Learning from COVID-19: the role of architecture in the experience of urban landscapes
Metadata
Show full item recordAuthor
Rodríguez Iturriaga, MartaEditorial
Firenze University
Materia
Urban Landscape Architecture Experience of landscape Existential space City-landscape
Date
2021-07-26Referencia bibliográfica
Rodríguez Iturriaga, M. (2021). Learning from COVID-19: The Role of Architecture in the Experience of Urban Landscapes. Ri-Vista. Research for Landscape Architecture, 19(1), 122-137. [https://doi.org/10.36253/rv-10182]
Sponsorship
Training Programme for University Teaching Staff (FPU) of the Spanish Ministry of Universities FPU16/02495Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic, through lockdowns and mobility restrictions, has created an atmosphere
of global reflection towards contemporary urban landscapes. Architecture is an essential
component in them and determines, to a large extent, how building users perceive, interpret, and
value the surrounding environment. From an experiential and phenomenological perspective, and
taking into account the situations lived in 2020, the paper explores the existing relations between
architecture and urban landscape at three levels: first, the experience of the environment from
the architectural space — namely, the home —; second, the experience of the ‘interior urban landscape’
at street level; and finally, the experience of the ‘exterior urban landscape’ from city fringes
or vantage points that provide vast prospects. The article advocates a holistic understanding of
landscapes in building and urban design processes and suggests landscape architecture can offer
a valuable apprenticeship in this sense. A sustained interplay between those disciplines shaping
the built environment is decidedly needed. The paper concludes by pointing out that landscape,
given its integrating and all-encompassing condition, could articulate the entire set of municipal
urban policies through a transdisciplinary ‘city-landscape’ plan.