Hybrid Morphologies - Infrastructure, Architecture, Landscape

This reading began with the idea of creating a new urbanism not based on order and similarity, but rather uncertainty and new potential territories. It will no longer be about trying to impossible limits, but more with defining boundaries and discovering unnameable hybrids. We should try to manipulate the infrastructure for endless diversification. Robert Smithson said the environment consists of unrelated fragments of places that will change landscapes and a new terrain with emerge. and example was Freeways, power lines, family houses are considered a landscape as one system. He believes the new societies created now are reliant on both natural and synthetic processes.

They describe:

Site: - "Material reality of a pile-existing situation."

Non Site: - "Abstract representation of reinterpretation of the site in the form of a text or a sculpture."To alter a site, non site strategies are applied.

Scape: - "A reading of the urban territory as landscape" Basically an endless city of continuous flowed form.

The Generic City: - Has three elements which are roads buildings nature and relate to each other through unpredictable ways. When these elements are together its wrong they should be treated as one not separate entities. This creates a constant uniformity. This unifying idea leads to an urban hierarchical organization.

Scaft: - "meaning to give form or to shape" We should try to create urban places with an unknown finished result that is adaptable to varying circumstances

Urbanity: "Expression of a mental landscape mirroring society changes both as material and cultural levels."

The article described how urban space is created, less by predetermined forms, but by the interactive forces. Favouring the dynamic, fluid condition of urban landscape. There is a relationship between infrastructure, architecture, landscape and through mutations and transformations they are explored. An example was Zaha Hadid considers her architecture a form of landscape extension. By blurring the boundaries it goes against traditional architectural objects as a finite entity. Her mountain building is the example of interconnected infrastructure and landscape. Rem Koolhass thinks a city is "A field determined by accumulations, connections, densities, transformations and fluctuations. This is when infrastructure, architecture and landscape form together as a spatial field. A wasted city can be reclaimed through the introduction of interconnection. In a new city there should be no figure-ground distinctions. This is a morphing of traditional city planning. Formal and spatial forms and objects will emerge continually and will allow a new interpretation of cities to grow. This is because the formal is undetermined. A new hierarchy can be established if we connect the three categories of a city: infrastructure, architecture, landscape.