Table of contents for N. 112 in Topos

MICROBIOLOGICAL LANDSCAPES

How do we plan and design greener, healthier, human-centered, sustainable and resilient urban spaces and architecture? Maybe by means of algae? This image shows the PhotoSynthEtica Tower Linz, by ecoLogicStudio (with Innsbruck University and the Bartlett UCL for the Upper Austria Cultural Institute). (p.24) Dear readers, the topic of the new topos issue is green technologies. The term may come across as an oxymoron at times; yet, coming to think about the current global challenges, it may actually prove to be a highly useful and sensible notion. Let’s remind ourselves: we are faced with a nexus of complex issues – climate change, air and water pollution, digitalization, urbanization, depletion of energy and other raw material sources, poverty, migration, pandemics. These issues need to be solved without further impacting our climate,…

MICROBIOLOGICAL LANDSCAPES

Paolo L. Bürgi

Paolo L. Bürgi is a landscape architect based in Camorino, Switzerland. He is adjunct professor at the University of Pennsylvania, visiting professor at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and at the Politecnico di Milano. He has participated in many international competitions winning several prizes, such as the “CERN-Route de Meyrin” in Switzerland or the “Helsinki Töölönlathi Parks” in Finland and the “The Rosa Barba International Landscape Architecture Prize” for the Cardada project in Switzerland in 2003. 1 INFLUENCED BY All the arts that left their traces within me. 2 INSPIRED BY Ernst Cramer’s courageous gestures and visions. Later my eyes were opened by Luis Barragan. His work has made me understand the intrinsic force and beauty of essentiality in architecture. 3 WHY LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE? It is extraordinarily difficult…

Paolo L. Bürgi

Wrap it (up) in Green

Wrap it (up) in Green

Will an all green city solve the issues related to climate change and pollution? This question inspires The Why Factory (t?f), the think tank of the Dutch architecture office MVRDV. Their concept “The Green Dip” provides possible answers. They propose increasing the integration of vegetation into the built environment to a radical and visionary level. MVRDV partner Winy Maas and Javier Arpa, Research and Education Coordinator of the Why Factory at the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft since 2018, are the directors of the project at t?F and developed a software that visualizes hybrid city– nature structures. In their efforts, the directors are supported by students from TU Delft, UTS Sydney and the IAAC Barcelona among other institutions. Their work blurs the boundaries between grey and green infrastructure and…

Solar Cities

Solar Cities

Cities occupy a mere two per cent of the land on earth but consume 60 to 80 per cent of global energy, out of which more than 70 per cent result from fossil fuels that exacerbate air pollution and global warming. Fifty-five per cent of the 7.7 billion people living on Earth in 2019 inhabited cities; with the rate of urbanization growing steadily, these figures are expected to rise to 68 per cent of 9.7 billion people in 2050. It is no surprise that cities will become central places of the response to climate change, and it is clearly necessary to promote renewable energy generation with zero emission in cities. As a type of renewable energy, solar energy has been used increasingly in recent years to generate green electricity. Apart…

Machines like us

Artificial intelligence (AI) is expected to think, comprehend, communicate and learn. Learning is essential to progress in life, to adapt to new and evolving situations, to become a thinking, feeling individual and a member of society guided by morality. We see time and again what the results are if lessons are not learned and action is guided by impulse alone, devoid of any moral judgment or consequence. Our societies, our civilization and our world can no longer afford dictatorial whims that undermine free, just, and equitable societies. Against this background, we have reached a technological threshold that has inspired the imagination of many and has real-time consequences for the way we do business, govern cities, and share the planet. AI is more than a buzzword, it hearkens the emergence of…

Green Technology in the Smart City

Every era conjures a dominant vision of the ideal city. The cities that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution made way for Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, which promised clean air, green grass, and healthy living. Later the image of a skyscraper in a park made up Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, with high-rise structures standing astride park-like boulevards. Then came Jane Jacobs’ Organic City embodying the aspirations of urban dwellers whose actual use of sidewalks, streets, and buildings gave the city its identity and, in the process, advanced the march of democracy. The rise of the information, media and cultural industries paved the way for Richard Florida’s Creative City where knowledge and the arts led the way. Today, media, urban planners, and government policymakers tell us that, we are in the…

Planting Robots

Planting Robots

There’s an abrasive metal-on-metal screech coming from the underbelly of the robot as it inches forward and attempts to lower its hoe-laden arms. It’s a rainy summer day on the Landgoed Velhorst farm in the Dutch village of Lochem, where I’ve come to observe the latest in agricultural robotics: the Robot One, developed (by the aptly named PixelFarming Robotics company) to make pixel farming a scalable enterprise. Pixel farming – also known as pixel cropping, pixelfarming, or pixelteelt in Dutch – is a nascent cropping system design and management method in which you plant crops in small patches (‘pixels’) arranged in diverse combinations. The technique is so new that the small crowd I’m here with today – a mix of farmers, agricultural researchers, roboticists, engineers, architects and designers, totalling maybe…

Mapping the Flood

Mapping the Flood

Green technology can not only mitigate the effects of climate change, but also be used for social justice (UNESCO, 2019). By curbing the negative impacts of humans on the environment – and therefore, on humans – technologies can protect the most vulnerable from climate change. Often, the poor are most affected by climate events. Landslides, floods, rising ocean levels and other consequences of rising temperatures around the world frequently hit “undesirable” land first (ibid), where people live in contested circumstances – i.e., informal settlements. This article will examine mapping technologies as green technology and as tools to map areas at risk of climate change, in order to improve resilience and social justice. Accessible maps with bottom-up information can not only improve resilience of vulnerable settlements (Loggia and Govender, 2019), but…

The Bicycle Parking Garage in Utrecht, the Netherlands

The railway station in Utrecht is the busiest in the Netherlands. A bicycle parking garage by Ector Hoogstad Architects, Rotterdam and landscape architects Buro Sant En Co, Den Haag, was built as part of the redesign and redevelopment of the station district in this fourth-largest city in the country. It holds the world record for bicycle garages with 13,500 parking spaces. Its top ranking is not really a surprise given its location in one of the country’s major traffic hubs along with the Dutch affinity for bicycles. However, the realisation of the project was also remarkable in that it provided a unique design impact to the overall redesign of the station district. Bicycle parking has become an attraction in itself as part of this bright and friendly complex. Whereas multi-storey…

The Bicycle Parking Garage in Utrecht, the Netherlands

BACKFLIP – Flamengo Park Rio de Janeiro

PIERRE-ANDRÉ MARTIN is a french Landscape Architect established in Rio de Janeiro since 2001. He is co-founder of the landscape architecture and environment firm EMBYÁ and also coordinator and teacher of ecological landscape courses and postgraduate courses at PUC-Rio University. When the design process of Flamengo Park started in 1961, the main and initial purpose of this landscape transformation was to solve transport problems between the central and the south area of the city of Rio de Janeiro and secondly to create a big urban park inspired by parkscapes such as Central Park in New York. A dream team of architects, designers, botanists, etc. was created: Lota de Macedo Soares, Affonso Eduardo Reidy, Roberto Burle Marx, Ethel Bauzer Medeiros, Luiz Emygdio de Mello Filho, among others. Flamengo Park is a…

BACKFLIP – Flamengo Park Rio de Janeiro

Human Intervention

Human Intervention

“Discover mysterious caves – Mexico’s hidden oases – Absolute Adventure Mexico….” When researching the definition and significance of cenotes online, such tourism-related references are predominant. Munich-based photographer Olaf Otto Becker has approached these places – natural pits or sinkholes that expose groundwater – in a completely different way. He examines the effect the influx of tourists has on the preservation of cultural traditions and landscapes. For the Mayans cenotes were holy places. Where once the sick were brought to be healed, now anyone with enough money can buy such a cave as a tourist enterprise. For an entry fee one can then swim in its pools or discover the cave with diving gear and a hired guide. All-inclusive packages offer bus transfers from and to the hotel, and include a…

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander

Born in 1921 in Mülheim-Ruhr, Germany, Cornelia immigrated 1938 to the US. She earned a diploma from Smith College in 1944 and continued her studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1953 she established her own design firm in Vancouver, British Columbia and became known for her collaborative, socially responsible, and environmentally thoughtful work. In 2019 The Cultural Landscape Foundation established the Cornelia Hahn Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize (tclf.org/oberlanderprize). 1 INFLUENCED BY My mother Beate Hahn. She wrote gardening books while living in Berlin, was an avid gardener, educator and a good friend of Karl Foerster. But she was strict and when we immigrated to the US, I had to find my own path to landscape architecture. 2 INSPIRED BY Having been painted, with my sister Charlotte,…

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander

Deep Green

Deep Green

The current rush of many cities to develop blue-green plans dealing with future threats of climate change is a testament to the obsession of our society with searching for ‘true’ answers within a problem-solving framework.1 The current global pandemic, however, highlights the urgent need for a new perspective to design innovation capable of engaging the systemic nature of the urban landscape and its architecture. Architects and planners often rely on a ‘sanitised’ and therefore highly aestheticised vision of the world’s ecosystems, exemplified by the very notion of green planning and its focus on greening cities. This notion may be one of the most enduring aspects we have inherited from modernity. And if bacteriological control was at the origin of its sanitation efforts, modern architecture and urban design turned it into…

“I call for a little more common sense in planning”

“I call for a little more common sense in planning”

topos: Professor Auer, along with the Italian architects Stefano Boeri and Alessandro Melis, Professor of Architecture and Innovation at Portsmouth University, you and your colleagues Bilge Kobas, Daniele Santucci and Ata Chokhachian are participating in the URBAINABLE – STADTHALTIG exhibition being held until late November at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste. The hypothesis of the exhibition is that it is the city itself that contains the systems with the greatest potential for sustainable development. At the same time the role of the city and architecture in an era of new challenges such as global warming, digitisation and demographic change is investigated following different approaches. What does your contribution examine? THOMAS AUER: Our main proposition is that “climate change adaptation offers the chance to rethink public space with less vehicle infrastructure, more…

green technologies

Becoming the world’s first climate-neutral continent by 2050 is the objective behind the EUROPEAN GREEN DEAL the most ambitious package of measures intended to enable European citizens and businesses to benefit from sustainable green transition.1 “The use of natural materials like BAMBOO can be a vital instrument to develop ecological alternatives for the cities of the future”, says Austrian architect Chris Precht2 Karl Burkart, Managing Director at One Earth, Rockefeller Philanthropy, defines a GREEN ECONOMY as based on six main sectors. These are renewable energy, green buildings, sustainable transport, water management, waste management, land management.3 Ferdinand Ludwig, German architect and Professor for Green Technologies at the Technical University of Munich uses trees’ natural structural abilities for architectural purposes: This field is called BAUBOTANIK – living plant constructions. He is developing…

green technologies

“So much of our education is based on theories that are no longer relevant to our times, neither in social, economic nor environmental terms.”

topos: In your book Soft City you write about a form of urbanisation that allows for both density and diversity in order to live locally. The coronavirus pandemic has severely limited travel, making us very “local” in the process. How does the soft city work in this context? What role do soft cities have now? DAVID SIM: As the soft city, with its convivial urban hygge and people enthusiastically participating in public life, fades into distant memory due to our response to the pandemic and the resulting lockdown, it's all too easy to envisage a harder, colder environment with a culture of physical distancing that favours the safety of individual travel in private motor vehicles, the seeking of seclusion in detached suburban houses, or perhaps even splendid isolation, i.e. living…

Sustainable Hedonism

Sustainable Hedonism

What does one get by combining a ski slope and a garbage incinerator? A structure like BIG’s Amager Resource Center (ARC) in Copenhagen. The ARC has just been completed, comprising one of the largest garbage incinerators of its kind. The “CopenHill,” as it has been nicknamed, is located on Amager island, about four kilometers west of the city center, adjacent to the Christianhavn neighborhood. Replacing a 45-year-old predecessor facility, it produces enough electricity for 30,000 households as well as district heating for 72,000 households. It is operated by a holding company that is owned by five municipalities in and around Copenhagen. But Copenhill is far more than these facts and numbers: it is also meant to become an excursion destination by offering an artificial ski slope including a ski lift…

Contributors

Sebastian Bernardy is an architect and researcher based in Rotterdam and co-founder of Eventually Made. He joined AMO after graduating from TU Delft, collaborated with Something Fantastic in Berlin, and tutored the studio abroad program at Harvard GSD. sebastian@eventuallymade.com Yves Cabannes is an urban planner and Emeritus Professor of Development Planning at Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. He was lecturer in Urban Planning at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. y.cabannes@ucl.ac.uk Lenora Ditzler is an agricultural systems scientist working on a PhD in Farming Systems Ecology at Wageningen University in The Netherlands. Lenora contributed to the exhibition Countryside, the Future, put on by Rem Koolhaas and Samir Bantal/AMO. lenora1.ditzler@wur.nl Mitchell Joachim is architect, urban designer and co-Founder of Terreform ONE, an architecture and urban design research group. He is a leading…

Contributors

ESCAPE PLAN - Graz

Styrian, but international: Caylend https://caylend.at Hotel Weitzer https://hotelweitzer.com/en Granada – Eh Ok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pzDsH6nD7q0 SUSANNAH LEOPOLD is a freelancer based in Graz, where she translates, writes, and edits English texts about architecture and art. In term time, she also works as an editorial assistant at GAM Lab, which is responsible for the annual publication Graz Architecture Magazine (GAM) as well as academic communication at Graz University of Technology’s Faculty of Architecture. Security is another point. Flamengo Park is so huge and the presence of the road systems make it host to people experiencing homelessness. This has required implementation of additional security patrols. This is not a problem that is exclusive to Flamengo Park, but some of its structures and its massive scale promote these undesired uses more than other spaces of…

ESCAPE PLAN - Graz

“BLACK LIVES MATTER IN LANDSCAPES.”

Marc Miller Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at The Pennsylvania State University There are implicit and explicit relationships between landscape, power, and race; and designers need to identify visions that are more inclusive. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota requires us to reflect on how we can create diverse and equitable spaces, and these are questions with international implications. The impact of the events of 25 May 2020 reached well past the American Midwest and triggered moves to make public spaces more accessible to Black people and those who experience racial inequality globally. Is it possible to imagine Black people in public spaces without derivative stereotypes? Can open spaces be transformed to reflect the needs and visions of Black people? Are there different ways to bring this idea…

Accra

One of the globe's largest emerging conurbations stretches along the south-facing coast of West Africa, reaching from Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to Lagos, Nigeria. Accra and its sister city Tema are located roughly in the middle between these two end points and make up a 50-kilometer stretch of urbanized area on the Trans-West African Coastal Highway, which connects the urban nodes of the region. Accra is the political capital, commercial center and largest city of Ghana, one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. As such, it brings together people from multiple backgrounds including the northern regions of the country that border the Sahel. Openness and tolerance for different cultures, value systems and lifestyles can be sensed throughout the city. Virtually all neighborhoods of Accra are diverse as tenants with links…

Accra

Deep Impact

Deep Impact

We tend to think of urbanization as a realm apart, somehow separate from the ecosystem, but nothing could be further from reality. In fact, we need to search below the urban veneer to reveal the wildlife that symbiotically shares our streets and dwellings. Inside the built environment we witness phenomena such as wall-eating snails that are overrunning Miami, packs of wild boars that meander Berlin, and an uncontrollable monkey incursion of Cape Town. Not to mention the all too familiar sights of city pigeons, and large colonies of rats. From carpet-hungry insects to coyotes hanging out in food shops, we have discovered streets that are far more alive than we often comprehend. With the changing conditions of the environment, animals too try to adapt, as in the case of wild…

Upstairs New York

Amidst the many short-lived shopping crazes in New York City during the national lockdown in the Spring of 2020, gardening tools looked like an unlikely one. The appeal, it seems, was the benefit of a new pastime to hold over the isolation, learning a new craft that connects to the dearly missed outside, and the prospect to reap the fruits of one’s own labour. Should the planted vegetables help comb over any insecurity in food supply, all the better. This form of widespread hyper-local farming was famous first in the midst of World War II, when the country urged families to plant victory gardens as an initiative to support the need for food rations in wartimes. Now, without a government campaign, many city dwellers turn to growing a garden simply…

Upstairs New York

Co-Design via App

Co-Design via App

Over the last two decades advancements in data collection, computing and visualisation methods have fundamentally changed our relationship with the physical world. Our current output of data is roughly 2.5 quintillion bytes a day. Ninety percent of the world’s data was created in the last two years alone. This has given rise to the smart city concept, defined by the International Telecommunication Union as an “innovative city that uses information and communication technologies (ICT) and other means to improve quality of life, efficiency of urban operation and services and competitiveness, while ensuring that it meets the needs of present and future generations with respect to economic, social and environmental aspects”1. Myriad reality-capture technologies have been installed in the built environment to measure and understand the city in real-time, supposedly responsive…

Future proof Garden Cities

What does Letchworth, the world’s first Garden City, which came to life in the beginning of the 20th century in England, share in common with Águas de São Pedro in Brazil, a tropicalized Garden City from the 1940s, and Magarpatta City, one of India’s greenest townships, which rose from the ground in the 2000s, 100 years after Letchworth? Each achieved impressive results: More than half of Letchworth Estate is still rural and largely productive, despite London pressure on land; Águas de S.P. ranks 1st or 2nd for its Human Development Index out of 5,570 Brazilian municipalities, and Magarpatta in India has become one of the very few carbon-positive townships in the world. It’s important to examine some of their uniqueness, but also to look at the reasons why innovative green…

Future proof Garden Cities

“Every city is unique – this is why we need more available data.”

“Every city is unique – this is why we need more available data.”

topos: Robert Heinecke, the corona pandemic sent the world into lockdown. Industrial companies cut down on production, mobility was reduced drastically. Are there official data about the extent to which this affected the air quality? What do your sensors in Hamburg tell you? ROBERT HEINECKE: Indeed, shortly after the initial German lockdown we published data from our sensor array in the city of Hamburg. Some of our sensor locations showed a strong decrease in pollutants, particularly in nitrogen dioxide. In other locations, pollution levels dropped only slightly. We know from other cities that in many places there was a much more significant improvement in air quality levels. This already shows the complexity of the topic: air pollution can’t just be reduced to a direct correlation with traffic, there are many…

Light for liveable Cities

Where there is light, there is life. And cities need public life; this has become clearer than ever before in recent months. People meet, communicate and feel comfortable whenever a square, a park or a street is illuminated in the evening. That’s what makes a city liveable. Whether in-ground spotlight, mast luminaire, bollard light or spot: There is a very diverse range of luminaires. The choice of light source must be carefully considered – this is the only way to provide atmosphere, safety and orientation and to ideally design open spaces. This is how a city becomes alive and how it stays liveable – even in these times dominated by the coronavirus. Column lighting New column luminaires, RENO ELEMENTS from Hess, employ a clear and minimalist design that lends character…

Light for liveable Cities

Space - made to create living space

Space - made to create living space

“Space” is the name of a new luminaire for mast top use by Focus Lighting. It is produced in cooperation with AART Designers, who are also the designers behind the Sky Park, another luminaire from the same Danish lighting manufacturer. The design used in Space is both timeless and appealingly friendly. It satisfies the specified criteria so as to be well suited for both modern and older architecture in both public and private spaces. A central light source surrounded by circular elements creates and precise and harmonic composition. It is transparent and calm by day, and at night – when the light is on – provides a wide, warm and glowing area of direct and indirect light framed by translucent shielding. Space looks elegant on both low and high poles…

#3 EDGE CITY – The End of the Aerotropolis

Los Angeles hosts an array of buildings representing what is new in the world. One of my favorites is the Theme Building at LAX, a Googie architectural gem conveying the optimism that prevailed in the Western world for a long time. Designed by a team around William Pereira and Charles Luckman, it was an icon of a world in which international travel was part of an increasingly open lifestyle. This lifestyle then became more generally available, which caused a new cultural richness as well as social and environmental concerns. And yet, the idea came to prominence that by looking at what is happening at airports, we can understand what is taking place to society in general. This thinking could be extended to other spatial concepts – such as the “airport…