Table of contents for June 2017 in Topos

The beauty of disfigured landscapes: the battlefields of the First World War, captured by photojournalist Michael St Maur Sheil. When the first issue of Topos was published in September 1992, the magazine’s starting point was a perceived change in the profession of landscape architecture. The editorial read: “... a change seems to be taking place in European landscape planning and many planners are expressing the wish to play a more active role in shaping the environment.” More than before, landscape architects at that time felt the desire to be seen as members of an artistic profession, that is as designers rather than just as planners guided by nature as the one and only principle directing their work. What you are holding in your hands, is the new 99th issue of…

TALENT Yifeng Lin The founder of YIYU Design (2013), a Shanghaibased firm with currently 10 employees, is one of China’s newcomers in the landscape architecture profession. Yifeng Lin holds a Master in landscape architecture from Harvard University, GSD. His first milestone project, AVIC Park in Nanchang, has attracted widespread attention. Yifeng Lin lectures at the University of Hong Kong and at Tongji University in Shanghai. 1 STARTING POINT OF CAREER An art based lab focusing on landscape and art installations, that consequently became the foundation of YIYU design 2 INFLUENCED BY My mother, a flower arranger; my father, a farmer and literature teacher; art, architecture, and music 3 INSPIRED BY Cycles in nature and life 4 DESIGN PRINCIPLES Merging poetic and rational thinking 5 FORMULA FOR SUCCESS Curiosity, courage, and…

The most conspicuous wound that war leaves, in relation to urban space, is depletion. Where before silhouettes of streets, houses, squares could be discerned in the three-dimensional urban fabric, giving it the appearance of something that had grown over time, that was complete and well-orchestrated, it is now the brittle contours of ruins that reign. The city, a place of life and coming together, lies shattered to the eyes of the observer. A place of death, no longer of life. And if war doesn’t take people’s lives, it at least destroys their living space with almost 100 percent certainty. With that, people’s emotional bond with the city and its community is at risk to fray as well. War is the opposite of security. And it especially obliterates the security emanating…

After disaster, for instance, everything is supposed to happen quickly, including the reestablishment of what is considered a “normal” or everyday life. After crisis, conflict, and disaster, typical demands can be heard: Provide shelter and housing quickly and rebuild communities sustainably. Architects attempt to acknowledge this challenge within their reconstruction plans. However, the societal, political, and economic circumstances of post-crisis recovery can actually derail such planning efforts, and for many forced migrants across the globe, shelter life becomes a new normality. In such cases, reconciling the time needed for rebuilding on the one hand and the requirements of sustainable planning and design on the other poses a dilemma. There is a resulting need to break through the typical patterns of reconstruction to more quickly and more effectively take advantage of…

The sheer scale of the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DOD) 25 million-acre footprint belies its perversely conventional scope: less battlefields and blacksites than miles of blacktop, cables, and pipelines connecting sprawling warehouses and logistics complexes, office parks, and suburban subdivisions. Yet these unexceptional spaces of fenced-off lots and linear landscapes catalogued in the DOD’s annual BSR (Base Structure Report) simultaneously camouflage the everyday architectures of a historically unprecedented militarism while parading a spatially bound and wellmanaged footprint that coincides neatly with its real estate portfolio. Made by force, this “footprint” disguises a more crucially overlooked and under-represented set of dynamic spaces made, unmade, and remade by militarism as a spatial process, bleeding beyond the borders of any site boundary. Ironically, it is a lesser-known inventory of more than 10,000 “sites”…

Playgrounds are not only places where people have fun; they are increasingly places where a variety of generations can meet and interact. Parents meet other parents, children find new friends and grandparents can marvel at their grandchildren’s motor skills, etc. Just as some playgrounds are dedicated to specific topics, there are also those that are tailored to a specific age group. But what does a playground for the entire family look like? Is the solution an intelligent combination of equipment that appeals to different age groups, or equipment with which adults can easily play along with children? Parents themselves have more fun and are more relaxed when there are enough seating areas, a variety of both sunny and shady areas, inviting picnic tables and possibly even drinking water dispensers. The…

The Gràcia Squares by Jaume Bach and Gabriel Mora (1984) are emblematic of this early period of Barcelona’s urban transformation. Exemplary for their subtle interventions in a dense urban fabric and the renovation of neglected public space, their creation of a contemporary but timeless aesthetic in dialogue with the historic surroundings, the squares were reorganised and used a reduced material palette of pavement, furniture, lighting and tree planting in symmetry with the adjacent buildings. Their open character, discreet simplicity and multifunctional use gave them a specific urban quality and brought them to the attention of the architecture world. As only a few of the nine proposed designs for a sequence of interconnected open spaces were actually realised, the potential impact all of the interventions would have had cannot be known.…

Lüke, 333 St. Charles Ave., New Orleans The Old No. 77 Hotel & Chandlery, 535 Tchoupitoulas St., New Orleans New Orleans Bump by Jelly Roll Morton youtube.com/watch?v=6pjFHj-Mluw THERESA RAMISCH studied urban planning at the Technical University of Munich with a focus on public participation and communication. She has worked as an editor for Garten + Landschaft and Topos Magazine since 2016. 1 Lafitte Greenway 29°58'08.0"N 90°05'04.8"W One example of the commitment commonly exhibited by residents is the Lafitte Greenway project in the neighbourhoods of Iberville, Tulane-Gravier, Bayou St. John and Treme. For decades an unused former railway line between Lake Pontchartrain and the French Quarter ran through the middle of the city. Like an invisible wall, this no man's land separated the neighbourhoods on either side of it. The potential…

Nice huh? The reason for this, however, is not a new spirit of community in a socialist dreamland, but rather fear. The economic crisis in Venezuela has produced a surge in daily crime in the streets of Caracas. This means that it is simply no longer safe to jog the streets alone. Hence, people seek “safety in numbers”, as the Guardian writes in an article in its Great Cities series. Security is an issue in many Latin American metropolises. Where I live, in Mexico, crime and safety have their own sections in the daily newspapers. But hardly anywhere has the situation deteriorated as it has in Caracas. The new reality is not a working class utopia, but the world's capital of robberies. And most of them are at gunpoint. Fear…

Our family’s relationship with Milan started with my grandfather, who survived in the city’s ruin during World War II. My own Milan story began in 2004 when I moved to Milan to work for Corriere della Sera – as a photojournalist. From the first moment on I realised that the city oscillates between the antipoles of tradition and the future. Today – 13 years later – it strikes me that, in such a contemporary and at the same time traditional environment, two even more contrasting urban textures are in harmony: a vigorous industrial grey and a smooth lush green. Three incidents finally brought about Milan’s metamorphosis from a concrete desert to a green cityscape. Firstly, there was the strategic master plan Raggi Verdi (Green Rays), which was developed by the…

Architects are egomaniacs – or at least that’s the cliché. They want to build giant projects, build a lot of them, and, what’s especially important, they want their structures to have an unmistakable style. When all goes well, masterpieces are created, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, Frank Gehry’s Museum in Bilbao or Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbe Philharmonic Hall. There is, however, a different notion about what being an architect means. One that does not focus on individual buildings but rather on the needs of people who will probably never set foot in the prestigious buildings created by star architects. Fabienne Hoelzel is not interested in architectural icons, although she once worked for Herzog & de Meuron. Her architectural and urban planning projects oscillate somewhere between the conflicting priorities…

Will autonomous vehicles revolutionize our urban landscapes sustainably? And if so, how? Kinder Baumgardner, managing principal at SWA Houston, has been researching this topic for a while. Here is his statement. Ever since Google released a video of its cute selfdriving car prototype in 2014, the blogosphere has parsed issues concerning insurance, ticket revenues, and safety. Questions about the built environment, however, are not getting enough attention: How will this revolution shift the basic economics of land use? And what are the design implications? The urgency becomes apparent when you consider current infrastructure projects. There isn’t an agreed-upon standard for how to incorporate robotic cars into traffic models, or how much parking to include in new developments. We are building freeways and cities with infrastructure that will be redundant within…

Alexander Arroyo is an environmental designer and critical geographer with a background in philosophy from Columbia University and landscape architecture from Harvard University, currently pursuing his PhD in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. a.s.arroyo@berkeley.edu Pierre Bélanger holding a PHD is a landscape urbanist, founder of OPSYS (Landscape Infrastructure Lab) and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture as well as Co- Director of the Master in Design Studies Program in Urbanism, Landscape, and Ecology at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. belanger@harvard.edu Tanja Braemer is Editor in Chief of Topos and the German landscape architecture magazine Garten + Landschaft. A journalist, she holds a degree in media studies and has been working for Callwey Publishing, which publishes Topos and Garten + Landschaft, since 2015. t.braemer@callwey.de Alexander Gutzmer is Editor in chief…