Sustaining Cities: Urban Policies, Practices, and Perceptions

Beyond Boundaries

95 Andrea Kahn, in “Defining Urban Sites,” contrasts the urban boundary conditions of a sixteenth-century sketch of Milan by Leonardo da Vinci to an historical eighteenth-century plan depicting an ideal Renaissance plan of Palmanuova. The Renaissance plan has a clear edge delineated by a heavy defensive boundary wall, while the Leonardo sketch has no clearly defined boundaries or edges. Although these two images convey different notions of representation (the former image is a plan, the latter an evocative sketch illustrating Leonardo’s imagined Milan), they reveal an important condition regarding the nature of boundaries. Kahn states “in Leonardo’s image no border divides site from situation.”1 There are two key components to this statement: one is the definition of the site by a boundary itself; the second is how that notion of site cannot be divorced from the activity, context, or network defined as the situation. By not limiting a site to a given political, legal (parcel), social, economic, or physical boundary, opportunities for a design’s expanded “spatial extension” can occur at a variety of scales.2 Boundaries are often equated with a “line of separation.” Inherent in Leonardo’s sketch and Kahn’s description is that demarcations of a site limit the intrinsic connections among disparate elements within the public realm. Therefore, the notion that a site is Mo Zell Beyond Boundaries i delineated by a series of edges is limiting and should not serve as the sole definition. By considering a site as boundless, a design intervention can operate at many scales. This essay examines bauenstudio’s design of the Northeastern University Veterans Memorial at a variety of operational scales. Kahn suggests that the distinction between site and situation is a relational construct, and for the memorial it is one that relies on a multitude of contexts including landscape, infrastructure , and urban. In making connections between site and situation while simultaneously being a specific place, the Veterans Memorial employs the language of landscape as an urban design tool, expanding on the notion of landscape urbanism, as elucidated by Charles Waldheim’s statement that “landscape has become both the lens through which the contemporary city is represented and the medium through which it is constructed.”3 Waldheim and other supporters of landscape urbanism tenets promote an engagement with infrastructure, blurred boundaries, and the indeterminacy of space that allows for multiple uses on a single site. Through this lens, one experiences the city, and thus the Northeastern University (NEU) Veterans Memorial , as flux with an interweaving of social, physical, and cultural possibilities. In 2005, Northeastern University announced an “ideas” competition to design a memorial to honor approximately four hundred alumni who had died while serving in the U.S. military. The design competition committee selected a small site on campus and provided few limitations to the memorial design; bauenstudio submitted the winning entry. Experience of the site, its surroundings and location, and its relation to the city influenced the memorial design. The memorial was not only considered as a place of remembrance but also as an opportunity to influence the public realm. mo zell 96 Boundless Site The campus of Northeastern University has edges that are not well defined. It merges with three adjacent neighborhoods: the South End, the Fenway, and Mission Hill. The edges of the campus are porous and allow for pedestrian traffic to and through these adjoining neighborhoods. The memorial design capitalizes on the quality of this porosity, including the transitory nature of the population, and the movement of people toward and along the site. In the early 1980s, the Northeastern campus was covered with a series of parking lots. As a way to cleanse the memory of that condition (and perhaps influenced by Olmsted’s nearby Back Bay Fens), the university’s landscape architects created a series of curved, meandering pathways edged with trees, shrubs, and flowers. This effort to “overgreen” the campus pushed the buildings into a position of backdrop with layered landscape in front. Unfortunately, the newly employed landscape was relegated to a neutral position within the spaces of the campus, as mere decoration. The university ’s landscape architects focused on making brick-lined pathways through the campus, while diluting all notions of identity and place. In designing the NEU Veterans Memorial, bauenstudio considered the existing site a residual one, a formless remnant that resulted from the...