The ambiguous surface: poetic, formal and programmatic reading of the territory

Prior to the emergence of landscape urbanism as a disciplinary discourse, a series of treatises in the late 20th century and early 2000s set out to unriddle the complex space of the territory. However, an intertextual section exposes a common descriptive problem of the space of the territory as a vast terrain of indeterminate and uncertain transformations. Adding to this ambiguity is the lack of design and form-giving discourse in the projective scope of urbanism parallel to its systematic shift from a design discipline to a social science. In the past century, the modern world has been dedicated to the city, and there is little and limited thought about the space of the territory which has substantially and inadvertently become a smeared backside that maintains the cities. Moreover, a twofold condition corroborates this notion since the late 1960s – a tug of war between the postmodern architects’ preoccupation with nostalgic, stylistic, scenic, and shallow buildings and the urbanists’ increasing concern for the city as a social problem at the cost of avoiding architectural design. At the Aspen Design Conference in 1955, architect Victor Gruen advocated that architects should expand their views beyond individual buildings and find architecture in the environment, employing architecture instrumentality, perhaps, on concepts of climate, geography, and geology. Therefore, the central idea of this paper is to explore the “terrain beyond the built” from a poetic, formal, and programmatic perspective and to question the role of the architect in the
foreseeable future.