LANDSCAPES: BETWEEN FIGURE AND GROUND

Landscape became a buzzword in architectural circles in the last decades. From the picturesque green lawns to colorful dutch nature to background to photographic essays, the idea of a landscape assumed a prominent role on architectural relations. Specifically in mid-1990’s it transformed itself into a projective tool, through the projects from offices like UNStudio and MVRDV, landscape-buildings enveloped data and diagrams into a single structure. I bring this concept of the word to argue that there are no “voids" in architecture any more. I compared here two moments of the landscape architecture as discipline: to the most prominent modernist landscape-architect, Roberto Burle Marx to the dutch appropriation of the term in the 90’s. 

In Burle Marx’s concept, put forward on projects in Rio de Janeiro and in Brasilia, for example, the idea of the void was similiar to a canvas, where the open space could be created and nurtured following the principles established by the architectural objects. The relationship between figure and ground was clear, and the approach to landscape was to be the backdrop for the architectural object. This lead to the idea of fixed open-spaces, planned and controlled with the same rigidity as the functionalist plans delivered by the architects.

On the other moment, landscape became bigger than “gardening" and encompassed a programatic element in its conception. Winy Maas coined the term datascapes to define the informational compound that goes into the decision making process, that in turn is treated as a formal device to blur the boundaries between the physicality of inside and outside, and the barriers from public to collective space. The importance of this distinction lies in the relationship between building and ground it creates on the contemporary city. I propose that the old model, understood as a modernist painting, is prejudicial to the dynamic of the city, and thus the new approach could be developed to create a more fluid hierarchy of spaces. In understanding the open space not as a compositional device, but as a fluid space between buildings, a set of voids - in a sense, closer to the medieval models of city morphology - the value of the space can aggregate another quality: informality. I would argue here that informality is related to the landscape by advancing the definition proposed by Balmond (Informal), where through the principles of locality, juxtaposition and hybridization, a set of forces are not isolated or independent, but have different degrees of interdependency that “transfers to each other, from separated natures” their effects.

This concept, I propose, when used with the idea of typology earlier presented, makes possible that the different spatial conditions created by the architectural planning could absorb the diversity of programs and functions of the city, making it flexible and in the end, becoming responsive to the demands of the city in formation.