Landscape and Infrastructures: Design Issues for the Integration of Parking Areas in Non-urban Contexts

Abstract

This work represents a critical review of a selection of significant parking area projects chosen within the contemporary international context, aimed at discussing the role of parking architecture conceived as an opportunity to reinvent non-urban landscapes. Such an issue is part of the very topical broader theme of relationships between infrastructure and landscape, and of the various space and time scales on which landscape is perceived. Nowadays designers have to deal with several parking design opportunities related to the construction of intermodal stations, airports, shopping malls, industrial areas, as well as natural, cultural and leisure parks. Even if these places and design themes have now become usual, they still require an appropriate and original design research. Parking areas, besides their specific original function, can represent gardens and public spaces lying between the city and the countryside, capable of producing new hybrid landscapes blending art, nature and architecture.

Key Words:

• parking areas
• landscape integration
• landscape architecture
• non-urban landscapes

Notes

1. Moreover, Vergine (1996) writes: Land Art was not a return to naturalism, in the sense of the eighteenth-century doctrine, nor a religious cult of nature, nor an estrangement from the artificial structures of the contemporary society, but some kind of magic technique instead, aimed at allowing man to gain and preserve a certain defence from these forces… We may call this phenomenon ‘totemism’, since the artist ties himself to natural events for mutual protection. (English translation by the authors)

2. See Dixon Hunt (1999, pp. 6–7): What has privileged Land Art in the essentially barren conceptual field of landscape architecture is its sense of creative purpose—the confidence of its practitioners and critics alike that has a firm basis in ideas. Ideas of how to respond to land, ideas of art and design, together with no fear of conjoining them. In short, Land Art seems to restore to landscape architecture its old and largely lost concern for the intricate melding of site, sight and insight. […]

3. Quoting the author: “I didn’t want this parking area to look like a parking area, so what I planned was an avenue, and the cars park along the avenue under the trees” (Weilacher, 1999, p. 112).

4. “Perfect control of the soil-media and plant-material is accompanied by the support of a farmer and an aviator. Jacques Simon embraces a planetary dimension where the sky and earth meet. These giant drawings made with ordinary products are set between immoderation and moderation, unreality and reality. It’s no longer just a question of scale but also of a relation between a conceptual ambition and the materiality of the works, between the exceptional means of modernity and ordinary means of the gardener” (Simon, 2006, p. 11).