Preface
Landscape architecture as cultural valorization
Layers of information. How does landscape work?
University of Marburg on Lahnberge
Ulm Science City on Eselsberg
Plateau de Kirchberg, Luxembourg
Dealing with “bad places”
Saarbrücken Harbour Island
Duisburg-Nord Landscape Park
Parco Dora, Turin
Hiriya Mountain, Tel Aviv
Design as experimental invention
Notes
Project data
Illustration credits
Further selected projects and competitions
Selected publications
Exhitions and catalogues
On Peter Latz and Partners
Preface/序言
The right degree of closeness is the right amount of detachment...... this is what one repeats to oneself as an author when trying to establish the best possible relation to one’s subject, whilst in actual fact oscillating between that enthusiastic curiosity that fuels writing, and the necessary critical reflection. In the end, the hope is to infect the reader with the same joy of discovery and understanding of gardens and of landscapes that ultimately moved me to put pen to paper. I say “ultimately”because, more so than ever before, in this book it has been particularly difficult to find the right degree of closeness through the right amount of detachment –this is not just a book on contemporary landscape architecture written by a teacher, but also a book written by a student about his teacher.
For almost seven years, from 1986 to 1993, I studied landscape architecture at the Technische Universität München-Weihenstephan in Freising and I was inevitably influenced in my professional thinking and actions by Peter Latz’s conceptual approaches. The search for critical distance, for an individual standpoint and new perspectives in landscape architecture was already prevalent some 20 years ago, as I wanted to push beyond the know-how I had been invested with. That said, it would be wrong to deny that my studies at Weihenstephan, and Peter Latz in particular, have had a lasting influence on my work.
The awareness of one’s own partiality and the knowledge of how difficult it would be to bring together the richness of Peter Latz’s work and the complexity of his thinking in a single publication has for years held me back from responding to Anneliese and Peter Latz’s willingness for me to write this book. Why then now, just when Peter Latz is preparing to relinquish his teaching and research at the TU München in spring 2008, and at a time when a new generation, in particular Tilman Latz, is gaining influence in the office of Latz + Partner?
To this day I have no truly plausible answers to these questions. It seems that, over the years, so much of the aforementioned ‘fuel’ has accumulated that it would no longer be prudent to delay ignition any longer, to stick with the metaphor. New generations of landscape architecture students (not only at the TU München and the Leibniz Universität Hannover) have discovered the work of Peter Latz and bemoan, quite rightly, and just as we did 20 years earlier, the lack of a comprehensive publication on the work of Latz + Partner from which one can learn more of their visionary design and planning approaches, and of the theoretical and conceptual background to the projects undertaken at the office in Ampertshausen.