ABSTRACT
Despite this revival of site practices, it is surprising how professionally compartmentalized they remain. Landscape architects read and write sites anew, hybridizing ecological processes with human experiences on marginal urban lands. They combine biofiltration strips with parking surfaces, producing new human/nonhuman habitats; apply bioremediation and phytoremediation to industrial landscapes, creating temporary and transitional landscapes that allow neighbors to witness site cleansing; and program urban renewal’s infrastructural gashes, its vague terrain, with the stuff of everyday life. Sites permeate architects’ thinking and making of buildings as well. But too often their concerns begin where the landscape architects’ end. They apply green technologies to roofs and walls, transforming these water-and airrepelling surfaces into porous membranes that filter, cleanse, and store wild energies. They refer to site forms and operations, often made visible through digital media, to imagine new morphologies of space and structure. Site frameworks, fields, figures, and processes have dematerialized the very divide that Eckbo found in Fitch’s 1948 article. The transparent curtain wall’s “increasingly precise and complete control of climate and habitat indoors” has been replaced by a thickened zone of air and moisture exchange that responds to, and harnesses, the fluctuations between inside and outside. It has been transgressed by folded surfaces that defy emphatic boundary-making between in and out. Contemporary buildings as well as designed landscapes are site-full.80
