Panel 3: Green Infrastructure
ture is outside of nature. This is a discussion that’s more within the academy just because of the people that are on the panel here. 70
Charles Waldheim Do we honestly think that Masdar is the solution? I mean, do we honestly believe that it’s gulf state urbanism in which we’re all off the grid with oil money? Is that our future? I mean really, come on. The tipping point of ecology is that in architectural culture—especially at leading design schools in North America and Western Europe—we have an interest in models coming from science. And you characterized it fairly, but I thought, on the other hand, I would say there’s an interesting confluence in leading design schools. In many schools, both design culture, and also history and theory, is being dominated by reading science, and so there’s a strange confluence where the landscape architects are reading models for ecology as an applied natural science and the architects are reading the same text at the level of model or metaphor. Whether it’s MIT or elsewhere, computation is producing an environment in which we can simulate models of complexity that aspire to nature in terms of orders of complexity. I’m not proposing a grand synthesis, but if you look at leading design schools or design culture in North America, there’s a renewed interest in models from nature. Both at the cultural projects level of model or metaphor, but also at the level of applied natural science. Tim Love And performance versus the symbolic interest in it. Charles Waldheim Sure. Landscape culture has been characterized in the last decade as a shift in concern from appearance toward a concern for performance, as Julia Czerniak attempted. One of the reasons that you see the city receding in Martin and Sarah’s drawing—and you see it in so many projects—is that this is the form of the American urban condition. One of the reasons that landscape urban-