Table of contents for September 2017 in Topos

What is time? This question has challenged philosophers and scientists ever since Plato first reflected on the phenomenon systematically. Hardly comprehensible and highly mystic in nature, the volatility of time has inspired enthralling concepts about its very essence. One way to understand what makes up the innermost quality of time, is to consider its relation to human beings: time is deeply linked to our perception. As we become aware of a sequence of changes, we conclude that this is the result of an ongoing process which in turn manifests the existence of time. Nevertheless, time is not inevitably a matter of subjectivity. It connects all humans to their spatial and urban surroundings by visualizing how they appear, alter and disappear over their lifespans. Cities, however, become more complex and vigorous…

Linking her experience in landscape architecture with urban climate adaptation, Lot Locher works on the initiative Amsterdam Rainproof (2013) – a network organization to make the Dutch capital robust against cloudburst events. Before returning to the Netherlands, she joined Gustafson Porter + Bowman as a project architect. Lot is currently looking into what is required to scale this and other successful network approaches to urban climate adaptation to a nationwide level. 1 CAREER STARING POINT? No clear starting point: Every step counts… From education, to all work experiences, to returning to The Netherlands and bringing my design focus to one city and one topic 2 INFLUENCED BY? People who act to make the world a better place 3 INSPIRED BY? The non-planned transformation of cities and the rhythmical metamorphoses of…

LITERATURE AUTHOR: Ali Madanipour TITLE: Cities in Time – Temporary Urbanism and the Future of the City Cities are high concentrations of people and of a wide range of objects and living organisms. Spatial arts and sciences are often interested in the spatial organization of these urban components. Their constitutions, contexts, relationships, forms and compositions become significant, with a focus on the relationship between people and their surroundings. Spatiality, however, is tightly interwoven with temporality. Without considering temporality, what we see, understand and make would be merely three-dimensional, as if frozen in a single moment in time, creating a cartography of the present. Time, however, is deeply embedded and expressed in every aspect of the city, not as a fixed infrastructure, but formed of many overlapping temporalities, with constituent parts that…

What if a bare wall could speak? If thoughts, fears and hopes were burnt into the concrete? If a wall could make the opinion of thousands visible and in doing so transform a public space into an arena for discussion, the birthplace of freedom? Utopia? Not at all. This is exactly what happened at the Berlin Wall, the stage for the East-West conflict prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Even though painting was not allowed at the Wall, graffiti writers and street artists such as Keith Haring used spray paint to immortalise themselves on the Western side of the Wall during the 1980’s in order to protest the political circumstances at the time. Street art and graffiti are highly-political; the artists are seismographs of our times. They lend…

Albert Einstein 24 hours is not the daily rotation time of the Earth, but 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.2 seconds 15 microseconds shorter is a year at the top of Mount Everest than at sea level 13,1 billion years is the age of the universe, give or take 3 MIO people move to cities every week 2 years is the length of a day on Mercury 2 hours/day is the average travel time to work in Thailand. (the world average commuting time is 40 min. one way) 11 MIO ha/year are lost due to global deforestation, an area corresponding to the size of Greece (source: WWF) 1.000 people die each year in the USA due to urban heat island effects…

Zurich, somewhere in a former industrial area that has evolved into a mixed-used residential area over time. Previously on the outskirts, now a central part of this trendy Swiss metropolis. This is where S2L has its offices. In a four-story building from the 1950’s, landscape architects Jan Stadelmann and Daia Stutz share an open-design studio along with their four employees and three additional architect offices. S2L is used to that type of interdisciplinary environment from their studies. After earning their bachelor degrees in landscape architecture together in the Swiss town of Rapperswil, they both went abroad for multifaced master’s programmes and that experience shapes them to this day. Stutz went to the USA and studied at the Harvard University Graduate School of Urban Design and Stadelmann went to Germany where…

Parco della Pace is the result of a long history of social resistance, contestation of power relations, exploitation of natural resources, and of appropriation by nature of abandoned infrastructure. Designed on the eastern side of the decommissioned Dal Molin military airport, in suburban Vicenza, the around 60-hectares Parco della Pace is the largest public park currently being built in Italy. Dal Molin airport was established in 1923 and was closed in 2008. Its conversion envisaged the construction of a USA military base, despite considerable opposition by local community and pacifist movements over the years. Public protests escalated in September 2007, when a small group of activists entered the airport premises and planted a group of 100 trees symbolically called “Bosco della pace” (Wood of Peace). While continuous actions of resistance…

Light is a versatile tool, one that makes places safer and provides orientation in the best of cases. It can illuminate sights and landmarks, direct attention and highlight architectural details, to name but one example. Accomplished light solutions make cities more attractive for visitors and residents alike. Modern luminaires are energy-efficient and compact, plus they are optionally dimmable, programmable or watertight. In many cases they can now also be equipped with additional functions, such as security cameras, WiFi, loudspeakers, and emergency and taxi phone systems, etc. However, with all due respect for the energy efficiency and sustainability of the products, a conscious, judicious but nevertheless creative way of dealing with all available light tools is called for; after all, modern media society spends enough time as it is in brightly…

Tascardoso Rua de O Seculo 242 4, Lisbon 1200-439 Altis Belém Hotel Doca do Bom Sucesso, 1400-038 Lisbon Amália Rodrigues - Coimbra https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=LqB8RAPC9QM MAIKE BURK is a freelance journalist, blogger and architect. She's searching for fascintating stories all over the world. One of her favorite cities is Lisbon. Lisbon’s historic city centre was destroyed by an earthquake in 1755 – and rebuilt in the spirit of the Enlightenment. Disaster management worked at the national and European level. The efforts at urban development are still visible today in the city’s layout. Architectural witnesses may be found everywhere. One current urban development project is working to re-connect the waterfront which had been cut off from the historic city centre by a street and rail line. Convento do Carmo 38.712157, -9.140493 The…

In the series From the Edges, ALEXANDER GUTZMER comments on urban phenomena taking place in the growing metropolises outside the classic urban New York-London-Tokyo triad. Editor-in-chief of Baumeister – The Architecture Magazine and Editorial Director of Callwey Publishing (which publishes Topos), he currently lives in Mexico. The idea of the architectural theme park, arguably an American invention from the first half of the last century, has long been adopted, and in fact driven to new dimensions by China, where the theme park became the themed city. Some years ago, the somewhat odd erection of artificial German, English, or Dutch towns around Shanghai caught a lot of media attention. They also had a strange fascination for me, eventually forming part of my Ph.D. thesis on virtual urbanism. However, projects like Anting…

Mumbai may only be India’s second city in size, but it is without a doubt the subcontinent’s capital of commerce, glamour, and endless aspirations. In many ways, it resembles New York, although the metropolis once called Bombay is, of course, twice as large. By mid-century, the self-declared Maximum City will swell to some 40 million inhabitants: the largest urban space on earth. Once upon a time there was a peaceful bay, a good place to drop anchor after a voyage across the oceans, a bom bahia, as the Portuguese seafarers put it in the 16th century: Bombay. Apart from the historic name, now obsolete, and a few derelict buildings, the Portuguese left few traces at their landing point, unlike in Goa and Diu, two other settlements developed by the globetrotters…

“Our democracy has been hacked. Big money is taking power. In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to fix our democracy crisis.” AL GORE Former Vice President of the USA and Nobel Laureate Miami Beach has choked. On the waters of the Atlantic. The ocean has inundated the city kneehigh on this bluer-than-blue summer day. Streets have become rivers, squares are now lakes. The sun is scorching and the air threatens to burst with humidity as streams of perspiration are running down mayor Philip Levine’s face. Together with Al Gore and a few others he is watching the pumps that were supposed to keep Miami Beach dry. They turned out to be completely useless. “With these new high tides that came in … you can’t do anything for…

topos: Mr. Ratti, do you feel yourself to be a pioneer in the field of drone graffiti painting? CARLO RATTI: Not in this regard. Others have experimented with drone graffiti as well. Think of the New York graffiti artist Katsu who launched a spray paint quadcopter. What is new about Paint by Drone is that we work with a high-precision swarm and can turn citizens into artists. The drone system in this instance is just an extension of their hands to create a largescale, collaborative piece of art. topos: How did you come up with the idea of “Paint by Drone”? C R: Drones are an increasingly common part of our everyday life. Did you know that according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, by 2020 there could be 1.3…

“Over time, the morphology of cities changes not only as new fabric is added, but also as existing fabric is modified.” PAUL KNOX Palimpsests: Biographies of 50 City Districts, 2012 Each chapter in a city’s history leaves its mark, for better or worse – in the layout of its streets, the fabric of its buildings, the nature of its institutions, and the cultural legacies of its residents. As a result, urban landscapes are mute manifestations of ideology and power, of changing ideals in architecture, urban design, and planning, of changing forces in real estate development, and of the changing tastes and aspirations of consumers. In broad terms, this can be seen as the product of the epochal sweep of change at national and international scales. In northwestern European towns and…

A lot of care and effort was once put into the architectural design of Dutch dikes, locks and pumping stations. That has changed. Today, the State Water Board is predominantly focused on safety. Mascha Onderwater states: It is time to reevaluate the importance of spatial quality. MASCHA ONDERWATER is a landscape architect with extensive experience in planning complex urban design and landscape architectural transformations. She is a member of the Bureau B+B management team. Ever since the early middle ages, the Dutch have been building dikes and mounds in order to make life in the soggy lowlands possible. In the course of the centuries, the waterworks became increasingly ingenious. Today, a large part of the Dutch landscape is characterized by polders, canals, locks and pumping stations. Although the State Water…

Three typologies of wilderness-making emerged in the study of Detroit: volcano, island, and savannah. For decades, demolition has been sought as a panacea for the tide of blight in Detroit. Waves of departure have marked the city both physically and socially, with outmigration to surrounding suburbs beginning in the 1950s. Policies promoted by federal and local government prohibited African Americans from securing mortgages, compounding declines in the local population. Detroit was transformed into the largest majority-minority city in the United States, and local resources were stretched thin in efforts to deliver maintenance to an increasingly divergent set of conditions. For a city largely comprised of single-family housing, residential demolition was initially slow to imprint change upon Detroit’s urban fabric. Although demand for demolition was great, delays were rampant, and progress…

Tanja Braemer is Editor in Chief of Topos and the German landscape architecture magazine Garten + Landschaft. A journalist with a degree in media studies, she has worked for Callwey Publishing, which publishes Topos and Garten + Landschaft, since 2015. t.braemer@callwey.de Jérémie Dru is an architect with a passion for photography. He started research into the perception of urban spaces on completing his studies at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture in Paris in 2012. http://jeremiedru.com Alexander Gutzmer is Editor in Chief of Baumeister – The Architecture Magazine, and Editorial Director of Callwey Publishing. He currently lives in Mexico. a.gutzmer@callwey.de Jutta Kehrer Director of LLD, Hong Kong, holds a degree in landscape architecture from Hannover University, Germany. Throughout her career she has practiced and lectured in the field of landscape architecture…

SUSANN AHN is a landscape architect and mediator. Since 2013, she has been teaching as a research associate in the TheoryLab at the Chair of Prof. Christophe Girot, ETH Zurich. She is also currently working on her PhD, writing a dissertation on culture-specific landscape architecture. ahn@arch.ethz.ch ISABELLE FEHLMANN is an art historian. Since 2015, she has been teaching as a research associate in the TheoryLab at the Chair of Prof. Christophe Girot at ETH Zurich. Additionally, she writes articles on, as well as guides for art exhibitions. fehlmann@arch.ethz.ch Barely two decades ago a modern residential and office quarter was built on an area of about 50 hectares in Oerlikon, Zurich, which before had been a monofunctional site of industrial facilities that were largely inaccessible to the public. The private owners…