calls for articles:
On Site review 33: land + landscape
On Site review 32: weak systems
While it may seem that we have been here before with dirt, geology and mapping, land is a different thing. Land is territory, surface; landscapes exist between geology and agricultural patterns; land is what we traverse and often try to own. Land in the service of the nation: environmental preserves of greater and lesser vulnerability. Land at the civic scale: fallow, parks often just waiting for development. Land at the domestic scale: the garden. Is this the only bit of land we are personally responsible for? What is landscape architecture? Do sustainability ambitions invalidate or reinvigorate the history of landscape as the mediation between urbanism and wilderness? What is landscape? Is the difference between land and landscape the lens by which we transform land into some sort of human endeavour?
Weak form: form without clear links to meaning, appropriate to the times (the late 20th century when Eisenmann wrote about this), whereby buildings can be thought of as media carrying messages and meaning to lots of diverse constituencies. Any meaning that accrues to form is both relative and ambiguous. Weak form is purposely zelig-like: it can be many things to many people. It can also be as nothing-like as media itself, physical form irrelevant, a strange reality found in the processes of consumption rather than in the bricks and mortar of traditional strong-form architecture. This curiously autonomous architecture is threaded into a web of all architecture, part of an array of things that act together to produce ever-mutable meaning. Weak systems: this is a term that could cover most construction: thin components, weak and insignificant in themselves, threaded into a system that makes them opaque and enveloping. This ranges from tensegrity systems to thin skins to break-away walls in hurricane zones. The assemblage of component parts make a whole quite different from any one part; again, an array of things act together to produce an infinite variety of form. Weak urbanism: informal housing and settlement. The rules are arcane, intimate and tribal, rather than legal, bureaucratic or democratic. Using weak materials, built without code, limited by money or lack of it, nonetheless informal settlements are resilient, adaptable, motile, opportunistic. There is much to be learned from their very provisionality.
What is the role of land in –
land claims land patterns land marks land registry
gardens
architecture
agriculture
design culture identity
cities
transportation development
land grabs
land art
70
In this Fall 2014 issue of On Site review , we would like to look at fragile, weak, unfinished, mutable, hopeful against-all- odds architecture, urbanism, landscapes, infrastructure and construction.
All things landscape: Proposals due 15 December 2014 Finished articles 1 February 2015
All inquires and proposals: www.onsitereview.ca/contact-onsite
Proposals due 15 June 2014 Finished articles 1 August 2014
All inquires and proposals: www.onsitereview.ca/contact-onsite
The call for articles is also repeated at: www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles with futher links to specifications, editing policies, contributor contracts.
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator