Description

At a certain level of generality, it is impossible not to think of housing and the landscapes in which they are placed or created, especially when landscape is regarded more or less synonymously with a literal or virtual setting, milieu, or context. Used more narrowly here, ‘housing and landscapes’ typifies ensembles of both terms within which a particular status, category, or kind of landscape relationship is of primary importance. Early on in the modern era, for instance, the relationship was often equated with a bucolic, rural setting that was deemed to be healthful in facilitating recuperation from livelihoods that other­wise involved industrial and related toil. In effect, it was a merger of ‘town and countryside’ that was the appropriate physical and spiritual repose for human habitation and, in one way or another, one that was embraced by those interested and active in reforming the working, social, and material conditions of the industrial era. Albert Brisbane, for instance, in his promotion of Fourier’s concept of the phalanstère in America of the 1840s, conceived of his phalanxes as both city and country in an era of rapid and disorienting urban expansion and increasing nostalgia for nature.
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Later, the Cadbury brothers in England of the 1890s endeavored to make it easy at Bournville for workingmen to own their own homes in the form of a garden village. This was quickly followed by Ebenezer Howard whose Garden City was to marry town and country together and from “this joyous union”, it was believed, would spring “a new hope, a new life, and a new civilization”.
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Certainly after the Garden City Movement got underway, the subject of the landscape in housing became both more conspicuous and varied. The Garden Cities Aniene and Garbatella in Rome, for example, were less a case of urban-rural merger, particularly of an Italian small-town variety, as they were housing in a garden setting and a somewhat exotic one at that.
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At Sunnyside, New York, another well-known Garden City application, landscapes and buildings were juxtaposed next to each other in more or less comparable volumes, and at Radburn, New Jersey, houses certainly became clustered in gardens comprised of unfenced private domains closely associated with a broader, less-manicured landscape of vegetated areas traversed by pedestrian paths and trails, including other recreational venues.
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Indeed, looking across houses and landscapes in America’s suburban evolution, sentiment has shifted noticeably from dwelling with a landscape in earlier eras, to dwelling in a landscape as a source of leisure-time activity in, say, the 1950s and 60s to more mindful engagement in contemporary times, particularly as the size and use for active pursuits have tapered off. In short, the ensemble relationship between housing, particularly when viewed as dwelling, with consciously and construed landscapes is both malleable and can change almost episodically with the times. Furthermore, this contrivance is part and parcel of particular contemporary forms or types of housing.

Precedents: from Active Mergers to Objects of Contemplation

A project that epitomized the idea of appropriate physical and spiritual repose for human habitation, alongside of multiple engagements with landscape, was Römerstadt on the then outskirts of Frankfurt am Main in Germany and constructed between 1927 and 1928 during Ernst May’s term as Stadtbaurat or ‘City Architect’.
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Indeed, it was also prominently part of the broader Garden City Movement, being built and managed by the Gardenstadt AG, a public property development company. Located next to the flood-prone Nidda River to the north of central Frankfurt in the city’s Niddatal area, Römerstadt was also intended from the outset to be a joint-use project where its lengthy embankments and allotment gardens formed part of a flood-control improvement beside the rectification of the river channel.

Originally conceived in 1914, this plan came to fruition largely under Max Bromme, part of Ernst May’s team, after the First World War and several floods in 1920 and 1926, respectively. The larger project also engaged with several other contemporary housing projects, such as Praunheim and Westhausen.
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In this regard, Römerstadt clearly engages with a larger city-scale landscape and one in which it served an explicit utilitarian purpose rather than simply being located generically in a countryside setting. The rounded faux fortifications of the embankment were also intended to recall a Roman encampment thought to formerly occupy the site, along with the name of the housing project itself. In addition to this larger landscape and its project-related landscape gardens for individual use by inhabitants, Römerstadt also incorporated private gardens directly associated particularly with two-storey terrace housing that comprised about half of the overall project, along with several community parks, including well-vegetated and secluded areas on top of the faux fortification along the length of the flood-control embankment. Leberecht Migge was the landscape architect behind most of these proposals.
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When seen in cross-section, the gardens associated with both the terrace housing and the larger apartment blocks clearly enjoyed a spatial reciprocity with the housing as external extensions. Overall, the project was comprised of 1,182 dwelling units housing a population on the order of from 3,000 to 4,000 inhabitants and well supported, as a more or less complete neighborhood, with community services, shops, an elementary school, and a community hall. Among the overall complement of dwellings, the terrace houses were of 75 to 88 square meters in area, often with useable basements, while the four-storey apartment blocks were of similar areas and largely in the form of three storeys of separate units plus additional maisonettes on the top floors. In fact, an overall intention behind the housing, both in and within specific landscapes, was to constitute what May referred to as a neue
wohnkultur, or new dwelling culture, and “as places to recuperate from daily labors”. More specifically, “the minimal housing units and gardens were seen to be part of a spiritual revolution and return to basics”, where “simplicity in the building realm would produce a new mental attitude” and one that was “more flexible, simpler, and more joyful”.
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Moving forward and particularly into the era of mass urban immigration in Italy after the Second World War, two schemes provided through INA CASA, a government-sponsored affordable housing program dating from the 1950s, presented two further relationships between housing and landscape. The first was Tiburtino, authored largely by Ludivico Quaroni and Mario Ridolfi on an 8.8-hectare sloping site towards Rome’s eastern periphery. Composed of 771 dwelling units and housing a neighborhood-sized population of around 4,000 inhabitants, the target population was lower-income immigrants to Rome from rural areas in neighboring provinces and from the mezzogiorno in the south.
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Working with the topography, the general layout was in the form of irregular attachments of three- to five-storey walk-up units with ample balconies and pitched roofs. This seriation of units, set beside winding streets and among paved and vegetated landscapes, was formally very different from what was and became the more normal palazzine arrangements of housing. From research and documentation of dwellings in rural villages and towns, primarily by Ridolfi, a ‘shape grammar’ was developed that served as a guideline for specific architectural elements of the project. The results were clearly sympathetic to the informal and ad hoc configurations and architectural inflections to be found in countryside villages and towns familiar to the new immigrants. Indeed, this familiarity was clearly intentional and a driving force behind the otherwise contemporary scheme.
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Overall and in combination with garden terraces alongside of small, well-vegetated, and paved plazas as well as interstitial spaces, a picturesque vernacular developed with the look of a small Italian town amid otherwise modern materials and construction techniques.

In the other scheme in Rome at Tuscolano, largely under the direction of Saverio Muratori, a more modernist array of housing blocks with a strong formal order was constructed, although also with incorporation of vernacular materials, window elements, and roofs. However, as a part of this complex, although otherwise adjacent to it and dating slightly later from 1953, was Adalberto Libera’s mat building and apartment block ensemble, presenting quite another way of engaging housing and landscape.
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With one element comprised of single-storey courtyard houses, accessed along narrow lanes, a strong ‘inside-outside’ arrangement of building and outdoor space was introduced in a clear domestication of landscape. Although with few, if any, precedents, the mat of courtyard housing, close by the Felice Aqueduct, harkened back to much earlier Roman residential quarters. The second element of the overall scheme, housing some 1,000 inhabitants all told, was a four-storey apartment building on pilotis and with a continuous banding of wide cantilevered balconies bringing landscape yet again into the adjacent housing units. This block, in turn, was also used in conjunction with the exterior wall of the adjacent courtyard houses to frame a relatively spacious park-plaza, entered into from a band of single-storey shops along another edge. In essence, two very different kinds of landscape, particularly along a public-private spectrum, were provided: one highly integrated with housing and domestication, with the other arranged more formally in the tradition of Italian public urban landscapes.
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Another modern commonplace of housing and landscape is ‘slabs and towers in a park’, envisaged early on by the likes of Le Corbusier and in many ways a logical outgrowth of a search for a balanced attachment between housing and greenery, light, and open air. A notable project in this regard, and also from the 1950s was Roehampton Lane, built on the outskirts of London by the London County Council Housing Division and project architects such as John Partridge, Whitfield Lewis, and Sir Leslie Martin. In an effort to decentralize London’s post-war circumstances, Roehampton was located in a rolling country setting of 40.5 hectares along a 1.3-kilometer-long frontage. Around 35 percent of some 1,900 dwelling units were provided in high-rise point blocks, symmetrically disposed around a central service core, rising 12 storeys in height and accommodating two- and three-bedroom flats.
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A further 30 percent of the units were in stacked maisonette configurations in slab blocks on pilotis and clearly floating, as it were, above the ground plane of the parkland setting. These configurations, along with the high-rise point towers, afforded broad panoramic views of the surrounding countryside. Most of the remainder of the housing was provided in the form of terrace housing along small lanes, in contrast to the more expansive parkland setting, although again not divorced in locational sentiment from the English countryside.

Another more iconic arrangement of ‘slabs in a park’ can be found in Lucio Costa’s superquadras, or superblocks, of Brasilia, dating from 1956. Stretching in a wide arc in plan, like the wings of an airplane, the interconnected configuration of superquadras, each comprised of around 600 dwelling units and housing a population of 3,000 or so people, was consistent with ‘neighborhood theory’ at the time. This arc, in turn, was seen by Costa to exist perpendicular to a monumental axis of larger public buildings and all in a bucolic setting.
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After all, the natural habitat of Brasilia, set inland and away from the Brazilian coast, was a forested area. The underlying arrangement of slab blocks in the superquadras varied considerably from one to another, but all embraced well-landscaped adjacent areas used for recreational and leisure-time activities. Each slab was usually six storeys in height, elevator-served, and raised on pilotis on top of a paved slab. The footprint of each apartment block was nominally 80 meters in length by 12 meters in width, accommodating around 220 inhabitants each, going back again to critical dimensions for dwelling units to be well-served by light and air. Various configurations of recessed balconies and brise soleil were used to mediate solar insolation to the dwelling units and the strips between the superquadras, usually accommodating community facilities like schools and playgrounds, as well as strip malls for shopping. The resulting ensembles of well-ordered ‘slabs in a park’, almost literally floating over a well-vegetated and managed setting, has been well received by inhabitants and is relatively dense, at some 340 people per hectare.
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Contemporary Cases: Houses and New Grounds

With its low-lying geography highly susceptible to floods, the Netherlands is one of the few countries where human intervention has profoundly shaped the landscape. Even with a relatively flat terrain, there is a variety of landscapes ranging from the agricultural and town landscapes in Groningen, polders and inland seas along the North Sea coast, castles and lakes of the Vecht region, harbors and canals, major trading ports, to the lush meadows and iconic windmills that have become emblematic of the country’s landscape. The two projects of interest here, De Citadel in Almere and Schots 1 & 2 in Groningen, present novel, contemporary approaches towards the integration of housing and landscapes. They illustrate how housing not only engages the broader built or natural landscapes that they are in, but also how landscapes are activated materially and metaphorically within housing. Completed in 2006 and 2003 respectively, De Citadel and Schots 1 & 2 are representative of a historic shift in Dutch housing that occurred in 1995 when all state housing subsidies were rescinded, leaving the provision of housing primarily to the market. A related directive that was equally influential was the government’s Fourth Spatial Planning Report (1988) and its later supplement published in 1993 that called for the production of low-density housing, and more specifically, 800,000 of such dwelling units to be constructed between 1995 and 2005 in neighborhoods close to existing cities.
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This prompted housing associations, which were semi-public institutions with strong government ties, to become financially independent development agencies.
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With the move towards marketization, architects were also increasingly expected to cater to the demand for individual expression and growing social diversity, and to the desire for functionally integrated programs.

Designed by Christian de Portzamparc, De Citadel is located in Almere – the newest city in the Netherlands, built on polders less than 20 kilometers away from Amsterdam. As one of the main cities in the Amsterdam metropolitan area, Almere is also part of the Randstad conurbation, the urban region in the shape of a crescent linking The Hague, Rotterdam, Utrecht, and Amsterdam that collectively encircles a green area known as the Green Heart. Unlike other metropolitan areas in Europe, there is no dominant core within this polycentric area. Instead, functions are spread out across the four largest Dutch cities as well as several medium-sized cities between them. In Amsterdam, a growing population due to immigration flows from the Mediterranean, and especially from the former Dutch colony of Suriname in the 1970s and 1980s,
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prompted the government to develop the groeikernen or growth center of Almere to increase the housing stock with some state funding.
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Akin to the new town strategy adopted in the United Kingdom, the aim was to create a complementary core within commuting distance to the larger metropolitan centers, thereby relieving the pressures in the major cities and encroachment on the Green Heart. Almere was therefore initially conceived of as a residential suburb comprising several semi-separate nuclei or districts and without a need for a large-scale commercial center. By 1991, however, this bedroom community function was no longer viable as the population had expanded to 100,000; so the municipality of Almere decided to create a fully-fledged city center in 1994.
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Almere’s city center, located in the district of Almere Stad, was designed by OMA which proposed a radical approach of vertically integrating public space, retail, leisure, and residential uses on top of the existing infrastructure in a compact and dense manner. In addition, OMA’s winning scheme in 1999 sought to recreate a medieval atmosphere by deviating from the orthogonal grid structure; the urban blocks were intentionally displaced at odd angles and a curved ground plane was introduced. Through a series of negotiations with the developers – Blauwhoed Eurowoningen and M.A.B., which specialized in housing and inner-city projects respectively – the finalized master plan also ensured the continuity of the grid across the blocks and the ground plane, and the creation of a vista allowing views to the water. Within this public-private development of commercial, cultural, entertainment/leisure, and housing projects, a cast of international architects were assembled to undertake various parts of the scheme, such as Kazuyo Sejima for a new theater and arts center, William Alsop for the Almere Urban Entertainment Center, OMA for a new cinema at Block 6, De Architekten Cie, René van Zuuk, and Claus en Kaan for housing along the waterfront, transforming this new city center into a showcase of architectural pieces. In particular, Block 1 situated right at the heart of this plan was entrusted to Christian de Portzamparc.

Occupying a full block measuring 130 meters by 130 meters, the project has a total built area of 45,000 square meters, and is divided into four sections by pedestrian paths that preserve the underlying integrity of the urban grid as well as OMA’s proposed layout. In keeping with OMA’s intention, De Citadel is a relatively dense project, at 29 dwelling units per hectare or approximately 100 people per hectare. Physically, the curved ground plane cuts through the project, separating the underground world of public transit, automobiles, and parking from the two floors of commercial activities experienced at the street level. Floating immediately above this plinth of shops and leisure programs is the world of habitation, with terraced housing bordering a central garden of sorts. Collectively, this stratification of programs in conformance to OMA’s urban design guidelines creates a massive ‘citadel’ or fortress complex, reminiscent of the medieval castles and fortresses in the neighboring Vecht region, rising above the verdant countryside. Here, landscape is not just evoked by this parallel with the famous Vecht scenery, but presents itself almost quite literally as a cut through the layers of the earth: emerging from the caverns and networks of the underground to a porous stratum of activity that is symbolically demarcated from the living world above by a highly articulated façade. The façade pattern, derived from traditional Siennese brickwork, represents a tectonically extruded ‘bedrock’ undergirding the artificial ‘ground’ plane above. Apart from these gestures, another design feature alluding to the rivers and significance of water in the Dutch landscape is the array of black and white mosaic tiles in sinuous curves, laid on the interior plazas and courts within the shopping blocks.

At the pedestrianized shopping street level, the four main circulation routes widen towards the intersection, creating a plaza and nexus of activity while simultaneously, in de Portzamparc’s words, “avoid[ing] the wall effect”.
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Every unit faces onto the pedestrian areas, clad in a double-storey structure of steel and glass that might seem repetitive but in fact allows for creative storefront displays, distinguishing one from another. Rising above the corner at this intersection is a six-storey residential tower supported on stilts – the only landmark in the undulating meadow – surrounded by two- to three-storey townhouses, in the vein of Dutch row houses’ local modern block typology familiar to the place. The townhouses are distinguished by a palette of solid white, brown, or yellow wash, and are stepped in and out along the edge of the access path, creating a dynamic façade underscoring the playfulness and vibrancy of this young city. There are 46 of these townhouse units in eight different unit types, while the six-storey tower contains another six identical units, each occupying an entire floor. All 52 dwelling units are 100 percent owned and constitute 8,000 square meters in built area, and are typically occupied by young families. Access to the central meadow and the bridges crossing the four sectors is restricted to the residents, while public access to this green space is confined to a cantilevered deck serviced by a café offering views to the meadow and a brief respite from the retail activities below. Looking out to the meadow from within one of the apartments, one is literally transported to a bucolic world akin to the pastoral Dutch countryside, recreating a landscape to be admired rather than for functional use.

Further north in the historic city of Groningen, the Schots 1 & 2 project presents a slightly different engagement between housing and landscapes. Located in the CiBoGa terrain, an urban renewal project comprising Circus, Boden, and Gasterrein at the edge of downtown Groningen, Schots 1 & 2 are among 13 schotsen – compact residential blocks with collective internal courtyards – in the master plan proposed by S333. Covering an area of 14 hectares, the CiBoGa terrain was a former industrial site sandwiched between the Noorderplantzoen city park and the Oosterhamrikkanaal waterway. The master plan, which was undertaken in 1996 and slated to be completed in 2014, aimed to connect these two landscape elements through the mixed-use neighborhood, including capping the polluted ground with underground parking, reusing the industrial buildings for public programs, creating 900 residential units that would support a live/work environment, introducing retail and collective services on site, and, more importantly, establishing a “strong, clear identity for the landscape and public spaces”.
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Following their work on the master plan, S333 was commissioned in 1998 to design the first phase of this redevelopment project– Schots 1 & 2.

In contrast to De Citadel, which was undertaken by a private real estate developer in a public-private partnership, Schots 1 & 2 was taken on by a development consortium of private organizations including ING Vastgoed, Amstelland Onkwikkeling, Bouwbedrijf Moes BV, and Amvest Vastgoed, together with Groningen’s largest housing association, Nijestee Vastgoed, which supplies some 13,000 rental housing units in the city.
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Given this social agenda, 30 percent of the 149 rental units in the project were thus designated as social housing. From the outset, S333 pursued two key strategies: first, they sought to elevate the role of context, nature, and urban ecology in re-evaluating, re-interpreting, and re-organizing dense urban neighborhoods; and second, they attempted to create a “multi-layering of activities and landscape”, somewhat similar to the stratification at De Citadel, to offer a compelling alternative to the traditional urban block typology.
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In essence, landscape and ecology were central to the design considerations and outcomes in this project. Besides treating and sealing the previously polluted ground with underground parking, S333 also had to work within the municipality’s regulation for a car-free zone throughout the site, where parking is capped at a ratio of one parking space for every two dwelling units. Further, apart from creating a landscape link between the city park and the canal, the site is also conceived of as a buffer or transition zone between the historic city fabric to the south, and the twentieth-century housing types to the north, where the schots, or literally ‘ice floes’, float within this open landscape.

Schots 1 & 2 have distinct site conditions that have had an influence on their resultant forms. Schots 1 is located at the intersection of two main streets – Boterdiep and Korreweg – and occupies a single urban block. Schots 2 is separated from Schots 1 by a pedestrianized shopping street in between, and sits in a much larger urban block that has also retained some of the existing, one- to two-storey Dutch row houses along the eastern and northern edges. As such, this two-part ‘megaform’ extends itself horizontally while working to densify existing fabric, beginning with a three-storey limb of terraced houses on the eastern side of Schots 2 that slopes up towards four storeys as it wraps around the corner before it folds along the western edge adjoining the southern terraced limb that likewise starts off as a two-storey limb of terraced houses that rises up to three storeys as it wraps around the western edge, defining the shopping street together with the four-storey limb that it meets seamlessly. Across the lively ground-floor public realm that is created by the shopping and community amenities, Schots 1 continues the building topography with a three-storey bar mirroring the pedestrianized façade for Schots 2 that breaks at a key moment where it adjoins a C-shaped limb and ascends into an eight-storey tower. To accommodate the awkward site, the two building limbs similarly twist and turn in ways that continue to define the perimeter of the block. Like the three-storey bar that it grafts upon, the four-storey C-shaped structure fronting the arterial street of Boterdiep has two additional eight-storey ‘outgrowths’, effectively demarcating the ‘peaks’ within what the architects have termed as a “volumetric landscape”.
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The notion of landscape is also incorporated through the provision of an array of functional outdoor spaces, such as courtyards, collective roof gardens, vertical gardens, patios, and winter gardens. The gravel-covered courtyards are shaped by the arms of housing and shops embracing these internal collective spaces that remain accessible to the public, albeit through discrete openings that maintain a degree of intimacy within them. Few trees are planted within the sprawling, terraced courtyard of Schots 2, generating a space that seeks to bring nature into human habitation but is easily maintained for a high degree of use and pedestrian traffic. In fact, the communal courtyard in Schots 2 has become a popular recreational spot for the residents, with the gravel appreciated for its practicality in the rainy weather as compared to a surface of grass and mud. Gravel is also used as a roof surface material across the S-shaped limb of Schots 2, and the four-storey bridge of the C-shaped component in Schots 1, juxtaposed with patches of green on the collective roof gardens. These landscape surfaces thus act as green roofs for the city, with watering systems integrated into the building. With the eight-storey abutments on Schots 1, the vertical surface afforded by the increased building height also offered an opportunity for greening in the form of climbers such as ivy.

With regard to its façades, Schots 1 is clad entirely in glass with varying levels of transparency to endow it with more of an urban character, while Schots 2 is clad with western red-cedar boarding, punctuated only by full-length glass doors and windows. Despite the contrasting materials, the ‘megaform’ projects a coherent form not only through the play with volumes, but also the adoption of a common design principle where the façades for both sections would comprise an irregular alternation of openings and closed areas, thereby concealing the individual units from the exterior. To inject a sense of warmth to Schots 1, the fibre-cement panels on the walls of the access areas were painted red, offering a contrast to the green glazed façades of the dwellings, creating the impression of a pixelated surface with the irregular sequence of openings and glazed glass panels. Together, Schots 1 & 2 offer a diversity of accommodations for a range of household types, including families with children, couples, the elderly, and students. This is reflected in the assortment of unit types, with three- to four-room single-storey apartments in Schots 1 and Schots 2 on the order of 87 to 135 square meters and 80 to 90 square meters respectively, and seven different types of terraced houses in Schots 2, ranging from two- to four-storey units accommodating five to seven rooms on the order of 90 to 158 square meters. Overall, the program is varied and apart from the 105 apartments and 44 houses, the project also includes one medical center, two supermarkets, eight shops, 300 parking spaces, and a plethora of landscape spaces. Clearly, apart from the emphasis on social and programmatic diversity, there is also a high intensity of use and density on the order of 114 dwelling units per hectare within this 1.3-hectare site.

Particular ensembles of houses and landscapes can be and have been used in national and regional circumstances to remake and restate terms of reference for modern mass housing, away from prevailing conditions. One such circumstance can be found in the broader Seoul Metropolitan area of South Korea, otherwise dominated by housing in the form of high-rise ‘towers in a park’, at least since they gained popular traction from the 1960s onwards. A project of note in the reaction to prevailing circumstances is Sanun Maeul in the Pangyo new area, dating from 2005 to 2010.
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This project is by the newly formed Land and Housing Corporation, a merger between the Korean Housing Corporation and Korean Land, both public companies engaged in property development and yet nowadays finding it difficult to compete in markets dominated by private entities. Designed by Kunwon, the project had two large objectives. One was to provide for and demonstrate the efficacy of more diversified publicly-sponsored housing. The other was to help make the Land and Housing Corporation more profitable and assist in defraying its large public debt. In a not uncommon trend elsewhere in the world, as South Koreans have become wealthier, the diversity of now active demand for housing has intensified away from the otherwise normal, high-rise apartments of modest size and accoutrements. At Sanun Maeul, the response was lower-density, multiple-unit housing and community center provision with a distinctive landscape setting. The project is comprised of 208 dwelling units on a six-hectare site on a relatively steep hillside, with units ranging in size from 131 to 208 square meters. Unlike many earlier housing projects in and around Seoul, the project cleverly engages with its site and internal spatial arrangements to establish meaningful connections with landscape in three different ways. The first is the building complex in its broader landscape of a hillside with a characteristic mountainous backdrop. The second involves buildings with landscapes in the form of outdoor terraces and newly-created grounds. The third is in the form of landscapes adjacent to buildings, both in a normal vegetated manner, as well as in the provision of unusual hardscapes and water gardens.

Trends, Consistencies, and Contexts

Various valences emerge in the inevitable ensemble of housing and landscape. Contrary to other tendencies towards higher densities in this volume, although not necessarily higher intensity, many of the projects in this chapter have been about relieving overcrowding in urban circumstances or, more specifically, towards bettering the relationship between housing and its immediate surroundings, especially with regard to the ready availability of light, air, vegetated open space and leisure time, as well as recreational opportunities. At root, or so it seems, this bettered relationship, along with accommodating people in more familiar or desirable and distinctive ways, has propelled the building of housing in landscapes into different relationships and colorations of emphasis. When it comes to the impact of connections and adjacencies – fundamental aspects of urban intensity – the less quotidian arrangement and sharp juxtaposition encountered in contemporary projects like De Citadel and Schots are pronounced and more so than in the past when both literal and metaphorical naturalization devoid of surprise was an aim. Along the way, the relationship between housing and landscape has gone from ‘town and country mergers’, to ‘dwelling in a garden setting’, to ‘building with landscape’ in a direct reciprocal manner, to ‘slabs and towers in a park’, and then on to embracing sentiments of a vernacular picturesque, outright domestication, and on to ‘landscapes both of and for the mind’.

Along the way, these valences and sentiments have been conjured up largely by relatively direct design operations, all focused on striking a particular relationship between building and landscape in an ensemble of dwelling. Included among these operations are conditions of juxtaposition where building is placed into a landscaped setting, or set adjacent to a landscape setting, as in, say, Sunnyside, New York, or where landscape is superimposed within a constructed setting in the case of courtyard housing and to some extent in the cases featured here in Almere and Groningen. This juxtaposition, in turn, can serve to physically or expressively integrate housing with landscape in a particular manner as at Tiburtino, or be about less connected yet proximal spatial reciprocity at, say, Greenbelt, Maryland, or in the first phase of Tuscolano. It can also involve and serve utilitarian needs, as at Römerstadt, as well as those that are more cerebral in inclination and sentiment, as in the later contemporary projects. Finally, it can also vary in spatial and other qualities within a single project, as at Sanun Maeul in South Korea.

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Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.