What's in a Name?
The first published letter in response to the New York Times Magazine architecture issue laments that despite the interesting innovations of architects covered therein, the respondent "would have liked to have seen perspectives from landscape architects, or what some refer to as 'landscape urbanism' ".
Giving the benefit of the doubt, the letter may very well have meant to say that in an issue of the magazine entitled "The Next City", the NYT was remiss not to feature the important contributions which landscape architects are making to the cities we will live in tomorrow.
But the invocation of "Landscape Urbanism" muddies the waters. For in fact, all the designers and firms mentioned -- OMA, MVRDV, Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, Stan Allen -- have contributed significantly to the development of landscape urbanism. Rather than say that these designers "are turning toward landscape architecture to infuse and renew their own architectural-design strategies", it might be more appropriate to say that some landscape architects are turning where these influential designers had turned a long time ago (26 years, in the case of Parc de la Villette). Whether or not they have ever uttered these two words in the context of their own works, MVRDV's Alphabet City, OMA/Koolhaas' and Tschumi's proposals for La Villette, and Stan Allen's writing and his work with Field Operations have all had a profound effect on the discourse surrounding landscape urbanism.
I say "surrounding" because it is the nature of this beast that is landscape urbanism that one can only address it, confront it, or critique it by surrounding it. It is everywhere an approximation. In this sense, it is like landscape itself: there is no single point of entry; it is susceptible to innumerable shifting perspectives and internal movements. If the invocation of "landscape urbanism" can at times blur and blend rather than categorize and confirm so much the better, for -- again, like landscape -- it is perpetually re-making itself.