Essay for arcCA Magazine, 08.2, June 2008 {jpeg} [PDF]
Architects by nature tend to be focused on buildings. This may seem obvious and simplistic, but I do not think it necessarily has to be this way. I imagine a future system of architecture education that views a building as one of many possible responses to a design challenge/problem. I like the idea of an architecture of removal, in which we become more strategic about removing structures and considering how little building we actually need to thrive as humans. In a system like this, landscape becomes the privileged form of human development, not buildings. How can we develop open urban spaces that are more than just high maintenance, ornamental, vanity landscapes? What functions can we assign our open spaces that might also have pleasurable aspects, such as food producing urban farms and dirt cleansing phyto-remediation gardens?
– Fritz Haeg, 2008