Abstract
This chapter identifies ten behaviors, or operative methods, adopted by contemporary designers confronted with problems of spatial reform in regions of the contemporary continuum. The analysis proceeds through the compared anatomy of a set of case studies, tackling spatial problems in a diversity of scales and contexts. The cases include a majority of implemented projects, but also speculative visions, figurative compositions, and performances to explore the tangible and intangible layers of the contemporary continuum. By arraying operative approaches spanning from metabolist to geophilosophical, the ten behaviors conjure up a ‘symbiotic field’ layering the ecological, societal, psychic, aesthetic, cultural, semiotic, geographic, and mythological: built macro-ecologies of geographic scale; artificial micro-ecologies implanted into the metropolitan platform; ecological installations raising awareness through aesthetic performances; cybernetic scenarios preconizing the control of natural/anthropic metabolism; atmospheric assemblages dealing with the cultural and the transient; experiments of psychic and sensorial manipulation of the landscape; explorations of the transculturation process in a utilitarian modernity versus symbiotic culture dialectic; formation of alternative spaces in the folds of the language; geopolitical plans representing the geography of power; geophilosophical excavations aiming at reimplanting a mythology into the landscape. Furthermore, the chapter analyzes the radical utopias that constitute the recurrent reference for many of today’s visions of the contemporary continuum. The text also argues on how the utopian visions of the 60s and 70s have unawares become today’s quotidian living contexts.
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Notes
- 1.
Several authors of the designs analyzed further on, participated in the TeleTalks conference series curated at the University of Monterrey in the period 2014–16, some events in collaboration with Laura Cipriani of IUAV. Extensive documentation of the conferences is collected in a separate publication.
- 2.
“Geography […] is a descriptive science; it tells what is. Geotechnics is applied science; it shows what ought to be” (MacKaye 1950–1, p. 439). In the same text, Benton MacKaye also accounts of how he had retrieved in a Webster’s International Dictionary of the ‘40s the famous definition often erroneously attributed to him: “Geotechnics—the applied science of making earth more habitable”. That definition reportedly orchestrates in the most effective form a series of three terms that had been agitating in his mind for about 40 years: ‘geotechnics’, ‘habitable globe’, ‘greater habitability’.
- 3.
Marot is quoting John Dixon Hunt.
- 4.
- 5.
About the ‘time of the meteors’, positioned by Michel Tournier between the extreme ‘speed of the asters’ and the extreme ‘slowness of geology’, see Chap. 6 in this book.
- 6.
Generally referring to radical architecture, or neo-avant-garde, or counter design, or anti-utopias, Tafuri chiefly addresses his repeated invective against Achizoom’s No-Stop City and secondarily Superstudio’s Continuous Monument.
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Pasini, R. (2019). The Symbiotic Field in Ten Behaviors. In: Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_4
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