building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

twentieth century, a rush born from the thoughts and dreams begun by the
utopians remains untold. Projects such as the Sea Ranch, California (1962),
landscaped by Lawrence Halprin with architectural interventions by Charles Moore
and Joseph Esherick, demonstrate a sensitivity with distant roots. The shacks of
Drop City, Colorado (1965), the hippie community that invented a modern
aesthetics of garbage and recycling, could have never arisen without the heritage of
the revelations and fantastic visions left by the utopias. All this represents the
pendulum of the American landscape, which has since oscillated between the two
poles. On the one hand, there is an attempt to bring the town into the wilderness,
which is expressed in the projects with the utopians’ agricultural matrix and is
manifest in Wright's proposal for Broadacre. On the other, there is the equally
provocative experiment by Olmsted and Downing to transfer the wilderness inside
the metropolis and make it one of its vital organs. These are the two extreme points
of view, which in the most sensitive projects develop the care for the conservation
and development of the natural world. At the same time, another world of
industrial transformation and of technical improvement had appeared on the
American landscape.
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