Saskia de Wit Tuin en landschap

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spool - landscape metropolis

SPOOL is an open-access journal in the field of architecture and the built environment, based on so-called threads, that refer to existing and upcoming research programmes/interests in Europe and beyond. Each thematic issue adds new articles to one of those threads. Combining different threads within one journal allows SPOOL to focus on the interrelationship between the fields.

In the thread ‘landscape metropolis’ SPOOL addresses the interrelation between urban, infrastructural, rural and natural formations as a dynamic, intertwined and layered urban-landscape structure. A structure that still lack in-depth attention from the perspective of aesthetic appreciation, designerly concepts of development, guidelines for planning and governance, and design theoretical apprehension. The prefix ‘landscape’ is used to describe attention to these topics through the lens of landscape architecture and offers novel potentials: in considering the metropolis as a cultural phenomenon that is constructed mentally as well as physically and socially.

The first issue of the journal explored the concept of the metropolitan landscape from different perspectives. 

 

metropolitan gardens

The heterogeneity of the contemporary metropolitan landscape has led to a multiplicity of intermediate spaces, in between and within the different tissues of the metropolitan landscape. These interstices can provide favourable conditions to be transformed into gardens. What design instruments can be discovered for these gardens to address the characteristics of the interstice? And what is the value of doing so? In this essay three contemporary examples are compared, which explicitly address the different metropolitan landscapes in which they are located. The gardens are compared focusing on the landscape, the metropolitan condition of their situation, and the formal, spatial and visual transformation of the context in the composition of the garden. From the case studies one can conclude that gardens can define specific places in a generic metropolitan landscape, employing several design tools: centring, enclosing and highlighting a specific selection of existing landscape qualities.


in Spool. Journal of architecture and the built environment No.1 vol.1 2013.