Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

not therefore about averting disaster by reversing the path of
unsustainable development (it is, after all, our market
capitalism). It is about averting disaster by averting denial. We
need the platforms to write our own stories about the
landscape, so that we can begin to think about it. And if we
could think about it, maybe we could do something about it.
The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name
We never billed laser\net as the prototype platform to ban
numbness. It was a rough copy. We are suspicious of the
capacity of spectacle to aestheticise reality so we can slumber
in our private narcissisms. It must celebrate darkness
(nowhere, it seems, do we allow country and city to get dark
any more). But in this rough copy we know what we want. We
want landscape terrains as agoras for synthesis and
awareness. We want to foster participation and criticality. We
propose re-mix platforms as the sites for collaborations
between farmers, milkmen, managers, constables,
contractors, builders, designers, artists, social scientists, even
anyone with an interest in the land. We need a social science
practice (what we did not have for laser\net) that will survey
rural vox popular with the same statistical rigour as we use
for soap–sex–war, to incorporate vox in the re-mix platform.
We need a future technology that will sensor the environment
– imagine crop-dusting the land with microsensors – to
monitor environmental shifts in food-chain ecology, in
biodiversity, and make visible how these are effected by land
use. Without aestheticising them. Make the networks readable
so that we can insert our stories into them, and so make them
landscape stories. Let the landscape speak, let the landscape
become the screen and platform for our stories. 4
Notes
1. Cahokia is UNESCO World Heritage Site No 198. Stonehenge, another
preliterate platform of mytho-astronomical significance, is Site 373. See
http://whc.unesco.org/pg.cfm?cid=31&id_site=198)
2. laser\net was an installation commissioned by the Geddes Institute for
Urban Research, University of Dundee, as part of its AHRC-funded
interdisciplinary workshop ‘Exploring the Digital City’. It was installed at
Centrespace at DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts). Designed and installed by
a collaboration including Lorens Holm and Paul Guzzardo, and John Bell and
Adam Covell, principals of FXV Ltd London.
3. We have borrowed ‘speaking land’ from Karen Forbes and Kathryn Findlay
and Fieldwork, the design research unit founded by Findlay at the Dundee
School of Architecture in 2005.
4. See ‘Ecological complexity untangled: the architecture of ecosystem
fragility’, Nature, Vol 442, No 7100 (20 July 2006), including the following
papers: Loreau et al, ‘Biological diversity for policy-makers: diversity without
representation’; Holt, ‘Ecology: asymmetry and stability’; Montoya et al,
‘Ecological networks and their fragility’; and Rooney et al, ‘Structural
asymmetry and the stability of diverse food webs’. See also John Vidal, ‘Cost
of shortage: civil unrest, mass migration and economic collapse’, Guardian,
17 August 2006, p 25.
5. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology 1, Penguin Books (London),
1993, trans Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest.
Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Images and video stills by
Lorens Holm and Paul Guzzardo
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