Quilian Riano interviews Chris Reed (Stoss Landscape Urbanism) for Places; the interview touches on a broad range of topics, including Stoss’s recent work, the importance of an expanded field for landscape architecture, and possibilities for inventing flexible alliances between design teams and collaborators in “related fields such as engineering, ecology, economics, etc.”:
“Within this expanded context, landscape architects are emerging as cultural leaders; in part this is because our field already deals with complexity at very large scales, with details at very small scales, and with time and change in both the short and long run. We also accept uncertainty as part of the life of a project — landscapes are beyond our full control. Cities and metropolitan regions — among the most complex of human inventions — require this mix of big, strategic thinking and tactical, on-the-ground agility. And they demand a comfort level in dealing with change, especially unanticipated change. Projects for large areas of existing cities — like the redevelopment of 300 acres of contaminated former portlands in Toronto, or of 5.5 miles of largely industrial riverfront in Minneapolis — will take decades to be realized, through a succession of economic highs and lows, political administrations, demographic shifts, environmental challenges (like major storms), and so on.
The strategies that landscape architects develop for such places should set out strong frameworks to initiate transformation, but also be able to absorb the kind of external changes I just described. So, rather than defining strict master plans for the Toronto and Minneapolis territories — master plans which try to limit change and prescribe physical or programmatic relationships — we chose to develop strong framework plans whose contents could shift or adjust to outside influences or even internal rules, but whose final results would only come through time. This is a very different way of thinking for designers and planners — but it is, in fact, the way landscapes and cities work anyway.”
Read the full interview at Places.
