A Sense of Crisis: Christophe Girot, Bas Princen

Lecture Christophe Girot | Landscape Topology

How does one enter a site, topically? Through a topological method that is specific to landscape architecture. With advanced capabilities of a point cloud models, topology can simulate more fully physical aspects of a site. Whether this method leads to a better design depends on the designer’s creative capacity to grasp a landscape's essence. As a method, then, topology is neither infallible nor does it guarantee better designs, but with a renewed effort to employ physical landscape models as departure point, it can cast an entirely different light on our approach to design. It is precisely this faculty – to navigate through a terrain precisely via a geographically informed, 3D digital space – that makes the difference in the approach of a design. Beyond the explicit, physical properties of a site, topology brings up the cultural limitations with which the designer is faced: language and concepts of nature that he or she may have to promote.

Through repeated testing, it is possible to see a project evolve virtually before its eventual realization. Looking at a landscape as a full, physical body provides an entirely different reading of reality than a conventional two-dimensional layered map, and, as a result, also promotes a different operating mode. Topological methods place the landscape designer at the heart of a virtual site that can help distinguish various elements of a place with a differentiated viewpoint. The virtual space of a point cloud model enables entirely new relationships and meanings to emerge between the very same landscape elements, namely because they now appear in a completely different order than in a 2D plan. In this way, the point cloud model introduces the notion of perceptual relativity in landscape design, which is quite different from conventional codes of planning and perspectival imaging.

Christophe Girot wurde 1957 in Paris geboren und ist Professor am Institut für Landschaftsarchitektur am Departement Architektur der ETH Zürich. Seine Lehr- und Forschungstätigkeit umfasst die Entwicklung neuer topologischer Methoden im Landschaftsentwurf, den Einsatz Neuer Medien in der Landschaftsanalyse- und Wahrnehmung, sowie die Erforschung der Geschichte und Theorie des Landschaftsentwurfs. Der Schwerpunkt seiner praktischen Tätigkeit liegt in der Auseinandersetzung mit der zeitgenössischen Landschaft.

Lecture Bas Princen

»I will focus on the aspect of 'a document (that describes a piece of the world), the construction of an image, the image in a space, and the image as an object and if it is then still a document that describes the world’ in short, the transformation of reality into an object.» Bas Princen

Bas Princen is an artist and photographer living & working in Rotterdam and recently in Zurich. He was educated as industrial designer at the Design Academy Eindhoven and later studied architecture at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam. Since then, through the use of photography, his work has focused on the urban landscape in transformation, researching the various forms, outcomes and imaginaries of changing urban space.
Recent exhibitions include: Breuer Revised at the Met in NY, 2017, Earth Pillar, solo Gallery, Paris, 2016, Constructing Worlds in the Barbican Art Gallery, London 2014; Room of Peace in the Arsenale exhibition Monditalia, at the 14th Venice Biennale; Reservoir, deSingel Antwerp 2011; Five Cities, Depo, Istanbul 2010; Refuge, Storefront for art and architecture NY 2010; Invisible frontier, AUT, Innsbruck 2008; Nature as Artifice, Kroller Muller Museum, Otterloo and Aperture Foundation, New York 2009; Spectacular City, Nai, Rotterdam, 2006; The Venice Biennale of Architecture 2004, 2006, 2010 and 2012