Landscapes
Sébastien Marot
Exile on Main Street : A relative manifesto of sub-urbanism
Lecture of November the 19th 2008
In 1978, while Colin Rowe and Oswald Mathias Ungers were showing Collage City and "Berlin: The City as a Green Archipelago" respectively, Rem Koolhaas published Delirious New York, a Retrospective Manifesto for Manhattan, both a theoretical and poetic masterwork, is considered the manifesto on sub-urbanism: the site is the matrix in which the programme is to be deciphered. Coincidentally, these three urban manifestos, each celebrated by a unique city (Rome, Berlin and New York), all found their origins in Ithaca, NY, home to Cornell University where their authors rubbed shoulders between 1972-1973 and bore their respective approaches. Another coincidence is that this small border town located at the mouth of a lake, creating almost an antithesis to the peninsula of Manhattan, was founded by the same person who created the New York Grid, the geographer Simeon DeWitt. Our aim is to inverse the demonstration of Delirious New York and to produce a manifesto on sub-urbanism: the programme is the matrix by which the site is to be deciphered. We want to analyse these coincidences and examine the laudatio urbis of this mega landscape where the poetic adventures of Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta-Clark and Vladimir Nabakov all took place. Ultimately, as Fitccarraldo says in the eponymous film by Werner Herzog: "I am planing something geographical."Sebastien Marot, philosopher training, assistant professor at the architecture school in Marne-la-Vallee and guest professor at the Institute of Landscape Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich.
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Production
Pavillon de l'Arsenal
Landscapes
The concept of landscape, often used today in the context of urban design, encompasses new issues involved in the creation of cities: scales, borders and environment.
Paris, the surrounding region as well as many other cities are currently examining public space, the integration of works of art, the reintegration of existing architecture both in the heart of cities and at the borders
Taking this development into account, the Pavillon de l'Arsenal has decided to invite landscape architects, architects, urban designers and engineers to host the new series of conferences. They will elaborate on their approaches by presenting their works and thus contributing to a much needed discussion on the possible future of Paris' cityscape.
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