BIArch Journal

• Share:
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Mail

Book Presentation: Stan Allen, "Landform Building"

History, Theory & Criticism

On April 30th, the Barcelona Institute of Architecture hosted the launch of Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain, a book edited by Stan Allen and Marc McQuaid surveying recent architectural production in the intersection between city and landscape. Stan Allen presented the publication to the audience for the first time, uncovering the theoretical intentions behind the work. The event was introduced by Josep Lluís Mateo and had Iñaki Ábalos and Michael Jakob as guest speakers in the final roundtable.

Stemming from two conferences on issues of landscape and sustainability held in Toronto and the Canadian Center of Architecture in Montreal, Stan Allen’s work tries to move forward from Charles Waldheim’s coining of “landscape urbanism” by evaluating the urban offspring of that operational framework and its evolution from the rhetoric of ecology and environment. Illustrated with works of architects such as Iñaki Ábalos, Steven Holl, Philippe Rahm, Marion Weiss and Walter Manfredi, Nader Tehrani, Emilio Tuñón y Luis Moreno Mansilla, or Bjarke Ingles and artist such as Tacita Dean, Tsunehisa Kimura or Walter Niedermayr, the book becomes a tour de force, proposing a change of protagonists with respect to previous associations between landscape and architecture.

As highlighted by Josep Lluís Mateo in the introduction—and despite some misinformed expectations—, the book is not about movement but about reifications; materializations of the dominant dialectics in landscape and urbanism during the past fifteen years. Departing from biological metaphors and generative processes just to concentrate in geological affinities and realities, the publication is organized according to four different categories –form, scale, atmosphere, and process- representing strategies of land colonization and operation. Allen highlights the tension between the dynamism of biogical paradigms and the reality of static tectonics, revamping the performative / adaptive aspects present in disciplinary discussions in recent years. Allen understands architecture continuously titillating between the performative biological metaphors and the almost stagnation and quietness of geological configurations. In this sense, the exteriorities of social, urban and ecological relations are more important within the book than the interiorities and autonomies of form configuration and diagramming. It is not a book about mimiquing or camouflage but rather about the programmatic possibilities of the artificial manipulation of landscape.

In order to do so, the narrative oscillates constantly between mapping and prescription, stimulating lexicon substitution from the world of natural sciences dominating the discourse during the 90s and early 00s (fluidity, adaptability, mutations, evolutions or biomorphism) to the realms of topography and mineralogy (tectonics, terrains, sediments, geomorphism). Perhaps is not a coincidence that the publication of the book parallels an overwhelming claim for more solid and robust social, economic, and political structures that could shelter and protect the local environments from the frantic flows of capital.

• Tags:

• events past,
• Media,
• Architectural Design,
• Faculty,
• History, Theory & Criticism