3 Videos

1 - Maarten van Acker: Re-tracing the Ringscape - Infrastructure as a Mode of Urban Design (2009)  via Vimeo

2 - Stan Allen: Pavilions and Fields: Beyond Landscape Urbanism (2009)

3 - Marcel Smets + Kelly Shannon: The Landscape of Contemporary Infrastructure (2010) - 

Click on: Video

The design of infrastructure is a formative element of the contemporary landscape. It inevitably produces a physical presence that affects its environs and constitutes a layer of a new totality. Infrastructure is not just an isolated entity for organizing transport or generating motion. It acts as the cornerstone for generating an inclusive new environment.

In this lecture, Marcel Smets will analyze the basic attitudes that dominate the design of transport infrastructure in the world today. He characterizes five basic approaches:
- Hiding
- Camouflage
- Assimilation
- Detachment
- Fusion

Each of these design approaches will be clearly identified and amply illustrated by archetypical examples of different programmatic nature (roads, bridges, parking, rail, and airport infrastructures). Indirectly, the lecture pleads for a more integrated design effort that addresses a new public space typology. Such conception of infrastructure as an inclusive landscape design is presented as a major requirement for enhancing the quality of today's built environment.