Landscape And Architecture: The Principles Of Landform Construction

Since the Environmental Movement, traditional land art evolved, on one hand, to climate art, and on the other, influenced landform building. “The principles of landform building,” according to architect and theorist Stan Allen, “offer a new lens with which to reexamine phenomena as diverse as the megastructure of the 1960s, the current fascination with green building, artificial ski slopes, or the vast multi-use stadia being constructed today.” These principles include the inhabitation of the landscape, which much of contemporary architecture has incorporated into its design. However unlike land art’s wild terrains, such as the salt lake of Spiral Jetty or the vast desert of Double Negative, contemporary architecture has incorporated principles of land art into densely populated urban typology, of which the following two projects serve as significant examples.

3.3.1 CASE STUDY 1: THE HIGHLINE

FIGURE 3.3. THE HIGH LINE

(Image by NYC Parks)

The High Line [see Figure 3.3] is a park built on top of an abandoned train track in the middle of New York City and is one of the most influential works today in regards to integrating landscape and architecture. One must only look at the design team to see the physical interdisciplinary manifestation: landscape architect James Corner, architects Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, artist Olafur Eliasson, and garden designer Piet Oudolf. They incorporated their interdisciplinarity into the project, stating, “Our strategy of agri-tecture combines organic and building materials into a blend of changing proportions that accommodates the wild, the cultivated, the intimate, and the hyper-social.” The High Line’s formation is deeply rooted in the principles of land art. Like Robert Smithson’s Spiral...

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...ners of the High Line created not only views, but an experience.

The idea of the High Line being “perpetually unfinished” is also a principle evolved from the land artists. However, while land artists typically incorporated constant change through the entropy of the site, the High Line is unfinished in its ability to continue to change through growing. The Park is being installed in three progressive parts. In this way, it is reinforcing its dynamic qualities through both the large scale growth of the infrastructure as each new part is installed and through the small scale growth of the High Line’s flora as the plants take root. In some elements, the High Line plays upon the erosion of the land art pieces by creating growth through entropy, which compels the viewer to appreciate both the time and natural processes of their surroundings. James Corner stated,