|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||||||
 |
||
 |
||
     |
Designers often use metaphor and analogy as devices to help develop concepts or to explain and discuss the structure and form of cities. Different ages have been partial to particular, popular metaphors. Some of the most influential have been drawn from religion, art and science. Despite the merits or differences of each, one common characteristic has been an emphasis upon an implicit assumption of "wholeness", of complete and contained forms. Whether artistic notions of composition in the renaissance, mechanical models of the enlightenment or organic metaphors of the 19th and 20th centuries there has been an implicit assumption that a city be conceived as a "Thing", a single organism or composition; i.e. a whole interconnected coherent structure that suffuses, supports or gives shape and form to the overall urban situation. While this can be true of paintings, sculptures, buildings and landscapes at the scale of gardens or a farm, it is not necessarily so for a city. One person or small group can conceive, design and construct all of these products except the latter. One set of principles or purpose can give shape and set the complex organs and features of an animal or plant. These are bounded, self-contained, working entities, separate from others, yet whole. Larger settlements - especially the major cities of the world - do not behave like individual organisms, nor can their structure be described or planned sufficiently by their earlier methods or analysis. They are too extensive, too polyvalent, too multicentered and driven by numerous independent (often conflicting) decision, authors, and systems. A more useful way to perceive them - in itself an evolution or development from earlier scientific and organic analogies is to consider cities in terms of landscape and the emerging study of landscape ecology. While this, too, will have limits, such an approach will ultimately prove more helpful both in our ability to describe cities and to interact as planners and designers. Several fundamental concepts of Landscape Ecology are presented; a description of elements - paths, corridors, and matrixes, dynamism and instability, energy flow and interaction between populations, the effects of complexity verses simplicity in the face of crisis, and non-scale dependent events. Reflecting upon involvement in urban projects at various scales over a forty-year period, it is concluded that no matter what the project - large or small, public or private - there was always another scale above and below that which the author was working. In fact every plan and each project was always a patch or a scrap, an incomplete fragment, and the larger urban situation was a palimpsest of such partial structures interacting in space and time in much the same manner as natural communities and systems in a landscape. Examples employed in the discussion range from The Seattle Skid Road Community to urban design schemes implemented in London, Denver, New York, and Frankfurt, as well as proposals for Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Dusseldorf.
Laurie Olin, is a founding partner of The Olin Partnership (formerly Hanna/Olin Ltd.) a landscape architectural and urban design practice located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His projects include Bryant Park and Battery Park City in New York, The Getty Center in Los Angeles, new squares in London, housing in Frankfurt, commercial development in Barcelona, and major projects at academic institutions including Yale, Stanford, MIT, and The University of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Working across the United States and abroad he has collaborated with many prominent architects including I.M. Pei & Partners, Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Norman Foster, and Davis Brody. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and won the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture in 1974. Mr. Olin has written widely on the history and theory of architecture and landscape, receiving the Bradford Williams medal for best writing on Landscape Architecture. His recent book Across the Open Field is both a memoir and series of essays on the evolution of the English landscape. Throughout his career, Mr. Olin has been involved in professional education, having been chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University and Thomas Jefferson Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia. He is currently Professor of Practice in Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 1998 received the award in Architecture from American Academy of Arts and Letters.
|
|