Capturing particularities in the metropolitan landscape
6 articles / 95 pages
E-ISSN 2215-0900
Issue editors
Dr. Ir. Saskia de Wit, TU Delft
Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Published:
2016-07-01
Editorial
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Since its first issue, SPOOL has used the term ‘landscape metropolis’ to address urban formations beyond the traditional city that – despite their increasing ubiquity - still lack in-depth attention from the perspective of aesthetic appreciation, designerly concepts of development, guidelines for planning and governance, and design theoretical apprehension. The prefix ‘landscape’ is used to describe attention to these topics through the lens of landscape architecture, and offers, we feel, some novel potentials: in considering the metropolis as a cultural phenomenon that is constructed...
Articles
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Based on a Travelling Transect approach, this paper explores how ample interpretations and opportunities for new thoughts about sites are developed, especially when these sites are explored along a combined material and immaterial predefined linear path that is distorted, challenged and redefined by bodily encounters and sensations on site. By using the Travelling Transect as an approach to do research and develop new understandings of sites, possible overlooked qualities manifest themselves in a series of registrations collected or inspired by encounters on site. Illustrated through a...
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This article investigates how experimental forms of urban mapping can reveal the particularity of places in non-standard urban situations with the intention of moving beyond the reductivism of still-dominant modernist modes of mapping and associated forms of planning. In order to do so, it reports on the emergence of a methodology involving transect walks, with the purpose of mapping the peculiarities of cultural landscapes. The study is located in cities and communities in the Arctic that are undergoing rapid transformation and are in urgent need of new conceptual approaches capable of...
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This paper argues that the opening up of landscape analysis to variables that exceed the 'tangible' or traditionally 'parameterized' values provides alternative access to the specificities of the landscape. In particular, the concept of 'atmosphere' as a particular dimension of the embodied experience, is proposed as an operative vehicle for the enrichment of the cartographic interpretation of the landscape. By placing the emphasis on atmosphere in terms of its causes, rather than its effects on our emotional sensibility, cartography enhances the identification of the particular by...
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Experimental walking can be used to identify particular places, design strategies and spatial visions for urban landscapes. Walking designers can explore sites and, in particular, their temporal dynamics and atmospheric particularities – both essential elements in making particular places. This article illustrates the benefits of this method, using the changing German city of Freiburg as an example.
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This paper investigates the theme particular places from the perspective of ‘quiet places’, by examining potential links between material and immaterial qualities of four distinct typologies of urban spaces in the landscape metropolis, and offering five thematic lenses to sharpen our view for the particular. While the relationship between green spaces and restorative qualities for humans has long been acknowledged, the present research investigates other types of urban spaces, not focusing on ‘green’ or dB ratio as such but instead on confluences of soundscape, cityscape, flowscape, and...
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In this paper, I introduce the concept of the frame. The mechanisms of framing are a strategic and conceptual tool for dealing with the complexities of place in terms of site specificity. Starting from both a theoretical understanding of the frame in terms of what it does rather than what it is, and from a specific site — the territory surrounding the Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania — I investigate ways of working with a contested territory in a site specific, open-ended way. As the locus of a large-scale urban project for a new civic centre initiated in 1984 by...
