Infrastructure and the Future
Tim Love This is precisely the architect’s problem today. Many have backed themselves into the corner as shape makers. 83
David Fletcher But a lot of that is changing. In architecture there’s a devastating preoccupation with parametric modeling that has just taken over, and it was great when it was just isolated on the west coast and it was at two schools—UCLA and SCI-Arc—and it was just a few of the students, but it’s just gone viral. Meanwhile, in landscape you have this threshold moment of Downsview Park, where we started to look at performance. We had really intelligent people starting to express these things, backed up by ecologists, and a similar fascination took over—but it was in a different direction. It was starting to use the tools of GIS and starting to use the modeling tools that were available online. Tim Love I want to add that the preoccupations of landscape architects over the last six or seven years have been relevant to people outside of the discipline, while form-making in architecture is only feeding a subculture of a very limited audience that is interested in those things themselves. So it opened up design again. David Fletcher We had our own preoccupation, and it was all of the stripes and bagels, so it’s nice to see it come back around. The reason I like number one in the R. Crumb drawing the most is because it’s the most honest. I don’t like number three because it’s expressing a very nostalgic eighteenth century notion of landscape that we know is completely unsustainable. Clare Lyster While we can communicate a sustainability-motivated agenda for infrastructure, I don’t think we have to create a new image for the city. And I don’t think sustainability is giving us that new image. Tim Love Right, is that aspirational—