Hybrid Morphologies

Infrastructure, Architecture, Landscape

If there is to be a unew urbanism " it will not be based on the

Marc Angeli! & Anna Klingmann
twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the stag -
ing of uncertainty ; it will no longer be concerned with the
arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the
irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim
for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling
fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be
crystallized into definitive form ; it will no longer be about
meticulous definition , the imposition of limits, but about
expanding notions , denying boundaries, not about separat-
ing and defining entities, but about discovering unnameable
hybrids ; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with
the manipu lation of infrastructure for endless intensifica -
tions and diversifications , shortcuts and redistributions-the
reinvention of psychological space.
Rem Koolhaas , " What Ever Happened to Urbanism ," 1994

16 DAIDALOS 7J 1999

known for his earthwork projects.
-pres in "The Crystal Land" the built landscape of urban
aanatio ns with the structure of geological formations.
n recalls an excursion with Nancy Holt, Julie Judd, and
fudd through New Jersey. the self-proclaimed "Garden
duringwhich abandoned quarries were visited. The text
':zillesspecific characteristics of the physical environment
-s.srddurin g their journey. Consisting of unrelated frag-
of built, natural, and altered landscapes a un ified image of
casting terrain emerges, despite the inherent differences
th~ fragments thems elves. Urban infrastructures, such as
and power lines, as well as the single family houses and
:;,mg centers of suburban neighborhoods, are together with
l:acdscapeseen as one system. They are sediments of one and
lllDt geology.
left page: from Arcitecture without Architects, 1964,
by BernardRudofsky,Connecticut, USA
below: suburb of Tokio
Smithson writes: "The highways crisscross through the towns
and become man -made geological networks of concrete. In fact.
the entire landscape has a mineral presence. From the shiny
chrome diner s to glass windows of shopping centers, a sense of
the crystalli ne prevails."1 From a driver's viewpoint, this artifi -
cial, crystalline landscape even merges with the topography of
the car's dashboard. The reflections on th e windshield, the plas-
tic buttons of the car radio. and the depression of the glove
compartment are read as a kind of extension of the territory of
the sub-urban conglomerate. This landscape, according to
Smithson, has not grown organically but exhibits properties of
mineralogical structures that depend equally on natural and
synthetic processes. In its geology, the city consists of a
stratification of layers forming a consolidated entity.
Smithson introduces a method by which to scrutinize,
through the juxtaposition of the terms Site and Non-Site, the
17

interaction betwee n the real cond itions of a place and his
interpretations of that place. Site stands for the material reality
of a pre-existing situation, as for exampl e, the familiar landscape
of New Jersey. A Non-Site, on the other hand , is an abstract
representation or reinterpretation of the site in the form of a
text, a map, or a sculpture. Smithson's earthwor ks, which he
calls "a sedimentation of the mind," involve in situ a context,
while concurrently suggesting other readings of that context. In
a series of interventions referred to as "flows" in which "large
quantities of asphalt, concrete, mud, or glue" are "poured across
parts of landsc apes," Non-Site strategies are superimposed onto
the Site, thus altering its perception.3
Site and Non-Site stand in a close relation to one another, yet
they represent different states of the same phenomenon. One
can be transposed onto th e other and vice versa. The analogy in
"The Crystal Land" between city, land, and geology, between the
topograph y of the urban landscape and the car's dashboard,
belong to both catego ries as they coalesce into a new physical /
Robert Smithson. Untitled
(Science-Fiction Landscape),
1966, negative,21,6x 30,5 cm,
CourtesyJohnWeberGallery,
New York.
menta l landscape. While the infrastructures for transportation
constitute a de facto condition of the site, they are at the same
time solidi fied fossils. The windshi eld glass of the car is captured
in its physical condition but read as an extens ion of the land-
scape. Site and Non-Site demarcate a space that, according to
Smithson, can be traversed-a space, fundamentally determin -
ing the so-called reality of space.
Scape
"SCAPE,"a term introduced by Rem Koolhaas, implies a read-
ing of the urban territory as landscape.4 The term prompts a
strategic distancing from traditional terminolo gies. The
binomial and dialectical nouns town -scape and land-scape are
not considered separate en tHies but are conjoined to form a
singular expression . "SCAPE"is an idiom for the edgeless city,
in which the distinction between center and periphery, between
inside and outside, between figure and ground is erased. The city
is understood as a continuous, topologically formed field
structure, its modulated surface covering vast extensions of
urban regions. Despite its inherent discontinuities, breaks and
fragmented orders, a specific form of cohesion is attributed to
the contemporaneous city, the urban landscape perceived as an
interconnected tissue. Koolhaas speaks of a city of "exacerbated
difference" that does not follow the ideal of a harm onic order but
is marked, throu gh the juxtaposition of opposites, by a perma-
nent hybridity-a hybridity constituting the city's primary
connective principle.
DAIDALOS 73 1999
 left: HansScharoun,water color
below: Hans Scharoun,capital city Berlin, competition
entry 1958, Stiftung Archiv der Akadem1eder Kunste,
Berlin, ScharounWV 212/2

> ANNA K LINGMANN HYBRID MORPHOLOGIES 19


above and right page:ZahaHadid, design for the ThamesHabitableBridge
Competition. 1997
In his essay "The Generic City," Koolhaas attempts to identify the
integral elements and structures of this new form of urban fab-
ric. He writes: "How to describe it? Imagine an open space, a
clearing in the forest, a leveled city. There are three elements :
roads, buildings, and nature; they coexist in flexible relation-
ships, seemingly without reason, in spectacu lar organizational
diversity. Any one of the three may dominate: sometimes the
'road' is lost- to be found meandering on a incomprehensible
detour; sometimes you see no building, only nature; then,
equally unpredictably, you are surrounded on ly by building. In
some frightening spots, all three are simultaneous ly absent."5
Such a view leads to a dissolution of traditionally established
categories. Infrastructure, architecture, and landscape amal -
gamate to become one complex. Instead of accentuating their
differences and treating them as separate entities, the possibility
of their convergence is proposed . When architecture is declared
as landscape, infrastructure as architecture, and landscape as
infrastructure, then the predicament is given for potentially
understanding the phenomenon city on other grounds than
those conventionally pursued. The method deployed is that of a
hybridization of termino logies, identified by Koolhaas with the
term MERGEand allowing hitherto separate phenomena to be
connected: "landscape and city= SCAPE,business and pleasure
= BUSINESS VACATION, golf course and urban fabric =
SMOOTH green crust of THIN urbanism,"6

20 DAIDALOS 7J 1999
r _? ira te elements of the city form a network conglomerate
4:-ie components which amidst divergences offers the
~- -:.:>
n of a constant uniformity. This unifying principle
.: particular notion of spatiality considered by Koolhaas,
- - = :o Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a type of smooth
-. :-his peculiar kind of space is not bound by a specific
-.;~ _: is primarily marked by vectorial displacements, "mul-
'11.l.L. .("<_ lines, strata and segmentarities, lines of flight and
- :es."8 It is a-hierarchical , decentralized , and nomadic in
- ,4,_:.1 ut ion. Smooth space is that of oscillating relation -
;- .._: ways addressing through their simultaneity multiple
:::r.:=:<:o ns. It is a space of coexisting structures. Smooth space
~-:s differences and distinction s: it literally smoothes over
~ :.NNA K LING MA N N HY BRI D M O RPH OLOG IES
Scape I -schaft
Such an understanding of the city as a dissolved and yet
consolidated territory has historical antecedents. Hans
Scharoun, for example, transposes within urbanism the concept
of landscape onto the concept of city, as suggested by his choice
of terminology. He speaks of an urban -land-scape and of an
awareness of the urban -land-scape-space as a basic condition for
any form of planning development. In his writings , one
en counters repeatedly the term - schaft, derived from the Old
High German scaft, meaning to give form or to sha pe. Word
combinations used by Scharoun as Gemein-schaft (community),
Nachbar-schaft (neighborhood), Himmel -schaft (sky-scape), or
Land-schaft (land-scape) form the basis of what migh t be termed
Stadt-schaft (city-scape).
According to Scharoun, this form-giving process must relate
to the "demand which expresses itself in the unfinished," that is,
in open systems, which he considers essential within planning
and urban design.9 Rather than based on "formal-dogmatic
21
this page and right page: Adriaan Geuze.West 8,
EasternScheidt Project, Zeeland, The Netherlands 1991/1992
. .
~~ . ,,.. - #--:-._- _. -- ... -- ,
principles," but instead on processes of tran sformation that take
up and heighten prevalent tendencies, Scharoun describes urban
space as a system constantly exposed to chan ges. Analogous to
natural environments, the city is not a static entity but a
mutable organization made of different components, adaptab le
to varying circumstances. The contradictory conditions of urban
contexts are marked by irregularities. In a different iated play of
dense and empty spaces, of infra-structures and housing-struc-
tures, of natural and artificial natur es, a continuo us urban land-
scape is formed. Through the superimpos ition of systems a field
is generated promoting spaces of varying qua Iity.
22
This formation process pertains to heterogeneous and none-
theless coherent relationships developing into a connected en-
tity.10 In this sense, the city evolves, not through the external
imposition of order, but according to internal interdependencies.
For Scharoun the urban field emanates from a process which
includes the traces and histories of past processes. Urbanity is an
expression of a "mental landscape" mirroring societal changes
both at material and cultural levels.u
Th is conceptua l framework forms the base of Scharoun's
architecture. In his design for the Berlin Cultural Forum, the
buildings of the Philharmonic, the Chamber Music Hall, and the
State Library literally comprise an urban landscape . A "valley" is
formed between the "mountains" of free standing edifices as
objects. The stepped-down geometry of the building's volumes
contribute to the integration of structures of varied scaies, thus
incorporating the New National Gallery by Mies van der Rohe
and the Matthei Church by Martin Stubler into a coalesced loose
ensemble. Urban space is created, less by the implementation of
predetermined type forms than by the tension resultin g from a
field of interactive forces. ln tha t, architect ure eludes the domain
of bounded compositions to favor the dynamic, unceasingly
fluid condition of the urban land-scape space .
Infrastr uctu re -Architecture -Land scape
Within con temporary architectural discourse, potential in ter-
connections of infrastructure, architecture, and landscape are
investigated. In the work of Adriaan Geuze, Zaha Hadid, and Rem
Koolhaas, for example, one encounters proposals for structures
of a hybrid nature, structures pertaining concurren tly to differ-
ent categories. Throug h mutations and transformations, new
morphologies are explored considering the possibility of an
architecturalization of landscape and infrastructure, a terminol-
ogy which reciprocally suggests an infrastructuralization or
landscapification of architecture .
The landscape architect Adriaan Geuze addresses in his work
prevalent urbanization patterns of the natural landscape,
inferring from such conditions a distinctive spatial conception .
Rather than separating landscape and infrastructural elements,
he int erweaves them, so as to form new conglome rates. An
example of this strategy is the Storm Surge Barrier project in
DAIDALOS n 1999
:;..:.JU. a coastal region artificially created by land reclamation
and marked by infrastructures, farming, abandoned
_,...,..,rr,"1 sites and sand depositories.12 Geuze approaches the
~ an ecological system. From the residues of the local
I industry, a polder landscape is created using black and
~a shells, functioning as a hatching ground for prevailing
populations. The project responds to the large scale of the
ding landscape. The alternating light and dark stripes of
shdls appear as an extension of nearby infrastructures
lbz:=:u~ _ a linked territorial complex. According to Geuze, the
-ape is always subjugated to a process of transformation in

, :;,,1 L & AN NA K LINGMANN H YBR ID MORPH OL O GIES


whi ch disparate elements are conjoined into a fluid spat ial
continuum.
A similar preoccupation with issues pertaining to the
configuration of the land is at the core of Zaha Hadid's work. She
considers her architecture as a form of landscape extension. Her
buildings, while responding to varied influences of their
surrounding contexts, are conceived as dynamic fragmen ts
stra tegically bundled into a congruous assembly. In the Hong
Kong Peak competition project the building is thought of as an
artificial landscape, its formal vocabulary derived from a reading
of the site, expanding and heightening its topographica l
characteristics . Through the superimpo sition of architectonic
layers and the blurring of boundaries, the structure unfolds as an
open tectonic field, countering traditional notions of the
architectural object as a finite entity. The form of the building
dissolves as the structure multiplies into a series of levitating
planes . While transforming the mountain in its form, the form
of the building seeming ly dissipates into the mountain itself. "To
conceive of the building as an artificial mountain is to render the
floor as a faceted escarpment and to project th e roof as a
dematerialized cavern. Hadid's Hong Kong project can be seen as
a piling up of geological plates, which through their mutua l
displacement serve, at one and the same time, both to excavate
and reconstruct the original body of the mountain . The strength
of Hadid's work resides in its energetic spatia l fluidit y."13
Rem Koolhaas und erstands the city as a field determined by
accumulations, connections, densities, transformations, and
fluctuations. Th is choice of terms, borrowed from the field of
topology, points to a conception of the city as a dynamic system
in which architecture, infrastructure, and landscape are no more
than events or occurrences within an uninterrupted spatial field.
In a project entitled "Dolphins," strategies are developed pertain -
ing to possible interpretations of traffic infrastructures using
architectural means. Koolhaas focuses on the spaces created by
freeway intersections, or as he calls it, the "slack within seem-
ingly exhausted infrastructural spiderwebs." 14 These left-over
spaces are densified using landscape and arch itectural elements.
Green open spaces and a dense, built fabric are interlaced within
the network of streets creating a new conglomerate of mutually
dependent parts. A wasted territory within the city is reclaimed
through the introduction of new programs and through the
interconnection of systems, commonly kept apart, such as those
for infrastructure, architecture, and landscape. The project
avoids any type of compositional order which might prioritize
architecture; it instead alludes to potential strategies promoting
a hybridization of componen ts within a space of topological
extension.
Fluid Morpholo gie s
While the traditional city demarcates a figure against the
ground of its surrounding landscape, in the contempo rary city
figure-ground distinctions are revoked. Landscape and built fab-
ric increasingly interact, entangl e, interweave. Neither ground
nor figure can explicitly be discerned within the amalgamated
and indefinable field of the urban territory, thus requiring other
formal differentiations. Moving from closed to open structures,
the city as an urban landscape increasingly evolves as a dynamic
process, questioning the authority of self-relian t architectural
form. The boundaries betw een architecture, infrastructure, and
landscape dissolve while de-centering the notion of the
architectural object as a closed en tity.
The morphology of traditional city planning encompasses
organizationa l geometries such as grids, axes and radial organ-
izations through which to establish order within the urban fab-
ric. These principles confirm the specific distinctions between
center and periphery, core and edge, inside and outside, categor -
ies no longer adequate to describe the urban conglomerate in its
entangled complex ity. In the new city, formal principles of
compositional provenance miss their target. Its morphology
instead unfolds from a system of relations between different,
sometimes contradictory forces, no longer as an absolute but in
reference to other structu res. Formal and spatial constellations
emerge from continually changing processes, open to new inter-
pretations. The city forms a territory of strategic possibilities in
which the relation between different parts is unceasingly re-
negotiated . The city morphology, in this sense, is fluid and
formally undetermined, pertaining to the oscillating inter-
depend encies of contextual forces rather than to th e logic of pre-
established form. Encapsulating magnitudes of processes the
city manifests itself as an open field.
The city is a system in motion, characterized by fluid condi -
tions. Within such a dynamic conglomerate, infrastructure,
architecture and landscape loose th eir autonomy, the estab-
lished meaning of their respective definitions exposed to
mutable significations . With th e dissolution of categories, an
undetermined state is attained, that repudiates - as to the logic
of a new spatial conception-firmly secured hierarchies.
Marc Angelil is an architect with offices in Zurich and Los Angelesand is the
director of the first year courseat the Architecture Department of the ETH
Zurich. AnnaKlingmannis an architect and teachesarchitecturaldesign at the
Hochschule der Klinste Berlin and at the ETHZurich.
DAIDALOS 73 1999
 Notes :
Theauthors would like to thank
SarahGraham for being a critical and
most supportive reader during the
preparationof this article.
Robert Smithson. "The Crystal
Land", in: Harper'sBazaar,1966;
JackFlam, RobertSmithson:The
CollectedWritings,Berkeley& Los
Angeles: Universityof California
Press, 1996, p. 8.
2 Robert Smithson, "A Provisional
Theoryof Non-Sites", 1968,in: Ibid.,
p. 364.
3 JackFlam, "Introduction:
ReadingRobert Smithson", in: Ibid.,
p. xxii.
4 RemKoolhaas,"Pearl River
Delta, The City of Exacerbated
Difference". in: Politics-Poetics
documentaX-the book,Kassel:
CantzVerlag, documenta and the
Museum Fridericianum, 1997.
5 RemKoolhaas,"The Generic
City", 1994. in: RemKoolhaas&
BruceMau, S,M,L,XL,New York, NY.:
TheMonacelli Press, 1995, p. 1254.
6 RemKoolhaas,"Pearl River
Delta, TheCity of Exacerbated
Difference," op. cit.
7 Gilles Deleuzeand FelixGuatlari,
A ThousandPlateaus,Minneapolis:
Universityof Minnesota Press, 1987;
Milleplateaux,Paris: Les Editions de
Minuit, 1980).
8 Ibid., p. 4.
9 JorgC. Kirschenmann&
EberhardSyring,HansScharoun.Die
Forderungdes Unvollendeten,
Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt,
1993. p.233.
10 Klaus-JakobThiele,UberHans
Scharoun,Berlin: AlexanderVerlag,
1986.
11 Hans Scharoun, "Organisches
Bauen",Vortrag anlasslich der 31.
Referendartagung,Berlin, 30.
Mai 1961,in: Peter Pfankuch, Hans
Scharoun:Bauten,Entwurfe,Texte,
Berlin: Akademieder Ki.inste,Band
10, Gebr. Mann Verlag,Berlin, 1974.
12 AdriaanGeuze,WestB.
LandscapeArchitecture,Rotterdam:
Rotterdam-Ma askant Foundation.
1995, pp. 20-23.
13 KennethFrampton, "A Kufic
Suprematist; TheWorld Culture of
Zaha Hadid," in: ZahaHadid
PlanetaryArchitecture,London UK.:
TheArchitectural Association, 1983.
14 RemKoolhaas& Bruce Mau,
S,M,L,XL,New YorkNY.:The
Monacelli Press, 1995, p. 999.

.
.--
~

. . ... structure
.
.
.. .. . .
. . archi
.
. . ... . . .. ...
. .. Further developmentof the diagramsby RosalindKrauss concerning the
relationship between architecture, infrastructure and landscape.
scape
.. ....
- . land

. .. tecture ..
.

... .. ......
. . .
...
. ..

_ & ANNA KLINGMANN HYBRIO MORPHO LOG I ES

25
 DAIDALOS
Architecture Art Culture

Architecture Goes Landscape

Architecture Vanishing into Landscape
Landscape Invading the City
Hybrid Morphologies
Topological Landscapes
Infrastructure, Architecture
and Landscape Converging
Applied Nature

Projects:
adidas -Scape
Petrosino Park, Manhattan
Swiss Self-representation
on Expo 2001
Vehovar & Jauslin
Diller + Scofidio
Vito Acconci
Ken Yeang

as well as:
Zaha Hadid, Adriaan Geuze,
Foreign Office Architects, Greg Lynn,
Ushida Finlay, Bernard Cache,
Paul Virilio und Claude Parent
73
Authors:
Marc Angelil
Anna Klingmann
Mark Lee
Linda Pollak
Philipp Ursprung
Anthony Vidler
Gregory Volk

SFJKWB G+B Arts Internationa l ISSN 1561-0152 8.- GBP n,-EUR 12,- USO 20,-AUD 2.200,- )PY