looks at Aalto’s relationship with the landscape – how he experienced it, and how he sought to integrate his architecture with the character of the terrain and vegetation of each site. Various factors influenced the outcome. The university campuses of Otaniemi and Jyväskylä offer a sample of how Aalto expertly wove together older architecture heritage to create something wholly new.
The exhibition takes a comprehensive look at how various features of the landscape influenced Aalto’s design process and his unique way of interpreting and reshaping the surroundings in dialogue with his architecture. With the town centre of Seinäjoki, for instance, he completely transformed the site with bold earthworks and by varying the height of the buildings.
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Amid a growing body of evidence pointing to the important role that nature plays in maintaining health and wellbeing, the presence of nature in urban environments is a highly topical theme of discourse at the moment. Finland’s most famous architect was ahead of his time in advocating green corridors and biophilic design, of which his architecture offers a fine sample.
Little-known outside of economics text books, just-in-time production has had countless affects on the modern urban landscape.
Just-In-Time (JIT) supply chains have left an indelible mark on the modern city. Developed by car manufacturer Toyota in the 1960s and 1970s, JIT’s essential aim is to cut costs by reducing the amount of goods and materials a firm holds in stock and increasing the speed with which these goods and materials are transported, housed, processed and consumed.
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Even from its origins, JIT was a distinctly spatial phenomenon. Japan suffers from a lack of land and natural resources. As a result, the country has long been forced to adopt a “lean” approach to manufacturing, involving smaller factories holding fewer goods and an efficient transport infrastructure to keep up a steady supply of new materials. Building on this pre-existing situation, managers at Toyota, also recognised the need to minimise waste by imposing greater discipline on the production line, ensuring smooth handling of materials and fewer mistakes.
The rise of the container
Just-in-time’s development went hand-in-hand with another innovation in global trade: containerisation. Now almost completely ubiquitous as a method of goods transport, containers were first widely adopted in the 1970s and, with the increasing standardisation of container units, it became possible to carry much larger quantities of goods on ever larger container ships, thus making it easier for a company to orient their supply chains to the just-in-time approach, since they could be more confident of a steady supply of goods.
Together JIT and containerisation brought about the decline of the inner-city warehouse as a building for storing goods. This set in train a rapid emptying of warehouse districts in major cities across the world, with the warehouses either being flattened and the land redeveloped – as happened in the development of a financial district in Canary Wharf from the 1980s and in the waterside redevelopment around Baltimore’s Inner Harbour in the 2000s – or converted – as happened in Manhattan’s Meat Packing district and in the London Borough of Hackney. Either way, property developers are indebted to JIT for the space it created in the inner city.
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Farewell to the seedy docks
The shift away from inner city docks also made way for the emergence of new ports in smaller towns and on the edge of cities. In the UK for instance, as the London and Edinburgh docks declined, ports like Felixstowe and Grimsby emerged in their place to become, respectively, the largest container and cargo ports in the country. Unlike the former historic ports, these towns remain relatively unknown beyond their immediate regions, they also lack the reputation for seediness that the London and Edinburgh docks once enjoyed. This is partly because it used to be much easier to rob a boat’s cargo and because there were more dockers who were more embedded in the city. Smuggling still occurs in these new ports, but it happens in a much more clinical fashion (as illustrated in the brilliant second season of The Wire).
Along with inner city seediness, JIT also helped bring about the death of main street, since the approach mainly benefits big companies that can manage large supply chains. Massive supermarket chains such as Walmart can source cheap goods from all over the world at prices that the small-town store and the medium-sized factory simply cannot compete with. This particular shift has delivered some big benefits to ordinary people, most notably that consumer products have become much cheaper than they used to be, enabling more people to afford both the necessities and luxuries of life. However, the jobs needed to have the money to buy these products have declined thanks to containerisation and JIT encouraging companies to take the work process to other parts of the world, a move which has had disastrous results for the middle class in major developed economies.
A Landscape in JIT’s image
One last thing (although there’s much more to talk about), JIT’s demand for an ever faster and smoother flow of goods has led to a huge reconfiguring of the landscape. Land reclamation and river dredging around major ports, expansion of high-speed rail and motorway networks, and a massive proliferation of so-called fulfilment centres on the urban periphery, are just a few of the major ways that this reconfiguration has impacted the physical geography of countries across the world.
Thanks to JIT, the global economy is now deeply connected. While it may seem impressive in its scope, this connectivity is very precarious. Most cities now have only enough food and medical supplies to last them a few days and are faced with the constant threat of ever-present bottlenecks and chokepoints. Looked at this way, just-in-time has probably gone too far and penetrated too deeply into every aspect of our lives. But can it even be stopped?
