How do architects actually design landscapes? We spoke to landscape architect and researcher Daniel Jauslin about how architecture and landscape work together.
It all began with a question: how do architects actually design landscapes? The architect and landscape architect Daniel Jauslin had already noticed during his studies that there are buildings that develop landscape-like spatial experiences in their interiors. He finally answered the question in his doctoral thesis, the results of which he wanted to present to the public – as part of an exhibition. The fact that this would initially take place virtually due to corona was not planned – but it may even have enriched it. Now “If Buildings were Landscapes …” can be seen from March 26 at the Baumuster-Centrale in Zurich. We spoke to Daniel Jauslin about how architecture and landscape work together.
Your exhibition is called “If Buildings were Landscapes” (translated: “If buildings were landscapes …”). What is it about? And: How did you come up with the idea of making this comparison the theme?
The exhibition summarizes the theme of my doctoral thesis, which I developed with my first doctoral supervisor Prof. Dr. Clemens Steenbergen when I came to Delft in 2008. We were interested in what happens when you turn your research with Dr. Wouter Reh on the architectural composition of classical European gardens (2008) around: how do architects actually design landscapes?
I noticed buildings that develop landscape-like spatial experiences on the inside while I was studying architecture in Zurich. For example, the Architectural Association in London, where leading architects such as Hadid, Koolhaas, Moussavi & Zaera-Polo and Bos & van Berkel experimented with landscape in different ways. They designed a kind of inner landscape with the ground, the paths, the views and images, but it was architecture for living, buildings such as hotels, libraries or ship terminals – ultimately entire cities were rethought as Landscape Urbanism.
I analyzed this phenomenon theoretically and practically, i.e. through texts and drawings, and ultimately called it Landscape Strategies in Architecture. After years of academic studies, I wanted to go public with it. And because it is about spatial phenomena, I wanted visitors to be able to immerse themselves in this world with (3D) films and models, so I decided on an exhibition.
The exhibition “If Buildings were Landscapes” is taking place online due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Of course, that was more of an accident at first. The exhibition was due to open in Delft at the beginning of April 2020 and we had already done the scenographic design ourselves in Zurich. We had practically already packed our bags when the head of landscape architecture, Ass. Prof. Dr. Inge Bobbink, called me in March to tell me that the city was closing the entire campus. The students, for whom the whole thing was primarily intended by me, have hardly seen the inside of the university since then.
As a result, there have been a few virtual exhibitions on similar themes – such as those by AMO / Rem Koolhaas at the Guggenheim and Sebastien Marot in Lausanne, in which authors from the fields of architecture and urban planning deal with the countryside. But they live more from their texts. I definitely didn’t want to go back there, as the thesis is already available online as an open source publication. We were more interested in the staged spatial experience; I looked at three VR solutions from Zurich, Berlin and Delft and the SIA International association gave me some financial support. The VR chitects from Delft ultimately had the best system in terms of technology and design and did a very good job.
What does that look like in practice?
Now you can use a laptop or even a smartphone to view the exhibition in advance, as it will be on display in Delft at some point. As an alumnus, I wasn’t even allowed in to photograph it, for example. It’s now like the games my children play online and technically very fast, because all the images are rendered in advance as panoramas. You may remember the old CD-ROM game Myst, which had great landscapes for the time – the technology, which was then called Apple QuickTimeVR, still works in a similar way today.
It was important to us that everyone with Internet access could watch it. Today, of course, kids have VR headsets and VR is much more intense in 3D. Until March 2021, we are building a virtual tour of one of the designs that I analyzed for the exhibition and such headsets: the Jussieu libraries in Paris by OMA Rem Koolhaas from 1992. Unfortunately, they were never built and with plans and models it is also difficult to understand how intensively this building would have merged with the entire city of Paris to form an urban landscape. We can bring this to life with today’s 3D GIS technology. On the screen or on your kids’ game headsets.
Nevertheless, not everything is possible on the Internet. If you want to see the 3D video installation “If buildings could talk”, which Wim Wenders staged with SANAA, you still have to come to the exhibition and put on specially disinfected glasses. I don’t yet know whether the exhibition will be allowed to take place outside in Zurich’s Bellvoir Park as an alternative or whether or when visitors will be able to see the models at the Baumusterzentrale Zurich, the Atelier Néerlandais in Paris or finally at the Delft Faculty of Architecture. It remains exciting to have an exhibition in the year of the pandemic.
What is your personal stance: should architects think more about landscape or should the disciplines work more closely together?
Both are important – and I practise both. My first training was as an architect, but I have always felt that there is more space in the landscape – literally and symbolically. For me, design strategies of the future were to be found in the landscape. This first brought me to landscape myself, where I was allowed to design a park in my first major project at West 8 Rotterdam: The Arteplage of the Swiss national exhibition Expo.02 in Yverdon-les-Bains. Alongside my mentor, the landscape architect Adriaan Geuze, I worked with many good architects such as Mateja Vehovar, Liz Diller, Tristan Kobler, Ric Scofidio and my brother Stefan Jauslin.
I first built houses with my later partners Hans Drexler and Marc Guinand, but with our first house in Pigniu in Graubünden, we were more interested in architecture as a vehicle for living in the Alpine landscape. Peter Eisenmann told me in an interview for my dissertation that he was interested in the light between the trees – loosely based on C.G. Jung … I must have grown into the green, to the side of the light.
“We cannot remain in the traditional autonomous disciplines.”
How does that manifest itself?
I crossed the boundaries between disciplines almost every day: As a landscape architect in Delft, I once taught architects and engineers how to build bridges. I have taught design at all levels of landscape architecture courses at the universities of Delft and Wageningen. Defining disciplines may help to achieve clarity, but when it comes to solving major urban planning tasks and the huge challenge of climate change, we cannot remain stuck in the traditional autonomous disciplines.
In practice, my office, DGJ Landscapes, now works together with very different, often specialized architectural offices in competitions. I consider myself lucky that we are always involved right from the start and that the landscape design no longer only concerns the surroundings after the building has been completed, but is an integral part of every good overall design – even if not every building has to be an internal landscape, as in the exhibition.
“We have to understand architecture as a system.”
What can architects learn from landscape architects?
Architecture has become incredibly specialized. Perhaps precisely because of the enormous increase in the complexity of the problems it is supposed to solve, architects are retreating into the refuge of an autonomous discipline. I think that’s fatal; you can’t plant a tree from the forest in a pot and put it in a museum. In the same way, we must think and develop buildings as organically interwoven with their context on all levels, in the cultural urban sense, in the technical sense and also with regard to the natural living environment, to which we still belong despite our spiritualization.
Gottfried Semper, the important architectural theorist of the 19th century, spoke of metabolism. He was referring more to historical tents as precursors of the Baute. As a formative classicist, he was very critical of his contemporary forerunners of green architecture, such as the green glass palaces popular in Paris and London at the time. But actually, metabolism is a key concept for us today: we need to understand architecture as a system that is connected and interacts with the living world of all species, including flora and fauna.
But we are only just beginning to do this, so there is still something to learn for several generations to come. Marot told me at one of his lectures in Lausanne that he essentially teaches architecture students at the EPFL what permaculture is. We probably still need to introduce this into landscape architecture, but the fact that nature-based agriculture is taught at a polytechnic for architects shows that we are further along today.
One of the areas of the exhibition is called “How to survive the Anthropocene” …
If you think further than just about the landscape experience in buildings, you come up with a potential of holistically conceived architecture that has hardly been exhausted. However, this idea stems more from my criticism of the buildings by Koolhaas, Eisenman or SANAA that I show:
Today’s architecture is, after all, incredibly wasteful and one of the most important causes of climate change. Concrete buildings, which modernism has virtually sanctified for an entire century, are, as we have known since the 1970s, all climate sinners. In Holland, people are now discussing concrete shame at specialist conferences (as they do in Scandinavia about flying shame) and, as almost everywhere else, are rediscovering timber construction. But when I started out as an architect in Holland, a wooden deck like the one on our red bridge in Amsterdam was almost unthinkable. But it’s not just about optimizing the metabolism in construction, for example with wood or other renewable resources, it’s also about the local conditions.
It is even about a fundamental attitude: planners in architecture have an inverted concept of time. As service providers, we concentrate on costs, deadlines and a concept of quality that is restricted to the marketable real estate object. Planning only lasts until the keys are handed over and the warranty work is completed. But we should build something with our cities that will outlive us by generations, like a forest: something that takes root locally and keeps growing anew.
“The intellectual potential is there.”
What are the instructions, the “how-to”, that you provide in your exhibition “If Buildings were Landscapes”?
In the virtual exhibition, I first show approaches in the form of links to videos of the many sustainable ideas and concepts. In the real exhibition, workshops were planned with young designers, which we wanted to partially replace with virtual workshops. Ultimately, I think there are two possibilities: Either architecture insists on its autonomy and closes itself off to the huge challenges of protecting nature and the climate. These will then be solved by specialized engineers, who are already increasingly in control of the built environment. Architecture may thus become a nice side issue, an interesting pastime, about as relevant as playing chess. Or it could reinvent itself, and an integral view of the surroundings and an understanding of the buildings as parts of a living landscape would be conceivable.
The intellectual potential is certainly there, but the Western Greco-Roman tradition has developed two millennia away from nature. I hope we still have time. That is why we are looking for solutions as to how architecture could survive the Anthropocene, our age in which humans have reshaped the natural development of the world in geological time scales.
About Daniel Jauslin and the exhibition “If Buildings were Landscapes”
The virtual exhibition “If Buildings were Landscapes …” curated by Daniel Jauslin PhD and designed by his office DGJ Landscapes is accessible from March to October 2021.
As soon as permitted, it will be shown at the Baumuster-Centrale Zurich, the Atélier Néerlandais Paris and at the Faculty of Architecture & the Built Environment TU Delft and accompanied by events.
The exhibition “If Buildings were Landscapes” can be seen from March 26 at the Swiss Baumuster-Centrale in Zurich.
Daniel Jauslin is a landscape architect, lecturer and researcher (PhD). Trained in architecture at ETH Zurich (1997), he has more than 20 years of international professional and academic experience designing at many scales, including award-winning furniture, buildings, gardens, landscapes, regions and infrastructures. Since 1999 he is co-founder of DGJ Landscapes in Zurich and founding partner of DGJ Architektur with Hans Drexler in Frankfurt. He has been a registered landscape architect since 2011. In this field, DGJ Landscapes is currently realizing projects between Jauslin’s home in Zurich and the surroundings of Versailles. From 2008 to 2015, he was involved as a lecturer in setting up the Master’s track in Landscape Architecture at TU Delft, where he also published his doctoral thesis in 2019. From 2015 to 2018, he taught landscape architecture at Wageningen University with Prof. Ir. Adriaan Geuze, among others, and continues to research architectural and landscape design.
