In this PhD research, the major environmental challenges of our time, such as climate change, sustainable energy transition and scarcity of resources, are approached from a spatial, landscape-architectural perspective. The goal is to accelerate the transition to liveable, low carbon cities. The focus of the research is at the local scale and attempts to turn challenges into opportunities for a better quality of life and living environment. Since 1857, when Frederick Law Olmsted combined the construction of two large drinking water reservoirs for the city of New York with the design of a beautiful park, these types of assignments are part of a landscape architect's job. At that time, the issue was to solve the problem of drinking water while now we are concerned about solving the combination of very diverse and different flows. This renders the assignment more complex but certainly no less landscape architectonic. As part of this research, many functions, flows, areas and actors in the urban landscape system of Rotterdam have been studied. This research focuses on the development, design and testing of new approaches to strengthen existing urban qualities and to tackle problems in such a way that positive effects for other functions (synergies) arise at the same time in order to improve the quality of life in cities.@en

Landscape design focuses on the construction and articulation of outdoor space and results in landscape architectonic compositions. In order to communicate about three-dimensional forms and functions, vocabulary, representations, and tools (in terms of spatial-visual characteristics) are of fundamental importance for landscape architects to describe, interpret, and manipulate landscape spaces. While combining design vocabulary and landscape indicators, qualitative and quantitative mapping approaches, visual representation and interpretation methods, this research aims to provide a framework for describing, understanding, and communicating about spatial-visual characteristics in landscape design. A pilot study is used to explore the potential of specific mapping approaches, such as compartment analysis, 3D landscapes, grid-cell analysis, landscape metrics, visibility analysis, and eye-tracking analysis, which are employed to address spatial-visual phenomena like sequence, orientation, continuity, and complexity. Hypothetical design experiments are conducted to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of spatial-visual mapping in the design process. Interviews with designers are carried out to reflect on techniques for mapping spatial-visual characteristics in the daily practice of landscape architecture. This research opens a way in which to apply visual landscape research in the process of landscape design and supports the development of multidisciplinary approaches. By expanding the spatial-visual mapping toolbox, designers can engage in issues of landscape development, transformation, and preservation while providing realistic and instrumental clues for interventions in urban landscapes. @en

This thesis explores the ways in which landscape is relevant as a concept for designing architecture. Buildings that have been designed like landscapes have become a topic in contemporary architecture. The apparent distinction between architecture and landscape is questioned in exemplary theories and new designs. The core of this thesis is three case studies of architectural designs that use landscape strategies. The analytical model for landscape architectural composition that Steenbergen and Reh (2003) developed for the European gardens is applied as in drawing analysis of these building's inner space composition. By distinguishing the landscape composition into a four layer model - ground form, spatial form, metaphorical form and programmatic form - the analysis will alter the reading of three architectural projects. Rem Koolhaas and OMA's unbuilt Jussieu design for two university libraries in Paris of 1992 is visualised for the first time as it could have looked if built. The Rolex Learning Centre at EPF Lausanne was declared 'landscape' as architecture by its designers Japanese Architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa (SANAA) at the opening in 2010. The City of Culture of Galicia in Santiago de Compostela by American architect Peter Eisenman was designed in 1999 in a process of layering - similar to the layer model analysis of this thesis. This thesis will interpret and compare the three architectural designs. It distinguishes design strategies, methods and landscape attitudes that are specific or commonly applied to the projects. Original drawing analysis and critique reveals unexplored potentials for landscape strategies in the architectural discipline.@en

This study enlarges on the notion of composition in landscape architecture. It builds upon the ‘Delft method’, which elaborates composition as a methodological framework from its sister discipline architecture. At the same time takes a critical stance in respect to this framework, informed by recent epistemological developments in landscape architecture such as the site-specificity and process discourses. The notion of composition is examined from a historical and theoretical perspective, before turning to an examination of the brownfield park project realised in the period 1975-2015. These projects emerge as an important laboratory and catalyst for developments in landscape architecture, whereby contextual, process, and formal-aesthetic aspects emerge as central themes. The thesis of this research is that a major theoretical and methodological expansion of the notion of composition can be distilled from the brownfield park project, in which seemingly irreconcilable paradigms such as site and process are incorporated. By extension, the study elaborates on the disciplinary specificity of landscape architecture as distinct to its sister disciplines architecture and urbanism, propositioning a ‘radical maturation’ of the foundations of the discipline in the period 1975 – 2015, via the brownfield park project. A metaphor for this process is offered by the phenomenon of ecdysis in arthropods (such as the blue swimmer crab), whereby the growth from juvenile to adult takes place in stages involving the moulting of an inelastic exoskeleton. Once shed, a larger exoskeleton is formed, whose shape and character is significantly different to its forebears. The research sketches the contours of a similar ‘disciplinary ecdysis’ in the period 1975-2015, whereby an evolution of design-as-composition praxis in landscape architecture takes place. In the slipstream of these findings, the research sheds new light on the shifts in the form and content of the city itself in this period, and the agency of the urban park in the problematique of the contemporary urban realm. In the cases studied, the park typology has been able to address problems that much of the traditional apparatus of spatial planning and design has failed to do. By extension, the study reveals that many of the paradigms of urban planning and design are in need of major review in the context of deindustrialization. The urban park typology – in its guise as the brownfield park – also appears also able to shape and qualify larger urban regions. As such, the research highlights the rise of brownfield lands and their impact on the fabric of the city, the life of their inhabitants and the paradigms that dominate urban cultures, in turn fundamentally revising the definitions and agencies of notions such as city, nature and landscape. @en