Terrain Vague

Stub note: This page was created during the ingest of Stalking Detroit and requires fuller treatment as more sources on post-industrial void space are ingested.

Definition

Terrain vague (Ignasi de Solà-Morales's term, from his 1995 essay "Terrain Vague") names the post-urban, residual spaces of the abandoned industrial city — vacated, indeterminate lands that are "foreign to the urban system," its "negative image," and yet paradoxically fertile: "Void, absence, yet also promise, the space of the possible, of expectation" (Solà-Morales, quoted in Daskalakis & Perez, "Projecting Detroit"). The term is deliberately double: vague carries both "empty/uncultivated" and "vague/wandering," so the concept binds physical vacancy to free time, expectancy, and "our strangeness in front of the world." In Stalking Detroit, Detroit "exacerbates and universalizes" the condition: the terrain vague is "no longer that anomalous space… at the margins of the city, but one that is ubiquitous," invading the urban core — "tangible evidence of the dissolution and imminent obsolescence of the modern, industrial city."

Key Thinkers

• Ignasi de Solà-Morales — coined the concept in "Terrain Vague" (1995); dedicatee of Stalking Detroit and (posthumously) author of its afterword "Impossible Urbanism," where Detroit is experienced as a city of "ruins of the future."
• Michael Weinstock — "Terrain Vague" (Architectural Design 75, 2005, via Taylor's chapter): transposes the concept to the smart home — dwelling as terrain vague between the digital and physical worlds. Not yet paged (see log).
• Committee for Urban Thinking: Detroit — Daskalakis & Perez's "Projecting Detroit" operationalizes the concept as a design strategy: an "architecture of absence" using landscape (the horizontal, the surface) rather than building; Bob Arens reads Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg Project as community engagement with "the inherently troubling realm of terrain vague."
• James Corner — response "Landscraping": void spaces are not leftovers of desertion but constructions — staged, "set-up" open grounds for "wholly indeterminate futures," managed by diagrams and logistical infrastructures (Koolhaas/OMA's Melun-Sénart linear voids, Geuze/West 8's empty scenarios, the English Commons, the Indian Maidan).
• Charles Waldheim & Marili Santos-Munné — "Decamping Detroit" treats decommissioned zones of indeterminate status as the ground for landscape urbanism (Waldheim coined the term c. 1990), modeled on Tarkovsky's Stalker Zone.

Related Concepts

• derive — both détourned, non-productive encounters with urban residual space; Young's "Line Frustration" uses the dérive to traverse Detroit's vacant boundary territories.
• psychogeography — the perceptual mapping of ambiance that complements the terrain vague's indeterminacy.
• spectacle — the danger that vacated terrain is aestheticized (ruin tourism, Vergara) or re-colonized by media image and "an urbanism of the simulacra."
• neoliberal-metropolis — the political economy of vacancy: disinvestment, "indirect land value," and the re-colonization of voids by stadia, casinos, and speculative image.
• adaptive-reuse — the design response Qureshi opposes to Solà-Morales's expectant indeterminacy: over 500,000 brownfield sites in the US make post-industrial space "an acute design issue," to be treated by spatial-therapy rather than left to "the space of the possible."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Stalking Detroit — Solà-Morales's concept quoted and radicalized throughout: Daskalakis & Perez's "Projecting Detroit" builds directly on "Terrain Vague"; Arens (Heidelberg Project) and Corner ("Landscraping") extend it.
• Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — the therapeutic counterpoint: "deindustrialization provides extensive opportunities for interior architecture and its allied design disciplines to respond to the increasing availability of post-industrial space"; Haag's Gas Works Park, Corner's High Line ("urban archaeology"), and Vienna's Gasometer City as reuse of the void "while capitalizing on industrial, historical, and cultural inheritance" — the terrain vague claimed as design opportunity rather than expectancy.
• Inside out (Webb 2018) — the void as programmable event-ground, via Banham: the drive-in movie house is "just a flat piece of ground where the operating company provides visual images and piped sound, and the rest of the situation comes on wheels" — a "ballroom in the wilderness" that dissolves back into "a length of highway" when the couple return to their car. The most ephemeral possible occupation of vacant ground; and Webb's note 4 names the parking-lot landscape "pressed metal deserts" targeted for elimination by the self-driving car. See automobile-vernacular.
• Shape shifting (Taylor 2018) — the concept transposed indoors, via Michael Weinstock: "the home has become a terrain vague, lying somewhere between the digital and physical worlds, between the infinite extension of data worlds and the decreasing experience of personal space." The vacancy of the post-industrial void migrates into the smart home: dwelling suspended between "the infinite extension of data worlds" and "the decreasing experience of personal space." See interactive-architecture.
• Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — the concept moved inside the building: "Like actual urban space, the early Portman hotel-shopping galleries offered voluminous, unarticulated, and unusable spaces. A maze of terrains vagues, these spatial gratuities have been reduced to minimums in the reprogramming of the Westin Peachtree Plaza. Today, there is very little terrain vague left to critique in the Portman hotels; the interior complexities and expansiveness of the podium have been value-engineered into leasable space." The interiorized terrain vague — the podium's spatial gratuities, the lobby lagoon, the "terrain vague ambiguities that so entranced Jameson and Baudrillard" — as the interior's own expectant indeterminacy, consumed by reprogramming (see atrium-hotel, interior-urbanism).
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the void's institutional enclosure and its Deleuzian reading: the derelict Bina Karya land beside the Yogyakarta kampung — "it looked to us like smooth space or terrain vague (Sola-Morales 1994), everything behind the wall was identified with a strict institutionalization and even incarceration of the social 'other'" (p. 100); the students' opening proposal rebuffed ("the derelict land was 'government land' and its use was unthinkable") and answered a year later by "a high brick wall and barbed wire… very clearly designed to stop squatting" (p. 100–101) — the terrain vague's capture by the state precisely where informality expected it; and the kampung's own use of leftover ground: "Garbage tends to collect in leftover spaces that are not territorialized" (p. 94). The register gives the concept its Southern, tenure-marked form: vacancy as a relation of power, not of planning neglect. See informal-urbanism, smooth-and-striated-space.
• Metropolitan hybrids: Programming for a thriving urbanity (Luna 2018) — the void's vertical and infrastructural forms: "In shrinking and postindustrial cities where either the population or an industry is declining, a variety of building stock is left abandoned, causing a loss of activity and gaps of metropolitanism" — the incomplete skyscraper (La Torre de David, "adapted in an ad hoc fashion, filled with markets, gyms, services, shops, and dwellings") as the tower-shaped terrain vague; and the infrastructure void: "The majority of disruptions in the urban fabric occur from infrastructure. As new technologies emerge and new infrastructure is developed, old infrastructural systems become obsolete, leaving empty voids in the urban fabric. Transportation infrastructure creates the most apparent disruptions; train lines bisect the city and elevated highways leave underutilized spaces." Where Solà-Morales's terrain vague expects and Qureshi's therapy reuses, Luna's is the catalyst programme: voids appropriated "with programming that injects new industries, making them act as catalysts" (see metropolitan-hybrids, polycentrality, obsolescence).
• source-notes/hedges-2018-the-waiting-room

Open Questions

• Is the terrain vague's "expectancy" politically progressive, or (per Herron's critique of Vergara) always already exposed to capture by nostalgia, tourism, and speculative re-colonization?
• How does the terrain vague relate to Lefebvre's everyday life — is vacancy the everyday at its most stripped-down, or its negation?
• Qureshi's spatial therapy treats the void as raw material for "economical, sustainable, and historically contiguous environments" — does such reuse resolve the terrain vague, or does it close down the very indeterminacy ("the space of the possible") that Solà-Morales valued?
• Banham's drive-in shows vacant ground occupied as interior event ("a ballroom in the wilderness") with no building at all — the terrain vague provisionally resolved, then released ("the dance floor turns back into a length of highway"). Is the drive-in the terrain vague's purest use — and does the event-interior preserve expectancy better than any built reuse?
• Weinstock (via Taylor) locates the terrain vague inside the smart home — "between the infinite extension of data worlds and the decreasing experience of personal space." Does the smart home resolve the condition (the responsive environment re-densifies personal space) or perfect it (the home as infrastructure, the interior as residual void between data fields)? Is the interior itself now a candidate terrain vague?
• Marinic's Portman podiums give the interior its own terrain-vague inventory ("a maze of terrains vagues") — and its disappearance ("very little terrain vague left to critique"). Can interior terrain vague be designed (spatial gratuities, leasable-space slack) rather than merely residual — and is its "value-engineering" the interior equivalent of the urban re-colonization the Stalking Detroit sources warn against?