Table of contents for Landscape as Urbanism in the Americas in NESS.docs

MEXICO In our Uruguayan practice, Fabrica de Paisaje, we explore the territory as a complex field that can be transformed. We prefer to refer to the landscape rather than to other less-ambiguous constructions. The landscape is, for us, the connective tissue of the territory, neither object nor field. We conceive of our practice as a machine to produce landscapes, that is, connections—formal, cultural, aesthetic, productive, social, ethical, economic—as well as processes. To think about changes in time and adaptive systems is to think in evolutionary terms; here lies the connection between man and nature. We try to replace an aesthetic of confrontation, based on a profoundly dialectic models (architecture and landscape, natural and artificial, man and nature), with a machinery of thought and action structured on a basis of coexistence…

COLOMBIA For this sustainable gardening project, Multisensory Carpet, our working team understands the idea of landscape as the organization of the natural surroundings and the use of technological devices as well as the cooperation of citizens to ensure its functionality and sustainability. The notion of a natural environment means contemplating living beings as well as environmental and technological agents. The project envisions landscape urbanism as a collection of small actions or projects that involve different disciplines and knowledges in order to solve a specific problem. It is the tracing of the layout and the planting of endemic species to reveal the classical beauty of the composition and the geometrical organization of the garden. The resulting forms utilize networks of both hydraulic and energy conduction. From this geometric development emerges the…

BRAZIL Situated on the Tamanduatei River floodplain and inaugurated in the 1920s as the main public leisure space in the historic center of Sao Paulo, Dom Pedro II Park succumbed, during the 1960s and 1970s, to the disastrous implementation of road infrastructures designed to accommodate the rising metropolitan traffic flows. These projects included the East-West Express diametric connection, an elevated metro station, two busway stations, and the largest urban bus terminal in the country. Transformed into a large residual and discredited roundabout with no local life, the area now faces the challenge of acquiring new meaning, one that regains its historical importance and that dialogues with its contemporary functions. This masterplan attempts to avoid the nostalgic approach of previous projects that sought to restore the bucolic park that was originally…

VENEZUELA Chapellin is an informal settlement in the Libertador municipality in Caracas. It is a community that has existed for over eighty years. Nestled between the neighborhoods of La Florida and the Caracas Country Club, it developed along the Chapellin creek over the course of several years and is a dense and well-consolidated community. The not-for-profit organization, Caracas Mi Convive, has been working with the community for several years. Enlace Arquitectura was asked to join them in the construction of a public space project funded by the Swiss Embassy in Venezuela. By working with the community through neighborhood assemblies, the team could come to understand and decide where the community would like to see their public spaces transformed and determine the types of activities that those spaces should facilitate. A…

ARGENTINA “The only possibility of being visible is to be able to exaggerate.” –Martin Rein Cano Bulla is a hybrid organization that combines architecture, landscape, urban planning, and nature. It analyzes the global environmental context in order to translate it into local culture, taking up the traditions of the city’s historical landscape designers, its public space, activism, explores research as well as new social phenomena. Bulla engages in a tactic of interruption in the established urban, political, and environmental scene of Buenos Aires. It is a practice of rupture, kinetics, and visibility. Rupture generates a change of an era and generation; kinetics implies a new process of building disciplinary certainties through constant exploration and experimentation; and visibility is the act of exaggerating the invisible and evading the cultural camouflage of…

CHILE One of the first projects we completed since formally beginning our practice was The Garden of the Forking Paths. It was also the first time we approached landscape and architecture without making a distinction between them, being able to break a dialectic condition between nature and the built environment. The brief for this competition requested a pavilion in a park. However, our project was not about creating a building in green surroundings, but rather about asking how we could become a part of the park. We wanted to intensify the experience of the place in order to reveal its qualities through a new series of situations of exploration and discovery. When we think about buildings in a park, we can make a fundamental distinction. On the one hand, we…

CHILE The project System of Integrated Patches: Deconstructing the Urban-Rural Limit in the City of Santiago was commissioned by the metropolitan authority, the borough of San Bernardo, and a local non-profit organization, Santiago Cerros Isla. It aimed to develop a corridor where five hills come together to become a system of natural areas for the city. The main question guiding this commission was: how can a substantial urban project be undertaken with few resources? The answer turned out to be that it could not be done, at least not under the terms of the national competition that commissioned the task. We decided not to interpret the commission as a uniproject but rather as a communicating system. To achieve this, the key was in the landscape: we planned and designed the…

COLOMBIA For Plan:B Arquitectos, buildings, the city, and the landscape are the temporary consolidation of natural, social, and urban forces that occur at various scales and with different impacts. Everything is connected through energy and material networks and there are no relevant differences between the natural and the artificial world. The Orquideorama in Medellin’s Botanical Garden follows the logic of the surrounding native forest and simultaneously consolidates a flexible and permeable public space. Columns like hollow trunks concentrate structural forces, water networks, energy, and gardens. The roof acts as a translucent and modular foliage that adapts to the position and height of the existing trees. As a whole, it defines a permeable and ambiguous space, available for varied day and night events including concerts, weddings, gastronomic festivals, fairs, and orchid…

March 15, 2016. Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin MAMM, Medellin March 18, 2016. Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago March 21, 2016. Espaco Israel Pinheiro, Brasilia June 28, 2017. Museo Tamayo, Mexico City May 28, 2018. Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires MALBA, Buenos Aires March 27-28, 2020. Harvard University Graduate School of Design GSD, Cambridge Participants Sebastián Adamo & Marcelo Faiden. adamo-faiden, Buenos Aires Miquel Adriá. Arquine, Mexico City Israel Álvarez. Modulo 11, Mexico City Tomás Alvim. Arq. Futuro, São Paulo Marcos Amadeo, Frenando Cynowiec, Juan Granara, Adrián Russo & Alexis Schächter. Monoblock, Buenos Aires Jorge Ambrosi. Ambrosi Etchegaray, Mexico City Pedro Aparicio. Harvard GSD, Cambridge – Estudio Altiplano, Bogotá Lucía Ardissone, Ana Garcia Ricci & Ignacio Fleurquin. Bulla, Buenos Aires Fabio Ayerra, Marcos Castaings, Martin Cobas,…

COLOMBIA In Husos, we consider landscape practices to be fundamental for tackling many of the environmental challenges we face in Latin America today. This includes the question of how to address the coexistence of humans and other species, which is mostly asymmetrical and often extremely conflictive. This is especially important in the Tropical Andes, where we usually work. On the one hand, the Tropical Andes tops the list of worldwide hotspots for endemism and species per surface. On the other hand, large-scale urbanization greatly impacts biodiversity. Landscape practices are especially significant in this region due to the high proportion of cities located inside or around areas with a high richness of species and endemism. It is important to note that over seventy-five percent of Latin America’s human population is found…

BRAZIL The urbanization project of the Praca do Cinema Glauber Rocha square and the Ladeira da Barroquinha takes into consideration the importance of built heritage; it looks to reconcile the diverse present and desired uses for this important axis in the Historic Center of Salvador de Bahia. The city’s context—it is the oldest city in Brazil with a strong history due to its colonization by the Portuguese—inspired the use of Portuguese stone. We approached the project through the city’s identity, linking the landscape with the cultural context. As architects, we are always looking beyond the site itself. We study the surroundings and consider what exists in order to make a project coherent with its environment; the landscape is present in all of our projects. Sometimes this link between what is…

COLOMBIA This project arose from a need to improve the infrastructure of a national highway that runs through the city and is parallel to the river. The city’s administration saw the project as an opportunity to recover the urban waterfront In the 1950s, the city government rectified and canalized Medellin’s river to eliminate flood areas and establish a national mobility corridor along its banks. This caused the city to divide in two, with 1.2 million people living on the east side of the river and another 1.2 million on the west side. The built connections between the two sides are designed exclusively for automobile traffic. The aim of the competition was to develop transversal pathways using quality public spaces that could recover the river’s significance for its citizens, generating use…

BRAZIL The aqueducts and waterways proposed by Sergio Bernardes provide a potential means of development and lay out a possible strategy for Brazil to combat regional disparities in wealth and infrastructure and achieve environmental balance. Based on a detailed study of Brazil’s hydrographic system, he proposes a nationwide effort to construct sixteen geometrically organized rings that are connected by 30,000 km of aqueducts. These were planned to be built on existing river beds, in accordance with routes of production, trade, transport, and other uses of water. They would contain power stations and facilities for the treatment of effluents. Aqueducts would unify the nation, integrating its various regions and promoting economic, social, and environmental parity among them. (1) Pathways of the First Tropical Civilization All of Brazil Connected by Aqueducts Throughout…

CHILE Common Places is an international and collaborative research project initiated and promoted by the architecture office Plan Comun. It is based in Santiago, Chile. For the last forty years, neoliberal experiments have been ongoing in Chile. The project focuses on the discussion and production of formal strategies to maximize collective space. It is an attempt to establish a common structure for dialogue and exchange, avoiding competition and fragmentation among a group of architects in order to openly discuss, through our discipline and knowledge, issues related to our built environment, culture, and commons. The group focuses on specific subjects that give shape to our everyday life and environments: from micro interventions to urban transformations; from landscape to infrastructure; from representation to monumentality. Common Places is a hybrid between a compilation…

COLOMBIA The notion of landscape has been associated with greenery and gardening in Colombia, and in most of Latin America; however, our joint practice understands landscape as a conscious setting up of a place through a landscape that is inhabited by the human being, enabling urban life to unfold within it; a place where there is an integral coexistence between the urban and the natural context. This is the case of the Jardin Botanico Medellin, where landscape constitutes the project itself, allowing for an articulation of a site that for years was totally isolated from its urban environment. Landscape guides the reorganization of the urban border, which starts from the entrance pavilion (Cafe del Bosque) and extends around the fourteen hectares of the botanical garden. The intervention has mainly consisted…

CHILE Your Reflection is the result of a collaborative project between Guillermo Hevia Garcia and Nicolas Urzua, and this text refers to their positions on this project specifically, and landscape urbanism in general, rather than their individual practices. “We believe we are a country and the truth is that we are just landscape.”–Chilean antipoet Nicanor Parra. This sentence has the power to question and unveil the main task of Chilean architecture. At the same time, it points directly to the fragility of a human relationship with landscape. Architecture has the power to work and make a real change in cities and landscapes. In Your Reflection, the creation of the natural (and yet artificial) landscape, both within the pavilion and the park, is what converts it into an architectural device, working…

MEXICO Culiacan, a city in northwestern Mexico eighty kilometers from the Pacific coast, has a population of more than one million inhabitants. For more than thirty years its botanical garden has been known for its collection of over 750 species of tropical flora. Ernesto Coppel, the president of the board of trustees, began this garden with the intention of improving the city’s quality of life and offering the people of Culiacan new ways of learning through experience: touching, seeing, smelling. Besides its plant variety, this garden is unique in that it functions as a park. Visitors can enjoy various activities such as sports, picnics, or promenades through the landscape. To develop this unique space, Coppel decided to commission a curator and thirty-five renowned artists to make site-specific art that would…

COLOMBIA The Amazon jungle and the Latin American rainforest have been presented in the public sphere as a black box; that is, it is suggested that no one outside of the forest understands its importance for human existence or its internal organization. Due to this lack of comprehension, the forest gets destroyed, invaded, and misused year after year. Also, the weak presence of government authority, development policies, and economic opportunities generates a context in which citizens see the forest as a provider of timber and a huge area apt for raising cattle, or for developing industries such as mining, oil, and infrastructure. Due to the location of the research project and the condition of the surroundings, mainly defined by geography, we cannot escape the use or understanding of landscape. More…

CHILE Landscape is defined by the geographer Denis Cosgrove as “a historically specific and consciously constructed way of seeing and controlling the world… developed by, and meaningful to, certain social groups.… (1)” This definition underpins our practice, our reflections, and our thinking of the world and the way we intervene in it through our projects. For instance, in the Alameda Providencia project in Santiago we considered Alameda Avenue to be a historically-constructed urban landscape developed by, and mainly benefitting, certain social groups, which, over time, helped to produce its contemporary image. Today The Alameda Providencia is the main civic and transport axis of the city, concentrating more than one hundred public bus routes and some of the most remarkable monuments, public buildings, and institutions in the country. Despite this, The…

ARGENTINA A tension between memorial space and monument defines this work. The project explores the landscape and the portrait, or more generally, the field and the object, in pictorial terms. The task was to avoid landscape and portrait as separate entities and therefore confuse them as one. This can also be found in my research and practice platform, Opera Publica (public works), that explores the intensity of a thing, or building with the res-publica or common good in mind. By encompassing a political dimension of architecture, one that is inclusive of public interest issues such as the contemporary framework of the megapolitan city, Opera Publica uses architectural materials to activate the micro-scalar urban territories that negotiate physical, environment, and societal struggles. The works speak, from architectural locality to environmental sociology…

ARGENTINA We are interested in the city as a scenario of efficient human development with low environmental impact. In Latin America, during the last few years, there has been a shift from the idea of the suburban city to the compact, medium-density city that can invest more heavily in its infrastructure, transportation, and public spaces. One definition of the city that is of interest to us is the city as a living organism and, accordingly, we consider our tasks to be those of general practitioners, turning our attention to the problem, working with urban planners, landscape architects, officials, developers, etc. Plaza Houssay was a project that had the potential to articulate these reflections. The idea that guided the competition was a strong basis for action as it already contained criterion…

MEXICO This project identifies landscape as a piece of hydrological infrastructure that is open to the public. Parque Ecologico Lago de Texcoco (Parque Texcoco) aims to direct the future of Greater Mexico City towards a sustainable environmental, political, and social development. Within the project, landscape is conceptualized as a transformation and evolution of this dynamic territory. Parque Texcoco not only has the potential to constitute an ecological and recreational area but also to serve critical functions that help mitigate the environmental challenges of the city, such as hydrological management, urban flood prevention, temperature regulation, air quality improvement, soil and vegetation rehabilitation and, most importantly, the regeneration of the Lake Texcoco and other water bodies within the Parque Texcoco territory and the larger Valley of Mexico. This project intends to strategize…

MEXICO When we saw the site, we knew it had to be a forest; in more than one way, the existing landscape suggested how the space had to be arranged. Landscape plays a fundamental role in the city and the Memorial a las Victimas de Violencia en Mexico is an urban piece that respects the site’s pre-existing characteristics. The landscape as urbanism framework plays an important role in the Gaeta Springall Arquitectos’ agenda. Examples include the Memorial a las Victimas de Violencia as well as the Parque Lineal Ferrocarril de Curnavaca. The office is currently involved in several projects related to the improvement of public spaces in the Iztapalapa Municipality in Mexico City. As an office, we believe that being involved in matters of landscape as urbanism not only improves…