Foreword

The idea of ‘Total Landscape’ first emerged to me in 1993 while work-

ing on the Global City project with my friends and fellow students

Sarah Gansel and Antonella Vitale at the Berlage Institute Amster-

dam (BiA). The project was supposed to rationalize an idea that

essentially came from our professor Elias Zenghelis, who gently

coaxed us into believing that that differences between what we call

‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ are no longer the differences of kind but of

degree. The Global City project was about identifying a universal

set of conditions characteristic for each point of a global network of

artificial ‘landscapes’ that would allow intensified compactness and

congestion in particular segments we called ‘environments’. Typology

and theme of environments depended on the percentage of density

occurring in the particular landscape, in relation to the balance

between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’. In that sense, the Global City project

was an attempt to rationalize and articulate the idea of a globally

emerging system that I cynically called The Straight Society. I had

no doubt that most people experienced ‘the logic of the inconceivable’

of such a system because it runs as an undercurrent stream beneath

what we daily experience in the world of appearances and the world

as sensed. It occurred to me that what I was truly interested in was

finding out how that system actually works through what seemed to

be a totalizing system of forces, and just how such a complex artificial

universe systematically links every artifice-whether a social relation-

ship, an artificial rain, or an economic order-into a universal densely

woven fabric. It was also clear that this man made, artificial system

was in desperate need of a holistic, comprehensive, anticipatory, and

sustainable understanding. I was not only interested in the question

of form, place, and aesthetic, but much more in the set of conditions

out of which it arises and the totalizing condition of convergence it

successfully fabricates. The work of Superstudio, Archizoom, Archi-

gram, the Situationists International, and the entire architectural

avant-garde of the 1960s and early 1970s was instrumental in initially

formulating the question of condition. The key question guiding this

quest at the time was the effect to which total landscape was influ-

encing the practice and theory of architecture, because to most of

us the early 1990s brought an obvious conflict that began emerging

between architects and Architecture.