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

Juhani Pallasmaa’s key essay articulates the ways in which
architects and landscape designers analyse the pretext for
architecture as a median in remembered landscape, and
draws out the creative initiatives that persist throughout the
visual arts as linkages, so refuting once and for all the
separation and superiority of such a domain once assumed by
architects for themselves.
Grahame Shane’s work on the recombinant city landscape,
as described in his article, has far-reaching consequences. He
takes up the issue of the American regional cityscape where
compressed patches have become rhizomatic assemblages of
highly contrasting urban fragments and landscape parcels,
the North American city remaining still a patchwork of
landscape scenarios and codes – the automobile being itself
the device that recodifies the urban–rural relationship. Shane
seeks out James Corner’s key role, as successor to Ian McHarg
at the University of Pennsylvania, and thus of Patrick Geddes,
whose ecological research early in the 20th century separated
out rural and urban regional systems by layers, a process that
was in turn computerised by McHarg. Shane concludes that
landscapes were created as a scenographic element in plotting
marketing locations in the global media ecology, rather than
structurally engaging in a ecological process.
Following up this clear appraisal, Lorens Holm and Paul
Guzzardo assess the potential for a digitalisation and reformulation
of the site/non-site parameters in the prevailing
urban/rural scenario. They use the metaphor of the
Mississippian lost or abandoned city of Cahokin, seen like a
laser\net narrative creation for today. The consequent focus
on the defoliation of rural cultures and global warming
epitomises, to the authors, a ‘style’ of today, and accepts the
end-result possibility of environmental death. Holm and
Guzzardo anticipate a ‘digital future landscape terrain’,
utilising laser/net technology, as a synthesis for a new
awareness. Technology is harnessed to good effect, to protect
and reformulate landscape ecologies.
But disasters are already upon us. One catastrophe has
threatened (but physically also narrowly veered away)
Gustafson and Porter’s Shoreline plan for the sea edge to the
historic core of Beirut City. This threat was entirely manmade.
The second catastrophe addressed, with great
foreboding but in mind of a future recovery, is described by
Felipe Correa: the case of New Orleans. After a long pause (the
human consequences were exacerbated by a protracted
history of social and physical neglect of ‘The Big Easy’),
measures are at last being put in place. But meantime, as with
the early city of Cahokin, the mystery is how half the
population has literally vanished upstate and beyond. Also
included in the issue is a short, illustrated eye-witness
summary of the after effects of the hurricane by a student,
which brings the experience on site for all to recognise in its
severity. Is this a paradigm for a new global effect – the
disintegration of hope?
The twin surveys of US design and that in Europe by Jayne
Merkel and Lucy Bullivant provide at last some
encouragement for the 21st century. Landscape designers,
architects, engineers and ecologists are increasingly working
together to define and implement new solutions, working on
the front line.
One thing here is certain, that pretext, context and subtext
have all transmogrified, and architects and landscape
designers, like the visual artists who have been the
pathfinders and scouts for this enterprise, need to seek wholly
different solutions. The surveys here offer new, divergent
directions, yet both fields are suffused with their own poetics,
as Pallasmaa has urged. Poetry is alive and well and the
poetics are not least evident in the major new international
projects referred to above, the chief abiding hope for salvation
in the laser\net world of today.
Notes
1. Dieter Kienast, in Udo Weilacher, Between Landscape Architecture and Land
Art, Birkhauser (Basel), 1999, pp 152–4.
2. John Dixon Hunt, ‘Introduction’ in ibid, pp 6–7.
3. Michael Spens, Modern Landscape, Phaidon (London), 2003, pp 48–51.
4. Ibid, pp 92–7.
5. Ibid, pp 187–91.
6. Ibid, pp 192–7.
7. See Hal Foster, Rosalind Kraus, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, Art
Since l900, Thames & Hudson (London), 2004, pp 358 and 540–2.
8. Ibid, pp 543–4.
Gross.Max, Whiteinch Cross, Glasgow, Scotland, 1999
A drawn overview of the scheme showing the correlation of various elements.
Eelco Hooftman of Gross.Max here placed great importance on the weaving
together, in a tight urban environment, of hard and soft landscape elements.
Text © 2007 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: p 6 © DigitalGlobe, exclusive
distributed for Europe by Telespazio; p 7 © Studio Hollein/Sina Baniahmad; p
8 © courtesy of Eisenman Architects; p 9 © Estate of Robertson
Smithson/DACS, London/VAGA, New York, 2007. Image courtesy James
Cohan Gallery, New York. Collection: DIA Center for the Arts, New York. Photo
Gianfranco Gorgoni; p 10 © English Heritage. NMR; p 11 © Gross.Max
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