Concluding Remarks
George Thrush It’s fine when that confusion doesn’t have any negative consequences. Let’s imagine a site that is in the street grid of the downtown area. It’s 82
not just a question of the decorative pattern on the skin of the building mimicking a flock of birds, but when the footprint of the project is now deforming not according to the logic of urbanism… Charles Waldheim I would say urbanism defined as the building up as blocks of building, that’s where landscape urbanism hits the ground, right? If we believe that the good city, the just city, is built up of a street wall of cornice, maybe brick, and a solid sidewalk, then we’re going to disagree at that point because I think the spatial implications of what you’re getting at are the social and environmental qualities of the nineteenth century city. There’s a great anxiety over the loss of that street wall because that was the fight of post-modernism. And, in fact, a part of what makes landscape urbanism threatening is the idea that these larger systems will take that urban fabric and render it in ways that you don’t find intelligible or legible. George Thrush The context here is everything. What strikes me as so excellent about landscape urbanism as a strategy, and the reason I advocate it so much, is that for cities that are not going to grow their way out of their circumstances… of course Detroit is the easiest one to talk about, but there are many, many others. Landscape Urbanism doesn’t have to have the same urban strategy as the nineteenth century city, but it has an aggregate way of working. The reason I focused on this downtown Boston type of site is precisely because there the conversation is more nuanced and more complicated, not all one system or all the other. This is where the distinction between biomimesis and biomorphism is for me. Biomimesis is an idea that can be executed in a number of forms; biomorphism is a way of transforming the image of the city.