URBAN ECOLOGIES IN THE AERIAL AGE
Harvard Graduate School of Design Piper Auditorium Gund Hall 48 Quincy Street Cambridge, MA
14 NOV 2O13
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15 NOV 2O13
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Convened by Charles Waldheim and Sonja D端mpelmann Airport Landscape claims the airport as a site of and for landscape. Airports have never been more central to the life of cities, yet they remain peripheral in design discourse. In spite of this, landscape architects have recently reasserted their historic interest in the airfield as a site of design through a range of practices. Airport Landscape presents these practices and convenes a discussion of the airport as landscape through sessions on airport culture, infrastructure, and ecology. Although airports have come to occupy pivotal positions in the economy, ecology, and geography of the cities they serve, the design disciplines have not given them much attention. Until recently, architects and urbanists have rarely examined the environmental effects and ecological implications of airport operations, yet the impacts of aviation continue to expand as commercial air travel increases globally. In recent years, the economic centrality, environmental consequences, and cultural relevance of airports have provided landscape architecture with new opportunities. On the one hand, the deregulation of the airline industry and widened access to commercial aviation have led to an increasing number of air passengers and the expansion and construction of airports in environmentally sensitive peripheral urban areas. On the other hand, many former commercial airports near city centers and military air bases have been decommissioned, often providing cities and designers with unforeseen challenges and opportunities.
While the modern airport can be read as an engineering project or architectural object, its manifold social, cultural, and environmental implications raise significant questions for the design disciplines. Over the past decade, multiple discourses have emerged. Some planners and designers consider the airport itself as a form of urbanism, to be developed as a city in its own right. Others have proposed reading the airport as an ecological or environmental field to be managed. Airport afterlives have taken a variety of forms, including public urban parks, residential neighborhoods, nature reserves, and solar parks. The horizontality and openness of former airport sites provide designers with many opportunities. Yet their remediation and renovation also demand massive investments of time, energy, and resources, as these sites have been relentlessly engineered to remove biological function. Presenting contemporary practices, recent projects, and new scholarly research on airport design, planning, development, and decommissioning, conference speakers will address the variable landscape of airports and their afterlives from multiple perspectives. Landscape architects will showcase airport conversions, presenting the models, methods, and measures of their practices, addressing the challenges encountered and strategies employed. Scholars from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, literature, anthropology, ecology, geography, engineering, urban planning, and cultural, environmental, architectural, and aviation history and the history of science will shed light on airport cultures, infrastructures, and ecologies.
Airports are both subject and object of culture, offering sites of and for cultural reproduction. This panel presents diverse readings of the airport as a cultural landscape through literature, architecture, photography, and film. It describes a new type of landscape that first emerged with the early airports in the 1920s, developed further with the construction of the first jetports in the 1950s and 1960s, and has often been described as a form of urbanism. The panel examines the airport through the lenses of geography and cultural and urban history, reading it both as a landscape that sorts, segregates, and excludes, and as an urban landscape that seeks to connect.
This panel addresses the airport as a site of urban infrastructure imbricated in aviation systems and transportation networks at the planetary scale. The panel deals with the multiscalar dimensions of the airport as a form of landscape infrastructure, from the scale of the individual airport site to the planetary airport system. This airport infrastructure is both a result of and a prerequisite for the contemporary global economy, and it enables the flows of goods and people that have led to the concept of the global city. Speakers in this panel critically examine the evolution of airport systems and the role that airport infrastructures play in the economy and ecology of the airport landscape.
Operating and abandoned airports comprise complex urban ecologies. Landscape architects and planners have engaged in the design of airports, mitigating and remediating the adverse environmental impacts of aviation. Airport planning, design, and development have led to the creation of new landscapes, event programs, and synthetic ecologies. This panel explores the planning, design, development, and reuse of airport sites by focusing on the relationship between the human and the nonhuman as well as on the flows of people, wildlife, machines, energy, water, and waste.
14 NOV 2O13
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Introductions Mohsen Mostafavi and Charles Waldheim Keynotes Peter Galison, Harvard University “Airport Landscape” Christophe Girot, ETH Zürich “Wild Planes and Airfields: An Allegory of 21st-Century Landscape”
15 NOV 2O13
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Introductions Charles Waldheim and Sonja Dümpelmann Keynote Adriaan Geuze, West 8 “Counteracting Stress Scape” Project Presentation Mary Margaret Jones, Hargreaves Associates “Two Decades of Airport Transformations”
131O--OO 15 moderator Edward Eigen, Harvard GSD Nathalie Roseau, University Paris East, École des Ponts ParisTech “The Airport as Urban Artifact: The Ecology of the Frontier” Dominick Pisano, National Air and Space Museum “The Lehigh Airports Competition of 1930: What the Judges Missed” Anke Ortlepp, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München “Symbols of a New Age?: American Airports and the Limits of Mobility”
Peter Adey, Royal Holloway, University of London “Terminal Termination” Project Presentation Ken Smith, Workshop: Ken Smith Landscape Architect “Structure and Scale in the Reuse of Airport Space: Orange County Great Park Case Study”
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lunch
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Keynote David Pascoe, Utrecht University “Accidental Landscapes: The Situations of an Airport” Project Presentation Philippe Coignet, Office of Landscape Morphology “Hellenikon Metropolitan Park”
14 13 - OO moderator Diane Davis, Harvard GSD Antoine Picon, Harvard GSD “Airport Infrastructure: From Flows to Events” Richard de Neufville, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “The Future of Airport Passenger Buildings: Towards Flexible Facilities and Landscapes” Markus Hesse, University of Luxembourg “The Mental Infrastructures of Airport-Urban Development” Christopher Hight, Rice University “Zone d’attente: The Airport’s Biopolitical Infrastructures” Project Presentation Henri Bava, Agence Ter “Re-Negotiating Airport Territories”
13 16 - OO moderator Pierre Bélanger, Harvard GSD Martina Schlünder, University of Toronto/ Susanne Bauer, Goethe University Frankfurt/ Nils Güttler, University of Erfurt “Interstitial Landscapes: Regimes of Control and the Production of Hybrid Ecologies at Frankfurt Airport”
Steven Barrett, Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Air Quality: From Airports to the Global Atmosphere” Suleiman Osman, George Washington University “The Anti-Airport Landscape: Local Protest Against Airports in the 1960s and 1970s” Nina-Marie Lister, Ryerson University “Airfield Ecologies: New Hybrid Landscapes from Management to Conversion” Project Presentation Eelco Hooftman, GROSS.MAX. “Tempelhofer Freiheit: A Prairie for the Contemporary Urban Cowboy”
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Round Table moderated by Elizabeth Meyer, University of Virginia Anita Berrizbeitia, Harvard GSD Felipe Correa, Harvard GSD Christophe Girot, ETH Zürich Eelco Hooftman, GROSS.MAX. Mary Margaret Jones, Hargreaves Associates Chris Reed, Harvard GSD Conclusions Sonja Dümpelmann
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GSD Alumni and Conference Reception
SPEAKERS AND MODERATORS Peter Adey is Professor of Geography and director of a new joint-MSc in Geopolitics & Security at Royal Holloway University of London, and Chair of the RGS-IBG Social and Cultural Geography Research Group, His publications include Mobility (Routledge, 2009), and Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Steven Barrett is Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Director of the MIT Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment, and Associate Director of the Partnership for Air Transportation Noise and Emissions Reduction (PARTNER). He also participates in the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. Susanne Bauer is junior professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Goethe University Frankfurt. She was co-curator of the exhibition “Split + Splice: Fragments from the Age of Biomedicine” in Copenhagen and has held research positions at University of Copenhagen, Humboldt University Berlin, and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Henri Bava is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, Co-Founder of Agence Ter, and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts. He has taught at the Versailles National School of Landscape Architecture and served as government landscape advisor to the Direction départemental de l’équipement (DDE) of the Eure department of France. Pierre Bélanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard GSD, Co-Director of OPSYS, and Advisor to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He is author of the forthcoming book Landscape Infrastructure: Urbanism beyond Engineering (MIT Press, 2014). Anita Berrizbeitia is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs at the Harvard GSD. Her publications include Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956–1961 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), and the edited Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2009). Philippe Coignet is a landscape architect and the director of the Paris-based Office of Landscape Morphology (OLM). He was named Best Young Landscape Architect by the Ministry of Culture in Paris in 2008. He has taught at the ETH School of Architecture in Zürich, the School of Architecture Paris-Malaquais, and Harvard University.
Felipe Correa is an architect and co-founder of Somatic Collaborative in New York City. He is currently Associate Professor of Urban Design and Director of the Urban Design Degree Program at the Harvard GSD where he also directs the South America Project, a transcontinental applied research network. Diane E. Davis is Professor of Urbanism and Development at the Harvard GSD and Project Director for “Transforming Urban Transport—The Role of Political Leadership,” funded by the Volvo Research and Educational Foundation. Recent publications include “How to Defeat a Megaproject: Lessons from Mexico City’s Airport Controversy” in Urban Megaprojects: A Worldwide View (Emerald, 2013). Sonja Dümpelmann is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard GSD. Her most recent book publication is the edited Garden Cultural History in the Age of Empire (Berg Publishers, 2013). Her book Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design is in press (University of Virginia Press, 2014). Edward Eigen is a scholar whose work focuses on the intersections of the human and natural sciences. An Associate Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the Harvard GSD, he is currently preparing to publish An Anomalous Plan, a study of laboratory spaces in nineteenth-century France. Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University and the Director of the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. In 1997, he was named John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and in 1999 he was awarded the Max Planck Prize. Galison’s book Image & Logic (University of Chicago Press, 1997) won the 1998 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society. Adriaan Geuze founded West 8 Urban Design & Landscape Architecture in 1987. He received a lifetime achievement award from the Mondriaan Foundation in the Netherlands. He lectures worldwide and has authored numerous books and essays, including Mosaics West 8 (Ludion, 2007). Christophe Girot is Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture in the Architecture Department at the ETH in Zürich. In his teaching and research, he deals with new topological methods in landscape design, landscape perception and analysis through new media, and contemporary theory and history of landscape architecture.
Nils Güttler is a historian of science and currently a postdoctoral scholar at the Research Center for Social and Cultural Studies in Gotha (University of Erfurt, Germany). He holds a PhD from Humboldt University of Berlin and has held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Huntington Library (San Marino, California). Markus Hesse is Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Luxembourg, Faculty of Humanities, where his research focuses on the relationship between places and flows. His recent publications include Cities, Regions and Flows (co-edited with Peter V. Hall, Routledge, 2012). Christopher Hight is Associate Professor of Architecture at Rice University. His publications include Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics (Routledge, 2008) and as co-editor Space Reader: Heterogeneous Space in Architecture (Wiley, 2009), and AD: Collective Intelligence in Design (Academy Press, 2006). Eelco Hooftman is Co-Founder of GROSS.MAX. and a member of the Royal Society of the Arts in Scotland. He has taught at the School of Landscape Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art and the Harvard GSD. He has also been a regular visiting critic at the AA London, the Academie van Bouwkunst Amsterdam, and the ETH Zürich. Mary Margaret Jones is Fellow and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the American Academy in Rome, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council, and President of Hargreaves Associates. She has been in charge of many award-winning projects and served on numerous juries. Nina-Marie Lister is Associate Professor of Urban + Regional Planning at Ryerson University and Visiting Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard GSD. She is the founding principal of Plandform and together with Chris Reed, she is co-editor of Projective Ecologies forthcoming with ACTAR and Harvard GSD. Elizabeth Meyer, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, is widely recognized as a landscape design theorist and critic. Her recent publications include “Sustaining Beauty,” “Slow Landscapes,” “Musings on a Manifesto,” and essays in monographs on landscape architects Nelson Byrd Woltz (New York/ Charlottesville) and Taylor Cullity Lethlean (Melbourne).
Mohsen Mostafavi, architect and educator, is the Dean and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design at the Harvard GSD. His work focuses on modes and processes of urbanization and on the interface between technology and aesthetics. He curated the exhibition “Nicholas Hawksmoor; Methodical Imaginings” at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. In the Life of Cities (2012) and Instigations (2012) are among his most recent publications. Richard de Neufville is Professor of Engineering Systems and Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. His recent books are Flexibility in Engineering Design (2011) and Airport Systems: Planning, Design, and Management (second edition, 2013). He has worked on the design of airport terminals on every continent except Antarctica. Anke Ortlepp is Professor of American Cultural History at the University of Munich (LMU). She is the author of German American Women’s Clubs in Milwaukee (Steiner Verlag, 2004) and the co-editor of Taking Up Space: New Approaches to American History (Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004) and Germans and African Americans: Two Centuries of Exchange (University Press of Mississippi, 2011). Suleiman Osman is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University and of American Council Learned Societies fellowship recipient. His book The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity (Oxford University Press, 2011) won the New York Society Library’s Hornblower Prize. David Pascoe is Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Utrecht University, Netherlands. His research interests lie in the interactions between literary and visual culture and technology. His publications include Aircraft (Reaktion, 2003) and Airspaces (Reaktion, 2004). Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the Harvard GSD. His numerous publications include Digital Culture in Architecture (Birkhäuser, 2010), and most recently Ornament: The Politics of Architecture and Subjectivity (Wiley, 2013). Dominick A. Pisano is curator at the National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C. His publications include To Fill the Skies with Pilots (University of Illinois Press, 1993), the coauthored Legend, Memory, and the Great War in the Air (University of Washington Press, 1992), and the edited book The Airplane in American Culture (University of Michigan Press, 2003).
Chris Reed is Principal of Stoss Landscape Urbanism and Associate Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard GSD. Reed is an internationally recognized figure in the fields of landscape and urbanism. His research focuses on the relationships between ecological thinking and design practices. Nathalie Roseau is an architect and engineer and an Associate Professor in the École des Ponts ParisTech, where she directs the urban planning master program. She is a guest professor at the Facultà di Architettura of the Politecnico di Milano, and her recent publications include Aerocity: Quand l’avion fait la ville (Editions Parenthèses, 2012). Martina Schlünder is a historian of medicine and science, a medical doctor, and a research fellow at Ludwik Fleck Center/Collegium Helveticum at ETH Zürich. Her publications include the co-edited special journal issue, “Cakes and Candies: The History and Ontological Politics of Feeding Laboratory Animals” (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH, 2012). Ken Smith’s practice explores the relationship between art, contemporary culture, and landscape. He established Workshop: Ken Smith Landscape Architect in 1992 and has taught and lectured at universities and institutions around the world. Smith’s work has been published widely in the popular and trade press. Charles Waldheim is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and John E. Irving Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard GSD.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Harvard University Graduate School of Design Mohsen Mostafavi, Dean, Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design Patricia Roberts, Executive Dean Beth Kramer, Associate Dean for Development and Alumni Relations Benjamin Prosky, Assistant Dean for Communications Events Office: Shantel Blakely, Emily Thomas (Intern) Communications Coordination: Meghan Sandberg Publications: Melissa Vaughn Web Content: Ronee Saroff Department of Landscape Architecture: Nicole Sander, Executive Assistant Siena Scarff, Siena Scarff Design IMAGE CREDITS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Altitude, Tarmac 003 – Airport Tarmac, Paris-Roissy Charles de Gaulle, June 2007. An Te Liu, EROS, 2013 Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Altitude, Tarmac 009 - Airport Tarmac, Paris-Roissy Charles de Gaulle, June 2007. Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Altitude, Tarmac 014 – Airport Tarmac, Phuket Town, January 2007.
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