Christophe Girot

Changing the Course of Rivers in an Asian City: Linking Landscapes to Human Benefits through Iterative Modeling and Design†

Concerns over water scarcity, climate change, and environmental health risks have prompted some Asian cities to invest in river rehabilitation, but deciding on the end goals of rehabilitation is a complex undertaking. We propose a multidisciplinary framework linking riparian landscape change to human well-being, providing information relevant to decision makers, in a format that facilitates stakeholder involvement. We illustrate this through a case study of the densely settled, environmentally degraded, and flood prone Ciliwung River flowing through metropolitan Jakarta, Indonesia. Our methodology attempts to respond to this complexity through an iterative approach, strongly based on conceptualization and mathematical modeling. Nested hydrologic, hydrodynamic, and water quality models provide outputs at catchment-, corridor-, and localized site-scales. Advanced 3-D landscape modeling is used for procedural design and precise visualization of proposed changes and their impacts, as predicted by the mathematical models. Finally, participatory planning and design methods allow us to obtain critical stakeholder feedback in shaping a socially acceptable approach. Our framework aims at demonstrating that a change in paradigm in river rehabilitation is possible, and providing future scenarios that balance concerns over flooding, water quality, and ecology, with the realities of a rapidly growing megacity.

The Walker‘s Perspective: strategies for conveying landscape perception using audiovisual media.

This paper presents a method and three case studies for the integration of video into the practice of landscape architecture. As a design practice, landscape architecture is heavily dependent on visualisations. Traditionally maps, perspectives and photographic stills were used, but today these techniques are clearly no longer up to the task: they convey little information about the way we perceive landscape. Landscape perception has changed dramatically since the introduction of the moving image and highspeed travel. Contemporary visualisations of landscapes must therefore include these dynamic parameters in order to meet the professions needs. We propose video as a new tool for visualizing the perception of and communicating about, landscape. In this paper we first introduce an analytical grid for the evaluation of video as a means of visualising landscape perception, from the vantage point of the slowest traveller, the pedestrian. Using three case studies, we then describe how video may be used to understand the specific situation of a walking perceiver. The findings are important both for practitioners and researchers in landscape architecture and for researchers of all disciplines interested in human perception

Eulogy of the Void

Are the challenges of landscape architecture in the city of Berlin comparable to any other European metropolis? Berlin—as the city that grew with modern expediency in the 19th century to become a precursor of urban landscape design and the city that was destined to bear witness to the ferocity of modern man. The voids in the middle of the city are the signature of post-War Berlin. They are literal erasures of historical spaces since transformed into inaccessible or undesirable ruins. Since November 1989, these voids and the traces of the Wall have had to be addressed: to be filled, to be protected, to be projected anew. Three different parks, three different stances that the city chose among the multiplicity of choices are discussed in this article: How did the initial design and later the citys management of the built project achieve its goals? These are perhaps some of the most challenging civic examples of contemporary fragmentation and fragility. The projects of Berlin have much to teach us of our landscapes to come.

Movism: Prologue to a New Visual Theory in Landscape Architecture

If we accept the precept that landscape architecture has always been bound to a strong pictorial and aesthetic tradition, then we are entitled to ask what referential image, if any, prevails in today’s landscape practice. Ever since the early Renaissance there has been a strong and determined picture frame in which our perception of landscape has expanded and matured, but with the advent of the moving image, particularly within new media, the notion of a precise reference image has become both relative and confused. New media simply brings us too many images, they are diffused via TV into countless superimpositions and impressions that, because of their sheer quantity and incessant flux, become a valueless juxtaposition of pictures. Walter Benjamin (1963) already understood this problem when he referred to the work of art in the age of reproduction, and although he essentially dealt with the question of the diluted meaning of art within mass culture, he touched upon something that has become quite overwhelming today: the overabundance of image in the age of mass media (see Benjamin 1963). Another major hurdle, which we have not yet integrated in our reflection on contemporary landscape aesthetics, is the ever growing presence and significance of the moving image in our daily lives and in our very own visual thinking. Outside the home window, today’s reference frame for landscapes is almost always in motion, be it the windshield of a car, the window of a train or an airplane, or simply the film screen showing a wonderful sample of springtime promenade in the meadows to sell us some piece of chocolate. Over the last century, the moving picture and its depiction of nature has broadly invaded and surpassed the traditional landscape iconic system that we had grown accustomed to. The truth of the matter is that we have lost the thread that once linked us to such a strong, simple and meditative acceptance of a single picture as landscape reference. This is the reason why we have sought, together with Marc Schwarz, Udo Weilacher, Andre Muller, and Fred Truniger of the Landscape Video Lab and the Landscape Post Graduate program at the ETH, and the help of students to pursue the question of framing and sampling new modes of representation and observation in landscape architecture.

Green Architecture: Landscape Topology and Context

‘Green architecture’ is very new to me. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, architects were working on very elaborate facades. Trees, more often than not, were put on the side in order not to hide the building. Now architects would tend to want to have the trees be the facade itself. That indicates a big level of progress and change in our design culture.

Horizontal Metropolis: Spatial, Social and Natural Capital Statements

One should consider the potential for a new kind of urban ecology, when speaking of spatial and natural capital in the horizontal metropolis. This could become a radical landscape project for the contemporary city, capable of embracing cultural and topological complexities, as well as placing biodiversity, energy and resilience at the forefront of societal concerns. But are we actually capable of casting such an ambitious project in today’s diffused and confused cities? Michel Foucault saw the 19th century as a period obsessed with its history and the fossilization of time in architecture, whereas the late 20th century he understood as an epoch of simultaneity, juxtaposition and dispersion where the world was seen less as something set over time, and rather as a network of connecting points intersecting with its own skein. What if the role of temporality in the 19th century and of spatiality in the 20th century were presently superseded by a phenomenal change in nature? If that were the case, what would the underpinnings and rules driving the natural capital of this new biologically and climatically driven world be?

Landscapology. Learning to Landscape the City

matrix on page 475. It shows that the twelve positions actually begin on the second line under the rubric Inception, but there is no clear explanation as to why the first rubric Initiation is left out of the positions. Although the twelve positions indicate a harmonic number they have no specific hierarchy, but this is precisely where van Beek introduces his concept of the ‘fixed path’ linking the various positions of the matrix in a predefined circuit. This reminds one of fixed stations in the medieval labyrinth at Chartres Cathedral which lead the faithful inexorably to the single truth at the heart of the nave.

Accepting the Landscape

discovered the spatial orderings that replicated their entire relationship to the universe as a whole. In the fragmented circumstances of contemporary life, the reduction and focus offered by minimalism suggest a direction for the restitution of that spiritual sense of place. Ordering devices common to much minimal art and to traditional formal gardens include seriality and repetition, geometry (particularly linear and point grids), perceived extension of dimensions, linear gesture, and visual exploitation of edges and centers, including bilateral and asymmetrical symmetry. Other avenues to the reconstitution of the visible include the exploration of texture, color, pattern, and scale as well as such contrasts as synthetic versus natural, living versus inert. By these means, minimalism in the landscape can ultimately achieve the visibility that allows humankind to celebrate-without irony and cynicism-the mystery, the essential quidditas, of the physical world, the world we humans not only inhabit but of which we are only a part.

Mitteilungen und Kommentare

In zahlreichen Wissenschafts-, Politikund Lebensbereichen häufen sich gegenwärtig Ethikfragen. An entsprechenden Thesen und Debatten mangelt es nicht. Überraschenderweise haben sich die räumliche Planung als öffentliche Aufgabe und die Wissenschaften, die ihr zur Seite stehen, während langer Zeit der Auseinandersetzung mit ethischen Fragen entzogen. Die Umweltwissenschaften hielten es anders. Sie sind auf die ethischen Aspekte zugegangen. So wird es für die räumliche Planung, die sich in Tuchfühlung mit dem Schutz der Umwelt sieht, Zeit, sich Rechenschaft über ihr Verhältnis zur Ethik zu geben und sich zu fragen, ob sich für sie resp. ihre Träger ethische Anhaltspunkte anbieten oder gar aufdrängen. Mit den nachstehenden Bemerkungen wird versucht, eine Skizze möglicher Grundorientierungen für die Alltagsarbeit und die Lehre der Raumplanung zu vermitteln – nicht als abschliessende Aussagen, sondern als Einladung, hier und jetzt mitzudenken. Den Autor würden kritische Reaktionen lebhaft interessieren. Dieser Text ist bewusst kurz gefasst, um das Anliegen gleichsam in die Augen springen zu lassen und um innert vernünftiger Frist zu Antworten zu gelangen [1].

Zwischen Raum und Ort

Landscape does not belong solely to the visible world; it belongs also to all of the interwoven histories that make up a particular place. This article draws an important distinction between the notion of space and of place, which is central to all landscape practice. Four examples of landscape projects in France and in Germany help illustrate this point of view. These projects share common ground with Dieter Kien- asts own work and philosophy. They underline the importance of site-specific considerations, of time and of history, while remaining resolutely open to innovation for the future. Respect for the landscape does not exclude strong design; it is more a matter of how one goes about juggling the significant historical elements unique to any given place. In Dieter Kienasts case one can say that he dealt with the question of defining place like a master of martial arts, using the incredible weight of history to dramatically leap ahead.