Udo Weilacher- Prof. Dr. ETH Zürich
- Professor (Full) at Technical University of Munich
Udo Weilacher
- Prof. Dr. ETH Zürich
- Professor (Full) at Technical University of Munich
Landscape Architecture and Transformation ... of cultural landscapes, e.g. urban environments, industrial brownfields
About
246
Publications
71,208
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292
Citations
Introduction
Current institution
Additional affiliations
April 2009 - present
October 2002 - April 2009
Position
- Professor (Full)
Description
- 2006 - 2008 dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Landscape Sciences at Leibniz University Hannover
October 2002 - April 2009
Education
March 1997 - October 2001
ETH Zurich
Field of study
- Landscape Architecture
September 1989 - June 1990
November 1986 - April 1993
Publications
Publications (246)
Der Gartenkünstler Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell (1750 – 1823) war ein Genie seiner Zeit. Die Welt, in der er seine Kunst ausübte, war eine andere als heute. Nimmt man jedoch das Werk von Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell ein wenig näher in Augenschein, lassen sich aus ihm durchaus zukunftsweisende Impulse für die Landschaftsarchitektur des 21. Jahrhundert...
The low‐lying, arid coastal regions of the Southern Mediterranean Basin, extending over 4,600 km, face daunting sea level rise and hydroclimatic changes due to shifting weather patterns. The impact of these factors on coastal urban buildings and infrastructure must be better understood. Alexandria, a historic and densely populated port city in Egyp...
Several North African coasts, including low-lying sandy and deltaic areas, are at high risk of coastal hazards due to increased climatic fluctuations. Alexandria, a historic and densely populated Mediterranean port city that is representative of several coastal cities in North Africa, has experienced over 280 building collapses near its shorelines...
The low-lying, arid coastal regions of the Southern Mediterranean basin, extending over 4600 km, face daunting sea level rise and hydroclimatic changes due to shifting weather patterns. The impacts of the above on coastal urban buildings and infrastructure still need to be more qualified and understood. Alexandria, a historic and densely populated...
„Die 26 in diesem Buch zusammengestellten Artikel von Dieter Kienast eröffnen einen Blick hinter die Kulissen der zehn Thesen. Sie offenbaren einen reichen theoretischen Fundus, der für die Entwicklung zukünftiger Landschaftsarchitektur von weitreichender Bedeutung sein wird.“ Mehr als zwei Jahrzehnte nach der Erstveröffentlichung der Textsammlung...
A survey based on the City Development Strategy for Sustainable Development criterion, assessing the inhabitants' perceptions of the degeneration and transformation of Alexandria's most iconic and historic urban waterway, Mahmoudieh Canal.
The city as a special type of landscape: On the future role of landscape architecture in urban development.
Waterways’ regeneration is proposed as one of the main mitigation strategies for addressing the alarming water budget deficit in the populous, hyper-arid Egypt, relying primarily on the Nile as its most important water source. The latter is increasingly under pressure from a rise in internal consumption, droughts, and upstream damming. We perform h...
Interview mit Landschaftsarchitekt Günther Vogt in "nodium. Zeitschrift des Alumni-Clubs Landschaft der TU München" #14
Viele schätzen die Alpen als attraktive Natur- und Freizeitlandschaft, aber die
wenigsten wissen, dass die Alpen auch industriell intensiv genutzt werden
- insbesondere durch die Schwerindustrie. Durch den globalen Strukturwandel
in der Industrieproduktion fallen aktuell hunderte von Stahl-, Chemie- und Zementwerken
brach, was die benachbarten...
The city of Alexandria struggles with growing pains. In its search for solutions, the Egyptian government has embarked on several grand projects to solve severe urban problems by transforming an important part of its once most valuable blue infrastructure. The most challenging of these is the “Artery of Hope” project, involving a 21-kilometer secti...
In the 21st century, the garden as a living component in the ‘network metropolis’, and gardening itself, especially ‘urban gardening’ is experiencing a remarkable renaissance.
Today, there is a need to carefully investigate the transformation of Alpine industrial landscapes because since the 1980s the structural change in global industrial production resulted in an economic crisis and the collapse of many heavy industries all over Europe and much of the Global North.
Today it should be very clear that as long as art is banned from garden and landscape, neither man nor nature is secure. Art in landscape is desperately needed as a powerful tool for creating and communicating knowledge beyond the traditional limits of classical science.
In 2007, six professors in space-related specialist fields from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland took the initiative and founded the International Doctoral College (IDK) “Spatial Research Lab.” In the opinion of the participating professors, particularly at the doctoral level there was a need for additional impulses to extend the subject and perso...
2007 haben sechs Professoren raumrelevanter Fachrichtungen aus Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz die Initiative ergriffen und das Internationale Doktorandenkolleg (IDK) „Forschungslabor Raum“ gegründet. Namentlich auf der Stufe des Doktorats bedurfte es aus Sicht der beteiligten Professoren zusätzlicher Impulse zur Erweiterung des fachlichen...
The symposium LOST & FOUND (March 1st and 2nd, 2021) marks the end of a 3-year Interreg research project on the transformation of industrial brownfields in the Alps. At the symposium, the specific approach of the trAILs project will be presented and discussed with experts and project partners from renowned European research and planning institution...
It seems, that sufficient knowledge has been gained by now to solve complex transformation problems in postindustrial areas. However, this assumption is not quite right. Although each industrial production process, whether aluminum smelting, cement, or steel production, is technically almost identical and requires the same infrastructure, the ecolo...
Final report of a 3-year research project (Interreg, Alpine Space) on the transformation of Alpine industrial landscapes
The challenges of spatial development in Europe can only be met through transdisciplinary cooperation. In a continent that is dynamically changing and undergoing complex processes of transformation, new and integrated methods for planning and design are needed to strengthen cohesion between Europe’s countries and regions. This book focuses on curre...
Only those who understand that landscape is a complex spatial system, and how the essence of complexity and the laws of landscape are made up, will be able to participate in shaping landscape in the Anthropocene as a viable network of living environments. The knowledge of these aspects is also the condition for the successful crossing of borders fo...
Since the middle of the 19 th century, when the term 'landscape architecture' began to replace the hitherto common term 'garden art' , the garden as a work of art and gardening, understood as a predominantly decorative activity, stood in the critical discussion about the future of the metropolises. It was not only architects and urban planners who...
Professor Dr. Udo Weilacher has always been interested in different relevant aspects of landscape architecture and produced many publications with great influence. Under the guidance of Peter Latz, he early on in his study gained a deep insight into the transformation of industrial landscapes. Today he plays an important role in the promotion of st...
Die 12te Ausgabe des Alumni-Magazins, herausgegeben vom Alumni-Club Landschaft der TU München (www.acl.wzw.tum.de), enthält zahlreiche Beiträge aus aktueller Forschung und Lehre in Landschaftsarchitektur und Landschaftsplanung sowie viele Berichte ehemaliger Absolvent*innen und ausführliche Informationen zum Symposium über „Grüne Infrastruktur“, ve...
The rapid structural change in the global exploitation of resources and their primary processing is causing a widespread and unprecedented growth of post-mining landscapes in both developed and developing countries. Whether performed on surface or underground, mineral extraction regularly leads to radical and permanent alterations of cultural lands...
Landschaft ausschließlich wissenschaftlich-objektiv oder rational-pragmatisch zu betrachten, führt häufg dazu, dass das eigentliche Wesen von Natur und Umwelt, die Poesie des Ortes unerkannt bleiben. „Wir sind gezwungen, erfnderisch zu sein, denn die Landschaft von morgen ist ein Rätsel, und die Landschaft von gestern kann man nicht einfach rekonst...
The influence of digitalization on landscape architecture ranges from major changes of human perception caused by globally disseminated stereotypical landscape images to the sophisticated digital technology in landscape design offices that promise a more accurate comprehension of complex natural systems. Does the digital high-tech equipment really...
Since a few decades in many European mountain regions a process of economic restructuring is leading to the decline of traditional heavy and manufacturing industry. The issue of brownfield transformation is therefore becoming a crucial topic in the sustainable development of peripheral and rural areas too, although not yet officially recognized. Th...
Prof. Dr. Udo Weilacher, landscape architect at the Technical University of Munich explains his view on landscape architecture in the Anthropocene.
Porosity is a substantial quality of a structurally stabilized living environment. Porosity without structure will not survive. Structure in terms of communication and communication in terms of the exchange of energy, matter, and information - that’s what all landscape need.
In 2019, the Chair of Landscape Architecture and Industrial Landscape (LAI) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) celebrates its 10th anniversary. The book illustrates the achievements in the past five years of research and teaching in cooperation with the team of assistants, many students and numerous project partners in the local, national...
The decline of traditional heavy and manufacturing industry is occurring nowadays even in peripheral and less urbanized regions, such as the Alps. Here, in the so-called "green heart of Europe", this process is leaving behind impressive former productive landscapes of relevant size and complexity: Alpine Industrial Landscapes (AILs).
In May 2018, James Corner was awarded the honorary doctorate (Dr. honoris causa) by the Department of Architecture at the Technical University of Munich TUM. He is the first landscape architect ever who is granted that academic honor at the TUM. In the interview with Udo Weilacher, James Corner explains his view on the transformative power of lands...
Sculpture parks, even if they are located in rural regions, are operating under urban conditions where clear boundaries between nature and culture do not exist anymore. Art is desperately needed as a producer of a relevant, different kind of knowledge, and sculpture parks can act as outdoor laboratories, where this new knowledge is generated. But a...
Ale tak dlugo jak parki rzezby sa po prostu salonem pieknosci cywilizacji pod golym niebem, ani sztuka, any cywilizacja nie sa bezpieczne.
Journal Name: LAF Landscape Architecture Frontiers. ISSN 2096-336X_
Landscape has various economic values. However, Udo Weilacher, the interviewee, argues that most drivers of the global economic development do underestimate the wide range of non-economic values of landscape. He points out that public awareness on the values of landscape and envir...
What exactly is the meaning of commons in modern urban open space systems? What role does landscape architecture have to play in the creation of these public areas, also known as ‘Allmende’ in German? When approaching this question, it can be helpful to bear in mind that the city is a special type of landscape, a particularly complex and vibrant sp...
This is what the present discussion of progressive environmental aesthetics is all about: sensitizing people's aesthetic perceptions of the different qualities in their natural and built environment. If this aim could be achieved in future through co-operation between art, landscape architecture, architecture and all the other sister disciplines, a...
Landscape Architects need to learn what it means today, given the current social, economic and ecological conditions, to rediscover and reinterpret the laws of landscape. Instead of permanently asking for new formulas, new concepts, designs and neologisms for landscape we should finally be a lot more forceful in implementing the well known laws of...
Rapid urban densification and transformation, severe global climate change, strong demographic changes, intensified migration tendencies, increasing digitalization and so on. Landscape Architecture today is facing the challenge that landscape as a man-made system of spaces is getting extremely complex. Appropriate design and planning strategies hav...
In the Anthropocene, the age of mankind, the clear boundaries between nature and culture have disappeared. Complex global problems that can no longer be solved with a purely technological-scientific approach and art is desperately needed as a producer of an important new kind of knowledge. In this respect the statement by the American philosopher J...
English:
27 renowned landscape architects from 12 different nations comment in short essays from their personal perspective on the popular conversion project in New York and add with their insightful texts to the professional discourse about the future transformation of urban infrastructure in general and the approach by James Corner in particular...
abstract English: 27 renowned landscape architects from 12 different nations comment in short essays from their personal perspective on the popular conversion project in New York and add with their insightful texts to the professional discourse about the future transformation of urban infrastructure in general and the approach by James Corner in pa...
Porosität ist also eine essentielle Eigenschaft von Raumgrenzen, die in Natur und Landschaft immer vorhanden ist und gewährleistet, dass Landschaftsteilräume untereinander als auch mit der Umgebung in Verbindung stehen. Geologen sprechen von „offener Porosität“ im Gegensatz zu „geschlossener Porosität“, die auch als „Dead-End-Porosität“ bezeichnet...
Udo Weilacher interviews the renowned landscape historian John Dixon Hunt from the University of Pennsylvania who shares his views on landscape history, theory and current landscape architecture
Porosity is an essential property of spatial boundaries, which is always present in nature and the landscape, and ensures that separate spatial units of landscape are connected to each other and to the environment. Geologists refer to “open porosity” as opposed to “closed porosity”, which is also known as “dead-end porosity”. In landscape architect...
Landscape is not an infrastructure that can be planned in sectors. But it is a compound of natural and artificial, infra- and suprastructures closely interwoven to form a living whole. The lecture at Landezine LIVE in Ljubljana/ Slopvenia 2017 sheds some light on this hypothesis.
The volume offers a survey of the contribution of German literature and culture to the evolution of ecological thought. As the field of ecocritical theory and practice is rapidly expanding towards transnational and global dimensions, it seems nevertheless necessary to consider the distinct manifestations of ecological thought in various cultures. I...
The 'Spatial Research Lab' international doctoral college, which Professor Dr. Bernd Scholl initiated in 2007, is going into the third round 2017.
Radio-Feature von Gerwig Epkes (SWR2). Im angloamerikanischen Raum gibt es schon seit langem das Genre "Nature Writing". Die Naturerfahrung wird in eine ästhetisch erlebbare Form überführt. Die Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe kombiniert in der Ausstellung "Unter freiem Himmel" 53 Landschaftsbilder aus den Jahren 1410/20 bis 2007 mit Texten, die pro...
Im Zuge aktueller Debatten um die Nachhaltigkeit von Stadt rückt aber das Gärtnern, etwa als „urban gardening“ wieder verstärkt in den Mittelpunkt des Interesses der Landschaftsarchitektur des 21. Jahrhunderts. Ist dieser Trend richtungsweisend oder nur eine Modeerscheinung, Ausdruck einer romantischen Vorstellung vom Rückzug aus zweckrational gepl...
In den vergangenen fünf Jahrzehnten hat sich die Landwirtschaft grundlegend verändert und entwickelte sich zur kapitalintensiven, mechanisierten Agrarindustrie. Die hoch technisierte Landbewirtschaftung hat gravierende Folgen für das Bild heutiger Kulturlandschaften und die Klagen in der Bevölkerung über ästhetisch reizlose Monokulturen häufen sich...
Interview with Kongjian Yu on the essence of landscape architecture
A landscape is a complex network of structures and if we try to cut this network into functional parts, we put the survivability of that super-organism at high risk. A landscape is not an infrastructure that can be planned in sectors, but it is a compound of natural and artificial, infra- and suprastructures forming a living whole. It is our task a...
The publication Unter freiem Himmel presents 53 top-class landscape paintings from seven centuries. 53 notable authors, journalists, intellectuals, art scholars, and natural scientists have written poems, stories, and essays that make it possible to take a highly inspiring stroll through the history of art. The river landscapes and plains, high mou...
Since the 15th century, when gardens turned into independent works of art, plans were considered to be one of the most important media of communication in landscape architecture. 500 years ago, architects and garden artists showed their visions in handmade, artfully designed plan documents of a world, where the beautiful and the useful exist in per...
Unser Lebensraum unterliegt einem permanenten Wandel: Tiefgreifende Veränderungen in den Bereichen Mobilität, Umwelt, Demografie, Energie und nicht zuletzt Klima erfordern zunehmend neue Strategien und Konzepte bei der räumlichen Planung und der Transformation unserer urbanen Landschaften.
Diese Publikation präsentiert tragfähige innovative und gan...
At the international doctoral college “Spatial Research Lab”, years of experience has shown that the far-reaching transformation processes in the landscape—and urban areas are of course considered part of it—can only be overcome by means of interdisciplinary cooperation. No individual discipline can master the consequences of these changes single-h...
Poster for the European Conference on Ecological Restauration 2016, TU Munich
Landscape is no longer perceived as a green total work of art, but it is a complex living organism. It has to change constantly in order to stay alive but it must not loose its structural integrity. The existence of complex networked structures is therefore one of the most important characteristics of landscape. These structures secure stability an...
Warum interessieren wir uns in der Landschaftsarchitektur für die erfinderische Analyse? Weil die Landschaft, die uns alltäglich umgibt, unendlich reich an Informationen ist und weil es immer viel mehr wahrzunehmen gibt als man selbst jemals wahrnehmen kann. Wir sehen nur, was wir zu sehen gelernt haben. Unser Wissen über Landschaft bleibt also ste...
Warum interessiert man sich in der Landschaftsarchitektur für die erfinderische Analyse? Weil die Landschaft, die uns alltäglich umgibt, unendlich reich an Informationen ist und weil es immer viel mehr wahrzunehmen gibt als man selbst jemals wahrnehmen kann.
The future of humanity will no doubt be an urban future. And gardening, as one of the themes discussed in debates about the sustainability of cities and the landscape, for example in the context of 'urban gardening', is once again becoming a focus of interest for landscape architecture in the 21st-century. Is this trend pointing the way or is it ju...
Vor über 20 Jahren verfasste der Landschaftsarchitekt Dieter Kienast "10 Thesen zur Landschaftsarchitektur". Das bewusst provokative Manifest hat nichts an Aktualität verloren.
The European Landart Network (ELAN) is an excellent platform for intercultural exchange, based on art as the appropriate communication mode, but art alone can not prevent the negative consequences, caused by the economical, ecological and social changes in the developed countries. Moreover, many artists rightly refuse to achieve any ecological, eco...
Wenn wir einmal darüber nachdenken, welches in der heutigen Zeit die zentralen Orte des kollektiven Gedenkens, die wichtigsten Stätten der gemeinsamen Erinnerung sind, dann drängt sich rasch die nahe liegende Erkenntnis auf, dass der Boden das wertvollste Gedächtnis der Erde ist. Und die Landschaft, verstanden als der sichtbare Teil der Erdoberfläc...
Questions
Question (1)
Spaces under big bridges seem to have very specific "qualities", especially for people living in larger cities. Many fear these locations because of their dark and dull atmosphere. Others use these spaces like valuable niches in the urban fabric because nobody really seem to take notice of these areas. I wonder if there is any focussed research on this subject in architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, urban sociology, psychology etc. etc.. Thanks for any hints!
