Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape

Rating:
Summary: Smoke and Mirrors
Review: Don't waste your money on this book- states the obvious in
an over-inflated language that serves to make the authors appear deeper than they really are. If they actually took the time to look around at the world and stop looking at design magazines they would realize that this topic is a more complex one globally rooted in the vernacular of farms, military architecture and the way people have lived and worked. Again shows the insecurity of landscape architects who feel they have to fabricate theory (and demonstrate their ignorance of the subject) in order to be taken seriously rather than address the realities of their own field.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book, long overdue
Review: I recently purchased this book in preparation for my thesis. Finally, a collaboration between an Architect and a Landscape Architect has advanced the architectural relationship of Inside vs. outside for the first time in decades. This subject has been long overlooked, and dubbed only pertinent for "Green" architects, yet I, like the authors believe that these are pertinent investigations for any design that is sited in the outdoor environment. Technology has progressed to the point that Architecture no longer needs to dominate the outdoors,.. it no longer needs to be the "machine in the garden", as the book puts it. Architecture can mean more to its environment, and vice/versa. This book is well thought out, well written, and the highlighted projects are exteremely well selected. I only hope that in another 20 years there might be a new volume of this book, filled with new, and even better examples of the "operations" that this book employs.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book, long overdue
Review: I recently purchased this book in preparation for my thesis. Finally, a collaboration between an Architect and a Landscape Architect has advanced the architectural relationship of Inside vs. outside for the first time in decades. This subject has been long overlooked, and dubbed only pertinent for "Green" architects, yet I, like the authors believe that these are pertinent investigations for any design that is sited in the outdoor environment. Technology has progressed to the point that Architecture no longer needs to dominate the outdoors,.. it no longer needs to be the "machine in the garden", as the book puts it. Architecture can mean more to its environment, and vice/versa. This book is well thought out, well written, and the highlighted projects are exteremely well selected. I only hope that in another 20 years there might be a new volume of this book, filled with new, and even better examples of the "operations" that this book employs.

Rating:
Summary: Architecture's Clay Feet
Review: Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape (Gloucester, MA: Rockport Publishers, 1999), by Linda Pollak and Anita Berrizbeitia, explores the dance between the environment and buildings in a series of strategic critical operations and is both an analytical and discursive tour of significant modernist and post-modernist projects ranging from Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum (1966-1972) to Villa Dall'Ava (1984-1991) by Rem Koolhaas. The former is discussed under the rubric "Threshold", the latter "Reciprocity". The remaining conceptual operations include "Materiality", "Insertion", and "Infrastructure". These terminologies unveil the manifold stratagems utilized in bringing architecture down to earth.

In the case of Dan Graham's Two-Way Mirror Cylinder (1991), high atop Manhattan's Dia Center in Chelsea, this involves bringing architecture to the light and to the sky. In the clamor for height in Manhattan, architecture that embraces nature must struggle all the more to find purchase, that archimedian point of exacting leverage (and revenge). Graham's reflective glass pavilion is a lyrical-polemical exercise staged outside the white box of the contemporary art gallery, on the roof with views of the Hudson River, and engages in a clever doublespeak regarding its surroundings. The cylinder is half mocking the water tower nearby and the mirrored glass is certainly an outgrowth of Graham's ascerbic critique of the modernist skyscraper and its pretension to omniscience.

Pollak and Berrizbeitia's discursus embarks into the nebulous region of the antitheses that have driven architecture mad for the last several generations: the object-subject dialectic of modernist space and the obsfucation of context perpetrated by dogmatists such as Philip Johnson, during his reign at MoMA with Alfred Barr. These latter two protagonists perpetrated a hoax on the public by denaturing the denatured modernist forms - a doubled denaturing - that excised the contingent and immanent factors of modernist architecture in favor of the universal and abstract. Pollak and Berrizbeitia's book seeks to restore this suppressed entelechy. The quest for the Absolute was (and remains) a provisional program to pull human artifice towards the stars while gesturing at the earth with secret hand signals of a cursory sort (Johnson's garden at MoMA or the ubiquitous, appalling inhumane plaza beneath the signature office tower). Johnson famously excised the landscape aspects of Mies van der Rohe's buildings - villas included - as a means of exacting even more profound anomie in his personal campaign to inflict architectural pain. Architecture has been exorcising this demon - this repression - for decades. It is only now that we are finding in Mies an aesthetic benevolence prefigured in his attempts to unveil the tectonic of modern, industrial-strength architectural form in association with landscape [...]

From "Architecture's Clay Feet" (2001)

Rating:
Summary: Within Site
Review: Inside-Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape by landscape architect Anita Berrizbeitia and architect Linda Pollak is a convincing exhortation to view the built world with new eyes. The authors argue that the visual, experiential and cultural impoverishment of much of our environment stems from the incapacity of designers of all types to connect their work to the world beyond the immediate sites they occupy. Central to this argument is the idea that, for the most part, we do not understand or experience the world as a series of discrete spaces but as a continuing series of overlapping perceptions. The problem, the authors say, is that most designers don't think or work as if this is the case. Instead, landscape and architectural designers (as well as other professionals) work within overly defined categories that prevent the lessons and methods of one practice from benefiting the other. Worse, this professional blinkering also prevents different designers from creating interconnections among their projects. Too often, designs for parks, roads, bridges and, of course, buildings, seem to fulfill their appointed tasks as if operating in a vacuum.

To initiate a way of thinking beyond the confines of just-architecture or just-landscape, Berrizbeitia and Pollak set up a framework of five "operations" or themes which describe different types of relationships between landscape and architecture. These operations (which are also chapters) - "reciprocity," "materiality," "threshold," "insertion" and "infrastructure" - are explored through 24 built projects in Europe and the US. For each project, the authors examine how the elements of the design are made to interact, overlap and affect each other in unprecedented ways. Their discussions reveal how each project's unique interpretation of siting, structure, open space or even drainage, among other things, offers multiple ways to enrich and re-connect our understanding and experience of architecture and landscape.

For instance, under "threshold," the authors describe Alvaro Siza's enigmatic Municipal Ocean Swimming Pool in Portugal (1961-66) as "between land and sea, constructed and natural, road and beach." Through a variety of stairs, terraces, interconnecting walls and roofs, Siza enriches the act of swimming by subtly incorporating into the design the rocky outcroppings of the sloping site, the nearby ocean and even the layout of the adjacent town. For "infrastructure," the authors show how a major traffic interchange in Barcelona (Placa de les Glories Catalanes, 1992) was transformed by Andreu Arriola from an over-scaled, single purpose no-man's land into a graceful civic space that integrates the moving car, parking and a public park. The authors open up new ways to appreciate some well-known projects by architects like Frank Gehry, Louis Kahn and Carlo Scarpa, and also present projects by a new generation of designers such as Rem Koolhaas, Enric Miralles and Carmen Pinos, Martha Schwartz, and Andre Chemetoff.

The book is profusely illustrated with many detailed and original views of the selected projects as well as plans and sections. The introductory texts and captions are smart and informative. Part theoretical disquisition, part how-to manual, the book convincingly shows that shapers of the built environment need to reach beyond the borders of their formal training, their professional biases and even the land-use regulations in which they practice, to shape a world where architecture and landscape interact in pleasurable and thought-provoking ways. This book should be very useful to those interested in architecture, landscape, urban design, environmental design, urban planning and community and public open space issues.-Ø


Rating:
Summary: Within Site
Review: Inside-Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape by landscape architect Anita Berrizbeitia and architect Linda Pollak is a convincing exhortation to view the built world with new eyes. The authors argue that the visual, experiential and cultural impoverishment of much of our environment stems from the incapacity of designers of all types to connect their work to the world beyond the immediate sites they occupy. Central to this argument is the idea that, for the most part, we do not understand or experience the world as a series of discrete spaces but as a continuing series of overlapping perceptions. The problem, the authors say, is that most designers don't think or work as if this is the case. Instead, landscape and architectural designers (as well as other professionals) work within overly defined categories that prevent the lessons and methods of one practice from benefiting the other. Worse, this professional blinkering also prevents different designers from creating interconnections among their projects. Too often, designs for parks, roads, bridges and, of course, buildings, seem to fulfill their appointed tasks as if operating in a vacuum.

To initiate a way of thinking beyond the confines of just-architecture or just-landscape, Berrizbeitia and Pollak set up a framework of five "operations" or themes which describe different types of relationships between landscape and architecture. These operations (which are also chapters) - "reciprocity," "materiality," "threshold," "insertion" and "infrastructure" - are explored through 24 built projects in Europe and the US. For each project, the authors examine how the elements of the design are made to interact, overlap and affect each other in unprecedented ways. Their discussions reveal how each project's unique interpretation of siting, structure, open space or even drainage, among other things, offers multiple ways to enrich and re-connect our understanding and experience of architecture and landscape.

For instance, under "threshold," the authors describe Alvaro Siza's enigmatic Municipal Ocean Swimming Pool in Portugal (1961-66) as "between land and sea, constructed and natural, road and beach." Through a variety of stairs, terraces, interconnecting walls and roofs, Siza enriches the act of swimming by subtly incorporating into the design the rocky outcroppings of the sloping site, the nearby ocean and even the layout of the adjacent town. For "infrastructure," the authors show how a major traffic interchange in Barcelona (Placa de les Glories Catalanes, 1992) was transformed by Andreu Arriola from an over-scaled, single purpose no-man's land into a graceful civic space that integrates the moving car, parking and a public park. The authors open up new ways to appreciate some well-known projects by architects like Frank Gehry, Louis Kahn and Carlo Scarpa, and also present projects by a new generation of designers such as Rem Koolhaas, Enric Miralles and Carmen Pinos, Martha Schwartz, and Andre Chemetoff.

The book is profusely illustrated with many detailed and original views of the selected projects as well as plans and sections. The introductory texts and captions are smart and informative. Part theoretical disquisition, part how-to manual, the book convincingly shows that shapers of the built environment need to reach beyond the borders of their formal training, their professional biases and even the land-use regulations in which they practice, to shape a world where architecture and landscape interact in pleasurable and thought-provoking ways. This book should be very useful to those interested in architecture, landscape, urban design, environmental design, urban planning and community and public open space issues.-Ø


Rating:
Summary: when architecture and landscape is one...
Review: what is interesting in this book, is that it's difficult to know if it is a book of architecture or a book more specialize in landscape,I would like to say even that the book speak about project which show a communion between landscape and architecture, we can't see where architecture finish and where landcape begin, everything is mixed for the best. the diversity of style in these projects and the fact that they are made by very famous (from Scarpa to Miralles)and also less know architect or landscape architect, make this book very diverse and interesting. The quality of the pictures is very good and drawings help just enough for the understanding of the project

Rating:
Summary: Commercial, Modern
Review: While I'll not dispute the other reviewers comments, it is worth mentioning that a) most of the structures profiled are commercial buildings and b) virtually everything is very modern architecture.

What my wife and I hoped to see was something more in tune with the residential, traditional homes most people live in.

One need only think of courtyards in southwestern architecture, decks and outdoor living areas, living rooms with French doors and transom windows overlooking a woodsy area, and the verandas on southern homes to picture what we were looking for.

If this is what *you* are looking for, this isn't the book for you.