Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Further consideration reveals the impossibility of adequately conceiving the air-
port as either a building or an urban ensemble. What is an airport if not a contiguous,
highly choreographed, scrupulously maintained and regularly manicured landscape?
In revisiting the site of the contemporary airport, SHAGAL
iodaa's work examines
one of the most emblematic sites of contemporary urban[isation], re-framing it as
an enormous public landscape.
This re-framing of the landscape offers extensive value to the discipline of land-
scape architecture and land planning, creating a critical space for the examination
of the contemporary city and the role of the designer/decision-maker within it. In
so doing, this work offers a cultural framework for intervention in sites of con-
temporary urbanisation. For many,
shrinkage
alone seems capable of rendering the
contemporary city's order, scale, and lack of density, both social and spatial. By
focusing design intelligence and research attention on the status of landscape in the
contemporary city, this work recommends itself for further reading by audiences
local and remote.
Contemporary landscapes are challenged by economic realities of a new kind,
which create mutant environments that transform sites and adapt them to the whims
and exigencies of complex infrastructures and logistics. The environmental com-
plexity of such sites is overwhelming, in terms of visual aesthetics first, but also in
terms of cultural and environmental understanding and integration.
This particular landscape intelligence is new, because there are no past references
for such environments. Zurich airport was not conceived as a landscape per se, but
rather as a large piece of infrastructure permitting machines to land and take-off.
The review of Zurich airport and recent economic and social events led to critical
attention being paid to
shrinkage
. Reinstating and maintaining the flora and fauna
in this area - instead of expanding the airport - required a “whole systems” design
approach. Zurich airport is a territory in itself, an island with all its rules and reg-
ulations. The “choreographic” dimension not only has a direct impact on the site,
but also across the entire region. The airport generates both value and disvalue. We
have reached a paradox in landscape - and land planning - which we are no longer
able to operate upon.
The [re]invention of nature along those narrow lines becomes a challenge for a
whole generation of landscape architects to come. SHAGAL
|
iodaa, unlike many,
didn't tackle land (or landscape) at a scale that has remained until now very abstract
and distant. Talking in Coleridge language, we have to say that SHAGAL
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iodaa's
design creates an endless text, an endless translation of the original that is aware of
its contradictoriness.
3
The aim is to be as true to the original as possible, that is, to
make viewers forget that the landscape
tableau
is really not as rigidly eternal as the
painting stored in the cultural memory.
The former site of Zurich airport was entirely woodland and hosted a diverse
array of rare vegetation, so-called “Swiss Natural Good”. It was the home habitat
to 316 species that thrived in these landscapes before men, in the mid-1960s, bull-
dozed it into an alien district like an omelette scrambled out of existence causing
widespread changes in vegetation patterns, distortion of the Glatt river and dis-
connection of natural reservoir areas. A consequence of this was that the number
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