Landscape Tunings: An Urban Park at the Danube

(Paperback, English)

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Landscape Tunings maintains that landscape is more than ecology and technical performance; it is also an environment of paramount importance to ones dispositions and wellbeingan emotional space of social relevance, tuned with and for its communities. In this book, OFICINAA examines the design potentials of the Danube River as a civic anchor, a bioclimatic medium, and a space for collective imagination in the city of Ingolstadt, Germany.

Landscape Tunings: An Urban Park at the Danube explores the citys littoral landscapes with video-essays, drawings, walks, public installations, and exhibitionseach spotlighting the sensate-space where the city meets the Danubes edge. It then showcases the bottom-up and tactical design approaches of the Stadt Park Donau | Donau-Loop project, which aims to foster the spatial embodiment with the riverine environments facing the present challenges of the anthropogenic era. With contributions by Gnther Vogt, Andres Lepik, and Simone Schimpf, Landscape Tunings projects the role of littoral landscapes as a medium for the collective wellbeing of the city.

Flowing through ten countries, the Danube is one of the most international rivers in the world. Regardless of its scale, economic output, and ecological relevance, the Danubes landscapes act as cornerstones for civic interaction while touching numerous urban fabrics. Initiated in 2013, the Stadt Park Donau | Donau-Loop project in Ingolstadt derives from a three-year design study in collaboration with the various communities in the city. Rather than totalizing, and related to the key German concept of Stimmung (tuning of space), the design interventions are spatial tunings to foster community access, wonder and delight. These interventions intensify the particularities of the river landscapes with its distinct environments, and leverage the potentials of the riverbanks as a thick space in the pressing commitments to social wellbeing. The Stadt Park Donau | Donau-Loop project was exhibited at the Museum of Concrete Art and Design in Ingolstadt. The exhibition shared the multiple scopes and scales of the design, inviting the public to envision the Danubes inherent beauty as a spatial component in the urban fabric of one the fastest growing cities in Germany.

Reviews

"This catalog accompanies an exhibition at the Museum for Concrete Art in the summer of 2014 that presented the ideas of the design concept, "Stadt Park Donau - Donau-Loop," created in response to a study commissioned to investigate the potential development of the Danube River area in Ingolstadt, Germany. The project created a new riverine district that encompassed various landscapes along the river and connected them with the town and urban expansion, through "tunings" linked by a multimodal pathway, the Donau-Loop, along the river's edge that connects smaller spaces. The catalog documents the project and exhibition and includes an interview with the designers and essays on the history of the river and the project's scales, environments, and visual elements, along with maps, plans, photos, and art." --ProtoView

Author Bio

Silvia Benedito received a degree in architecture from the University of Coimbra, a degree in music from the Conservatory of Coimbra, Portugal, and a master degree in urban design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA. A former Senior Associate at James Corner Field Operations (NYC), Benedito is Assistant Professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where she investigates the role of atmospheres in the built environment. She is also co-coordinator of the Master Program for Art, Design and the Public Domain at the GSD. Benedito was awarded the MacDowell Colony fellowship, the Graham Foundation publication grant, the Luso-American Fellowship, the Gulbenkian Foundation grant, and the Fernando Tvora Prize from the Portuguese Institute of Architects. Benedito co-founded OFICINAA in 2010. Alexander Husler studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and architecture at the Technical University of Munich, Germany and holds a Master in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA. He worked at Hild & K, Munich, and at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), NYC. Husler taught at various international universities, such as the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Technical University of Munich, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design in Cambridge. Husler approaches design with an interdisciplinary mindset, with a particular interest on the subjective interactions of body and space, where he uses his education and training as a sculptor. Husler co-founded OFICINAA in 2010.