Framing

Abstract

In the 80’s and 90’s, architects grew interested in experimenting with change over time, flexibility, indeterminacy, multiple layers and programs – what Manuel Gausa defined as an emerging open logic in architecture. At the same time, landscape and ecology were seen by many as the most appropriate medium to operate in the context of complex urban infrastructure and fringe areas. Currently, the threat posed by climate change and the increasing investment from cities on creating and repurposing open spaces and infrastructure, is feeding a renovated interest in landscape design. However, it is also leading to an increasing objectification of landscape. This paper will look at five recent projects of landscape architecture to reflect on the value and limits of 'open-ness' in urban design. In the almost one-thousand-page volume published following his doctoral thesis, architect and theorist Manuel Gausa highlights how, during the second half of the 20 th Century, a change of 'logic' happened in science and society, one that would radically mutate architecture three decades later. Open: espacio, tiempo e información (Gausa, 2010) is a theory, a manual, and a dictionary aiming to articulate the impact that scientific discoveries (from fractals to system and chaos theories), philosophical thought (especially by Foucault and Deleuze), and technology (digital computing, mobility and communication systems) had on the practice of architecture. In the same way in which Picasso, Henry Ford, and Albert Einstein in early 20 th Century influenced what would become, 30 years later, modern architecture; Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, Edward Lorenz, Benoît Mandelbrot, Gilles Deleuze, the Internet, and the first flight to the Moon, in the 60’s, have influenced the work of architects at the end of the century (Gausa, 2010). The work of architects and writers such as Rem Koolhaas