Infrastructure and the Future
Daniel Barber So were architects… Tim Love I want to get back to the idea of water management and the way it touches two disciplines. Water is the one flow that connects architecture to landscape architecture as a quantifiable thing, as the idea that surfaces at one level and has to be conceived of in both disciplines at the same time. I raise that point only because there is a disciplinary battle still going on between landscape architects and architects about who will control the future vision of the city, which is being played out very differently at different institutions, so I want to bring pedagogy back into it because we have a dean and a chair here, and we are in a school of architecture. We should think about this issue of green infrastructure and the roles we all play. David Fletcher One of the things that is unsaid, and that is fundamental to landscape architecture, is a fundamental idealism, or what you might call a utopianism. We’ve been beaten up for a long time by architects. Concerns about ecology and concerns about process have not been taken seriously or have been seen as ancillary to the larger goals. I was in a panel recently at SCI-Arc that was dealing with these issues. Sylvia Lavin was the moderator and she was basically asking how we as architects can reclaim our position in the larger urban discourse. I taught at SCI-Arc and I was thinking, “You mean to tell me that you guys have been spending the last five or six years learning to play, turning Maya into these blobby buildings, and you do exactly what you describe, which are these magnificent, very substantial analyses, for half a semester. But they are completely disconnected from your projects.” Landscape architecture of the last ten years really prioritizes performance. Our heroes are dealing with both of those issues and creating projects that are like this performalist standard that are evaluated both on formal resolution but also on all these other…
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