Field
operations (USA)
Stanley T. Allen (1956), James Corner (1961)
Stanley T. Allen (1956), James Corner (1961)
The
architect Stan Allen and the landscape artist-cum-town-planner James Corner
set up Field Operations in New York and Philadelphia in 1999. In violating
the theoretical divisions which carve up urban thinking, they formulate
and experiment with complex, dynamic and evolutive strategies which organize,
in both space and time, the many contemporary territorial issues (city-
and town-planning, landscape gardening and design, ecology, sociology, geography,
etc.). Their project to convert the banks of the North Delaware River, in
Philadelphia, proposes a flexible and adaptive grid which connects what
is built and what is not built, as well as the private and the public, and
city and river. Their Downsview Park proposition, involving an area of military
wasteland in northeastern Toronto, weaves together two primary systems,
circuits and flux, and over and beyond two visions of the city, as striated
and programmed territory and as new "nature". Their award-winning
project for the competition for converting the Fresh Kills Landfill, the
New York garbage dump on Staten Island, was based on the formulation of
a busy matrix of lines ("Threads"), surfaces ("Mats")
and "Clusters", capable of organizing an alternative landscape
on this repressed territory.