Urban landscape infrastructures: Designing operative landscape structures for the built environment

This paper explores infrastructure as a type of landscape and landscape as a type of infrastructure. The hybridisation of the two concepts, landscape and infrastructure, seeks to redefine infrastructure beyond its strictly utilitarian definition, while allowing design disciplines to gain operative force in territorial transformation processes....

Metropolitan gardens: Gardens in the interstices of the metropolitan tissue

The heterogeneity of the contemporary metropolitan landscape has led to a multiplicity of intermediate spaces, in between and within the different tissues of the metropolitan landscape. These interstices can provide favourable conditions to be transformed into gardens. What design instruments can be discovered for these gardens to address the...

Gestapelde tijd: Historische tuinen als eigentijdse ontwerpopgave

Bij het werken aan historische tuinen heeft de landschapsarchitect niet alleen te maken met de vele tijdslagen die een ontwerp hebben veranderd in wat het nu is – ook andere disciplines spreken zich uit over de waarde en waardevolle elementen die er in voorkomen. Dat leidt tot soms starre voorschriften die de objecten geen goed doen. Een...

Articulating the Site: The Reflection Garden as a Condensation of the Genius Loci

The term genius loci—“the prevailing character or atmosphere of a place,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it—has long been used to interpret landscape characteristics. Lately, however, it is being used, and abused, as a justification in just about any discourse. For spatial, aesthetic, and ecological discussions and social, cultural,...