Landscape Architecture in Rome : renaissance, baroque and ...

Description

Landscape Architecture in Rome : renaissance, baroque and ...

Informations

• Publié par: uqisohuz
• Nombre de lectures: 215
• Langue: English

Extrait

“Landscape Architecture in Rome” is part of the research project URBAN LANDSCAPES / METROPOLITAN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE,by Prof.dr.ir. C.M. Steenbergen, DELFT UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY, NL.

Landscape Architecture in Rome : renaissance, baroque and contemporary city

How do designers look at landscape in relation to the city? How is the original landscape be reflected in the shape of the city? How far the interaction between city and landscape can be designed?

These the main questions the research entitledUrban Landscapes, metropolitan landscape architecturebrought forward by the department of Landscape Architecture at the Technical University in Delft (NL), is trying to answer. Somehow it is not surprising that such an ambition is brought forward by a dutch university. The Netherlands are famous for their planning tradition and their capacity of winning the land and controlling the level of the water. Understanding and transforming the landscape in the dutch context is not only desirable, but necessary. It is particularly interesting for me, as italian architect, to be confronted with the dutch analytical and conceptual approach to landscape design, especially in this historical moment when landscape has re-acquired its dignity and relevance in relation to the practice of architecture and urban planning.

From Architecture and Landscape to Urban Landscape Architecture The involvement of the Department of Landscape Architecture of TU Delft in the discussion about the re-evaluation of landscape design dates back to the 1970s, and it has been formalized in the bookArchitecture and Landscape*, published in 1996 as integration and widening of the dutch edition of 1985.The investigation tackles the foundations of Landscape Architecture, its language and visual grammar, and it regards the analysis of historical parks and contemporary territorial infrastructure paying particular attention to their experimental character. The main ambition is to penetrate the logic of the architectonic design on a landscape level. Urban Landscapestakes a step further considering the city as a landscape-architectonic composition. Its relationship with the urban context is analysed on a metropolitan scale and the urban pattern is put in relation to the original conformation of the territory. Landscape, and its morphology in particular, is seen as the substratum to the urban form, and because of this the starting point for all design and planning. But the identity of a city is determined as well by other factors than landscape, such as architecture and history. The research project aims to investigate the “hybrid landscape” that is the product of their interaction: the urban parks and open space in general, the landscape structure of the city and the urbanization of men-made landscapes. By drawing in a comparative way different metropolis of the world,Urban Landscapesexamines the relationship between the landscape and the shape of the city with particular attention to these parks and urban landscapes where, in a particular moment in time, this relationship has been interpreted and/or transformed in a significant way for the urban development of the city. The research goes beyound the traditional definition of urban green. A park is not automaticly defined by the presence of vegetation, but can be called as such if it contains elements that in the moment of their creation, just as now, have been able to understand and reinterpret the landscape.

Research by drawing The methodology carried out by the Professor Clemens Steenbergen and Wouter Reth tends to diverge by the classical historiography, which is often iconographic and supported by reproductions of maps, engravings, paintings which were produced in a specific historical moment and with a specific style. The pragmatic dutch mentality is operative and dynamic. Researching means digging into the past with contemporary tools: first of all it is necessary to build up a data bank by means of an inventorisation, then make a cataloge out of it and, last but not least, translate this catalogue into a drawing. This last action is the most important one because it implies an assesment, an interpretation, a selection. “Research by drawing” means drawing as a designer: it presupposes looking at the city as to an architectural landscape with the goal of finding instruments that will allow us to intervene in the city in an appropriate manner. In this sense we can say that this type of research is both historical and oriented towards the future. Each city taken into consideration by the research is analysed on a metropolitan scale via the production of a series of comparable maps: the study area dimension is 30 x 30 km, the method of representation and the scale (1:100.000) are the same. What changes every time is the given interpretation of how the city works and which are the special places within its boundaries that still have the power to inspire us from a design point of view. Such an interpretation is possible only after investigating, in the first place, the topography of the city, and, subsequently, the relationship between the parks and the geomorphology and, afterwords, the relationship between geomorphology and the urban pattern. It is interesting to notice that, even if the methodology stays the same, for every drawing the descriptive tools have to be adapted. Every drawing is in fact “site specific” and implies the definition of a specific problematic.