area 105 – artificial landscape

The term landscape, freed from the limitations connected with the common concept that it is strictly associated with nature, is in any case still a matter of homogeneous surroundings: the…

The adjective “artificial” is normally used to indicate something negative. Its semantic area is vast and complex, with countless meanings that may however be retraced to the fundamental sense of…

There are places which are part of our everyday life, which dominate it in the forms and manners required by our society. There are places for consumption, transit, amusement which…

“Island City” is a large, roughly 400 ha artificial island on the eastern side of Hakata Bay. The client, Fukuoka City, planned to create a new nature on this stark…

The Meydan retail development performs not just a as a efficient retail complex but as a true urban centre in one of the fastest growing areas of Istanbul. Located in…

The project comes out of the creation of a new topography that indexes and qualifies this zone of expansion in Torre Pacheco, on a plot of public equipments; a urban,…

More than an isolated school, the aim is to develop an urban project that encourages new sectorial centralities with the equipments that are already being used by the school such as…

In 2001 the city of Roosendaal (a provincial town in the southwest of the Netherlands) decided to ban cars from the New Market in the centre of town by building…

Heatherwick Studio was commissioned to design a café building to replace a seafront kiosk in Littlehampton, a traditional seaside town on England‘s south coast. Exposed to weather and vandalism, the narrow site…

This is not (only) a bridge. The bridge is architecture over the water, a room of the city floating over the river, full of activity, instead of a mere jump…

Located in east-central Denver, City Park is the largest and most notable park in Denver. This historic 1.3 kmq park has large open grass fields with Ferril Lake in its…

‘Palace of May’ comes into being a symbolic sculpture of ‘Hi Seoul Festival 2009’ in the heart of Seoul, Seoul Plaza. This year the theme of the festival is sustainable…

This project is situated in the framework of the “Las Teresitas” beach redevelopment in Santa Cruz Tenerife. Following a competition won by Dominique Perrault in 2000, the redevelopment of Teresitas…

How do you create urbanity on the edges of Kiev’s twilight zone of Stalinist suburbanism? Our proposal favors high density vs. low density, variation over repetition and asymmetry before symmetry. It…

How do you create a hotel and apartment house in the mountains that offers the same standards of accessibility, circulation and logistics as a modern hotel? The starting point of the project…

Marco Casamonti: In this issue of area, dedicated to artificial landscapes, we are trying to tackle the theme of simulation in architecture in its various facets, including that of kitsch,…

Self Portrait with World Center Trade Center, 1979 Photography by Tseng Kwong Chi, © 1979  by Muna Tseng Dance Projects, Inc., New York NY. Courtesy Galleria Carla Sozzani  An unexpected…

Las Vegas is in the Mojave desert. It was part of Mexico until 1855; the Hispanic name means “the lawns” because there were springs in the area that allowed a…