EXCERPT

From "Building City Landscape: Interdiciplinary Design Work in the Downsview Park Competition," by Linda Pollak

Five teams composed of architects, landscape architects, ecologists, urbanists, graphic designers, and other professionals submitted designs for Downsview Park in Toronto. Yet little has been said about how the interdisciplinarity of the teams might have contributed to the competition's objective "to promote innovative design proposals that would respond to the social and natural histories of the site while developing its potential as a new landscape."

How did the structure of the teams, in which diverse voices were active from the start, enable them to challenge monolithic or exclusive representations, to produce such rich and multivalent projects? These questions can be broached by positing a distinction between interdisciplinary and collaborative work. A project by an individual can be interdisciplinary in its engagement of different fields of knowledge. A project can also be collaborative without being interdisciplinary, in the sense of architects or landscape architects working together. As well, not all collaboration is substantial. What is important about Downsview is the number of instances in which, perhaps owing to the difficulty of the project itself, there occurs significant interdisciplinary collaboration.

Interdisciplinarity is a slippery concept, implying that there exists internal consistency of a discipline, when in fact there can be as much variation of approach within disciplines as between them. Yet the longstanding division between architecture and landscape architecture-which has conditioned the perception of what is possible within a project-is not susceptible to easy or willful erasure. Blurring boundaries between disciplines paradoxically serves to maintain them by making them difficult to perceive, and increases a project's susceptibility to its own autonomy, or totalization. It can be more useful to be aware of disciplinary edges than to blur them-to move toward a concept of boundary as a location of creative work, open to those design identities whose constructed position is solid enough for them to reach out to other logics and strategies.

What is between disciplinary autonomy and exclusivity, on the one hand, and blurring on the other? As I have attempted to show by identifying aspects of the work of the Downsview teams, vitality in collaboration happens when embedded differences are no longer accepted without question, but rather become places of exchange. The political struggle required of each individual to see from different perspectives, to recognize radical (i.e., unassimilable) differences in terms of parameters or criteria, embodies a gain in critical mobility.

One of the promises of the experience of Downsview's interdisciplinary teams-of many voices being present from the start of a project-is to explore the possible folding of contradictory realities or discourses into the structure of a work. This promise implies acknowledgment of the incommensurability of languages and suggests the creation of paradoxical spaces that go in different directions at the same time.