LAA#120: Hey Pilgrim!

This Perspective follows two themes – pilgrimages and infrastructure. The
traditional pilgrimage is a religious journey, but the art, architecture and, dare I
say, landscape pilgrimage has recently become a real market, to which I am fully
signed up.

The tourism market is dependent upon quality public infrastructure and each will
fail without the other. This creates obvious opportunities for all people working
in the design and construction industries, especially for landscape architects.
Once you leave the airport or train station, in most cases you will be on foot,
walking through the landscape.

Due to happy circumstance, I am in the middle of my fourth trip to Europe in two
years (I am typing this on the train between Venice and Vienna). I can attest to a
boom in public sector tourist infrastructure – in Paris, Strasbourg, London,
Edinburgh, Dublin, Florence and even Venice, with the opening in early
September of the fourth pedestrian bridge over the Grand Canal at the Piazzale
Roma. This bridge is not without controversy as it (bizarrely!) has steps and is at
too steep a grade ever to achieve code-compliant access. Interestingly, there is an
Accessible Venice Taskforce that has seen a level of modification to some
bridges, such as ramp inserts to steps and the odd inclinator or stair lift. But in
the main, Venice is built for the able-bodied.

As The Cure sang, everything is constantly changing: most of the projects I have
seen on my travels have been driven by the needs of public transport. They have
included: upgrades of existing transport hub infrastructure such as rail stations;
the redevelopment of former industrial sites into pedestrian plazas, integrating
the public realm into mixed-use redevelopment; and “park and ride” hubs, which
integrate the suburban end of new public transport lines, such as the Luas in
Dublin. Edinburgh is installing a tram from the city centre to the old port of
Leith, which is now a vibrant residential community. Florence is in the middle of
an upgrade to the forecourt of the railway station and to the area surrounding the
twelfth-century basilica of Santa Maria Novella. One outcome from this latest
development is fewer permeable surfaces – a large reduction in grassed areas can
be seen when the current landscape is compared with old photographs. Venice’s
campos (larger squares) also used to have trees and small productive gardens,
which are now long gone. This is perhaps one of the environmental costs of a
vibrant pilgrim industry.

One of the legs of my latest pilgrimage was to the 11th Venice Architecture
Biennale. Venice is an apt location for a celebration of the changing nature of
architecture and built landscape. Sea level rises are the rub for the adaptable
Venetians and temporary boardwalks have already been stockpiled in central
areas to provide a network of higher-level routes, which is necessary during the
winter season flooding.

Many of the European exhibitions at the Biennale, particularly those from
Germany and Great Britain, focused on the need for sustainable housing
developments and sustainable energy production and use. My first Perspective
column was titled “Housing the Landscape” and the five architectural practices
featured from Great Britain are achieving that aim. The exhibitions of the
Scandinavian countries and France were more focused on individual projects,
though several of the French projects were infrastructure-based. The presentation
of the French projects was effective. It included a model coupled with a digital
presentation of images and project data, which encouraged a full engagement but
allowed for the reality of the inevitable “exhibition overload.” Oddly, there was
no specific entry from the United States of America, but there were numerous
exhibitions of American individuals and practices. My view of the Australian
exhibition was that the presentation was lacking – to fully appreciate each work
you needed to buy, then read the catalogue while viewing the models. A
disappointment was that one particular model had been damaged in transit and
was not included in the exhibition.

The Italian Pavilion was vast, and included around sixty individual or group
exhibitions, tending to the intellectual or conceptual pole of architectural
discourse. If viewed as artworks as many had been conceived and hung as – they
were accessible, but those that included too much text lost me in the context. The
Japanese Pavilion was a one-person show of exquisite pencil drawings applied
directly onto the internal walls of a white cube, which depicted potential
landscapes and ways of living. The South Korean exhibition showed a new
development in the demilitarized zone, specifically designated as a book
publishing mini-city. The German exhibition concerned energy use and the
pavilion team changed their usual behaviour before and after the event to offset
the energy their exhibition consumed. They also explored the reuse of materials
such as water bottles equipped with a tongue and groove, which enables them to
be used as building blocks following their initial use as emergency water
supplies.

Turning my focus back to Australia, it was pleasing to see the range of projects
submitted for the 2008 AILA National Awards. There are a number of potential
pilgrimages in the winning projects – I will be attempting a visit to the hippo
enclosure at Werribee Zoo and the Australian Garden at Cranbourne when I am
in Melbourne next May at the AILA National Conference. I hope to see many of
you there!

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