Monday, 31 January 2011
Sunday, 30 January 2011
Fieldwork in Antwerp
The students have been spending 4 days in Antwerp attending lectures and biking around the Green Single. The single is a challenging area, and in order to understand the single as a whole, the students are now divided into 6 groups. Each group will be looking at one strategic site along the single. Each group will also be mapping one theme troughout the entire single. The strategic areas are identified as : New South (Nieuw Zuid), Mastvest, Berchem Station, Rivierenhof Park, Albert Kanaal/Lobroekdok/Park Spoor Noord, and finally the docklands in the north. The themes the students are mapping for the entire singel is : location of cobble stones and green, parking, water, identify ruptures and mobility, map out the neighbouring buildings front/back relationship to the single and topography and drawing up 13 sections where the bridges are today.
Monday, 24 January 2011
Welcome to our blog.
The course is a landscape urbanism design studio. It will investigate the possibilities of landscape and infrastructure as a structuring device for requalifying the built environment and potentially for new urbanization. The site of the design research the Groene Single (Green Ring) of Antwerp, the port city of Belgium on the Schelde River. The ring was once the fortification band of the city and is today the infrastructure ring road of the city. It is an important component of a number of projects by the City of Antwerp, including the soft spine of the ‘spatial structure plan’ (by Secchi & Vigano) and a series of plans for its entire reconfiguration as a landscape/ infrastructure element that connects/ collects diverse urban tissues and sites along its trajectory. The decision to finally veto the building of the controversial Oosterweel Bridge (which would have closed the ring) requires the radical rethinking Antwerp’s connectivity to the larger region and simultaneously requires to rethink the site of the Green Singel itself. Studio participants will develop urban visions for the Green Singel and strategic urban design projects for sites along the Green Singel that draw upon the inherent qualities of the space of and around the ring and creatively marries ecological, infrastructural, and development potentials – underlining the present‐day possibilities for landscape urbanism.
Participants will sharpen their critical capacity by assessing the city’s present plans and projects‐in‐the‐pipeline and be exposed to tools, methods and approaches of fieldwork and mapping to support ecological and contextresponsive urbanism. Through the studio, students will learn to deal with the territory, the interplay between different scales, the relation of landscape and infrastructure, engineering, design and time frames, as well as the integration of strategic considerations into their design concepts. A crucial element will be the interplay between urban (elements) and natural (structures). Learning outcomes in formal terms will be both the mastering of graphic representations of plans as the reporting in writing that substantiates the project. The studio will function as a collective laboratory, investigating the complex relationships between landscape, infrastructure, and urbanism. The studio will include kick‐off fieldwork trip to Antwerp, mapping the city ‘from below’ which will complement the more traditional ‘from above’ analysis. There will also be an intensive workshop in Antwerp. Analysis and concept strategies will be developed in groups. Strategic projects will be developed in small groups or individually. The studio will be developed in collaboration with the Department of Urban Planning of the City of Antwerp.
Intermediate presentations to a larger jury (internal and external) will accompany the different phases of the design. The final jury will be composed of staff members and external jury members. The final presentation to this jury and the report are the basis of the evaluation. A course reader will be prepared at the beginning of the course. It will consist of articles on landscape urbanism and as well on Antwerp.
Bruno De Meulder – Kelly Shannon – Els Vervloesem
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