Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens

Marc Treib

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415617253
• eBook ISBN: 9781136804588
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

While we all live our lives in designed landscapes of various types, only on occasion do we consider what these landscapes mean to us and how they have acquired that significance. Can a landscape architect or garden designer really imbue new settings with meaning, or does meaning evolve over time, created by those who perceive and use these landscapes? What role does the selection and arrangement of plants and hard materials play in this process and just where does the passage of time enter into the equation?

These questions collectively provide the core material for Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens, a compendium of four landmark essays written over a period of twenty years by leading scholars in the field of landscape architecture. New commentaries by the authors accompany each of the essays and reflect on the thinking behind them as well as the evolution of the author's thoughts since their original publication.

Although the central theme of these writings is landscape architecture broadly taken, the principal subject of several essays and commentaries is the garden, a subject historically plentiful in allusions and metaphors. As a whole Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens offers the general reader as well as the professional a rich source of ideas about the designed landscape and the ways by which we perceive, consider, react, and dwell within them – and what they mean to us.

The essays have been perennial favorites in landscape courses since their original publication in Landscape Journal. Bringing them together – bolstered by the new commentaries – creates a book valuable to all those creating gardens and landscapes, as well as those teaching and studying these subjects.

1.

Form, Meaning, and

Expression in

Landscape Architecture

Laurie Olin [1988]

Historically, landscape design has derived a considerable amount of its social value and artistic strength from three aspects of the endeavor: the richness of the medium in sensual and phenomenological terms; the thematic content concerning the relationship of society and individuals to nature; and the fact that nature is the great metaphor underlying all art.

Human landscapes exhibit a complexity akin to living organisms. They are composed of disparate elements that form entities different from their parts; they inhabit real time and interact with their environment. They can be evolutionary, undergoing morphological change (e.g., trees growing and maturing with subsequent visual, spatial, and ecological changes), and can even die, both physically and metaphorically.

Recently, two important and, in my view, incorrect theoretical assumptions have become so ubiquitous that they have seriously weakened landscape architecture as an artistic field, despite its social utility. The first has been to confuse human landscapes and the needs and achievements they embody with natural landscapes and their processes. Students, teachers, and practitioners alike demonstrate a lack of understanding of the relationship between the author/artist/designer and the medium of expression; also, they fail to understand its limits, range, and potential on the one hand and display an ignorance of the formal issues within the field and an anticultural stance that eschews aesthetic concerns and their history on the other. The second assumption is a new deterministic and doctrinaire view of what is “natural” and “beautiful” that has replaced older, alternative, views that were equally doctrinaire. Couched in a born-again language of fundamentalist ecology, this chilling, close-minded stance of moral certitude is hostile to the vast body of work produced through history, castigating it as “formal” and as representing the dominance of humans over nature.

This failure to appreciate the formal possibilities of the field, typological repertoire, and potential content (allegorical, iconographic, symbolic, emblematic) that have been developed through history is encouraged in part by an anti-intellectual and anti-historical bias that runs deep in American society and the profession, and in part by the wide scattering of the built work in time and space. The difficulties that accompany the amount of travel necessary to visit this diffuse body of work are compounded by the difficulties of describing and recording the phenomenological nature of sites that possess even minimal complexity or subtlety. As long as I can remember, the vast majority of practitioners have espoused a functional and “problem solving” ethic that, although socially beneficial up to a point, has in effect asserted that mere instrumentality is sufficient in the creation of human environments, eschewing the more difficult issues that are raised if one also aspires to practice at the level of art.

In theory, the range of formal expression in landscape design could be as broad and varied in scope as that of the numerous landscapes, things, and events in the universe, if not more so, since one might presuppose an opportunity for new experiments and combinations of existing phenomena. The things we make might only be limited by the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. As Buckminster Fuller once remarked, “The opposite of natural is impossible.”¹ Yet despite the astonishing number of different landscape designs built since prehistory, there has emerged a finite, even limited, repertoire of favored formal strategies and expressions that have been applied to countless different and particular places through time.

EXPERIMENTATION IN CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE DESIGN

The principal reason for the limitation of formal expression thus far is predominantly cultural, although certain constraints in building materials and physical intervention transcend both art and technology. Water, when unrestrained, runs downhill; plants die when their biological needs are not met. Nevertheless, the choice of materials with which to build—soil, stone, cardboard, tin, etc.—is determined almost exclusively by social factors (economics, safety) and cultural factors (aesthetics). The stir created by revolutionaries in design is usually brought about by their transgression of what is culturally acceptable regarding the choice of material or form or composition.

Three recent American landscape designs that exemplify such transgression of convention, thereby attracting critical scrutiny, attack, and praise, are Martha Schwartz’s Bagel Garden in Boston, SWA’s (George Hargreaves) Harlequin Plaza in Denver, and SWA’s (Jim Reeves and Dan Mock) Williams Square at Las Colinas near Dallas. These projects have followed other contemporary art and design fields in an attempt to broaden the range of acceptable (and serious) formal expression from that which is normative in the field. No one does this in the name of program, function, or biophysical imperative except as broadly defined—i.e., only if aesthetics and the risk taking that accompanies inquiry and a craving for change (to see what is around the next bend) are defined as functions. In fact, one of the things that all of these projects have in common is how little they use the most traditional materials and devices of landscape design, specifically plants and reference to natural landscapes. Their shock value derives from this abnegation of “normal” imagery and texture. They are “contrast gainers” that in every likelihood will lose their strength and energy over time as they become members of a new class of landscape designs that eschew dependence upon planting or direct reference to natural form for their organization. This is not to say that they do not refer to nature. They do, but indirectly, by reference first to other works of art that were more directly inspired by “nature.” As in transmission of energy in other forms and media, there is at each step a loss and a dissipation of that energy.

One dilemma of much recent avant-garde landscape design is that, in the desire to reinvigorate the field, many have turned to devices or strategies that lead away from the central source of its power: Nature. In the attempt to avoid banality and transcend imitation, a crisis of abstraction has developed. By adopting strategies borrowed directly from other fields and by referring to work that is itself an abstraction from the referent, many contemporary landscape designers are producing work that is thin, at best a second- or third-hand emotional or artistic encounter.

MATERIALS

The work of Martha Schwartz (the Bagel Garden, and her mother’s garden in Philadelphia), of Schwartz and Peter Walker (the Necco field installed temporarily at MIT), and Walker’s Tanner Fountain at Harvard University raise the issue of palette [see figure 4-2]. They argue that landscape design can use a host of untried and unconventional materials. Garrett Eckbo and Gabriel Guevrekian pioneered this endeavor earlier in the twentieth century with mixed results. Both experimented with industrial materials as substitutes for traditional materials. One thinks of Eckbo’s use of plastic panels (corrugated and otherwise) and various precast elements and shapes in lieu of wood arbors, masonry walls, and screens; his search for new colors, textures, and shadows; and his adoption of shapes from the School of Paris painters; or of Guevrekian, who substituted shiny metal spheres and crystalline polygons for shrubs in his remarkable Garden of Light.

Landscapes throughout history have predominantly been made of natural materials, with the objects and structures placed within them made from processed or manipulated natural materials. In the nineteenth century, iron, concrete, asphalt, and glass were added in the works of Lenné, Paxton, Alphand, Olmsted, and others. Recent projects of artist Robert Irwin—with ephemeral qualities that are both analogous and complementary to those of plants and the play of light and shade through their structure and surfaces, and the successful mingling of metal and wire with natural elements—should convince any thoughtful person that the problematic effort to expand and invigorate the palette with which we work is a worthy one. On the other hand, when one considers the overwhelming variety of plants and the almost endless variety of patterns that one can achieve with only a few colors and shapes of pavement stones, it is easy to understand why some of the most gifted designers in the field have spent their careers working with a limited palette that was self-imposed, gradually reducing their choices to fewer and fewer elements, thereby producing profoundly poetic works. In fairness, one must further remark that Schwartz and Walker have embarked upon a similar reductive regimen and that their exploration of tainted or unexpected materials and formal orders has been carried out with enormous self-control and restraint. The self-conscious, continual referencing to contemporary works of art rather than to the world itself, however, is a genuine weakness.

IMAGERY

Williams Square at Las Colinas, Texas, near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, by Skidmore Owings and Merrill, SWA, and the sculptor Robert Glen, can be considered to have expanded the range of expression currently practiced by attempting to rescue rhetoric and imagery from the past, specifically that of baroque aquatic sculpture groups [figure 1-1]. This is a revisionist (even historicist) piece that makes the assertion that a landscape design composition today can include elements that are figurative and narrative, and that they can be heroic in scale and understandable to laymen of the region. This work of folk imagery—“wild horses”—is raised to a level of civic prominence with violent and illusionistic presentation. The frozen moment of the Hellenist tradition that was revived by Bernini and continued by the Vanvitelli in works such as Acteon and his dogs in the fountains at Caserta comes to mind. The little jets that forever record the splash of the hooves are a touch that both the dilettante and connoisseur of the eighteenth century would have liked.

1-1
SWA GROUP, LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS; ROBERT GLEN, SCULPTOR; WILLIAMS [MUSTANG] SQUARE, LAS COLINAS, TEXAS, 1984. [MARC TREIB]

COMPOSITION

At Harlequin Plaza, George Hargreaves and his colleagues used old and accepted materials and arranged geometric compositions that were new and startling to landscape design in America [figure 1-2]. The materials—stone, stucco, soil, plants, metal, and water —can all be found in the Bois de Boulogne and Central Park. What is new and different (and unsettling to many) is the compositional methods and devices employed. The composition is indebted to strategies developed in painting, especially surrealism. This is a landscape of displacement, distortion, and dislocation. There are echoes of Dalí and de Hooch, of de Chirico and Haight-Ashbury, of Latin America, and of the School of Paris. Things assume positions or weight that we don’t normally expect. The floor, or pavement, which we usually expect to be a fairly neutral ground quietly holding everything in place, is not only a brightly contrasting and active surface, but its orthogonal patterns are skewed and begin to writhe under the comparatively weightless objects that break and interrupt it more than sit upon it. Walls rise and fall, or are pulled apart, the outsides of which are harsh. Inside, between two central walls, things are small, fragile, oddly domestic, and out of place. Regardless of one’s personal pleasures and aesthetic preference, this is an effective and moving work. It stimulates and disturbs. It pleases and teases. It winks and talks tough. In this work we can see an old strategy that has led to a succession of design styles in painting and architecture. Style is largely concerned with the development of a set of formal characteristics that are common to a group of objects or works of art (Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Picturesque, Gardenesque, Deco, Modern, etc.). Once such a set of characteristics becomes obvious, at least to the point where a designer can consciously know how to achieve them, then it is only a matter of desire to be able to break from those conventions. Examples of how to break from the conventions of classical, beaux arts, and picturesque design composition lie all about us like beacons in the work of many twentieth-century artists, writers, architects, and musicians. Hargreaves simply stepped over that line and utilized several of the most common devices of our era —principally collage and distortion.

1-2
GEORGE HARGREAVES/SWA GROUP, HARLEQUIN PLAZA, ENGLEWOOD, COLORADO, 1982. [MARC TREIB]

A CRITIQUE

I am a little uncomfortable with the results of all of these works, partly because of my own predilections regarding what I wish to make myself, but also because of my skepticism about either the position taken by the designer or the choice of subject or materials. Experimentation with new materials is desirable and Walker/Schwartz in their emulation of Frank Gehry and numerous sculptors such as Carl Andre are to be applauded. Walker’s Tanner Fountain in front of the physics building at Harvard—which places a series of handsome glacial boulders within a field of asphalt and water, steam and an eerie hum—is a remarkable piece. In my opinion, it is stronger than many of Walker/Schwartz’s other works because it refers more directly to the material that it abstracts: natural landscapes of violence and erosion. I would have arranged the stones differently—denser to looser and not so uniform and equal in space and stone sizes—and I would have set them within a sea of pebbles and smaller stones. This would, of course, have completely changed the effect and the meaning, which raises an important question: How can changing the spacing of the stones or the simple substitution of what is, after all, only the bottom of a basin (but it isn’t really a basin either, which is important) change the meaning? Because we invest certain patterns and materials with particular ideas and meaning, especially regarding nature and man’s works, these patterns are loaded with associations. In this case, the material—asphalt—and the uniformity of position between solid and void have an association in our culture with the mechanistic and artificial, even to the point of abhorrence; whereas stones and water are quintessentially “natural” and are almost universally enjoyed by people, both old and young. This juxtaposition of the abhorrent and the delightful creates a challenge to our expectations of what is normal or proper. Likewise, the mechanical repetition of the near grid and near randomness of the stones, which denies particularity of place and focus, is both ironic in its self-denial (it is a particular place and a focal point within its context) and alludes to the absolute infinity of matter and its extension throughout the universe—a clearly evocative and apt metaphor to find at the doorstep of an academic building devoted to the study of matter. This is a powerful and successful work, employing traditional artistic devices for the presentation of meaning, some of which are referred to above. There is more here, for those who take the time to consider, about the seasons, the mutability of matter—water, steam, and ice, for instance—the deception of appearances, the energy that comes unbidden from the earth or from the sky, volcanoes and seacoasts, and so on. The piece also raises questions about alternatives to conventional fountains with their cascades, basins and pools, copings, walls, and ornament. Although this design eschews planting, it relies for its success upon the circumstantial planting that exists there as its context. The trees and grass of its campus setting form a background, a benign cultural interpretation of “Mother Earth” against which this disruptive and stimulating composition is positioned. Like many so-called site sculptors such as Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, or Alice Aycock, who are enormously dependent upon the pre-existence of a broad, cohesive, often beautiful, natural or cultural setting in which to make their disruptive gestures or to build their mysterious large-scale objects, this fountain (and the early work of Martha Schwartz as well) are gestures that play off and against an environment but are not about—nor capable of—creating an environment beyond that of an extended object.

Denver’s Harlequin Plaza confronts different expectations and raises other questions. How are we to regard a landscape of dis-orientation and alienation? Is surrealism an acceptable strategy to employ in constructing an ordinary part of the workaday world? Why or why not? Such thoughts first occurred to me upon seeing several projects of Aldo Rossi. These were visually powerful schemes (for housing and education) that were obviously sophisticated works of art. The most apparent source of Rossi’s visual schemata is the early work of the Italian pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1. Form, Meaning, and Expression in Landscape Architecture
• 1a. Commentary 1: What Did I Mean Then or Now?
• 2. Must Landscapes Mean? Approaches to Significance in Recent Landscape Architecture
• 2a. Commentary 2: Must Landscapes Mean? Revisited
• 3. Can Gardens Mean?
• 3a. Commentary 3:
• 4. Gardens Can Mean
• 4a. Commentary 4: Meaning and Criticism
• Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index