The reclaiming of sites

The key priciple of this process involves careful survely, identification, criticism, and inventive analysis. The close coordination and complex representation of site and planning is worth emphasizing. It harks back to the origin and tradition of a discipline that has always been intimately linked to developments in surveying, painting, theater, and scenography. Just as the layout of the large classical gardens can be related to the progress and ambitions of cartography, so the contemporary landscape architect becomes a special type of project manager, an exegete (or narrator) of the landscape.

More precisely, there are four steps in the study and projection of site-based landscapes: anamnesis, or recollection of previous history; preparation for the staging of the new conditions; three-dimensional sequencing; and relational structuring.

1.Anamnesis: Upon the tracks overlaid by the march of time, site interpretation detects potencialities to be nurtured and passed on. The reading is thus that of an inheritance and the eventual project a bequest.

2.Preparation: A Landscape is fully bound into the effects of nature and time: the cycle of seasons and the passage of time; procecesses of hydrology, weathering, and succession; and the alternation of day and night, sun and moon. Thus, in reading the site as a living and dynamic organism, the landscape architect is able to revitalize and incorporate once abandoned sites into present and larger fields of effect.

3.Three-dimensional sequencing: The study of gardens has led to a qualitative preception of the layers comprised by public space... This is a rich and complex vision, at once aesthetic and ecological, and it involves a project (even if minimally) with all the layers that compose the landscape: earthwork, topography, soil, drainage, utilities, planting, furnishing, and so on.

4.Relational structuring: This principle refers to the special attention that must be given to boundaries, adjacent areas, surrondings, and backgrounds.

To encourage people to view public spaces as landscape means getting them to reconsider their own habits and functions and, ultimately, to overcome the divisive thinking on which those functions are based. It means persuading clients to allow other aims to have weight, aims that can be shared among many people on the basis of reworking the way in which territory is directed and managed. This strategic and synthetic approach is what enables contemporary landscape architects to assume leadresgip roles in the design and coordination of large-scale projects.