The view through the window shows the typical set of any city. On the right, a few collective housing towers have a paved community area on the ground floor. On the left, a recent building intended for hospital use, with a well resolved curtain wall facade. In the background, a 248 m high skyscraper. In the middle of this typically contemporary collage, there is an unused plot, waiting for the construction of an public equipment. In it, some trees grow freely, with their fallen branches and their natural disorder. Among them, a lot of low vegetation. Before, this site was used as an informal parking lot. Recently fenced, despite the poor condition of a land eroded by rain, herbs and shrubs grow and in spring, it is dotted with wildflowers and poppies.
The French gardener and philosopher Gilles Clément says that spaces like these, which from a conventional view, we could consider wasteland, are truly diverse. He has dedicated a book, “Manifesto of the Third Landscape”, to them. The Third Landscape is conformed by spaces between motorways in a road junction. Urban areas in which building skeletons are abandoned. Not occupied sites in the city, freed after the demolition of a building or left in a new area, waiting for a project. Spaces next to fences and borders. All these are abandoned to indecision, placed in wait.
In addition to the Third Landscape, Clément defines primary assemblages or natural reserves, that resemble the ideal nature. They are usually places that have been delimited, protected.The Third Landscape, on the other hand, is made up of wastelands. It is part of all urban and agricultural spaces. According to Clément, every order generates a waste, so the Third Landscape is usually located near to places of exploitation: boundaries, places that are difficult to reach and spaces waiting for occupancy.
The more suburban we go, the more residual spaces we will find, Clément says. In city centers, practically everything is occupied, rarely we will find some unbuilt land, and even less of a street or square where the pavement is missing. The vacant lots are usually fenced, and sometimes, the neighboring communities claim them for free use.
In the periphery, perhaps spaces between highways are the most representative of that notion of the Third Landscape. Those no-man’s-land areas that accompany our suburban trips are so characteristic of the postmodern city. An image that shows a collage of residential, industrial and commercial areas, advertising signs, communication routes, and these fragments of landscape that remain as the only ones to which no function has been assigned. The Third Landscape is, for Clément, one of the spaces in the world where greater biodiversity can arise, and flora and fauna can be recomposed according to existing conditions.
How can we relate to these ideas from architecture? Clèment himself proposes to see us as planetary gardeners, and to take responsibility as social beings that share the same territory, taking from a cooperation with nature.
Projects such as the Conservation and Musealization of the Galician Castros, which AGi architects is currently developing, or the Rehabilitation of the Puente de Furelos, also in Galicia, Spain, make us think that any architecture is potentially a Third Landscape. Put another way, any architecture is potentially a ruin, and as such, a Third Landscape. Galicia’s projects make us reflect on the role that ancient architectures like those must have today and on how to act on them. Architectural and human intervention can occur in balance and cooperation with the natural evolution of biodiversity. The balance with the environment is a challenge on which to reflect today, as Gilles Clément says, as planetary gardeners.
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