“Cities are not static Objects but active arenas marked by continuous energy flow and transformation of which landscape and building and other hard parts are not permanent structure but transitional manifestations. Like a biological organism the urbanized landscape is an open system”
This quote is taken from Alan Berger’s Drosscape essay and it evokes a relevant yet broad question. Can our urban environments be considered organicist? Originally I thought that New York City with its very regimented grid could be considered organicist because it seems like a collection of building types or cells with different forms that become a unified whole. Our current urban cities have extensive and clear systems with noticeable profiles and act like an animals feeding off each other consuming and producing. The streets, sewers, and electrical systems unify these massive monsters of life. But as soon as you zoom in scale does the City still act like an organism? Looking at one building it’s hard to think of it as a living thing. In an Essay titled ”How to Design with the Animal” Edward M. Dodington continues this discussion stating that we should view our cities as landscapes rather than living beings. We must see our built environment not as a Terra Firma but as a moving shifting landscape; as James Corner puts it, a “Terra Fluxus” a ground constantly in movement, and change. Urbanity as the way I see it is a collection of animals not a single beast that has been created and inhabited by sentient beings. Thus I have concluded that we should not see our urban environments as organicist. Even though they contain a great deal of ecologies they do not act as a unified whole and must only be considered as an environment or “urban landscape”. I am convinced that Organicism relates only on smaller scales and every new building after the next is one mutation after another some good and others bad. Collectively when viewing all these mutations whether it be rural, suburban, or urban they don’t create a single whole, but rather a man made jungle of disorientation.
REFERENCES
Berger, Alan. Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.
Waldheim, Charles. The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.
Dodington, Edward. How to Design With the Animal:Constructing Post Humanist Environments. Houston : Proquest LLC, 2009.
