Infrastructure as landscape as architecture

Abstract

In a critical review this chapter shows how the Yokohama Ferry Terminal by Foreign Office Architects crossed the three distinct realms of ‘infrastructure’, ‘architecture’ and ‘landscape’. This key individual project dissolved disciplinary borders between the three disciplines and achieved new methodical grounds for design. It is a precedent in a general shift in the development of the design disciplines of the built environment. The single project shows how deep conceptual shifts affect the disciplinary assumptions that initially limited this task for architects–and how versatile the strategies of infrastructure and landscape are in architecture. While the Yokohama Ferry Terminal is at first sight simply a passenger terminal, it is also an infrastructural transport-related building, used most of the time as a garden-like public space. At first elaborating on definitions of the three terms ‘infrastructure’, ‘landscape’, and ‘architecture’, the article will question how plausible and useful these divisions between the categories are for designers, or if we should rather focus on the crossings of these divisions. A discipline that wants to be dynamic is to be explored at its edges as well as preserved in its core. Such crossings become especially relevant in ambitious projects. With this example at hand, this chapter explores the disciplinary framework and will touch upon design methodological definitions. The case study is valuable to show the full depth of field that architecture with landscape methods can have within contemporary architectural production and how landscape and infrastructure can merge in new kinds of public artifacts beyond object centered design. The themes that make the Yokohama Ferry Terminal’s form or ‘scape’ can be summarised under the term ‘flow’.