The Return of Nature

Sustaining Architecture in the Face of Sustainability

Preston Cohen, Erika Naginski, Preston Scott Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317749769
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Return of Nature asks you to critique your conception of nature and your approach to architectural sustainability and green design. What do the terms mean? Are they de facto design requirements? Or are they unintended design replacements? The book is divided into five parts giving you multiple viewpoints on the role of the relations between architecture, nature, technology, and culture. A detailed case study of a built project concludes each part to help you translate theory into practice. This holistic approach will allow you to formulate your own theory and to adjust your practice based on your findings. Will you provoke change, design architecture that responds to change, or both?

Coedited by an architect and a historian, the book features new essays by Robert Levit, Catherine Ingraham, Sylvia Lavin, Barry Bergdoll, K. Michael Hays, Diane Lewis, Andrew Payne, Mark Jarzombek, Jean-Francois Chevrier, Elizabeth Diller, Antoine Picon, and Jorge Silvetti. Five case studies document the work of MOS Architects, Michael Bell Architecture, Steven Holl Architects, George L. Legendre, and Preston Scott Cohen.

Part I

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Organic Conceits

1

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Design’s New Catechism

Robert Levit

The ethical imperatives raised by ecological crisis have thrust landscape architecture to the center of design discourse, and architects, along with their big-scale brethren, urban designers, have desisted from their clichéd condescension and become converts to the environmental vocation.¹ Landscape architecture is no longer dismissed by architects who have imagined it as a background—figureless and ornamental—a passive ground waiting for building (terms of habitual condescension directed by architects towards landscape architecture, identified by Elizabeth Meyer).² Rather, now, it is the discipline, and, by their adaptation to it, architects and urban designers have recast their own position, joining landscape architects to attend to today’s environmental crises and mitigate threats to our survival.

All this may be for the best, but it is worth asking what is being made of landscape architecture by architects and, in some cases, how it is being recast even by landscape architects. Mohsen Mostafavi raises this question in the introduction to his volume Ecological Urbanism (2010):

Is it enough for architects, landscape architects, and urbanists to simply conceive of the future of their various disciplines in terms of engineering and constructing a more energy-efficient environment? As important as the question of energy is today, the emphasis on quantity—on energy reduction—obscures its relationship with the qualitative value of things.³

That is: what is the aesthetic vocation for ecologically oriented design practices— what Mostafavi calls, citing Guattari, a new “ethico-esthetic paradigm”? Continuing to draw on Guattari, Mostafavi promotes an aesthetic that will reveal the complementarity between us and the milieus that make us and that we make. But what city does not already reveal (or at least demonstrate to the inquisitive mind) the complementarities between ecological forces including those of human activity? To put it bluntly, the city has always been just such a system. It simply is an ecology in which people and built systems dynamically interact with each other and with the environment (non-human and inanimate). To see the city in such terms is but a matter of disposition, not a distinguishing mark by which to sort—according to a nonsensical distinction—the ecological from the non-ecological city. Thus, the question remains: What is the new thing that should become apprehensible to sensuous perception—that is, to aesthetic experience—under a new ecological regime?

To be clear, the question of what is to become perceivable is a different one from what instruments should be used and perhaps invented to face a mounting environmental crisis. Absent such a distinction there would be no need to raise the aesthetic question as Mostafavi does. He assumes not only that changes in technique for dealing with environmental challenges will have a sufficient impact on the physique of cities, but that these changes will (or should) demand, as it were, the invention of a new aesthetic regime through which to turn the brute fact of technique into aesthetic experience (as Le Corbusier’s “five points” did for the technical innovations of ferroconcrete column and slab construction). However, it is no more possible today to account for the aesthetic commitments of environmentally oriented practices by seeking their derivation from technical or instrumental origins than it was in the case of Le Corbusier’s fashioning of a new architectural idiom through his “five points.”⁴ Thus, in reference to the claims that Charles Waldheim makes, as we shall see, on behalf of an undisguised instrumentality in environmental design (landscape urbanism), something more is at stake than simply making visible the new means of managing the environment, and what this something is bears some consideration.

But, before coming to what this something is, let us consider a more prosaic question. It lies outside the nimbus cast by the moral imperatives of design’s “ethico- esthetic” response to the challenges of sustainable design. This question, urgent to designers, is one in which disciplinary identity and professional prerogatives are at stake. Professionals in adjacent technical disciplines such as engineering, building technologies, and materials science increasingly compete against design professionals around issues of technical competence in an ever more complex field of design. Not to mention the growing competition between architects and landscape architects. Increasingly, sustainability is a key concern. How are designers to respond? The acquisition of new forms of technical mastery—or at least familiarity with the deployment and management of new technologies—can only be part of the response. Arguably as important, if not more so, has been the growing centrality of a rhetoric in design that overtly communicates design’s new (renewed?) ethical dedications.⁵

Thus Waldheim remarks that while the canonical landscapes of Frederick Law Olmsted—Central Park and the Emerald Necklace—were, in fact, designed as ecological infrastructures, they masqueraded as pastoral landscapes. (Masquerading or not, whatever Waldheim’s reservations may be, for Olmsted and his peers the dual status of these landscapes as works of landscape rhetoric and infrastructure was not a contradiction to be overcome but a virtue.) By contrast, Waldheim continues,

contemporary practices of landscape urbanism reject the camouflaging of ecological systems within pastoral images of “nature.” Rather, contemporary landscape urbanism practices recommend the use of infrastructural systems and the public landscape they engender as the very ordering mechanisms of the urban field itself, shaping and shifting the organization of urban settlement.⁶

He insists that infrastructures should shape the urban field—arguably something they have always already done—but also, as if this were a separate effort, that the impact of infrastructures on the shape of urban settlement should be left undisguised.⁷ The exception taken to Olmsted’s work, according to this view, is not that it made a less perfect infrastructure (it did not) because it took on pastoral form. Rather, the problem is that this work did not present itself as infrastructure as such, unvarnished and naked to the eye.

Yet what, after all, is camouflage or disguise? The Fens of Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace was both a working wetland (before the damming of the Charles River) and a polysemic allusion to other landscapes—Scottish fens, the marshlands of the New England shore, and more—suggesting an atavistic, fictive origin for the city of Boston.⁸ Should these allusions or their forms count as a disguise? Especially given that the constitutive elements of the iconography of Olmsted’s landscape design also happened to be the very elements of the landscape ecology that performed the remediating function constituting its infrastructural performance? The wetland planting was both the instrument and the form of literary and scenographic allusions. If, regardless of its performative success, the Fens is to be construed as camouflaged infrastructure, then what would it mean be to be undisguised? What would or does uncamouflaged infrastructure look like?

From an ecological perspective, the city in its entirety has always already been an infrastructure—always caught up in shaping and being shaped by the dynamic interactions between living and nonliving matter. That is simply what the city is. Manuel De Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (1997) serves as a guide here.⁹ In what he describes as a “natural history” of the city, even the typological carapace of the city—its architecture, its stable (only slowly changing) urban typologies and morphologies—is viewed through a naturalist’s vision.¹⁰ Buildings—the calciferous shells of a living multi-species reef (i.e. the built form of the city) made by women and men but inhabited by much more—is by definition a system within a larger ecology, an infrastructure among infrastructures.¹¹ In other words, there is no city or settlement pattern that is ever anything but an urban ecology and, in that sense, an infrastructure for the living. Thus what is recognized as infrastructure depends, in some large measure, on one’s perspective. From the naturalist’s point of view, everything is infrastructure.

If everything is already infrastructure, as I believe it is, then there can be no dispensing of camouflage because, following the logic above, there is no such thing.¹² What, then, is at stake in Waldheim’s call to do so? Perhaps it is better, for the moment, to put aside the finer points of definition and simply allow that what counts as infrastructure in ordinary conversation is simply systems: bridges, sewers, streets, power lines and a host of technical instruments that have today been supplemented by a wider view that includes organic and hydrological systems. To unveil infrastructure is to make these systems speak directly of themselves and to make their operations and dynamic interactions present themselves as such. In order to be uncamouflaged, they must present themselves without, paradoxically, representing themselves. They must simply be and, in so being, be present to our perception.

However, since the appearance of such systems—to the extent that they are even in part products of human ingenuity—are so inadequately determined by anything approaching an absolute performative logic, what comes to stand as the undisguised, unadorned, and visible system is a visual rhetoric. As such it must claim to present a naked instrument whose appearance is simply a given. For an instrument, according to this claim, need not be expressive, it need only work, yet all the while paradoxically relying on a choice of expression that is nothing less than a rhetorical expression of its instrumentality. Infrastructure is understood to be naked (uncamouflaged) to the extent that the idiom communicating its instrumental status remains unrecognized as a visual code. Instead, this code must appear to be no more than the unmediated ontology of instrumental necessity. Two false premises commingle in the fantasy of uncamouflaged landscapes: first, that there is a mode of perception which operates outside of symbolic codes and recognizes directly the performative logic of things, and second, that there are sufficiently objective conditions to determine environments free of symbolic codes and practices.¹³

Let us return to Mostafavi’s summons to an aesthetic project. His call to attend to questions of quality in the face of quantitative demands addresses the distinction (which is not to say the conflict) between performative and aesthetic goals. He would like new aesthetic experiences to raise consciousness of the imbricated relationship between ourselves and the extended milieus in which we live, at the same time that new aesthetic experiences might simply be discovered through the experience of the new arrangements of environments responding to the challenges of sustainability. The first goal is epistemological and didactic in nature; the second is simply openness to new experience. He mentions seeing Paris, or at least one of its boulevards, from a new vantage point, elevated, on the Arts Viaduct as an example of the latter. Now, if, at first blush, Mostafavi’s ruminations seem different from Waldheim’s, with the former setting up a difference between quality and quantity and between engineering and some...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Organic Conceits
• Part II The Sublime Past
• Part III Sustaining Nature
• Part IV The Nature of Infrastructure
• Part V Nature, Unnaturally
• Index