Landform Building

Landform Building
Stan Allen and Marc McQuade, eds. in collaboration with Princeton University School of Architecture. Schirmer/Mosel, 2011 (416 pp., US $65)

The common link between landscape and architecture can be defined by the concept of megastructure, or at least this is the first message perceived when opening the book Landform Building and flip through its pages. But this close relationship has been changing fast in the last ten years, from the biological to the geological; the desire to make a responsive architecture is now fulfilled with references to landscape. As Stan Allen points, now a parallel trend looks not to the biology of individual species but to the collective behaviour of ecological systems as a model for cities, buildings and landscapes: "Architecture is situated between the biological and the geological—slower than living but faster than the underlying geology."

The start point of this new way to understand architecture was in the early 1990s, when the emergence of Landscape Urbanism was focused on experiments on folding, surface manipulation and the creation of artificial terrains. Mostly all of these strategies can be related with some avant-garde projects of the 1960s, such as Hans Hollein's Aircraft Carrier City in Landscape or Raimund Abraham's Transplantation I; a time when architectural proposals included per-se the transformation of landscape, better explained by Erwin Rommel [quoted by Marida Talamona], "Any work of architecture, before it is an object, is a transformation of the landscape."

Going beyond its formal implications, the debate about landform building [1] makes us think on important issues like bigness, which according to Rem Koolhaas [2], seemed a phenomenon of and for (the) New World(s), when its programmatic hybridizations/proximities/frictions/overlaps/superpositions are possible. The shift from the idea of program to the idea of use has been remarked by Mirko Zardini, while at the same time, he recall us to think on the intersection between landscape and socio-political issues. Michael Jakob explains it with simple words: "The relation to nature is always political."

The current desire to blur the boundary between nature and culture is present in mostly all of the case studies presented on the book. From the Gordon Strong Automobile Objective by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1924 to the New Deichman Main Library Competition by Toyo Ito in 2009, we can find the idea of treat urban space as a geological matter. A good example of this approach is the Biblioteca España by Giancarlo Mazzanti & Architects, located in Medellín, in some of the most rugged topography in Colombia. As a response to this kind of "topographic challenge", the architects developed landscapes related to geography, rather than an architectural object, described by Mazzanti as an "operational geography", the project reinforces the ambiguity between building and landscape.

All the theory behind the concept of Landform Building is also supported by some artworks and speculative projects. It's worth to remark the work of Tacita Dean, Found Ice: Berlin, August 2000. Through this collection of fifteen photographs, her work is linked to Michael Jakob's archaeology of the artificial mountain [3] and we can see that her images are an evidence that ice does not follow the laws of form; and just as the desire of some architects for their buildings, its shape is always in formation. On his essay, Jakob go back to Koolhaas' idea of bigness, when he points that artificial mountains always express the idea of great size, however small they may be. This idea around big size is present not only on Tacita Dean's artwork but also on the Visual Scandals by Tsunehisa Kimura. All of Kimura's photomontages are a dystopic representation of the world but what make sense of having them in this book is the way they reflect the juxtaposition through objects, events and landscapes. While Kimura manipulates time and space, Dean's frozen images are a perfect counterpoint on the narratives of landscape.

The same can be said about Robert Smithson's work, some of his projects transform and expand our notions of landscape, always referring to an expanded field inhabited by myths and utopias. His project Bingham Copper Mining Pit - Utah Reclamation Project has been used by Jakob as an example of the inversion of the artificial mountain, known as the "largest hole in the world", full of significant meaning and related with the trace of humanity that the landform buildings propose. At this point, the Alpine Landscapes of Walter Niedermayr activate this trace of humanity, when placing human beings within nature, revealing the vulnerability of human presence between the vast and the empty of the natural landscape ("Not just vastness; emptiness too." –Reyner Banham [4]).

The compilation of all these analysis, debates, conversations, essays and art-works became a complete and useful document. A travel through the history and changes confronted by architecture when interacting with the landscape and transforming it into the landform megastructures we have nowadays. We wonder if Fumihiko Maki, when he defined the basic concept of megastructure on his publication Investigations in Collective Form [5], had some kind of idea on the evolution that this concept will had and all its derivative terms, such as Keneth Frampton's "megaform" [6], to become a fuzzy line between the natural and the tectonic. Or should we say, the natural tectonic?

Natural tectonic can be understood as the architectural reconstruction of nature, as pointed by David Gissen and it could be a positive approach if we start thinking again on the idea that architecture can also bring nature back into the view and experience of the city. We want to end quoting Gissen: "Through this lens, we understand "nature" as something that was (past tense) in the city. By bringing it back, we reconstruct the former reality of the city but also acknowledge the end of nature as we understand it."

NOTES:
[1] Landform Building, Architecture's New Terrain. Conference at Princeton University School of Architecture [visited on 29th August 2011]
[2] Thinking big. John Rajchman talks with Rem Koolhaas [visited on 29th August 2011]
[3] Michael Jakob, "On Mountains, Scalable and Unscalable" MS [4] Reyner Banham, "Scenes in America Deserta". The MIT Press, 1989.
[5] Fumihiko Maki, "Investigations in Collective Form." 1964. PDF available. Visited on 29th August 2011]
[6] Kenneth Frampton, "Megaform As Urban Landscape". University of Michigan, 1999.