land scape architecture
the picturesque Prof. Antonio di Campli
USAC, Turin, 13 june 2012
Aesthetic ideal defined explicitly at the end of XVII Century thanks to the writings of William Gilpin, Uvedale Price and Richard Knight. The picturesque marked the taste for the Grand Tour, the elitarian tourism and would have resulted in the Biedermeier style and in the Kitsch. It emerges during the Enlightenment era between the emotions for the ruins and exotic curiosities for the East, it was painting technique (Vasari), now is a way to look at the world.
The principles on which it moves: to observe, to feel, to understand what appears all around according to variety, straw, irregularities, roughness within a path of effects that has objectivist or associationist plots. The picturesque is not just an aesthetic trick but it has a broader involvement with social life, it was not resolved in the care for decoration but had consonance with Enlightenment. Inspirer of this new taste was Salvator Rosa, who described cliffs and mountains, rugged cliffs.the pleasure of memories and its combination with the nostalgic feeling for the world in decline, for a natural environment whose vision was improved by the mirror of Claude Lorrain.
The picturesque operates according to the principle of a machine of illusion. The taste of the picturesque is a cult of the excesses and the picturesque garden is a kind of open Wunderkammer.. where the landscapes are accumulated, the oddities, all the eye complacencies eye.
In mid-nineteenth Ruskin expressed in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, a difficulty to condense a concept that is fuzzy in its nature. Mobile and floating, always moving with its predilection for the plot and the tangle, for variety and irregularity, for roughness. Distinguing the Pictoresque from other categories such as the Sublime, Ruskin shows a sensitivity that gives an aesthetic value to a an exterior and subjected sublimity: what we contemplate is no longer a material fact but a secondary connotation, ephemeral and transient, fragile and superficial. To look at the effect of time on the buildings, the cracks and moss no more exalts the centrality of the work of man, of the product, but its merging, melting, with nature, from this emerges the taste for the ruins for the decadent varieties.
It is a search for a new morality of truth, as defined by the count of Ermenonville Girardin, a truth opposed to a still beauty, drawn from its natural becoming and, because of this, a false truth, opposed to the animated the new beauty.
Thomas Hearne (1744-1817): “Newark Castle, Nottingham”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometeus, 1818
picturesque observe and feel according to irregulaties, variety, roughness.. principle of a machine of illusion
01 new morality of truth relevance of time
02
the picturesque produces two research lines Attention to the genius loci (Norberg-Schulz)
The realization of architectural settings strongly individualized (New Urbanism, Prince Charles, Celebration).
Aadrian Geuze (1960) The Picturesque
Theatre Square, Rotteram, 1990
The square in the traditional sense is a meeting place and observation. In this project the urban void corresponding to roof of an underground garage, becomes the square in the traditional sense, but takes into account the changes that occurred in practices and social behavior, relationships between people and between people and spaces in contemporary societies. 1250 sqm. A place for meetings, a place of crossing, a place where to seeand be seen, an observation place from which it is possible to seize the profile of the city The horizontal plane, is raised 35 cm. it is composed of a mosaic of the surfaces treated with different materials, which lend themselves to different uses. The lighting is variable depending on the needs of the scene.
wood
resin
metal
Expo 02 “Arteplage”, Yverdon-les-Bains The ‘Arteplage’ of Yverdon-les-Bains was one of the four sites into which the Swiss National Exhibition that took place in 2002, was divided. Enormous artificial dunes, six meters in height, are the main organising elements of the design. Wandering between or over these hills, the visitors are confronted with masses of flowers in strong colours and psychedelic patterns, also producing (dis)orientating fragrances. Various facilities are accommodated in rough timber structures, integrated in the dunes. These structures act as ‘artificial body-parts’ that complete the form of each dune. Each pavilion roof is covered with semi-transparent stamoid, bubble-jet printed with a graphic flower-pattern, reflecting the biological species on the dune itself.
An artificial, floating cloud forms an “objet du desir” in the lake of Neuchâtel, accessible only by vanishing into its white foggy substance. Because of a natural approach to materials and elementary detailing, every built object on the Arteplage was recycable and taken away afterwards.
Scheldt storm surge barrier 1990-92 Five years after the works on the Eastern Scheldt storm surge barrier were completed West 8 designed the surrounding landscape by ironing out the sand depots into vast plateaus, covered with shells. Beds of shells are the ideal rest place for coastal birds at high water. They choose the field that gives the best camouflage, white birds choosing white shells and black birds choosing black shells. Here the fields are divided into geometrical patterns that contrast with the coastline and stress the artificial nature of the colonies. The plateaus offer the motorist crossing the storm surge barrier not just an intriguing bird-infested perspective of graphic patterns but also open up the panorama across the sea.
Carrasco Square, Amsterdam 1997
The Carrasco Square is situated to the south of Sloterdijk Station and runs all the way to the canal called Haarlemmertrekvaart. The Carrasco Square, which for the most part is lying underneath the new-elevated railroad tracks, is very well suited for the assimilation of car traffic for the transferium Sloterdijk. Furthermore the square is an important connection for pedestrians: stairs lead up to the higher Orly Square and there is an elevated entry to the station. The overhead road network and the square’s bordering buildings leave it predominantly in the shade. The darkness was a particularly difficult design challenge that had to be overcome to ensure public safety. WEST 8 ‘s design provides a mosaic of grass and paving, a surrealistic painting of asphalt and green for the Carrasco Square. The design consists of tracks of grass and asphalt. The grass is changed into black asphalt with white dots where it crosses a road or is unfavourably situated towards the sun. The roads that cross the floor pattern will be divided from the rest of the area by an elevated rail. The floor pattern is a two-dimensional design that goes along with the three-dimensional presence of the concrete columns that carry the elevated railroad tracks. The area is transformed into an urban forest by allowing part of the columns to be overgrown by ivy and replacing one of the columns with a concrete cast of a beach tree. Furthermore iron casts of tree stumps were placed in this area. These are lighting elements that radiate an orange to magenta light. The different user demands of the square’s daily uses and the need to discourage antisocial behaviour were essential design considerations.
From provocative collages that splice aerial photographs, maps, and nudes, to park designs that play upon the associative imagery evoked by industrial artifacts, recent works of landscape architecture suggest that a new appreciation for landscape is emerging. Some scholars profess that these works break from the tradition of Picturesque because they do not look like Picturesque landscapes, nor do they participate in the ideology of the Picturesque that attempts to naturalize power. However, that photographs of controlled agricultural burns, or parks that feature abandoned refrigerator towers, still tread upon the familiar territory of the Picturesque. While the formal and ideological aspects of recently acclaimed design works are discernibly different from Picturesque-style landscapes, the pleasures we take from them remain indebted to Picturesque aesthetics.