[The Heavy Hitters].

Written by Rachel Scudder | LSA 220 | Final Essay Due: November 12, 2013

An exploration of landscape as theory: Edmund Bacon, Carl Steinitz and Charles Waldheim epitomize the theories of urbanism and allocation of space within a city. All three men explored change in cites, and the methods by which to approach redesigning them. Edmund Bacon Edmund Bacon, born in West Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1910 was a man before his time, a man so far ahead of his time, as to which some of his theories were unrecognized until late in his life, or after his life ended. Bacon emphasized, Form should derive from not dictate, the design structure, a theory almost unheard of before this time. He was one of the first people to organize a global conference on the post-petroleum future. His prospects were compared to those of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs city planners, he did not always see eye to eye on with. He also opposed to suburban sprawl, contradictory to most people at the time. Educated at Cornell, Bacon graduated with a degree in Architecture. In his final year at Cornell Bacon first proposed a civic center and an urban park. After graduation, Bacon hopped around the world for a bit, working in China, a place where he started prospecting for the future of Philadelphia.

Bacon then worked for a variety of different firms in the United States, delving deeper into civic planning. Eventually Bacon returned to Philadelphia as the Managing Director of the Philadelphia Housing Association. Bacon then supported highways and super block high rises of I.M. Pei. One of his most significant contributions to his legacy started in 1947 when he joined the staff of the Philadelphia City Planning where he served as co-designer until 1947. Bacon wanted rows of houses with garages in the alleys in the back, but the community demanded, and got, garages in front. Bacon wanted transit-oriented development, before the term even existed. He also co-designed the Better Philadelphia Exhibition, an exhibition, playing out the prospects of the future development of Philadelphia. It was the exhibition that earned Bacon most of his fame and recognition. Bacon was a part of Penn Center, Society Hill, Penn's Landing, The Far Northeast and the Independence Mall. In his book, Design of Cities, Bacon a planned a city based off the architecture around it. There is a major emphasis on movement and repose, a place where the emphasis was on pedestrians and not on the automobile . He viewed the city as a work of art and as a whole, complete organism. Bacon emphasized movement through the space, and the value of space as it references Excerpts from Design of Cities

pedestrians. As a whole, Ed was a unique and powerful figure, had he lived in another day in age, perhaps in some type of Utopian state, he would have had more success with his theories. All that he accomplished physically, was nothing compared to the expression of his ideas, all transcribed in his Skateboarding at the age of 92, in protest to new the whole area new houses are inserted into the old fabric lot as gaps restrictions occur, thus giving an organic revitalization which strengthens rather than destroys a book. Enhance the structure already there instead of tearing down community institutions and psychological and human association Carl Steinitz Carl Steinitz (1938- ), currently a professor at Harvard changed the way people approach the landscape. He is an emphasizer of geodesign, and has made major process in the exploration of such a focus for his work for the last 30 years. What is geodesign, one may ask? Its a set of techniques and skills for forecasting built and natural environments in a cohesive process, including: project concept, analysis, specification, participation and collaboration by interested parties, design creation, simulation, and evaluation. Some of the awards he has been granted are the outstanding educators award in Landscape Architecture (1984), the distinguished practitioner award for international association for landscape and ecology (1996) and honorary professorship by Beijing Forestry University (1987) amongst others. He specializes in emphasizing landscape change, methods of landscape design, methods of landscape analysis and examination visual quality and landscape. Steinitz did less designing, and more studying on description, process of how the landscape works,

evaluation of if it works well, a proposed change, the impact of this change and a Geodesign decision or conclusion on whether or not it should be changed. Framework One of the projects Steinitz worked on was in Arizona amongst several other people. This work translated into a book, Alternative Futures for Changing Landscapes: The Upper San Pedro River Basin in Arizona and Sonora. In the design he offered specific was to approach designing the city, a cycle of thought and forethought. The cycle has an overall basis of three main components: describing the scope of the project, defining the method by which to approach the scope of the project and method by which to implement said method. Encompassed in describing the scope is representation, process, evaluation, change and decision. In Defining a method, there is decision, impact, change, evaluation, and representation. Finally in the third component, the implementation method, there is representation, process, change impact and decision. A colleague of Steinitz, Charles Waldheim, studies a different, yet similar side of Landscape Architecture at Harvard. Waldheim has received his masters degree in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. The current chair of landscape architecture at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard and former dean at the University of Toronto, Waldheim teaches contemporary urbanism, and has an area of focus on the cities of Detroit and Chicago. He was the 2006 recipient of the Rome Prize amongst other awards. He stresses city and Charles Waldheim

environmental literacy. His study of landscape urbanism stresses itself as, a maturing body of practice thats available to put into use. And as an allowance, Ecological urbanism is a logical extension of landscape urbanism. The Landscape Urbanism Reader a book written by Charles Waldheim describes landscape as Urbanism. Unlike Bacon (the architect) Waldheim proposes that instead of using architecture to define a city, one should use the landscape itself and its natural pre-existing qualities as a model for urbanism. Such a change in theory can be attested to an increase in environmental awareness, and the role of a landscape architecture has been taken into more serious consideration in the planning of cities. Waldheim critiques architecture and urban designs inability to unify a city with its elements alone, and claims that such approaches to urban design, is inflexible with a rapidly transforming condition of contemporary urban culture. He proposes instead to decreases the context of the individual building, but puts into context of a large scale infrastructural landscape. And, as opposed to implementing nature into the landscape (i.e.: Olmsteads central Park) as an afterthought, he suggests that we use nature as the, ordering mechanism of the urban field itself. Overall Waldheim has to say a great deal about landscape urbanism and how it, describes a disciplinary realignment currently underway in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism. For many, across a range of disciplines, landscape has become both the lens through which the contemporary city is represented and the medium through which it is constructed. Specifically, Waldheim wrote and analysis of the Lafayette Park in Detroit, that was later published and entitles, Hilberseimer/Mies Van Der Rohe Lafayette Park

Detroit He explored the details of the landscape, its urban order and the structural change happening on the site itself. It was on emphasis on a superblock (a great commercial or residential block striped to through traffic, crossed by pedestrian walks which is often spotted with grassed malls). The project stressed a decentralized state of urbanism by which it decreased density, added extensive landscaping and public parks, made it easier for automobile access and a safe place for children to play. Waldheim expressed that the parks goals were to decrease perceived density of the site by carefully massing the largest number of inhabitants in the thin slats up out of the way of access to the ground plane. Waldheim argues that cities built on the concept of landscape urbanism are better equipped to handle economic hard times, and

An Example of Landscape Urbanism

accommodate themselves with the shrinkage and growth.

1. Edmund N Bacon, Design of Cities (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 319.

Bacon, Edmund. Design of Cities. New York: Penguin Books, 1976.

2. Charles Waldheim, Hilberseimer/Mies Van Der Rohe: Lafayette Park Detroit (New York: Prestel Publishing, 2004), 19.

Waldheim, Charles. Hilberseimer/ Mies Van Der Rohe: Lafayette Park Detroit. New York: Prestel Publishing, 2004.

3. Carl Steinitz and Peter Roger, a System Analysis Model of Urbanization and Change: An Experiment in Interdisciplinary Education (London: The MIT Press, 1970), 10

Steinitz, Carl and Peter Roger. A System Analysis Model of Urbanization and Change: An Experiment in Interdisciplinary Education. London: The MIT Press, 1970.

4. Carl Steinitz, Hector Arias, Scott Bassett, Michael Flaxman, Tomas Goode, Thomas Maddock III, David Mousat, Richard Peiser and Allan Shearer. Alternative Future for Changing Landscapes: The Upper San Pedro River Basin In Arizona and Sonora (Washington: Island Press, 2003), 13-22.

Steinitz, Carl, Hector Arias, Scott Bassett, Michael Flaxman, Tomas Goode, Thomas Maddock III,David Mousat, Rochard Peiser and Allan Shearer. Alternative Future for Changing Landscapes: The Upper San Pedro River Basin In Arizona and Sonora. Washington: Island Press, 2003. 5. Ben Adler, The Philidelphia Story, Architect: The Magazine of the American Institute of Architecture, May 14, 2013, http://www.architectmagazine.com/books/edmundbacon-biography-by-gregory-heller.aspx. 6. Meg Studer, An Interview with Charles Weidham: Landscape Urbanism Now, Landscape Urbanism, Fall 2012, http://landscapeurbanism.com/article/megstuder-interviewwaldheim/. 7. William R. Miller, Introducing Geodesign, the Concept, ESRI, 2012, http://www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/introducing-geodesign.pdf