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

landscape architects, not only one’s contemporaries and the
living, but perhaps more importantly with predecessors who
have been dead for decades or centuries. Any authentic work
is set into the timeless tradition of artistic works and the
work is meaningful only if it presents itself humbly to this
tradition and becomes part of that continuum. Countless
works made at all times, but particularly today, are too
ignorant, disrespectful and arrogant to be accepted as
constituents of the esteemed institution of tradition.
Aestheticisation
The Modern Movement arrived occasionally at architecture’s
boundary as the consequence of aestheticisation, seeing
architecture as a pure art. Particularly in our time, however,
the process of aestheticisation has produced projects and
buildings that have moved outside the territory of
architecture entirely and turned into objects of art –
frequently poor art, at that.
Current philosophical discourse has reintroduced the issue
of beauty and ethics. The writings of Elaine Scarry, such as her
small, elegant book On Beauty and Being Just, exemplify this
new orientation of ethics. 17 I fully agree with Scarry’s
argument for the primacy of aesthetic judgement – an idea
that has been also condensed into powerful formulations by
Joseph Brodsky: ‘Man is an aesthetic being before becoming
an ethical being,’ 18 and: ‘Aesthetics is the mother of ethics.’ 19
The poet even makes a thought-provoking statement of the
evolutionary role of beauty: ‘The purpose of evolution, believe
it or not, is beauty, which survives it all and generates truth
simply by being a fusion of the mental and the sensual.’ 20
At the same time that we see the constitutive value of
aesthetic aspiration and judgement, we should be critical of
the dubious practice of aestheticisation. In our consumer
culture, aestheticisation has turned into the canniest strategy
Michelangelo Antonioni, Autostrada Landscape, from ‘Cronaca di un amore’, 1961
Here the director sought to convey the alienation of the road, reinforced by the
two massive beverage mock-ups for advertising that create a bleak and
contrasting scene for the love-torn participants.
of manipulation: violence, human suffering and inequality are
aestheticised today as well as politics and war. Indeed, our very
lives are turning into aestheticised products that we consume
as nonchalantly as the newest material products of fashion.
Beauty is absolutely an inseparable part of the notion of
art, but it has a complex nature. Joseph Brodsky even dares to
criticise Ezra Pound for his tendency to aim directly and solely
at beauty: ‘The Cantos, too, left me cold, the main error was the
old one: questing after beauty. For someone with such a long
record of residence in Italy, it was odd that he hadn’t realized
that beauty can’t be targeted, that it is always a by-product of
other, often very ordinary pursuits.’ 21
In our craft of architecture, also, seductive beauty and
aesthetic appeal have regrettably turned into a conscious and
explicit aim. In the very same manner as in poetry,
enchanting and touching beauty in architecture is a result of
other concerns: a desire for simplicity, precision or
truthfulness, and especially for the experience of life and of
being human in the middle of other human beings. Every
great building opens a view into the essence of the human
condition and, most importantly, to an idealised and better
world. This was the message of Alvar Aalto in his address to
Swedish architects in 1957: ‘Architecture has a second
thought … the idea of creating a Paradise. That is the only
purpose of our buildings … we wish to build a Paradise on
earth for people.’ 22
Synthetic Landscape
In one of his earliest essays, Alvar Aalto praises the image of
an Italian town at the back of Andrea Mantegna’s painting
Christ in the Garden (1460), and describes it as a ‘synthetic
landscape’ or ‘an architect´s vision of the landscape’. 23 The
idea of a man-made synthetic landscape, an architectural
microcosm, was, in fact, the guiding idea throughout Aalto’s
life, and all his buildings can be viewed as man-made
microcosms steeped in their landscape settings.
The architectural profession at large might do better if we
began to think of our buildings as microcosms and synthetic
landscapes instead of seeing them as aestheticised objects.
Architecture in our time has been concerned with landscape
merely as a formal and visual counterpoint, or a sounding
board for architectural forms. Today, however, buildings are
increasingly beginning to be understood as processes that
unavoidably go through phases of functional, technical and
cultural change as well as processes of wear and deterioration.
The fundamentally time-bound dynamic and open-ended
nature of landscape architecture can provide meaningful
lessons for a ‘weak’ or ‘fragile’ architecture that acknowledges
vulnerability instead of obsessively fighting against time and
change as architecture traditionally has done. 24
The inevitable and overdue ecological perspective, a
conscious and controlled interaction of nature’s systems and
human lifestyles and constructions also calls for strategies that
have been essential ingredients of landscape architecture. The
nature–architecture relationship must by necessity be expanded
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