The [Loving] Metropolitan Landscape and the Public-Private Borderland: Refiguring the Field for Architecture, Landscape and Urban Design

Abstract

This chapter promotes the city as integrated with its metropolitan landscape. It sees the city less as a series of architectural figures (autonomous works of art, technology and craftsmanship) on the common infrastructural ground of public space (museums, libraries, town halls, streets, squares and parks circumscribed by fields and transport systems) and more as the suspended animation of serial spatial practices negotiated across timeframes varying between the fleeting and the endless stretching out of the present. The corollaries to such a view are unpredictable, affirmatively uncertain, but not without confident commitment, clear architectural expression and evident territorial claims and differences.

This chapter encourages the recurrent critique of our old habits, especially those that precondition the relation between our cities and the landscapes within which they are arranged. The practices promoted through this chapter are premised on a deconstruction of our conventional legislative disciplinary approach to urban, landscape and architectural configuration. The recommendation is to nurture spatial practices that focus less on ends and more on means, not means as an end but means as “pure means”. The dynamics of the negotiated practices are interdisciplinary, procedural and elastic but also encouraging towards the development of specific disciplinary means that open, hold and further promote flexible reciprocity between means of production and the production of means that opportune the movement through and between territorial limits. This chapter promotes architectural, urban and landscape borderlands as affirmative conditions at scales that range between body and world.