FROM THE BIOLOGICAL TO THE GEOLOGICAL STAN ALLEN If mere survival, mere continuance, i of interest, then the hhardor sorts of rocks, such as granite, have to be put at the top of, th ‘the rack’s way of staying in the game is different from the way of living things. The rock, we may say, resists ehange: it stays put, lunchanging. The living thing escapes change either by correcting change or changing itself to meet change or by incorporating change int its own being. Gregory Bateson istas the most successful among macroscopic entities... But For the past two decades, the dominant working metaphor in advanced architecture has been biological: a desire to make architecture more lifelike, that is to say, more fluid, adaptable, and responsive to change. Working from D'Arcy Wentworth ‘Thompson's description of natural form as a “diagram of forces,” advanced computer technology has been used to simulate the active forces that shape biological form. These contemporary strategies of animate form go beyond the bio-morphism of the 1950s and ‘60s by suggesting that the architect does not so much imitate the forms of nature as model the natural process of form generation. With contemporary digital technology, for example, it is now possible to grow or evelve new formal configura- tions in response to specific forces and constraints: structural, climatic, or programmatic. While this has produced compelling formal results, there are conceptual and procedural limits. The design techniques used to generate these new buildings may be dynamic, but the buildings themselves are static—if they move at all, they move very slowly. The forms generated may resemble nature, but they retain little of the performative or adaptive complexity of life itself. Old metaphors of building as body persist, and the potential of metabolic exchange or co-evolution with a shifting context is limited. Moreover, despite advances in fab- rication technology, a large gap still exists between the fluid, curvilinear forms generated by the software and the intractabil- ity of materials and construction logistics. Buildings—like the ground—are hard, stubborn, and slow. Arising out of similar ambitions, a parallel trend looks not to the biology of individual species but to the collective behavior of ecological systems as a model for cities, buildings, and land- scapes. Landscapes change and evolve, and they, too, are shaped by force and resistance working over time. But the rate of change ina landscape or an ecological system is far slower than that t Full model Analysis modelof an individual living body. Architecture is situated between the biological and the geological —slower than living beings but faster than the underlying geology. Resistance and change are both at work in the landscape: the hardness of the rock and the ‘fluid adaptability of living things. This interplay underscores the fact that all evolution is co-evolution; individual species and their environments change and evolve on parallel courses, constantly exchanging informa tion. Ecologies, unlike buildings, do not respect borders. Instead they range across territories and establish complex relations operating simultaneously at multiple scales, from microscopic ‘to regional. In the design of a city, landscape, or territory, the ‘question of process is shifted from design process—the short and limited province of the discipline —to the long life of a build ing, city, or landscape over time, enmeshed in complex social and cultural formations. ‘Throughout the decade of the 1990s, architects looked increasingly to landscape architecture —and later, to Landscape Urbanism—as modols for a productive synthesis of formal con: tinuity and programmatic flexibility.' Whereas an architect like Frank Gehry was primarily interested in the sculptural qualities of curvilinear building form, younger practitioners such as Foreign. Office Architects (FOA), MVRDV or UN Studio turned instead to the performative and organizational potential of landscape and infrastructure. This new interest in the ability of field-like organi- zations to distribute and channel the flows of energy, information, and people on-site— especially large-scale urban sites—coincided with the newfound potential of the computer to model complex surfaces. Common to landscape and architecture, warped or folded surfaces promised new forms of connectivity, novel programmatic configurations and a new aesthetics of smoothness. Architecture, which had traditionally been associated with the vertical plane and bounding partitions, dissolves into an extensive, horizontal field of interconnected surfaces. MVRDV's Villa VPRO, completed in 1997, appears as a simple stack of horizontal floor plates with minimal vertical enclosure. ‘The building elevation reveals the section of these horizontal surfaces, which warp and fold into one another, establishing continuity between the separate floors. The proposition of this project is that, within the deep section of these extended hori- zontal floors, a dense hive-like ecology will emerge over time as the building interacts with, and adapts to, the work-life of its inhabitants. The innovation of the project at the time was to claim that the building is not something that occupies the site but rather that the activity of the architect is to construct the site. Landscape, in this instance, implies process and change, not form: it cannot be designed and controlled as a totality but instead must be projected into the fture and allowed to grow in over time.* Adjacent to the Villa VPRO, MVRDV also built another small structure, for a media company. The RVU building is a simple bar embedded into the landscape. At the entrance, the green roof of the building establishes a smooth continuity withthe ground. It folds down to reveal the geometric form of the building against the soft contours of the landscape. While this building, with its extensive planting, appears more landscape- like, itis the larger, tougher Villa VPRO that behaves more like a landscape, creating unpredictable programmatic potentials and new models of connectivity. Designed at more or less the same time but finished five years later, FOA’s Yokohama Port Terminal is perhaps the most convincing realization of an architecture invested in the idea of landscape techniques working at the scale of a building. Indeed, Yokohama is nothing if not a constructed landscape, and it is not quite accurate to call ita building at all. As an object on site, the project has none of the vertical, iconic presence tradition: ally associated with building. The boundary between interior and exterior is fluid and permeable. What FOA understood better than anyone else at the time was that the 1995 competition pre sented the perfect fit between a program that involved managing the flows of goods and people and an emerging aesthetic of continu ous surfaces. The project functions at the level of infrastructure and public amenity, shaping and channeling the movement of passengers at the same time that it creates new public space at the city’s waterfront. The architects have literally constructed a new site. Working exclusively with a language of warped and folded surfaces, the project establishes a complex choreography of movement, service and public spaces. This is not a project that depends upon a palette of traditional landscape materials to establish connections with landscape practice. Instead FOA’s terminal operates almost entirely on the basis of the operative techniques of landscape design and the programmatic effects of continuous topological surfaces. Parallel to these architectural investigations of surface and constructed landscape, a number of innovative landscape archi: tects were exploring the potential of landscape architecture to revitalize the practices of urban design.’ Landscape Urbanism works with an extended notion of landscape that goes beyond the design of gardens and parks. Its ambitions are large-scale and synthetic, often directed at distressed and marginal zones of the city. The traditional tools of landscape architecture (including site ecology, surface preparation, planting regimes, and the design of public spaces) are expanded in scope and dimension to encompass extended urban sites. As such, Landscape Urbanism is particularly well suited to address the dispersed, horizontal condition of the American city. It is time-based and process oriented, operating of necessity on a long-term horizon of implementation. Finally, it encompasses highly collaborative practices and focuses almost exclusively on the public realm Recognizing that large-scale landscapes or urban territo- ries can never be precisely controlled, landscape architect James Corner has adopted Rem Koolhaas’ strategy of “irrigating the site with potential.” “Urban infrastructure,” Corner writes, “sows the seeds of future possibility, staging the ground for both eine anne