Lecture: Postindustrial landscapes in Germany

LA Spring Lecture Series presents Constanze Petrow

Wednesday, March 23 at 4:00 pm

Cook/Douglas Lecture Hall

Postindustrial landscapes in Germany: How Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt developed their waterfront since 1990

The presentation compares three approaches of waterfront redevelopment in centrally located spaces in Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt/Main. Special interest is devoted to public open spaces and landscape design. We’ll have a look at Berlin’s Spree promenade, Hamburg’s HafenCity and Frankfurt’s Main promenade and Westhafen quarter. All sites became available in the course of deindustrialization – or, in the case of Berlin, after the Wall came down. As a result of differing urban development policies and image strategies they are part of, the places display distinct atmospheres and attract different kinds of people. The paper discusses the messages delivered by design and thus scrutinizes the political character of landscape architecture.

This talk is the kick-off event for the International Design Workshop Wednesday  3-23 to Saturday 3-26

Architecture students and faculty from the Technical University of Darmstadt (Germany) will visit the New York/New Jersey region and will join the Landscape Architecture senior design studio for a four day intensive workshop. The topic will be urban redevelopment and open space design for a section of the Newark Waterfront. 

Dr. Constanze A. Petrow is a licensed landscape architect. After studying landscape planning at the Technische Universität Berlin and working for landscape offices in Berlin she lectured and researched at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar from 2001 till 2009. In 2007 she was a visiting faculty at Washington Alexandria Architecture Center (Virginia Tech). She has been writing for landscape magazines since 2001. In 2009 she received her Doctorate from Leibniz-Universität Hannover with a thesis on the relationship between landscape architecture and the public, focusing on perceptions of the profession’s work by leading newspapers in Germany and Switzerland. Since 2009 she has been a post-doc researcher and member of the ‘Urban Research’ Centre of Research Excellence at the Technische Universität Darmstadt.