OASE #80 The Architecture of the Territory
In his seminal publication Il territorio dell’architettura (The Territory of Architecture, 1966) the Italian architect Gregotti widened the perspective of architects and urban designers towards the expanded reality of the urban territory: an urban reality that was in his view the sum of well-defined historical city cores, unitary city extensions, distinct modern city projects and urban dispersal. For Gregotti, thinking territorially implied imagining projects that reach beyond the limits of the building and the traditional city and play a role on a regional scale level. Instead of leaving the design of this territory exclusively to specialists from other disciplinary fields, Gregotti encouraged architects and urban designers to actively engage in it.
In recent years, new questions concerning the urban territory have come to the fore, such as the re-use of landscapes of industrial production, the phenomenon of shrinking cities, and the urgent demand for sustainable development on the scale of the territory. Contemporary theoretical investigations, like the recent discourse on landscape urbanism, aim at developing a new paradigm for dealing with the design of territories and urban landscapes. This issue of OASE addresses design on this scale, and investigates the ‘architecture of the territory’. It attempts to discuss the mutual relation between design and the urban and rural landscape. By these means, OASE hopes to critically reflect on the current discourse on landscapes and territories, and offer valuable insights and approaches for design.
OASE invites as well for historical and theoretical reflections on the architecture of the territory, as for case-studies that illustrate the multivarious approaches that architects and urban designers have developed for the architecture of the territory. The role of design will be foregrounded in both case-studies and theoretical contributions. Questions that can be addressed are: How to understand the character of an architecture of the territory? What strategic role can a design project play in the (re)development of larger regions? Which instruments and approaches are nessesary to realize a sustainable architecture of the territory? How can an architectural project play a role within the complex reality of the territory?
Abstracts of max. 400 words can be send to k.m.havik@tudelft.nl before January 4th, 2009
Editors of this issue: Tom Avermaete, Klaske Havik, Hans Teerds, Nancy Meijsmans
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