(1) the landscape field is small and its literature inadequate. therefore, a singular, articulate practitioner can have a truly large impact on the trajectory of the profession (see notes on Corner, Smithson, Olmsted from earlier posts).
(2) landscape's potentials have yet to be well-presented to a wider audience. HOW - and in what language (technical, political, professional or otherwise) - the sharing of landscape themes takes place is a critical, lingering question.
National Geographic Meets Topotek
Rem Koolhaas' writings for Wired Magazine in the 1990's marked an important moment for the crossover of architecture's agenda...and landscape is still waiting and ripe for a similar opportunity. The profession needs a good translator to get take landscape objectives and present them for a wider audience. Not so much because clients in a traditional sense will spring from the wider audience, but more because the values and appreciation now isolated with professionals needs to be shared before design opportunities in the public realm are to expand.
I propose a media venue analogous to Wired for landscape's coming out: National Geographic. Though certainly not as hot as Wired in the 90's, landscape's burden of proof comes with a slightly different time frame. The topics of nature - and its audience and its assumptions - span eras and eons. If the National Geographic readers can begin appreciate landscape architecture's emerging interest in infrastructure, pattern, and color, then that would be something.
Above, a Topotek courtyard (Innenhof Unter den Linden, 2005) on the iconic yellow cover.
The Competition System (in Germany)
Germany is the site of a great deal of very exciting landscape architecture. And I mean very exciting. From aesthetics to concepts there's a lot of new things that have gone on in the last 10-15 years there, as well as exciting things happening today. Sure, there's still a lot of boring stuff there (think windswept plazas with striped paving patterns in muted colors) but a lot of it is frighteningly interesting.
All cultural rationale aside, this is possibly because Germany (like other European countries) uses a competition system to decide the designers of many public and institutional projects. This system allows for small offices (or individuals) to enter and to win projects that would be completely impossible in the United States. One could start an office in Germany by winning one competition, and many do. Is it possible that because the system encourages many small, progressive offices to work in landscape that the aesthetics are more interesting, and the themes more challenging and provocative because they rely on an open system rather than a closed one?
Is PoMo a dirty term in landscape?
Well, is it? The pastoral still has a hold in this country to the extent that one wonders why anything ever isn't pastoral, and that which isn't pastoral is modernist. These polite (ok, the modernist is insistently polite) landscapes still hold sway over the American practice of landscape architecture. Land art exists beside landscape, but when the two are formally introduced as one, well, divorce is in the air. Historical and cultural referents are few and dainty, and those that practice landscape in an insistent, impolite manner, don't "fit in". Take Martha Schwartz. She made a bagel garden. And forever that is what many landscape architects will remember her for. Perhaps in the hallowed halls of Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where she teaches, she's known for the body of her work, but elsewhere she garners a shrug.
Her work, and that of others who use non-traditional materials, make plants behave oddly, ignore or invest in the context of a place visibly, make shapes that owe more to "art" than to "nature", aren't afraid of paradigmatic shifts, bright colors, the language of social interaction, is something that has always existed on the fringe of landscape in the United States. These practioners who's work is more post modern than modern, not at all pastoral are dismissed here, while in Europe it is the norm. What is it about our heterogenous population that makes for homogenious landscapes?
The Expanded Field
Elizabeth K Meyer's essay "The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture", originally published in an ecological planning context, is an important essay for landscape. The essay seeks to establish landscape as a flexible and broad context within which landscape operations are then played out. Meyer seeks to place landscape in a grey area that resists bianary pairings, such as man/nature, nature/culture, horizontal/vertical.Borrowing from Rosalind Krauss' method of using a Klein diagram (Krauss' essay is Sculpture in the Expanded Field) and positioning her title closely with Krauss', Meyer is pursuing a melange just in publication of the essay. Though she's directly referencing art history in her language, title and diagram, the essay was published in an ecological planning journal. Thus, we have another bianary dualism, ecology/art, one that is particularly relevant today in the field of landscape.
Robert Smithson_SHIFT
In the late 1960’s to 1970’s artist Robert Smithson explored the topics of entropy, representation and measurement through his non-site works. By arranging and containing material from banal places (Franklin, NJ; quarries in Nevada) in a gallery setting, he set up curious relationships of scale, authorship and authenticity. Smithson’s model encouraged other artists to explore their own relevance to contemporary, outdoor settings; for landscape architects, his legacy demonstrates the value in describing one piece through multiple modes (including print, model, map and photograph).
1968 change to offer = artists investigate and manipulate banal landscapes
Frederick Law Olmsted_SHIFT
Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision for Boston in the Emerald Necklace incorporated the operations of infrastructure, normally the purview of engineers, into a landscape architecture project. He employed a range of “soft” civil engineering techniques – dredging, retaining and vegetating - to transform the linear park into a functioning drainage basin that simultaneously cleaned the urban waters, forestalled flooding, and provided recreational opportunities.
George Washington Vanderbilt II’s Biltmore Estate, also by Olmsted, incorporated the knowledge of another profession: that of forestry. As opposed to the static, stylized English manner Vanderbilt initially requested, Olmsted designed the greater grounds to yield timber and planned an arboretum; both features remain instructive to foresters to this day.
1878 change to offer = incorporate ecological function with landscape aesthetics
George Washington Vanderbilt II’s Biltmore Estate, also by Olmsted, incorporated the knowledge of another profession: that of forestry. As opposed to the static, stylized English manner Vanderbilt initially requested, Olmsted designed the greater grounds to yield timber and planned an arboretum; both features remain instructive to foresters to this day.
1878 change to offer = incorporate ecological function with landscape aesthetics
James Corner
James Corner, principal of Field Operations and professor at the University of Pennsylvania is a rare breed of landscape architect. At once a practitioner with high profile projects, he is also a theoretician and writer. The largely unwritten history of Landscape Architecture proper and the theories that are cocomittant with its practice are an absence of weight in the discipline.
building-landscape
The Yokohama ferry terminal as designed by FOA is a shift from buildings with landscape elements on structure (still dualistic at best) to landscape elements hybridized with structure, creating a complex set of relationships. Still, in escaping the dualistic nature of building and landscape, does one really gain anything new, or merely a mediocre landscape skinning an interesting building.
(draft)
(draft)
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
