Site Matters

Strategies for Uncertainty Through Planning and Design

Andrea Kahn, Carol J. Burns, Andrea Kahn, Carol J. Burns

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429514432
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Architecture
• Categoría: Architecture Design

In the era of the Anthropocene, site matters are more pressing than ever. Building on the concepts, theories, and multi-disciplinary approaches raised in the first edition, this publication strives to address the changes that have taken place over the last 15 years with new material to complement and re-position the initial volume.

Reaching across design disciplines, this highly illustrated anthology assembles essays from architects, landscape architects, urban designers, planners, historians, and artists to explore ways to physically and conceptually engage site. Thoughtful discourse and empirically grounded pieces combine to provide the language and theory to contextualize the meanings of site in the built environment. The increasingly complex hybridity of constructed environments today demands new tools for thinking about and working with site. Drawing contributions from outside and within the traditional design disciplines, this edition will trace important developments in site thinking with new essays on topics such as climate change, landscape as infrastructure, shifts from global to planetary urbanization debates, and the proliferation of participatory site transformation practices.

Edited by two leading practitioners and academics, Site Matters juxtaposes timeless contributions from individuals including Elizabeth Meyer, Robert Beauregard, and Robin Dripps with original new writings from Peter Marcuse, Jane Wolff, Neil Brenner, and Thaisa Way, amongst others, to recontextualize and reignite the debate around site. An ideal text for students, academics, and researchers interested in site and design theory.

1.Why Site Matters

Andrea Kahn and Carol J. Burns

As part of a bid by New York City to host the 2012 Olympic Games, five multidisciplinary teams of architects, landscape architects, and urban designers and planners were invited to offer design ideas for an Olympic Village. One team was led by a New York firm, three by European designers, and one by a firm from Los Angeles.¹ Proposals were requested for a particular parcel of land at the southern tip of Queens West, a waterfront area (formerly Hunter’s Point) with unimpeded views across the East River to mid-town Manhattan. Publicly exhibited in the spring of 2004, all five designs were presented similarly, in three-dimensional models with graphic panels including images and text. Each team conformed to established presentation requirements, yet each nonetheless depicted their project and its urban surroundings in notably different ways. Despite common constraints regarding scale and size, the models varied widely in extent and character. One team focused on local edge conditions, conceiving the site in terms of immediate physical surroundings. In contrast, another treated the site strictly as conceptual terrain, using the proposals to engage the history of ideas about the area.² Some teams viewed it as belonging to the city at large, “opening the site as a New York City attraction” or “creating the largest urban waterfront park in New York City.”³ Two teams opted to construct additional models. One focused on the design of a cluster of buildings to show the proposal in greater architectural detail. The other depicted a large swath of Manhattan Island, from the East River to the Hudson, situating the Olympic Village in relation to midtown. The different physical areas identified as relevant to each project and the distinct strategies used to see and understand these areas prompt a question: what constitutes a site in design?

For the disciplines and professions concerned with design of the physical environment, site matters. Not only are physical design projects always located in a specific place, the work of physical design also necessarily depends on notional understandings about the relationships between a project and a locale. Given that design reconfigures the environment using physical and conceptual means, articulate comprehension of site in physical and conceptual terms should be fundamental. Surprisingly, however, the design field overall has a history of scanty literature directly addressing the subject. The first edition of this volume began to correct that striking omission, and this current edition aims to follow suit.

As exemplified by the Olympic Village proposals, a specific locale provides the material ground for action in design practice, and ideas about site provide a theoretical background against which such actions are taken. Such received understandings of the subject – even if unnoticed, unexamined, or inarticulate – inevitably precede design action.

The word site is actually quite simple; in common parlance, it refers to the ground chosen for something and to the location of some set of activities or practices. Each specialized area of physical design – architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and urban planning – nevertheless construes the location of its activities and practices overtly and tacitly through its own normative approaches. For example, landscape architecture treats site explicitly as material terrain. Architecture’s traditional focus on buildings has led to a tacit focus on the lot as the ground for design intervention. Urban planning, given its concerns beyond the purely physical, tends to construe location more broadly, incorporating social, economic, and political concerns. Urban design, more recently established as a field, tends to borrow notions about site from the other areas of design, drawing upon the material specificity associated with landscape architecture and architecture, as well as the broader, less physical concerns of planning.

The multiplicity of comprehensions about the subject of site has rarely been made explicit. Within each of the design specialty areas can be found literature on specific locales and projects. However, even internally, none of the design areas has systematically treated “thinking about sites” in a disciplinary sense, and certainly not in reference to allied areas or to other disciplines, which also comprehend this fundamental topic in different ways. Too little has changed in the years since Amos Rapoport noted the absence of this subject in design theory: “I am not certain that any consistent theory of site as a form determinant has ever been proposed.”⁴ Without making claim for consistent theory, this anthology ushers the subject of site out of its theoretical and historiographical obscurity.

While consistent in its avoidance of site-related issues, in the 30 years that elapsed between Rapoport’s observation and the first edition of Site Matters, the direction of design theory discourse changed substantially. Architectural theory in particular, through the early aughts (2000s), became ever more disassociated from the consideration of physical conditions, veering toward a progressively abstract array of concerns. This shift – due in part to increased contact with other disciplines, including philosophy and literary theory – has both enriched and impoverished architectural thinking. In joining, and at times initiating, a shift from modernist to postmodernist thought, architectural discourse has become more rigorous, broad, and inclusive. But at the same time, the fundamental unity between theory and practice has been discounted.

Theory specialists have emerged seeking status as distinct from professional practitioners, and design discourse has suffered from contention born of hardening the line between theorizing and practicing.⁵ Stressing the fundamental integration of theory and practice, this volume engages in and promotes thinking through practices themselves. As editors, we conceive of theorizing in general as “both an abstraction from, and an enrichment of, concrete experience.”⁶ Methodologically, concrete theorizing recognizes theoretical activity as itself a practice and considers any reflective practice to be necessarily informed by theory. Though concrete theory might derive from (or criticize) canonical texts, it can also rise from questions posed by practical activity. Concrete theory can begin by elucidating design ideas and exploring their manifestations in practice, or it might begin in the articulation of that which practice has already appropriated in reality, or it can find its sources in abstraction in order to arrive at the “reproduction of the concrete by way of thought.”⁷ In this approach, design action and design philosophy take place in the same realm, one not dissociable from the realm of political thought and political action. We agree with Antonio Gramsci that the philosophy of each person “is contained in its entirety in [her] political action.”⁸

This book explores and critically discerns how sites are engaged by, and conceptualized through, design. As editors, our overall intention is twofold: to lay out what we think site means and to explore how these meanings inform thinking about specific sites as places for design action and activism. We tie thinking about site as a conceptual construct – site thinking – to the grounded site as a physical condition – thinking about a site.

What Is a Site?

In design discourse, a site too often is taken as a straightforward entity contained by boundaries that delimit it from the surroundings. This oversimplified understanding has arguable basis, as every work of physical design focuses on spatially finite places. The great majority of professional commissions begin not only with a client, but also with a predesignated lot owned or controlled by that client. In this sense, designers often receive a site as a delimited given entity. Design pedagogy traditionally has mirrored this aspect of practice. A majority of design studio courses, even those working with hypothetical problems, assign specific locations to students as fixed constraints so that the locale for academic projects also seems delimited and predetermined. Practice and pedagogy reinforce similar tacit understandings of site as a circumscribed physical area given a priori. Though generally accepted, perhaps for reasons of expediency, such an approach to the site in design misses much. It suggests that designers have no role to play in determining sites and, conversely, that the determination of a site does not bear on matters of design consideration. By implication, it minimizes the consequentiality of factors that inform site choice. By association, it similarly brackets out the set of design concerns conventionally and misleadingly referred to as predesign issues, including also program, financing, and other strategic factors that shape and structure a project. More profoundly still, it occludes the fact that a site is defined by those holding the power to do so. Indeed, all other discussions of site follow from that structural certainty.

Figure 1.1Enric Miralles/Carme Pinos, “Tiro con Arco Competition,” Archery Range, Barcelona. Plan and section of entry ramp and earth berming.

(Courtesy of Carme Pinos)

At the same time, existing physical conditions have an enormous influence on ensuing design proposals – both academic and professional – and the final form of built works. Landform and land itself can become the focus of design. Some projects – such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water or the Quinta da Conceiçao Swimming Pool by Alvaro Siza – gain renown for forceful, direct engagement with geological and hydrological conditions. Such features, along with orientation, topography, and drainage, connect to larger systems that operate in various ways at multiple scales: the solar system, geomorphology, and the water cycle. Any place registers tangible certain aspects of many larger, more spatially extensive patterns, orders, and systems. Design can modify site features in relation to larger patterns: vegetation can shade the sun, topographies might be altered, and watercourses might be channeled, buried, or unearthed. Cities – such as New Orleans, Prague, and Boston – reshape the edge between land and water. Channeled watercourses in the Florida Everglades create sinkholes. The Grands Projets in Paris, located to spur development, affect urban growth. Each built project creates new forces within its own area and also modifies and influences systems that both reach beyond the site and operate within it.

Conceived over time this way, the site has three distinct areas. The first, most obvious one is the area of control, easy to trace in the property lines designating legal metes and bounds. The second, encompassing forces that act upon a plot without being confined to it, can be called the area of influence. Third is the area of effect – the domains impacted following design action. These three territories overlap despite their different geographies and temporalities. The area of control – most commonly referred to in design discourse with the term site – describes the most limited field spatially and temporally. Forces within it predate design action. Lying outside direct design control, the areas of influence and effect situate design actions in relation to wider processes, including the often-unpredictable change propelled by design intervention. All three areas exist squarely within the domain of design concerns.

To be controlled or owned, the physical site needs delimitation; however, to be understood in design, it must be considered extensively in reference to its setting. No particular locale can be experienced in isolation. Embedded in comprehension of a contained parcel is contact with something tangibly much greater. The concept of site, then, simultaneously refers to seemingly opposite ideas: a physically specific place and a spatially and temporally expansive surround. Incorporating three distinct geographic areas, two divergent spatial ideas, and past, present, and future timeframes, sites are complex.

Language reflects this inherent complexity. A variety of closely associated terms address different aspects of physical location. Place, property, ground, setting, context, situation, landscape: the idea of site might embrace each of these. Though often used interchangeably, none of them are exactly equivalent.⁹ Neither mutually exclusive nor simply commensurate, each term invokes an identifiable region in the conceptual territory of site. With temporal, cultural, ideological, perceptual, scalar, and ontological dimensions, this territory is a culturally rich construct. Its abundant associative meanings – sponsored by many applications in design discourse, synonyms, and denotations – remain tightly interwoven. Site resonates on multiple registers, and its multivalence yields varied outcomes.

On a practical leve...