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
New York’s East River separates the spectacular skyline of Manhattan from Long Island City, the westernmost neighbourhood of the New York City borough of Queens. Until recently, Long Island City’s rather uninviting waterfront was an abandoned industrial area. Today, the picture is different. Eleven acres of former wasteland have now become the recently completed “Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park” – New York City’s newest model for waterfront resiliency.
Designed by SWA/BALSLEY and WEISS/MANFREDI in collaboration with ARUP, “Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park” achieves two things – it transforms an abandoned industrial land into a resilient infrastructure and, at the same time, provides a contemplative retreat for the neighbourhood. The park directly adjoins a currently ongoing mixed-use and affordable housing development project, the city’s largest since the 1970s.
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Connection of nature, human and urbanity
The park’s design combines infrastructure, landscape, architecture and art in order to achieve a maximum benefit for the public. Visitors enter the area with its dreamlike character via a narrow bridge. Just one glimpse later, they spot “Luminescence” – a land art installation by New York-based artist Nobuho Nagasawa. Almost two meters tall glowing sculptures depict the different phases of the moon. In her work, the artist manifests the spatial relationship between nature, the built environment and human beings. This is also the park’s overarching theme.
Narrow paths lead through sculpted grassland. Picnic promontories and wooden platforms offer space for relaxing moments. Three fitness terraces adopt the dramatic gradient of the site as a design theme. A generously designed promenade leads the visitor towards a spectacular overlook. What looks like a tremendous sculpture from a distance turns out to be a nearly ten meters tall, cantilevered platform with a unique view of Manhattan’s skyline and the East River. The overlook’s steel-clad formwork relates to the site’s industrial legacy and integrates it into the architectural design. Not only the choice of material refers to the site’s historical heritage and its unique characteristics. The use of salt-mesh as main vegetation and the multi-layered spatial arrangement of design elements anticipate the inevitable rising water levels of the East River and potential patterns of flooding.
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Integration of the past
What used to be a neglected wasteland in the past is now a dynamic public space that also offers room for deceleration. A space that doesn’t deny its past, but sensitively integrates it into its design. Especially in the context of increasingly dense urban areas such as New York, the targeted activation and densification of unused spaces is more relevant than ever. “Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park” seems to be an answer to the question on which spatial concepts offer a new design model for urban ecology and a prototype for innovative sustainable design.
The decline of the American automotive industry leaves its traces in Detroit: From the sixties on, the proud city struggles with an economical downfall which results in a remarkable decline of its population and urban life. Today, abandoned and neglected buildings shape the core area. Since then, many efforts have been made to bring Motor City’s engine back to work. The latest attempt comes with a project from the Danish architects Schmidt, Hammer, Lassen and includes the first skyscraper for Detroit’s downtown in a generation. It seems promising because, in contrast to past projects, social and ecological components play a greater role.
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Failed Reanimations
The most recognisable effort for a reanimation of the abandoned downtown area was surely the giant Renaissance Center from 1977. Initiators were the managers of the automotive industry. A complex of five high-rise buildings houses the offices of General Motors and should bring new economic impulse to the City. But the Renaissance Center failed. The planners committed the mistake of equating economics with urban life. Detroitians especially criticised the fortress-like character of the buildings and the ignoring of the waterfront.
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Multidimensional approach
Schmidt, Hammer and Lassen Architects from Copenhagen created an ambitious concept for Detroit’s downtown. Located at the nearly empty Monroe Blocks, it differs a lot from previous projects. Instead of only focusing on businesses, the concept also respects urban life and the environment. The development will combine public spaces for various activities with 480 residential units and Detroit’s first high-rise office tower in a generation. Following the old Woodward’s plan of the downtown, the new Monroe Blocks will re-establish the urban fabric, promoting gathering, socialising and interaction. Small side streets and a wide variety of accessible spaces will connect some of the city’s key central public spaces. Maybe a more European approach can ignite the engine of Motor City again.
All pictures by Schmidt, Hammer, Lassen Architects.
Two strategic landscape design approaches for the periphery of cities illustrate how productive landscapes can inform future city parks, anchoring the future in the legacy of the past and providing restorative environments, beneficial for urban ecologies and highly embraced by the new urbanites.
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On the contrary, the periphery, as the part of the city where the urban fabric meets the countryside, has a high potential of consolidating China’s rural past with its emerging urban future, by creating places of significance where the vernacular landscape patterns can inform the urban fabric and help create new living environments of meaning and distinction.
The noted Chinese landscape firm Turenscape has been a key player in promoting urban ecologies in China over the past decades, creating prototypes for inner-city rejuvenation as well as suburban ecologies. The following two projects stand exemplary of Turenscape’s approach to landscape design. Both parks not only succeed in delivering highly popular new urban leisure destinations, but at the same time illustrate a model design strategy for the transition from productive landscape at the urban fringe towards sustainable inner-city park. They offer environments composed of layers of the past as well as the present, nurturing the synergy of both experiences and providing a rich journey to the parks’ visitors. (…)
Find the whole article in our current 98th TOPOS magazine:
Since 2003, the FOR-SITE Foundation is dedicated to the creation, understanding and presentation of art about place. Its latest project is the exhibition “Home Land Security“ which takes place at Fort Winfield Scott at Langdon Court, a former military site on San Francisco Bay. It is open until December 18, 2016.
Battery Boutelle – for tourists in the San Francisco area it is best known as a location to take perfect shots of the Golden Gate Bridge. The art exhibition “Home Land Security“, which momentarily takes place at Fort Winfield Scott, a suite of decommissioned coastal batteries and buildings, focuses on a completely different subject. Occupying this former military site, it brings together 18 contemporary artists from 12 countries “to reflect on the human dimensions and increasing complexity of national security, including the physical and psychological borders we create, protect, and cross in its name“ (website for-site.org). The artworks encompass media ranging from painting and sculpture to video and performance.
“When you put art with nature and with history, then you bring the community to share that and have dialogue.“ – Kate Bickert (Director Park Initiatives and Stewardship, Golden Gate National Parks Conservatory)
For decades, the exhibition area used to serve as key sites in the US Army’s Coastal Defense System. It was built over a hundred years ago. With this exhibition, FOR-SITE has opened some of the buildings to the public for the first time. It is the foundation’s belief that art can inspire fresh thinking and start an important dialogue about our natural and cultural environment. And it is certainly not their first project of this kind. In 2014/15 they co-operated with Ai Weiwei, the internationally renowned Chinese artist and activist and turned Alcatraz Island, the notorious prison, with a series of new works into a national park. The project “@Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz” attracted nearly 900.000 visitors.
The exhibition “Home Land Security” closes on December 18, 2016. It’s free and open from Wednesday to Sunday, 10 am – 5 pm.
(Picture: Flickr_Peter Kaminski)
Duisburg, 1985: The Meiderich Ironworks abandons the coal and steel production plant in Duisburg, after polluting the area for more than eight decades. Six years later, the landscape architect Peter Latz is commissioned to design a public park on site. Instead of turning the area into a classical garden park, Latz embraced the site’s industrial past. In Rust Red, Latz shares his firsthand knowledge of the project to present. A book review.
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In August 2015 the Guardian architecture critic Rowan Moore ranked the Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park as one of the ten best parks in the world. Yet this icon of contemporary landscape architecture had already found recognition outside of specialist circles. In 2005 the Museum of Modern Art in New York used an exhibition entitled “Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape” to showcase modern landscape architecture to an interested public. This park landscape on a former industrial site was one of the projects shown in the exhibition, while this magnum opus from Peter Latz has also come to feature regularly in expert discussions.
Now Latz has called on more than 20 years of personal experience to pen the book Rust Red – Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord. He seeks to present a “mature park”, showing what can evolve out of ideas, sketches and colorful pictures. In five chapters (approach, structures, methods, places and visions) he takes readers on a walk through the park and shares with them thoughts, reflections and concepts surrounding the design stage, as well as experiences, impressions and developments from the subsequent years. He explains how he and his team approached the seemingly chaotic layout of the former Meidericher Ironworks, analysing the site, filtering out feasible structures and eventually transforming them into a contemporary park. Project partners and associates also chip in with their own written contributions. In addition to numerous well-known pictures, new photographs provide new perspectives. It is easy to think that everything has been said about such a renowned project, but this publication is certainly a must-have for any professional library.
