Course Description

Elective studios offering students an opportunity to explore particular topics in landscape, often in collaboration with architecture and community and regional planning graduate students. Fifteen laboratory hours a week for one semester. May be repeated for credit when the topics vary.

Project/Studio Description

Reclaiming the Post-Industrial Landscape of Mexico City
The Ex Refineria de Azcapotzalco.

The Studio
Professor Mario Schjetnan

Reclaiming and recycling former industrial sites is becoming one of the most important activities of landscape architects or "landscape urbanists" in the early XXI century. The term "manufactured sites" coined by Niall Kirkwood underlines the notions of new attitudes and theory in technology, science and design towards the condition of post - industrial landscapes in many of our cities. The new attitude, as expressed in several exemplary projects around the world, demonstrates that remediation per se of abandoned, contaminated or despoiled sites, devoid of clear intentions and programs for reuse with intelligent proposals of landscape design are actually less expensive, faster and urbanistically more successful. In other words, it is imperative to approach the site and its conditions in an integral way, where the teams of scientists, environmental engineers, and landscape architects and urbanists determine in conjunction the level of contamination, the remediation strategy, and the theory of reuse or conservation of preexisting structures, concomitant with the landscape concept.

The Studio will look at the abandoned site of the former PEMEX oil refinery of Mexico City, in the area of Azcapotzalco. The studio will be developed in two phases: the first phase will deal with the conditions of the site, its precedents, history and urban considerations in order to develop alternatives of reuse and a conceptual master plan. The second phase will elaborate at the level of design a portion or element within the master plan.

The Studio class will travel to Mexico City in the early part of the semester in order to understand the site, region and its possibilities and relationship in the metropolitan area.

The Site

The Azcapotzalco oil refinery of Mexico City (MC) produced for half a century (from the 1940's to the 1990's) the oils and gasoline for the motorcars and trucks that helped move the circulation of people and goods in a period of extreme rapid expansion of the Metropolitan Area (MCMA). In that period, the MCMA grew from 1million inhabitants to 16 million. In 1992, the Oil Refinery was closed down, due to the pressure of surrounding communities, who perceived it as potential threat to life and security and to the intensive air pollution emanating from processes that became old in contrast to new technologies and demand for better and cleaner products. Azcapotzalco is a district of Mexico City with a long history of settlement before the Aztec dominance, evolving into cattle farms and milk production in the XIX and early part of the XX centuries. The area became an important industrial sector in Mexico City from the 1940's to the present and is in a process of transformation, as many of the industries have closed, becoming obsolete or have been moved to other areas of the country.

The refinery site is a flat terrain of around 100 hectares, in a clearly strategic location, sitting close to the central part of the city and with excellent communications of primary roads and rapid transit (metro), and served by electricity and other infrastructure.

As in other sites of closed refineries in other parts of the world, the soils are contaminated and need to be "remediated"; that is, a thorough process of decontamination, cleaning and capping has to be devised, designed and established in order to be able to "recycle" and reuse the site contemplating the future habitation in conditions of health and security.

The Seminar
Professor Lynn Osgood

In parallel with the design investigation of the post-industrial urban landscape, a series of seven seminar classes with be offered to help frame the larger question of praxis in contemporary design. Praxis here will be looked at not simply as an application of theory in design work, but as the educator Paulo Freire defines, a cycle of action and reflection that is creative, intentional and iterative in nature.

Beginning with a historical look at the early shift into the modern era of design, the series will look at both the sites and media of exploration that define landscape architecture as a discipline. Individual seminars will focus on topics that cross the disciplines of architecture, planning, and urban design, but that also take on unique characteristics based upon the landscape medium. And just as designs must range from the small to the large scale, we too will ask how larger trends within the field can inform the specific design decisions for individual projects.

The series of seminars will address:

• Contemporary theory - modern beginnings
• Contemporary theory - postmodern trends and evolving ideas of praxis
• Concepts of nature/Nature and culture/Culture
• Representation, mapping and production
• Temporality and Narrative
• Materiality and Phenomenology
• Evolving understandings of 'site' and 'place'

Course Structure

The organization of the course will involve individual and group work and investigations of both research and design. The course will be phased with sequences of research and design alternating twice through the semester. Information from research will be shared between the students at class pin-ups, informal presentations, and seminars/talks, while individual design proposals are being pursued.

Time Commitment

Class times as stated in the Graduate Catalog, and as much additional time as necessary to meet the objectives of the course. Participation and attendance in all studio reviews and pin-ups are required. Absences will be accepted only with appropriate documentation from a physician.