three terms

land scape architecture

three terms Prof. Antonio di Campli

USAC, Turin, 31 may 2012

This first lesson propose a reflection about the concepts of landscape, garden design and landscape architecture, exploring their different meanings, interactions and overlappings.

We’ll try to reflect in particular about the complexity and power of the term landscape, the meaning this concept has today for us, finally it is about the relationships among the idea of landscape, the practice of garden design and the invention of “landscape architecture”.

In order to explore these relationships it is useful to star a reflection on the concept of landscape, a term that, in its current use, comprehend and include all the others.

“The most abundant thing on earth is landscape�

(Maria Zambrano)

1 landscape 2 garden design 3 landscape architecture

Landscape has from a long time become the main field of conquest for contemporary societies, it is an immaterial good, a space of appropriation and conflict.

The term landscape is unclear, it defines at the same time the thing and the image of the thing, according to some geographers it is a “bat-word� that match too many definitions.

Landscapes are created by people, through their experience and engagement with the world around them. They may be close-grained, worked-upon, lived in places, or may be distant and halffantasised.

In contemporary western societies, we can say, we perceive landscapes, we are the point from which the seeing occurs. It is an ego-centred landscape, a perspectival landscape, a landscape of views and vistas.

The term landscape was originally coined by aesthetes, antiquarians and landed gentry in the emergent capitalist world of western Europe.

It is a particular bourgeois concept defined to evoke a particular set of elite experiences, a particular way of seeing.

More accurately, it was re-coined.

There was an earlier anglo-saxon useage of the word corresponding to the german landschaft - meaning a sheaf, a patch of cultivated ground, something small scale corresponding to a peasant’s perception, a mere fragment of a feudal estate.

This usage had gone out of vogue by the eleventh century, replaced by words that corresponded to the larger political space of those with power – territoire, pays, domain.

And then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it re-emerged, tightly tied to a particular “way of seeing”, a particular experience, where territoty becomes a picture.

This coinage is a fine example of how those with power can use language and image to conceptualise and naturalise a particular, and in this case, deeply inequal, way of relating to the land and to the people.

Landscape. The Invention of the Name

Landscape as Counterpower «The idea of landscape was born as an aesthetical image based on something that, from the political and historical point of view, is called impotence. This is the true birth of the landscape. At a time when civil society, which began to arise in Germany, between the end of eighteenth century an the beginning ot nineteenth century, had no power, or rather was completely excluded from power. This civil society only had an aesthetic culture. In short, this bourgeois society knew novels, painting, music, but knew nothing else. The complex of knowledge and techniques by which the world was ruled was still in the hands of the feudal aristocracy. The landscape was born here, strategically, as a way to oppose to the old management of territory defined in terms of “space” another possible model». (F. Farinelli)

Deutschland. The German eighteenth-century civil society evoked by Farinelli is the bourgeois society, b端rgerlich, i.e. a society composed of those individuals, both plebeians and civilians, who experience visions and values apart from those who are noble and aristocratic. (The bourgeoisie is the class whose values all want to imitate, aristocrats included, it is the only class conscious of its inadequacy, but because of this it is fruitful).

The destruction of the systems of powers characterizing the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Deutschland was the goal of this class, and this passage from one a feudal world (and space) into the bourgeois one could be achieved only producing a new image of the space itself, a more complex vision of the world, developing a new model of perception, understanding, and construction of space.

DEUTSCHLAND

The concept of landscape is redefined in Germany at the beginning of the eighteenth century, as a result of this anxiety, by some geographers like Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Ritter. “Mountain means freedom�, with this expression the German writer Friedrich Schiller intended to emphasize that in the mountains was absent or was less felt the feudal and aristocratic despotic power, which hindered the deployment of bourgeois values.

It is in this sense that some geographers like Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), try to transform the concept of landscape from an instrument of aesthetic appreciation of space to a model of scientific description (understanding, and therefore government) of the world and thereby contribute to the transit of middle class from the domain of only the aesthetic appearance to that of knowledge and mastery of space.

Against the old logical spatial denomination spaces made by the feudal-aristocratic political power, the attempt of the bourgeois knowledge is to establish on the same space a different power, a new domain with a differente nature from the existing one.

Alexander von Humboldt, Section of the Andes

The criticism developed and put forth by these geographers against the old geographical knowledge and its discourses, is a critique underpinning the existing social order, and in this context, it is an attempt to theorize an apparently distinct geographical knowledge, it is a trick useful at a first instance, to get free from the existing political power, to approach it to another political form, to set up another domain, more subtle, less explicit.

In this way, says Farinelli, the new geography “tranfers on the field of geographical space conception of a revendication that is the reverse of the form in which it manifests”.

According to what logic it was possible to redefine the geographical knowledge, the description of the space?

This reflection is the basis of the antagonistic character that bourgeois geographical knowledge tends to acquire against the aristocratical-feudal knowledge.

The political order based on boundaries, on the cartographic power of maps, on the enumeration of elements, on the Linnaeus’s logic of description of nature, is presented as too unstable, unfit to offer any adequate representation of space. The new order or descriptive model is based on the “natural” position of elements, not on the subdivision but on the situation, i.e. on a logic that, to describe a space, identifies its invariant elements, its unchanging surroundings.

What is produced, according to Farinelli, is a “already experienced and trained” notion who “behind the apparent innocence of his childhood forms hides a terrible cunning.”

The landscape redefined as a scientific model of description (and government of space) appears immediately as the opposite of the cartographic logic, the opposite of any form of reduction or enumeration; it is an aesthetic and sentimental totality where it is not possible to separate individual objects, no possible internal separation between things, where you can not apply any rational analysis, otherwise the stimmung, the vibrating unison between observed object and the observing subject is soon destroyed. Landscape means an inability to separate things each other and from their environment, which of course includes human societies.

Redefinition of Geographic Knowledge

Landscape and Spatial Representation: the Invention of Linear Perspective.

The emergence of the concept of landscape is connected with the development of linear perspective, first used by Filippo Brunelleschi and formalised by Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise of 1435, Della pittura.

The significance of this development was that it allowed painters to represent a three dimensional world in a two dimensional surface, through a technique which organised represented objects in relation to each other. Yet this technique was regarded not as an artifice but as a means of revealing truth. Perspective art represents a form of visual control, which freezes time and presents things as they empirically appear to be. At the same time, perspective establishes not merely a set of spatial relations on the canvas, but a fixed relationship between object and subject, locating the viewer outside the picture, and outside of the relationships being depicted.

The viewer is thereby rendered trascendental, outside history.

Landscape painting is thus a representation of place which alienates land, such as that it can be appropriated by gaze which looks from outside. As such it privileges vision over other senses, a tendency which can also be recognized in Renaissance theatre, cartography, and later in Cartesian philosophy, which associates consciousness with eye.

Power Landscape, land appropriated by the disengaged look, is thus a notion which emerges at a particular point in history.

This form of representation was established in Italy and Flanders, argues Denis Cosgrove, it involves the emergency of a new “way of looking”, a new politic of vision.

This politic lies in the development of social relations which allowed land to be looked as as a commodity, disengaged from hereditary pattern of tenure, able to be bought and sold at will. Thus landscape painting and the idea of landscape emerge hand-in-hand with capitalism.

Denis Cosgrove (Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscapes, Croon Helm, London and Sidney 1984), affirms that landscape is an ideological concept. «It represents a way in which certain classes of people have signified themselves and their world through which they have underlined and communicated their own social role and that of others with respect to nature».

The practice of landscape emerges during the period of transition to Capitalism; one important aspect of this process was the transformation of land into a commodity. In this new situation, the relationship to the territory is characterized by a process of alienation (which at the same time becomes the main prerequisite for the possibility to appreciate a landscape as an aesthetic object).

The pre-modern dweller, the insider, has been replaced, at least among the propertied class, by someone outside the scene, the outsider, and in so doing, this subject has a new and different degree of control never experienced before.

For this reason, Cosgrove argues that the concept of place, which is a most enveloping notion that does not imply a state or condition of control, is antithetical to the idea of landscape.

Both concepts, landscape / perspective (linear perspective, the technical apparatus of observation and representation related to a sort of detached, estranged view) “reinforce ideas of individualism, subjective control of an objective environment, and the separation of personal experience from the flux of collective historical experience�.

The arts of landscape, during the period of their emergence and success, have acted as tools of the new system of power, they have naturalized and erased, in terms of representation, the contingencies of relationships with the land through the reassuring artifice of the Pastoral.

Therefore, the landscape can be traditionally seen as a way of representing the land and nature that reproduces the particularities of gender and class.

It is a view where those working with the land, and can not possess it, are hided.

This is why Cosgrove sees the practices of landscape as part of a system of power relations, as forms of cultural power.

3 Examples (Barrell’s studies; Wiepking’s plans; Heidegger’s hut) Some scholars, such as Denis Cosgrove, William J.T. Mitchell, and John Barrell, reflecting in general terms on landscape representation, have claimed that its primary concern is the definition of a model of space and a system of values aimed at the control of a territorial or urban area.

Intended in this way, the concept of landscape acquires an ideological dimension as an expression of values and viewpoints on how space should be perceived and occupied.

Some of the picturesque images of the English Romantic period are an example of this, like those of John Constable, where the describing of the landscape has a distinctly model character: “It represents a way in which certain classes of people have signified themselves and their world through which they have underlined and communicated their own social role and that of others with respect to nature.”

This form of description or account occurs through a process of decantation and abstraction of signs, conventions of use and values, and expresses the way in which a social group implicitly tends to think of space, and to naturalize economic and social practice within it. The result is a partially imagined territorial space, the expression of a system of power relationships – by which we mean cultural power.

John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape This book examine how the rural poors are represented in the landscape paintings of the period (17301840), and, more generally how social relations are depicted in such paintings, and what place the poor are shown as occupying in society of England seen as a whole.

John Barrell sees the poet and the painter of the years 1730-1840 as committed to a continual struggle, at one to reveal more and more of the actuality of the life of the poor, and to find more effective ways of concealing that actuality.

But this in the circumstances of the late eighteenth century must be rendered acceptable to patrons who stand in fear of an organized and militant working class.

Barrell argued that the vision of rural life described by Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable, among others, “can be understood only by understanding the constraints . . . that determined how the poor could, or rather how they could not be represented.” These pictures of rural life offer “the image of a stable, unified, almost egalitarian society.”

1

Only by considering this “mythical unity” in terms of what is shown, how it is organized within the composition, and how this relates to the social realities of the time, it is possible to understand the way in which the painters constructed this “artifice”.

Furthermore, Barrell suggested, these “constraints still operate in subtle ways today.”

“We should ask ourselves whether we do not still, in the ways we admire Gainsborough, Stubbs, and Constable, identify with the interests of their customers [who purchased these pictures] and against the poor they portray.”

In other words, Barrell’s analysis also may explain ways in which modern viewers respond to these pictures.

John Barrell shows that whilst the picture of rural Britain was usually dominated by those in the light, there were also those in darkness - the marginalised elements within rural society - to consider. We must always be aware how these marginalised groups were considered, represented (as stereotypes, romanticised, exoticised, etc.) and understood, and why this situation existed.

For example, in eighteenth century art the ‘basic rule’ was: “the rich and their habitations must be illuminated, and the poor and theirs be left in the shadows of the “dark side of the landscape’’. This division has the advantage of marking the differences in status and fortune between rich and poor, while showing that the unity of the landscape and of the society it can be seen to represent is dependent on the existence of both, which combine in a harmonious whole.

As the landscape could not be structured without the natural contrasts of light and shade, so the society could not survive without social and economic distinctions”. As Barrell observed, the interrelationship between light and darkness can be regarded as a metaphor for the structure of society.

Three painters: Gainsborough, Morland, Constable.

John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home, now known as “Constable Country”.

Constable’s astonishing power to convey the physical poise of working men and animals at peace in their settings; no one saunters through his landscapes; all carachters have the appearance of serfs.

Constable’s attempt is to present his peopled landscapes as an image of harmoy between man and nature. Constable’s political attitude, he seems to have been, enough in view of his birth and position of his family, an old-style rural tory, convinced that the social and economic stability of England depended on a flourishing agriculture. These attitudes are a piece with eighteenth-century Georgic, except insofar as the interests of agriculture and industry had come to seem over the intervening period in some ways antithetic; so that although an image of the poor “as they really are” could on certain terms now be admitted in pictures concerned directly with the problems of the poor, this would have been a considerable embarassment to onstable, in his attempt to recreate an older, georgic, image of the fat and productuve land of East Anglia.

So it was necessary for him to reduce his figures until they merge with the landscape, to distance them, to paint them as indistinctly as possible. Thsi imahe of harminy is possible only if the labourer is distant or indistinct. The landscape is an image of stability and permanence; the stability of an ideally structured and economic social order.

John Constable, The Stour Valley and Dedham Village

(ref: Enclosure Act)

John Constable, The Hay Wain

John Constable, Boat Building near Flatford Mill

John Constable, Dedham Vale

John Constable, Flatford Mill from a Lock on the Stour

John Constable, Flower Garden

Heinrich Friedrich Wiepking-Juergensmann (1891-1973) Landscape as identity, culture “blood and soil�.

The themes of landscape protection were born in Germany around the late nineteenth century.

They were generated by middle class anxieties around the issues of national identity, the pace of industrialization / urbanization, the deterioration of the countryside.

The nineteenth century Romantic cult of nature has saturated the landscape with symbolic meaning, a sublime naturalism that can be found in the poetry of Heinrich Heine, in the philosophy of Gottfried Herder, in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, and in music of Richard Wagner.

At the time of their birth middle class concerns were not, strictly speaking, about environmental questions, the lens for observing the processes of environmental and territorial modification was of a nationalist kind, arguing that the countryside deterioration processes would erode the distinctive German national character, a process that would have produced a moral decline of the population.

These first protectors saw scenic sites (Siebengebirge), indigenous flora and fauna like natural monuments or anchors of national identity; as persistent indicators of environmental conditions places of the Germanic tribes homeland.

These elements of persistence were seen as capable of giving stability to a young nation, unified in 1871 and whose modernization processes was marked by elements of instability.

2

HEIMAT. The period between 1880 and 1914 was defined by Eric Hobsbawm as the “flowering of invented traditions”, a period in which the Europeans have given new strength to old rituals, holidays, social practices that have given the new nations a sense of heritage in a period of rapid social changes and industrialization.

This process also saw the involvment of landscape protectors actively participating in the nation’s cultural construction identifying natural landscapes as symbols of national strength.

As argued by Anthony D. Smith, the natural characters “can define and locate a community in the landscape” recalling, as in a narration, symbolic crises, dramatic events, turning points in the history of a community; German organizations for landscape protection, in a similar way to those British , French or American, have taken part in this cultural nationalization process of landscape.

HEIMAT

In 1940 Wiepking said that “plain aesthetic reasoning play no role in landscape politics,” a statement reaffirmed in his book Die Landschaftfibel (landscape booklet), written in 1942.

Wiepking wanted to preserve the German identity, he “had to restore the sense of Germanness of a considerable part of our population, including the rural one, in a soul landscape that corrispond to our being and our spirit”, to do this, he said,” we need to create Germans landscapes”.

Wiepking conceived the new East German landscape as a Wehrlandschaft, a military defense landscape.

In these plans also the use of vegetation had to follow the Nazi ideology. In the National Socialist era plants sociology derived from Humboldt’s plant geography was “teutonized” and became a criterion to avoid unacceptable combinations of plants.

The model included hedges and revegetation against erosion, with rows of trees placed in such a manner as to obstruct the path of emenies’ tanks, the hedges were composed of rows of trees planted in a north-south direction, with deep pits in both sides in order to form an obstacle to an attack coming from the east. Wiepking has given to this planting an eternal value if done properly.

1942, City of Auschwitz Plan, “Total Landscape Plan”.

This is certainly not the first example of such operations, the parks of Chatsworth in England and Pavlovsk in Russia are examples where entire villages were rebuilt elsewhere to promote the construction of an Arcadian environment for the elite. Similar operations were also conducted outside Europe: the Indians and Yellowstone Park in Wyoming, or the removal of natives in the Serengeti in Tanzania.

In these experiments, the conceptions of ideal environments are related not only to natural and built landscape, but also to specific notions of what constitutes an ideal society.

Heidegger’s Hut, Todtnauberg, Black Forest “On a steep slope of a wide valley of the Southern Black Forest, is located at 1150 meters altitude, a small hut. In horizontal projection, it measures six feet by seven. A low roof covers three rooms: the kitchen, the bedroom and a small study. Scattered in the narrow valley, at the end of a slope, there are, spacious and solid, farms with large overhanging roofs. Along the slopes, meadows and lawns go up into the forest with its ancient trees, tall and dark. And above all things, a clear summer sky - in whose radiant spaciousness two hawks rise, making wide circles”.

Schoepferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz? (Der Alemanne, March 1934) Creatve Landscapes? Why Do We Live in the Province?

3

Walden, or Life in the Woods, is the book written almost entirely by Henri David Thoreau during his stay in a hut, built largely on his own, on the shores of Walden, near the town of Concord, Massachusetts.

He lived there from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847.

The experience of living in the forest was at the same time an attempt to find an authentic and intimate relationship with nature, to find himself in a mercantile society that had betrayed the true values.

It was an optimistic experiment about the possibility reconciliation of life with the natural space.

During his stay Thoreau describes his life but also its natural and environmental context of focusing on detailed descriptions of the lake and the surrounding area is characterized by the presence of numerous water bodies.

Unabomber’s Hut, Montana On 2 December 1997 a small hut hidden in the woods of Montana was transported by trucks to the city of Sacramento.

Followed by a convoy of helicopters and photographers it took three days to move this building 10x12 feet from a state of isolation to a big city. For the first time an entire building is examined as evidence by a court, a small structure with an innocent image was accused of giving shelter to a dangerous criminal who has terrorized the U.S. for 18 years. The structure is simple and refers to the childish archetype of the hut with a simple roof, but elementary forms play a key role in the American imaginary. The cabin in the woods is a generic place of retreat for the city dweller, an image that we can see in the vacation home, in the fishing lodge, in the camp. From the point of view, the cabin of Unabomber is a copy of that in which Thoreau lived between 1845 and 1847.

Some alternatives The idea of landscape, traditionally conceived, is intertwined with the concept of community, belonging, and group identity and thus intending it it as a tool for specific action against external threats. Anyway it is possible ot find different declinations of this idea.

Let’s consider some symbolic images:

Ulysses observing the salty horizon of Ogygia island Petrarch, who climbs the slopes of Mont Ventoux The Indies as they appear for the first time in the eyes of Christopher Columbus The sublime and the scenarios of the ruins of Byron, Winckelmann and other Grand Tour travellers The exotic landscapes but infested by cannibals who appear to survivors of Typee The island of Robinson Crusoe The characters of Kaspar Friedrich on the seashore The Earth seen from the Moon

The power of these images, in particular those describing a person who looks a natural setting, is one of the symbolic forms of Western culture and in this relationship between observer and landscape, it is possible to recognize a concept of space and world.

Landscape is considered as the triumph of culture against chaos, but these figures what else they communicate?

In these images the landscape does not seem to correspond simply to an object of pleasure, rather to a threshold, which draws the viewer beyond the common knowledge, beyond himself, toward what appears to be in unknowable.

These images subtend the idea that landscape is certainly an expression of culture, something but at the same time it is also the opposite, a limit a veil, a mist behind which lie the lands of a unknown territory.

To clarify this concept can it be useful to look at some useful studies.

Scapeland The first of these studies is a short essay by Jean-Francois Lyotard called Scapeland, in this title the inversion of the term corresponds to a reversal of the traditional meaning of the concept of landscape, Lyotard emphasizes the relationship between landscape and alienation (estrangement).

Starting from Kant’s reflections about the relationships between landscape and madness, where the German philosopher talked about the perception of landscape as a form of madness , Lyotard observes that landscape perception emerges through a condition of alienation /estrangement under which: the mind is transported from one sensible matters to another, but retains the the sensorial organization appropriate to the first. The sensible matter is assimilated by the mind in this new position, and, according to Lyotard, it is this condition that we meet the landscape.

Landscape is conceived as estrangement: this is the moment when the power over the object wobbles.

Landscape, in the sense that Lyotard develops, is the breakdown and dissolution of the traditional idea of landscape.

“To have a feel for landscape you have to lose your feeling of place”: landscape is without destiny, something that resists the powers of composition, eye and mind.

Consequently, according to Lyotard, landscapes are elusive elements in front of which we are astonished, “lost travelers”, “there would appear to be a landscape whenever the mind is transported from one sensible matter to another, but retains the sensorial organisation appropriate to the first, or at least a memory of it“.

The Earth seen from the Moon, the countryside for the urban dweller and the city for the farmer.

Estrangement seems to be the condition for the perception of landscape.

For Lyotard, a landscape is the “cancellation of a support”, an “absence that stands a horrorific presence where the mind reels and loses his goal, his aim”.

Clearly, he argues, landscapes do not combine together history with geography. They are half seen, half touched, they blind and anaesthetise. “the relationship between landscape and the eye is moved and repositioned near the end of the theme of subjectivity.

There are aspects of this formulation that appear close to the Freudian concept of uncanny: “landscape (…) should be thought as the erasure of a support. If anything remains, it is an absence which stand as a sign of horrifyng presence in which the mind fails and misses its aim”

Estrangement Lyotard’s text has some similarities with the geological-philosophical essay by Ernst Bloch, written in 1932, Berlin Seen from the Landscape.

Bloch’s essay revolves around the theme of estrangement: the issue here is the alienated, distant relationship between the city and its soil, its physical support: the unstable ground on which Berlin is built, “the landscape itself does not seem be enough appropriate, and to this extent, it resembles the exciting, unreal city “.

The settlement in this fluid ann mobile landscape never develops in terms of depth, and the relationship with the soil remains curiously abstract. “This formless landscape”, Bloch writes, “has greatly hindered the inhabitants to fit well in it (...), they cannot prey the mountains or to take shelter in caves.” Compared to the landscape of southern Germany there is nothing of the rich immanence of Goethean nature.

The apparent poverty of the Berlin landscape, and the detachment and abstraction that it suggests, contains a promise. The condition of the city of perpetual estrangement is one in which any ideology has to struggle hard to put down roots.

The city lies exposed in a experimental time, not falsely warmed in the midst of mountains and in cultural regions of an area already well characterized”. The premonition of Bloch about Berlin as a city whose sense of estrangement, given by its deterritorialized soil, provide it with a politically radical future.

Landscape “seen from below”.

John Brinckerhoff Jackson in the first of his essays, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, talks about landscape to describe the socio-cultural construction of the physical environment made by communities and individuals.

“A landscape is a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature… it represents man taking upon himself the role of time.”

“No landscape, vernacular or otherwise, can be comprehended unless we perceive it as an organization of space; unless we ask ourselves who owns or uses those spaces, how they were created and how they change”.

This view involves concepts such as system, organization, and tends to be used in the a paraesthetical sense. This definition of landscape “a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence”, was an attempt to avoid optical inclinations that he has identified in the landscape official definitions “portion of land which the eye can comprehend at a glance”, even if he maintained some visual connotations of (composition, background).

If the classical definition, landscape tends to be seen “from above” (the eye of the master, of who owns or plans to take possession), the second tends to be “from below”, the daily lived and experienced by social groups, vernacular landscapes, etc..

John Brinckerhoff Jackson was the founder of LandscapeMagazine in 1951.

Influenced by the French Annales school of geographers, Jackson saw landscape as the product of human activity as well as a visual display: “a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence”. (“The Word Itself,” in Defining the Vernacular Landscape [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984], 8).

Jackson rarely spoke of the work of professionally trained landscape architects; instead he focused his acute eye on the vernacular landscape: more pervasive, thus more indicative, of a broader segment of the population. To Jackson, a vernacular landscape was also beautiful and often held more than formal beauty:

“The older I grow and the longer I look at landscapes and seek to understand them, the more convinced I am that their beauty is not simply an aspect but their very essence and that that beauty derives from the human presence. . . . The beauty that we see in the vernacular landscape is the image of our common humanity: hard work, stubborn hope, and mutual forbearance striving to be loved. I believe that a landscape which makes these qualities manifest is one that can be called beautiful”

Ian Hamilton Finlay, Little Sparta, Dunsyre, Lanarkshire, Scotland, 1966 “Gardening activity is of five kinds, namely, sowing, planting, fixing, placing, maintaining. In so far as gardening is an Art, all these may be taken under the one head, composing.�

(Ian Hamilton Finlay)

1 landscape 2 garden design 3 landscape architecture

The idea of garden as a natural place modified by human intervention according to aesthetic purposes comes from the concept of private ownership of natural resources and from the belief that natural beauty can be perfected by human intervention. The first garden is that of the man who chose to terminate his wanderings.

The first garden is alimentary. The orchard or vegetable garden is the first garden.

The first garden is a fence. It is better to well protect the vegetables, fruit, and then the flowers, animals.

The word garden refers to enclosure or enclosed space: iranian paradeisos, latin hortus conclusus; finally it expresses the art of living, the one that, over time, will continue to seem us “the best.”

It’s the way to conceive “the best” that, depending on the model of civilization, will determine the style of the gardens.

The notion of precious good, is constantly evolving.

The scenography intended to enhance “the best” adapts itself according to the mutations of garden ideas, but the principle of the garden remains constant: to get as close to paradise as possible.

The garden is therefore always something double: its organization linked both to motivations of utilitarian order, and ideal order.

The garden can be seen as the highest evolution of agrarian culture or as the place of escape from the city.

The garden is so intimate and collective: the ambiguous place where human societies have articulated nature and culture, design and pleasure, work and enjoyment

Alhambra Gardens, Granada. Plan

Garden Court of the Linderaja (Boudoir of the Sultana). Alhambra

At the same time garden is the place of the exposed interiority outside and is the concept of interior to establish a link between landscape, garden art and landscape architecture.

Interior: a domestic place, intimate, controlled.

“Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively ... when the solidarity of the old disciplines breaks down—perhaps even violently, via the jolts of fashion—in the interests of a new object and a new language..”

(Roland Barthes)

1 landscape 2 garden design 3 landscape architecture

Starting from these considerations about the concepts of garden and garden design it is maybe easier to explain what we mean with the locution “landscape architecture�, and to reflect about the success of this concept today and in which way this idea has absorbed and redefined the practice of garden design.

During the last years the concept of landscape has become a device of agglomeration, and communication of almost all the discourses about society, territory and city transformations, and the strategies of their interaction and modification.

Across a range of disciplines, landscape has become a lens through which the contemporary city and territory is represented and a medium through which it is constructed.

“Landscape architecture” is a locution first used by Gilbert Laing Meason in his book On The Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy (1828) to describe the relationship between architecture and landscape in the great landscape paintings.

This expression was then used by John Claudius Loudon to describe a specific type of architecture, suited to being placed in designed landscapes.

Loudon was admired by the American designer and theorist Andrew Jackson Downing and “landscape architecture” was the subject of a chapter in Downing’s book A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841).

This led to its adoption by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux.

Olmsted gave a different slant to the meaning of “landscape architecture”, using the term to describe the whole professional task of designing a composition of planting, landform, water, paving and other structures.

Their first use of this term was in the winning entry for the design of Central Park in New York City.

Olmsted and Vaux then in 1863 adopted “landscape architect” as a professional title and used it to describe their work for the planning of urban park systems.

Olmsted’s project for the Emerald Necklace in Boston was widely admired and led to the use of “landscape architecture” as a professional title in Europe.

Emerald Necklace: a 4.5 km2 chain of parks linked by parkways and waterways in Boston.

More than 300,000 people live within this area. The Emerald Necklace is the only remaining intact linear park designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s first landscape architect.

Today landscape architecture is a multi-disciplinary field, incorporating aspects of: garden design, botany, horticulture, the fine arts, architecture, industrial design, geology and the earth sciences, environmental psychology, geography, and ecology.

The activities of a landscape architect can range from the creation of public parks and parkways to site planning for campuses and corporate office parks, from the design of residential estates to the design of civil infrastructure and the management of large wilderness areas or reclamation of degraded landscapes such as mines or landfills.

It involves the systematic investigation of existing social, ecological, and geological conditions and processes in the landscape, and the design of interventions that will produce the desired outcome.

The scope of the profession includes: urban design; site planning; town or urban planning; environmental restoration; parks and recreation planning; visual resource management; green infrastructure planning and provision; and private estate and residence landscape master planning and design; all at varying scales of design, planning and management.

Landscape, we can say, is today a sponge term, able to absorbe every kind of intervention in city and territory. The activity of garden design: the art and process of designing and creating plans for layout and planting of gardens and parks is absorbed in it.

We have Landscape Ecology, the science of studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and particular ecosystems. Landscape ecology integrates biophysical and analytical approaches with humanistic and holistic perspectives across the natural sciences and social sciences.

Landscape Planning, and finally Landscape Urbanism, a theory of planning and design for urbanism arguing that landscape, rather than architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience.

Landscape Urbanism has emerged as a theory in the late 1990’s, it describes “the ability to produce urban effects traditionally achieved through the construction of buildings simply through the organization of horizontal surfaces.” . The term, “Landscape Urbanism” was initially coined by Peter Connolly, but later was made more popular by architect and current Landscape Architecture chair of the GSD at Harvard, Charles Waldheim, as a means of describing the recent emergence of landscape as a medium of urban order for the contemporary city .

In all these different fields the focus is on the cultural control of space, something that involves social control and dwelling practices: from disciplinated society to control society.

Landscape Architecture / Garden Design.

The connection between them is in the concept of interior and interiority, of a domesticated and controlled space.

Landscape is always an expression of spatial and social control, we have to be aware of this condition.

When we talk about landscape architecture this means that we’re observing a territory or city through a black mirror or Claude glass.

Manufactured in England in the 18th century, the Claude glass (or Black Mirror) is a small mirror, slightly convex in shape, with its surface tinted a dark colour. Bound up like a pocket-book or in a carrying case, black mirrors were used by artists, travellers and connoisseurs of landscape and landscape painting.

Black Mirrors have the effect of abstracting the subject reflected in it from its surroundings, reducing and simplifying the colour and tonal range of scenes and scenery to give them a painterly quality.

claude glass

They were famously used by picturesque artists in England in the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a frame for drawing sketches of picturesque landscapes, as a landscape-viewing device. The user would turn his back on the scene to observe the framed view through the tinted mirror—in a sort of prephotographic lens—which added the picturesque aesthetic of a subtle gradation of tones. They were wielded on picturesque tours of Britain, the Continent and North America. In areas such as the Wye Valley or the Lake District, the distorted perspective, altered colour saturation and compressed tonal values of the reflection resulted in a loss of detail (especially in the shadows), but an overall unification of form and line.

The Claude mirror essentially edited a natural scene, making its scale and diversity manageable, throwing its picturesque qualities into relief and - crucially - making it much easier to draw and record.

Claude Lorrain, Shepherd, 1655

The Claude mirror references the relationship between desire and the fabrication of place, between the body and the environment. Unlike the camera obscura or camera lucida - devices that facilitate accurate transcription - the Claude mirror transforms the view from what it looks like to how it ought to look. Linking the mirror as we do with contemporary popular culture, tourism, snapshots, web-based security and surveillance technology, exposes the on-going mediation of nature through technologies of vision.

It reveals the layered, culturally-determined nature of the gaze.

It draws attention to the complex mediation between looking and mark-marking, framing and representation, as well as the many interventions that occur between apprehending and understanding landscape.