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CounterPunch
October
26, 2002
The Fusion Thing
Landscape + Architecture
by GAVIN KEENEY
The historical, diachronic interplay of landscape
+ architecture in modern architectural production is/was at
times a visionary pas de deux, while at other times an anti-visionary
danse macabre (danse mecanique). In the latter case, landscape
(milieu, ambiance, ground) is eclipsed and/or flattened in the
strenuous and sometimes idealistic (utopian) seige represented
by high-borne modernist formalism (technocratic, positivist,
pragmatic, and programmatic). In such scenarios, landscape became
an almost nothing, not by design, but by proscription, elimination,
and/or abstraction. In this essentialist project, landscape
became de-natured space.
In the somewhat delicate, often lyrical
case of the pas de deux, landscape is situated at the elective
nexus of interpenetrating systems (architectonic and environmental
fields), as intermediate condition, or simply noted, in passing,
as a surplus value incorporated into the development of the
architectural object by juxtaposition. The extension of architectural
eIements into the near landscape in the work of Frank Lloyd
Wright, Alvar Aalto or Carlo Scarpa, and the penetration of
the building by so-called free-flowing or layered space suggests
the classical disposition of positive and negative, solid and
void, and the articulation if not transformation of architectural
forms to fully synthetic forms in the rare instances when landscape
and site impregnate architecture with a prescient auratic 'interiority'
and/or formal radiance that plays out in an explicit synthesis
of verticality and horizontality -- as in early modernist villas
-- thereby picturing the contingent, material conditions for
architecture's emergence. The most immaterial aspects of ambient
environmental factors -- the play of light and shadow -- often
provide architecture with an archaic uncanniness (an elemental
timeliness) that is purely ephemeral and, most usually, unintended
(purely incidental). Ando and Holl are masters of this poetic/phenomenological
genre, while others (Gehry) simply accept the inevitable 'patina'
of building marked by time. The mutable materiality of architecture
supported this embrace of the ambient, as glass curtain walls
and metal cladding became ever more common and de-materializations
occurred in the genre, noted explicitly by MoMA's mid-1990s
exhibition "Light Construction". Dan Graham's mirrored
pavilions play wonderfully with this ominiscient quality of
glass doubling the field of vision such that the very field
of representation breaks down into a prismatic and often kaleidoscopic
universe of shards, filters, and superimpositions -- the effect
entirely dependent on the setting of the object in the landscape.
This latter de-materialization invokes the concept of 'total
flow' and the tendency towards objectifying surface at the expense
of depth.
Outside of this cyclic, accidental, and
discontinuous emergence of sublimated aspects of architecture's
implicit ground, a third order of symbolization and abstraction
is to be found that represents a preliminary and provisional
synthesis of subject/object relations -- i.e., most often a
figurative symbiosis built into form and described as gestural
or sublime fusion of 'form' and 'content' in sculpture and the
hybridized field of land art, most especially, where discursive
orders are stripped away and an elemental, generative, and formal
essence presses forward. In the case of art, and its near-automatic
assumption of conceptual autonomy, the works of Noguchi and
Smithson, plus the avalanche of land art-inspired landscape
architecture after the 1960s, re-present the archaic and liminal
nature of almost-first nature (perhaps 'fourth nature') through
hyper-sensual manipulations of form and a presentiment, if
not an acclamation, of pre-linguistic forms and seminal structural
operations versus aspects of full-blown discourse (full-fledged
signifiers). Here, timeliness is reduced to an iconic presence
tipping inexorably toward absence (timelessness). These liminal
measures most often take the form of excavations or insertions
(interventions) that at the least pretend to re-write the codes
of occupying or mapping presence. This type of deep-sea diving
comes in many forms and is not limited to the delineation of
art-in-the-landscape, or art-as-landscape. The concise, inward-driven
nature of such expression is primarily poetic and is found in
all of the arts. This archaistic jouissance deliberately invokes
the ontological ground as a place 'before' -- pre-existent to
-- the emergence of the Imaginary (the phantasmatic world of
doubled and/or tripled un-realities). These figures play in
the dust of the Self, seemingly before the emergence of the
Ego (and Super Ego). Such fictive gestures also act as analogs
for the extreme interiority of works of art and architecture
prior to their deployment as cultural signs and tropes (figures
of speech and thought). In the process of stripping away the
detritus of signifying chains (modes of expression and discourse),
such maneuvers circle the same ground repeatedly. The eventual
collapse of the operative figures of near-speech simply occurs
as the work vanishes into the annals of art or architectural
history. The dissolution of many of Heizer's and Smithson's
remote works matters hardly at all given that they were putative
gestures at/within 'wilderness' but overt acts of defiance aimed
at the production of art and the art world.
From 1930 to 1960, the time of the emergence
of high-modern architecture (and the International Style), landscape
was effectively subjugated by the ordeal/onslaught of hyper-structural
and technocratic instrumentalities -- cultural, political, economic,
and otherwise. The image of architecture and the architect as
glossy man accompanied the last hurrah for messianic modernism.
The high-architectonic was at best complemented by neutral ground/landscape,
though most often ground/landscape was 'locked away' in the
spatial assault of low-formalist and high-functionalist orthogonal
systems -- super-functionalisms. The amalgam that came to be
known as corporate modernism, and which was typified by Mies
van der Rohe's transcendent glass office buildings (set upon
pristine podiums), is/was, according to Cacciari and Quetglas,
the pure reification and secularization of the certain abstracted
aspects of sacral architectures past. This 'classicism' masked
the origins of the modernist experiment in socially-self-conscious
experiments in form-making -- e.g., Mies' problematical Berlin
period -- and became hypostatized in the omniscent and omnivorous
over-production of sterile corporate architectures. Most mid-century
modern landscape architecture, following suit, adopted the dominant
visual code of geometricism and the architectonic logic of plan
libre as the spirit of the age, overthrowing the last vestiges
of romanticism, post-romanticism, and the late-Olmstedian picturesque.
The latter continued well into the mid-1900s transposed into
the form of national parks and interstate transportation systems.
In the case of the exemplars of modern landscape architecture
(Kiley, Eckbo, Tunnard, Sasaki, and Walker), an attendant minimalism,
expressed in seriality and typological reductionism, secured
the accommodation of landscape to architecture, albeit through
subjugation and abstraction. Gaudi, Burle Marx, and Luis Barragan,
on the other hand, appear to represent unique expressions of
critical regionalism before it was characterized as such by
Kenneth Frampton.
After the 1960s, as the hegemony of abstract
planning and object-oriented modern architecture increasingly
fell into disarray (and disrespect), various alternative visions
emerged alongside post-modernism (after 1968) both reviving
and re-negotiating the language of generic historical form
and the geometric and material expressions of late-modernity
-- modernity being measured, in Lacan's immortal words, "from
the Renaissance to the so-called zenith of the twentieth century".
In the 1980s, as the last signs of the ecological and vernacular
movements of the 1970s faded or were absorbed into a new artistic
vision of landscape architecture (including expropriated affects
of land art), a new wave of design speculation, which premiated
or gave equal merit to ground, submerged the last vestiges of
high (mid-century) modernism and the ubiquity of the neo-baroque
landscapes of corporate campuses and urban entourage (Walker's
"everything 3 meters apart'). Rote geometricism continued
as a default methodology in landscape urbanism, especially in
the case of 1980s urban projects that sought to revitalize the
devastated economic prospects of the city center. The waterfront
'festival marketplace' became the new re-urban model, ending
-- thankfully -- with Battery Park City in the late 1980s.
In landscape architecture, various neo-modernist
schools attempted a revival of geometricism, but without the
stringent and necessary measures of pure (and grave) formalism
-- as was occuring in architecture -- while post-modern schools
evolved toward a neo-minimalist, sur-rationalist, or neo-mannerist
mode of representation. Deconstructivist-inspired landscape
urbanism appeared as figurative 'storyboards' in the 1980s and
1990s, primarily in the guise of international design competitions
(see Berlin after 1989). Narratology and linguistics permeated
the 'extended field' (Krauss) inherited from the 1960s, but
failed to secure the poetic task of re-writing the foundational
language common to landscape + architecture. Rather than search
for primordial pre-linguistic analogs in design languages, linguistics
was applied in a very literal, superficial, and artificial manner
as 'writing and reading' the landscape. As landscape architecture
attempted to re-align the dysfunctional and infrastructural
contingencies of the modern city, late-modernism also clashed
with New Urbanism. Landscape + architecture fell into vogue,
however, only insofar as the type and scale of projects and
commissions required the collaboration of multiple disciplines
and aesthetic considerations and/or computer-generated modeling
softwares promoted convergence (see Parc Downsview Park). This
nascent order only tangentially embraced the artistic jouissance
of renascent forms of formalism -- that dialectical/synthetic
hybridization of milieu and anti-milieu that returns at times
of cultural crisis. The deterministic and materialistic (anti-humanistic)
systems of planning which evolved from McHarg's system of mapping
produced a new wave characterized by its obsession with terrain
vague and junk space while new ecological imperatives were advanced
in the necessary re-appropriation of post-industrial wastelands,
urban and ex-urban. This latter movement, post-McHarg, returned
to landscape the dynamic instrumentalities of process-driven
design, while adding whole new representational systems and
blurring/obscuring relative scales and normative graphic conventions.
Montage and mapping were combined to produce a new avant-garde
sensibility, even though much of the intellectual rigor of
the Dadaist-inspired idiom was off-loaded or simply repressed.
Today, following this historical melange
of schools and movements, the always-already deferred synthesis/syrrhesis
of landscape + architecture -- that which resides uneasily
in the interstices of all instrumentalized and discriminatory
systems and/or fields, and that which has been problematized
as "in-betweenness" -- may be seen exacting revenge
in the form of an irruptive other-worldliness in the operations
of various latter-day conceptual artists (the irrepressible
avant-gardists). This other-worldliness (which is radically
contingent versus transcendental) comes to expression in the
form of the attempt to bring/harness the figures and forces
(gestures) of things and milieux -- an ambient intellectual
and environmental syrrhesis (flowing together) -- that counters
cyclical reification, outright expropriation, and rote appropriation.
As K. Michael Hayes had pointed out, the late-1990s emphasis
on flows (datascapes, vectors, etc) in mostly virtual architectures
might, in itself, end in a return to a mere emphasis on imagology
and surface without the induction of the intellectual coordinates
that support critical-historical consciousness. Virtuality is,
afterall, the present-day reified realm of the Imaginary. To
this must be added the poetic, inter-textual, and the extreme
formalistic gestures harvested from post-structuralism and
structuralism. This quest to bring ambient cultural and natural
forces to play within the axes of three-dimensional space --
to produce the total work of art -- stands astride the conflicting
claims of architecture to be both an art and a science. It is
in the latter instance, in architecture as a hyper-conscious
(self-conscious and critical) art, that the more profound exemplifications
of landscape + architecture will be found. Everything else will
proceed per usual.
Gavin Keeney
is a landscape architect in New York and writes on the subject
of landscape + architecture + other things, a cultural amalgam
always-already forthcoming. He is author of On
the Nature of Things (Birkhauser, 2000). He can be reached
at: ateliermp@netscape.net
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October 14,
2002
Harry Browne
Ireland:
No to War; No to Nice
Don Atapattu
The Tragedy of Alan Dershowitz
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