Landscape Theory In Design

 Spatial practices 92 In some instances, the worked-matter performs as an analogon, which is an image, sensation, or a physical element that prompts the imagination. Think of spontaneous memorials where people bring worked-matter to the scene of the incident. A bottle of Lucky Tiger left at a spontaneous memorial is no longer just a toiletry product, but rather an analogon, which calls forth the deceased by giving us what he smelled like. It prompts us to imagine the aftershave other than it is. The being for-itself haunts being in-itself in the context for-others. Look at the image of Little Spirits Garden by the interdisciplinary designers/artists Pechet Studio and Daly Landscape Architecture. The garden is designed to pay tribute to the loss of infants in the Victoria area of British Columbia, Canada. A tiny concrete house was made for each of the 3,000 infants to be commemorated. Parents and family members were encouraged to bring items to inhabit the houses. Espace propre You can see the phenomenology of Sartre in the early work of Bernard Lassus. According to Conan, Lassus’s working process “is accomplished through a process of corporeal exploration.”66 This reflects Sartre’s goal, which seeks to render those phenomena invisible, visible.67 and remind one of the “multiple relations that bind us to the visible and the tangible world.”68 Lassus’s garden theory began in the Coracle Gallery in London; according to Lassus, “I hung strips of yellow paper from the ceiling of the gallery, suspended a plumb line next to a wall and put a spirit level on the floor. I did this in order to destroy the notion that rooms are exact geometric forms . . . It’s a matter of destroying misperceptions and examining what seems to be reality.”69 Phenomenology debated Sartre’s Phenomenology has been debated by philosophers, particularly Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who privileged the role of the body in phenomenology. In fact several books have been published that are exclusively dedicated to their disagreements. A common critique made by Merleau-Ponty concerns Sartre’s in-itself (en-soi) and for-itself (pour-soi) in his conception of being. For Merleau-Ponty, this theory represents the “cutting consciousness off from the world” with in-itself and for-itself having no effect on each other.70 But other scholars have argued that Sartre’s dualism is a false labelling of in-itself and for-itself, and that the two types of being are “more of a continuum than a polar duality.”71 For example, negation prompts the oscillation between being and nothingness. Do you see how the worked-matter performs as an analogon? Why do you think people feel compelled to bring items to this landscape and to spontaneous memorials in general?

Spatial practices  93 The role of phenomenology in the design process has also been debated. The architecture theorist Jonathan Hale notes that some have charged, “Phenomenology is fundamentally conservative and backward-looking, apparently too preoccupied with nostalgia for a supposedly subject-centred world.”72 Indeed, the very idea of subject-centred world was challenged by post-structuralism. As you will read in the Language chapter, there are many overlaps between phenomenology and structuralism, as well as post-structuralism. Yet phenomenology’s privileging of first-hand experiences and the primacy of subjectivity in creating meaning is at odds with structuralism’s privileging of the external systems of relations. Proponents of structuralism argued that a priori structures of the mind mediate experiences, and thus, they would preclude any direct description of lived reality. Moreover post-structuralism would question not only the subjectivity of experience, but also the very placement of human experience at the centre of meaning. Yet, if there is one dimension of human experience that is primarily defined by your own personal encounters, it is your memory, and this is the subject of the next section. Primary reading for phenomenology Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Intuition and Expression: Theory of Philosophical Concept Formation. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy – First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF MEMORY AND SPACE the soul can still regard past events which are preserved in its intellect, and it can recall these (for recollection is an intellectual activity). But it can form no new memories when it no longer has a body. Because memory requires a body, the souls in Dante’s Inferno are forever stuck in their pasts, unable to form memories or combine old ones into new thought (for which they would need bodily organs).73 (Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 2004) An expert of medieval culture, Carruthers is referring to the narrative poem, The Divine Comedy, by Durante degli Alighieri (1265–1321) better known as Dante. The poem divulges the imaginary journey of Dante’s soul towards God from “Inferno” to “Purgatory” and eventually “Paradise.” Why do you think the body is an important dimension of human’s ability to form memories?

 Spatial practices 94 Carruthers herself notes that this bodily connection to memory is based on the medieval Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas’s (1225–1274) belief that “sensory memory does not survive death.”74 He was probably on to something. Not as much as your soul, but about the important linkages between your body, mind, and brain in the creation of memories. Recent studies in the neurosciences have found that the spaces you experience are vital to the formation of memories. Specific neurons in the brain enable you to both construct and navigate internally a sense of external physical spaces and to construct memories.75 Because these parts of your brain’s circuitry are exclusively dedicated to spatial navigation and memory, the experience of physical spaces with your body can produce strong memories. In fact your spatial memory may exceed other types of memory. Think about the difference between reading about a landscape versus physically experiencing a landscape. The ability to recall spatial experiences – culturally or personally – in the present is critical to the design process because spatial memories can also serve as springboards for design. Carruthers also notes that memories can be used to create new things. This insight links past encounters and the imagination, which is critical to students who are often called upon to envision anew with the past in mind. This idea is also reflected in the architect Juhani Pallasmaa’s contention, “Memory and fantasy, recollection and imagination, are related and they have always a situational and specific content. One who cannot remember can hardly imagine because memory is the soil of the imagination. Memory is also the ground of self-identity; we are what we remember.”76 Why memory and space matter Since landscape architects often work with natural systems that have their own memories it is important to avoid the outsize romantic memories often attached to these systems. In California, for example, landscape architects carried out an extensive programme of day-lighting streams. The fluvial geomorphologist Matt Kondolf argues that many of these projects demonstrate how cultural memory can distort knowledge concerning the restoration of alluvial systems. Uvas Creek in California, for example, was restored to match an idealized version of rivers witnessed in English landscape gardens. The day-lighted creek was designed as a serpentine, single channel with a series of logs and plump boulders lining the sides. Unfortunately creeks in this part of California are wide, But why should you concern yourself with the theory of a medieval friar? Can you recall the landscape you visited more vividly and precisely than a landscape you read about?

Spatial practices  95 with sand-and-gravel beds. One year after this extreme makeover, Uvas Creek reverted to what creeks look like in this particular region of the world – wide and gravelly. Kondolf warns that despite our cultural preference for the single meandering channel, witnessed in numerous landscape paintings and etchings, “the river usually remembers and reasserts its true nature, which is often more dynamic and messy.”77 This example demonstrates that memory and the types of memory – cultural or natural – are important to distinguish from each other. Memory and space in action Framed space Framing refers to vertical frames made with vegetation, walls, or even earth. They are typically used to draw attention to a view. The architect Donlyn Lyndon argues, “Spaces become memorable in two ways: through formal structures with special coherence or power, and through events that take place rooted in location.”78 Landscape architects are primarily concerned with his first point – forming spaces. Vertical frames can enable the designer to direct attention to important parts of the site. At Centennial Park by Maria Caffarena de la Fuente, Andrés García Alcaraz, Victor Cobos Márquez, and Bernardo Gómez Delgado, in Algeciras, Spain, significant features on and off the site are literally framed. As part of a national park area situated on the Punta de San García, Centennial Park provides a view out to the Strait of Gibraltar. Four concrete frames at a turn in the park’s pathway frame the space of both cultural and natural artefacts. These prospects range from the Rock of Gibraltar, viewing stations created for the project, and to the site’s location at the juncture connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Mediterranean Sea. 2.26 Centennial Park (2007) by Maria Caffarena de la Fuente, Andrés García Alcaraz, Victor Cobos Márquez, and Bernardo Gómez Delgado, image courtesy of falconaumanni, https:// creativecommons. org/licenses/ by-sa/3.0/deed.en, Algeciras, Spain

 Spatial practices 96 Remnant space Because landscape architects often incorporate existing site features as part of their design response, they also have the opportunity to retain remnant spaces as a way to recall past spatial memories of the site. Remnant spaces are leftover spaces from a former process or use of the site. Look at Thames Barrier Park, by the landscape architect Alain Provost, in East London. Notice the deep spatial qualities of the sunken garden. This space takes its cue from the site’s previous industrial use. The park occupies a former chemical and dye works, armaments factory, and tarmac plant. By preserving and reconceiving the five-meter-deep former dry dock (utilized when the land was an industrial site) as a sunken garden, Provost creates one of the chief mnemonic features of the site. These frames are literally giant frames, can you think of other ways you might frame space? 2.27 Thames Barrier Park (2000) by Alain Provost of Groupe Signes with Patel Taylor, London, England In keeping this hollowed space and making it part of the design, do you learn something about the scale of the industrial activities that took place there? Why do you think the hedges in the sunken garden are maintained in wavelike patterns?

Spatial practices  97 Manufactured memories While Thames Barrier Park expresses a past use that actually occurred on the site, landscapes can also be designed to convey former uses as a constructed memory. Indeed, not all memories are accounts of something true. The construction of false or distorted memories happens to everyone. Look at the image of MFO Park, by Burckhardt + Partner AG and Raderschall Landscape Architects, in Zurich. The park is located in the Neu-Oerlikon area, which was home to a former weapons production and testing facility, dismantled in 1999. The galvanized steel framing system, wire mesh, and cables suggest a former industrial building, but the structure is new. It also serves as an armature for numerous scented perennial vines and creepers, which climb the structure. Catwalks and stairs allow for the volumetric exploration of the structure and provide experiences of different fragrances. 2.28 MFO Park (2002) by Planergemeinschaft MFO-Park burckhardtpartner/ raderschall, Burckhardt + Partner AG Architekten/ Raderschall Landschaftsarchitekten AG, image courtesy of Markus Fierz and Roland Raderschall, Zurich, Switzerland Can you see how the design recalls a memory of a building that may not have been there at all? What role do you think the scents play in memory?

 Spatial practices 98 Childhood memories Your own spatial memories can also serve as a catalyst for design. This insight links past encounters and the imagination, which is critical for students in the design studio. Consider the River Aire. The watercourse drains a 100-km catchment area from the Salève range to the mountains of France and onto the Plaine de l’Aire. During the 1930s it was reconfigured as a concrete channel. More than a half-century later, George Descombes was commissioned to restore five kilometers of this canal into an open water system.79 Descombes not only refused to forget the river’s past as a channelled waterway, but he also sought to reveal the imaginative relationship he had with this watercourse. He notes: This river is part of the territory of my childhood. My father was a bookseller, which as a child gave me access – at least in writing – to the American landscapes described by the novelists James Fenimore Cooper, James Oliver Curwood, and Joseph Conrad. So with these impressions in my mind I used to go to the river with my dog, excitingly expecting to encounter a grizzly bear or something walking or fighting in the snow. The land and its trees and river then seemed large and the reality of my own dimensions small. That has all changed, of course, the dimensions have changed. I became taller and the landscape smaller.80 In response, Descombes’s design of the formerly channellized river retains parts of the straight concrete walls (memories of the canal) in juxtaposition with the unwieldy movements of the newly freed river (his own personal memories of the waterway). Heterodite Bernard Lassus asks, “Is not heterogeneity more welcoming than homogeneity?”81 The prefix hetero- means other or different. On the other hand, the prefix homo- means the same. Lassus proposes a heterodite space where site memories are slivers of time juxtaposed. For Conan, Heterodite constitutes a creative approach that replaces the idea of composition – that is, the introduction of an intellectual order chosen a priori by the creator. In contrast to the composition Heterodite theory calls for highlighting the How do you think his response reflects both the site’s memory and his own memory and imagination? Do you have spatial memories that could serve as an inspiration for design? Do you remember a landscape from your childhood memories as huge, and when you visited this same landscape as an adult it seemed smaller?

Spatial practices  99 fragments of the history of a place thus discovered in an ensemble of juxtaposed fractions of a place, whose extension is left up to the imagination of each.82 Lassus argues that heterogeneity is appropriate for gardens and landscapes because “no site is ever a blank surface, thus it is not possible to apply a unifying organization, which in order to reduce heterogenius, would tend to destroy the knowledge of it still more.”83 Look at Lassus’s design for a motorway rest stop at Nîmes-Caissargues, France. At the Nîmes-Caissargues Rest Stop Lassus contrasts spatial practices from two different time periods: Le Nôtre’s use of the avenue space in his baroque gardens and the twentieth-century highway. A great garden invention of the seventeenth century, the 700-meter-long avenue is bound by rows of trees on each side in Lassus’s design. While the motorway literally cuts off the avenue, the spatial boundaries of the avenue continues over it, sloping towards the view of Nîmes. Here, Lassus collides two pre-eminent landscape types of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries – the stately space of the avenue and that of the open road. 2.29 The avenue from the theatre façade at Nîmes-Caissargues Rest Stop (1990) by Bernard Lassus Plasticien Architecte– Paysagiste, image courtesy of Dominic McIver Lopes, Nîmes, France 2.30 The avenue extending on either side of the motorway at NîmesCaissargues Rest Stop (1990) by Bernard Lassus Plasticien Architecte–Paysagiste, image courtesy of Dominic McIver Lopes, Nîmes, France Do you see how the Rest Stop is a heterodite space? If Lassus placed sound walls where the site meets the motorway, why would that not be a heterodite space?

 Spatial practices 100 Memory and space debated The historian Daniel Abrahamson notes, “Memory, conventionally understood, consists of personal recall and reconstruction of past events. Necessarily, it involves forgetting. History, conventionally understood, represents culture’s official explanation of the past.”84 Abrahamson thinks that designers should not rely solely on personal memories when reconstructing the past because these memories are difficult to critique. For example, you can’t challenge Descombes’s childhood memories because they are his own personal recollections. On the other hand you could challenge a historical fact about the River Aire, such as the erection of a dam in 1876. There would be documentation and perhaps photographs, and other recordings to substantiate its construction that year. In other words, Abrahamson is concerned that society, and design professionals in particular, may have forgotten the important role that history plays. Chiefly, that history is documented, and in turn, open for debate. He notes. “If the public is content merely to remember the past, then the powerful will be entrusted too fully with planning the future. Change demands engagement, which entails conviction; conviction allows debate, which leads to change. Memory cannot be debated; history can. Make history, not memory.”85 Primary reading for space and memory Daniel M. Abrahamson, “Make History Not Memory.” Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Marc Treib, editor, Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF CONTESTED SPACE Space thus understood is both abstract and concrete in character: abstract inasmuch as it has no existence save by virtue of the exchangeability of all its component parts, and concrete inasmuch as it is socially real and as such localized.86 (Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution, 1970) Here, the Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) employs the terminology (abstract and concrete) to describe the commodification of space in the production of post-Second World War urban development. He argued that the urban landscape was not simply composed of symbolic and functional spaces created by professionals. Rather, these spaces were key locations where economics, ideology, and capital were continually negotiated. It is where society literally reproduces itself as a spatial practice. “Abstract” space, according to Lefebvre, is the space you work with when you are designing. It is measurable and exists in the mind of a professional landscape architect, Can you think of why memories might pose a problem for a memorial design or a historic preservation project?

Spatial practices  101 architect, or planner. In other words, it is the space you use as a designer. Abstract space is also an instrumental space, meaning it plays a key role in power relations. Henri Lefebvre’s use of the term “concrete” does not refer to the pourable mixture of cement, water, sand, and gravel. Rather, concrete space, according to Lefebvre, is the space you experience. It is not so much measured space as it is lived space. Lefebvre studied the town of Mourenx in France to prove his point. Originally a sparsely populated commune in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department, the discovery of gas deposits in the area during the 1950s prompted the French government to build another town in Mourenx to accommodate thousands of new workers. Lefebvre argued that the spaces of this housing development were abstract, in other words conceived by the designer as isolated features in an exchange-value society; thus, securely tethered to the capitalist chain of production, distribution, and consumption. But he also contended that these spaces were concrete in character, as the distribution of housing types mirrored the workers’ status in the factory system, “segregating the inhabitants according to socioprofessional categories: workers lived in blocks of flats, supervisors in towers, management personnel in villas.”87 It is in this sense that Mourenx becomes a commodity, which is a concrete abstraction. 2.31 New City: San Francisco Redeveloped (1947), public domain

 Spatial practices 102 For Lefebvre the process of commodification became the operational logistics of spatial practices – the procurement and design of housing. Lefebvre often described these spatial practices as an “isomorphic space without privileged orientation or direction (such as front or back, high or low); any linkage among objects in this space is neither impossible nor necessary.”88 Certainly, what Lefebvre experienced at Mourenx was not limited to France. Globally, this type of urbanism spread to numerous countries during the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly in the United States through federally funded urban renewal programmes. Many of these housing schemes were inspired by the architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret’s (Le Corbusier’s) plan for Radiant City, which separated land uses and transportation corridors, and featured various forms of multi-family high-rise housing with swaths of open space. Look at the redesign proposal for San Francisco’s Western Addition area. Lefebvre’s critique of space later extended to the historic redevelopments of older European cities as he anticipated the transformation of these urban centres as exclusive sites for tourism. He writes: countries in the throes of rapid development blithely destroy historic spaces – houses, palaces, military or civil structures. If advantage or profit is to be found in it, then the old is swept away. Later, however, perhaps towards the end of the period of accelerated growth, these same countries are liable to discover how such space may be pressed into the service of cultural consumption, of ‘culture itself,’ and of the tourism and the leisure industries with their almost limitless prospects. When this happens, everything that they so merrily demolished during the belle époque is reconstituted at great expense . . . what had been annihilated in the earlier frenzy of growth now becomes an object of adoration. And former objects of utility now pass for rare and precious works of art.89 Ironically, 15 years after this account was published, Lefebvre was interviewed from his home near the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He complained bitterly that he was being “pushed out” of his apartment as the city of Paris was “museumfied” for touristic development.90 The renovation of apartments in his neighbourhood increased their value; thus, Lefebvre himself was facing the impacts of his theory that linked designed space, power, and capital. Why contested space matters Since the inception of the profession of landscape architecture, a chief concern has been the creation of public spaces that are shared by all people. During How do the proposed buildings and open spaces compare with the older gridiron housing that was created before the Second World War? When you design spaces, do you conceive of them in the abstract?

Spatial practices  103 the nineteenth century when Frederick Law Olmsted visited Birkenhead Park, a project that gave the people of Liverpool 51 hectares (125 acres) of pastoral parkland, he was keen to bring this notion of a people’s garden to the United States. This vision eventually materialized in his plans with the architect Calvert Vaux for Central Park in New York City. Since Olmsted’s time, landscape architects have continued to fight for publically accessible spaces. Since the late 1970s, however, the privatization of previously public, open space has increased, chiefly in cities. Funded through public–private partnerships, this breed of urban landscape is often heavily monitored to keep certain individuals out, particularly homeless people and skateboarders. The urban historian M. Christine Boyer argues that these types of urban spaces are signs that the city has relinquished its social contract with its citizens. In her assessment of public– private redevelopments in New York City, she noted that the city was “no longer concerned with such high-Modernist aspirations as providing a broad range of housing, efficient transportation or leisure and workspace for the masses.”91 The withdrawal of federal funding for urban projects, the loss of industrial economies, and the waning social imperative of designers in general, opened the doors to a new conception of the city in North America. According to Boyer this conception regarded the city as a site for tourism and the spectacle of consumption, resulting in the privatization of public spaces and a greater disparity between rich and poor – a critique that would certainly resonate with Lefebvre. Critiques of post-Second World War functionalist urbanism, the privatization of public spaces in North America, and the transformation of historic urban centres as spectacles for tourist consumption suggest that conceptions of space are not neutral or objective, nor do these conceptions of space simply represent power. Space is power, and it is this contestation of power relations that can be explored in design. Contested space in action Utopias and heterotopias The philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) in his essay, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” outlined a conception of heterotopias he found in all societies. While utopias are unreal idealized sites, he argues that heterotopias are real counter sites for those not conforming to societal norms. For Foucault they exist in all societies, and in Western culture these spaces of societal deviation include places for dead people (the cemetery), ill people (the hospital), or bank robbers (prison). Skateboarders are an interesting social type because communities will often go to great lengths to prohibit them from skating in public landscapes designed for other activities. At the same time, landscape architects have been creating special spaces, heterotopias, where they can skate. These real counter sites can reproduce a street vocabulary with steps and handrails or a suburban vocabulary with sunken areas appearing like empty swimming pools. Yet, despite these

 Spatial practices 104 efforts, skateboarders continue to appropriate their own spaces in the city. As the designer Chihsun Chiu notes, they refuse “to accept the city as produced. Thus such physical elements as roads, footpaths, railings, stairs, and handrails are stripped of their symbolic values and given new values.”92 Look at the Eduard-Wallnöfer-Platz, designed by LAAC, in Innsbruck, Austria. At 9,000 square meters (2.2 acres), the public square comprises an undulating topography of concrete and granite aggregate, which has been treated differently (such as sandblasted or polished), creating a continual surface for play. The designers intentionally sought to blur the boundaries between a heterotopic space for unauthorized activities (skateboarding) and condoned activities, such as eating your lunch on a park bench. ArchDaily notes that the Platz contains “a wide variety of people happily coexisting within it, from businessmen, to skaters, to the elderly, to families with young children.”93 2.32 Eduard-WallnöferPlatz (2010) by LAAC Architekten, image courtesy Ralf Roletschek, https:// creativecommons. org/licenses/ by-sa/3.0/deed.en, Innsbruck, Austria Can you think of other types of programmes that coexist in the same landscape?

Spatial practices  105 Subversive space In the Forming chapter you read about subversive interventions, where the Guerrilla Grafters intentionally subverted the established practice of planting non-fruit-bearing street trees by grafting fruit-bearing branches onto these trees. Subversive spaces can also be created and can serve as a critique. The landscape architect Julie Bargmann, founder of D.I.R.T. (Dump It Right There) Studio, is known for her dynamic action plans that reuse site material as integral to the design process. Yet, Bargmann is also known as a fierce advocate for public rights to landscapes. When her studio was commissioned to design Hardberger Park at Voelcker Farm, 311 acres of degraded post-agricultural land on the outskirts of San Antonio, she worked very closely with surrounding community members to realize the park as 75 percent managed woodland and 25 percent outdoor rooms for community use. During the numerous meetings with neighbours and other community members she noticed that some people did not like how large immigrant families used the parks in the area for outdoor dining. This attitude incensed Bargmann, as she wanted all people to use this new park. Look at the image of Hardberger Park at Voelcker Farm. 2.33 Hardberger Park (2009) by lead designer, Julie Bargmann, D.I.R.T. Studio, Stephen Stimson and Lauren Stimson, Stephen Stimson Associates Landscape Architects, San Antonio, Texas, USA

 Spatial practices 106 Residual space Residual spaces take advantage of leftover spaces. These are spaces that are often unused or unprogrammed, and while they are most likely owned by someone, they often lack any signs of ownership, and may even be neglected. Residual spaces are often ideal sites to intervene. Look at the image of the Crack Garden in San Francisco. In what CMG Landscape Architecture calls “tactical interventions,” a concrete slab in an urban backyard was jackhammered with a series of vertical lines, creating cracks that extended to the soil below. The cracks were planted with tough plants that could endure the environment and in turn transform the concrete lot into a green space. Contested spaces debated Disputes over space – who designs it and uses it, and when and how – are commonly associated with issues of gender, race, and class. The landscape architecture professor Patricia McGirr argues that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (discussed in Spatial Constructs at the beginning of this chapter) “became a medium for the struggle over class, race, gender made possible by What did Bargmann do to accommodate the immigrant families? How was this act subversive? 2.34 Crack Garden (1999) by Kevin Conger of CMG Landscape Architecture, San Francisco, image courtesy of Kevin Conger, California, USA Why do you think CMG called this a tactical intervention? What will be the long-term benefit of Crack Garden? Why do you think they made the cracks consistent lines?

Spatial practices  107 its larger context.”94 Many veterans resented Maya Lin’s design because it did not conform to the heroic figurative style of memorials that they were familiar with, and which their response, the Three Soldiers statue, abides by. Lin’s design was anti-heroic, sombre, and most notably abstract. McGirr furthermore maintains that many of the veterans resented the designer herself: Lin was not only female, but she was also of Chinese heritage, and she was placed in the category of Asian Other. In addition to issues of gender, race, and class, the increasingly risk-averse, safety-conscious nature of society is a significant factor contributing to the contestability of landscapes. The fear of taking risks and its transformation as a core value in many cultures is based on what the sociologist Frank Furedi calls the “precautionary principle,” when the perceived dangers in taking risks are greater than not taking risks at all. According to Furedi the precautionary “principle has caused an institutionalization of caution. It offers security in exchange for lowering expectations, limiting growth and preventing experimentation and change.”95 The precautionary principle makes sense for the security industries; however, it’s an insufficient tenet for the design of landscapes. There are some landscapes where risk taking should be encouraged. For example, landscapes for children should prompt curiosity and provide that vital ingredient of challenge. Yet all too often the false hope of a risk-free environment prevails and many outdoor play spaces designed for children are sterile with low, standardized play equipment, fencing, and rubber matting – what the landscape architect Helen Woolley calls Kit, Fence, Carpet, or KFC!96 Primary reading for contested space Christine Boyer, “Cities for Sale: Merchandising History at South Street Seaport.” Michel Foucault “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Henri Lefebvre, “The Production of Space.” NOTES 1. August Schmarsow, “Essence of Architectural Creation,” Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, intro. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 281–297 (289). “Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung,” (Essence of Architectural Creation) served as Schmarsow’s inaugural address to the University of Leipzig in 1893, and was published a year later by Karl Hiesermann in Leipzig. 2. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, “Introduction,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, intro. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 1–85 (61). 3. Ibid. 4. For more on the spatial experiences of landscapes in history, particularly during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, see Michel Conan, ed., Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2003) and Martin Calder, ed., Experiencing the Garden in the Eighteenth Century (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006).

 Spatial practices 108 5. Charles Downing Lay, “Space Composition,” Landscape Architecture 8 (January 1918): 77–86. 6. Adrian Forty, “Space,” Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000), 256–275 (265). 7. Christopher Tunnard, Gardens in the Modern Landscape (London: The Architectural Press, 1938; 1948), 105. 8. Marc Treib, “Axioms for a Modern Landscape Architecture,” Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review, ed. Marc Treib (New York: MIT Press, 1993), 36–67 (40). 9. Garrett Eckbo, Landscape for Living (New York: Architectural Record with Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1950), 62. 10. Sylvia Crowe, Garden Design (Woodbridge: Garden Art Press, 1994), 82. 11. Noel van Dooren,“Speaking About Drawing,” Topos: The World of Landscape Architecture 80 (2012): 43–54, 47. 12. Stephanie Ross, What Gardens Mean (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 171. 13. Gina Crandell, Tree Gardens: Architecture and the Forest (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2013), 49. 14. Susan Herrington, “Beauty: Past and Future,” Landscape Research 41, no. 4 (2016): 441–449. 15. Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 158. 16. Marc Treib, “The Nature of Space,” Dan Kiley Landscapes: The Poetry of Space, eds. Reuben M. Rainey and Marc Treib (Richmond, CA: William Stout Publishers, 2009), 57–78 (58). 17. See Marc Treib, “Dan Kiley and Classical Modernism: Mies in Leaf,” Landscape Journal 24 no. 1 (2005): 1–12. 18. Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music (New York: Dutton, 2006). 19. Susan Herrington, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander – Making the Modern Landscape (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). 20. Jane Hutton, “Substance and Structure 1: The Material Culture of Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Architecture’s Core? Harvard Design Magazine no. 36 (2013): 116–123 (123). See also Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, ed. John Cava (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 21. Ibid. 22. William S. Saunders, “Go Productive: The Rice Campus of Shenyang Jianzhu University,” Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu, ed. William S. Saunders (Basel: Birkhaüser, 2013), 50–55 (50). 23. Elizabeth K. Meyer, “Kiley and the Spaces of Landscape Modernism,” Dan Kiley Landscapes: The Poetry of Space, eds. Ruben M. Rainey and Marc Treib (Richmond, CA: William Stout Publishers, 2009), 117–143 (139). 24. Gilles A. Tiberghien, “Vegetation as Setting: Living Environment in Miniature,” Intermediate Natures: The Landscapes of Michel Desvigne, ed. Delphine Costedoat (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2009), 137–149 (147). 25. Ibid., 141. 26. John Hopkins and Peter Neal Interview, “Interview with Sarah Price, Layering Horticulture and Ecological Across the London 2012 Gardens,” The Making of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, eds. John Hopkins and Peter Neal (Chichester: John Wiley, 2013), 153–164 (154). 27. William Robinson, Wild Garden, accessed 20 January 2015, http://babel.hathitrust.org/ cgi/pt?id=hvd.32044103115259;view=1up;seq=7.

Spatial practices  109 28. Udo Weilacher, Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1996), 117. 29. Emily Waugh, “Interview with Claude Cormier + Associés,” Landscape Architecture’s Core? Harvard Design Magazine no. 36 (2013): 46. 30. Gill Valentine, “Women’s Fear and the Design of Public Space,” Built Environment: Women and the Designed Environment 16, no. 4 (1990): 288–303 (301–302). 31. Peter Walker, Experiments in Gesture, Seriality, and Flatness, ed. Linda L. Jewell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1990), 12. 32. Dean Cardasis, “Imaginary Gardens with Real Frogs: Space in the Work of Martha Schwartz,” GSD News (Winter–Spring 1996): 1–4 (3). 33. John F. Kihlstrom, “Joseph Jastrow and His Duck – Or Is It a Rabbit?” accessed 28 May 2015, http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/JastrowDuck.htm. 34. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 5–6. 35. Dominic McIver Lopes, “Painting,” The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, third edition, eds. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (New York: Routledge, 2013), 596–605 (600–601). 36. Sheldon Saul Richmond, Aesthetic Criteria: Gombrich and the Philosophies of Science of Popper and Polanyi (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 48. 37. Arnault Maillet, The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 88. 38. Ibid., 113. 39. Luke Morgan, “The Early Modern ‘Trompe-L’Oeil’ Garden,” Garden History 33, no. 2 (2005): 286–293. 40. André Mollet, Le Jardin de Plaisir, 1651, accessed 28 May 2015, www.oakspring.org/ landscape7.html. 41. Gina Pollara “Kahn’s Vision Realized,” Four Freedoms Park: A Memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt, expanded edition (New York: Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, 2014), 10–11 (11). 42. Harold Osborne “Anamorphosis,” The Oxford Companion to Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 43–44. 43. Juxtapoz, “Who to Believe? By François Abélanet,” 10 July 2011, accessed 28 May 2015, www.juxtapoz.com/current/who-to-believe-by-francois-abelanet. 44. Henry Adams, “Is a ‘Garden’ the World’s Greatest New Artwork? Francois Abelanet’s Extraordinary Turf ‘Sculpture’ on a Paris Plaza Epitomizes a Grand Tradition of Artful Illusion,” The Smithsonian, accessed 28 May 2015, www.smithsonianmag.com/ arts-culture/is-a-garden-the-worlds-greatest-new-artwork-949342/?no-ist. 45. Bence Nanay, “Perception and Imagination: A Modal Perception as Mental Imagery,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition 150, no. 2 (2010): 239–254. 46. John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1993), 220. Also see Johannes Itten, The Elements of Color: A Treatise on the Color System of Johannes Itten Based on His Book the Art of Color, trans. Ernst Van Hagen (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970). 47. Weilacher, Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art, 111. 48. Katherine J. Morris, Sartre (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 39. 49. Edmund Husserl quoted in Dermont Moran, “Pure Phenomenology, Its Method, and Its Field of Investigation,” The Phenomenology Reader, eds. Timothy Mooney and Dermont Moran (London: Routledge, 2002), 124–133, 125. 50. David Woodruff Smith, “Phenomenology,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed 28 May 2015, http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/phenomenology.

 Spatial practices 110 51. Ibid. 52. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012). 53. Susan Herrington, “You Are Not Here: Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the Architecture of Absence,” Footprint: Delft School of Design Journal 3 (2008): 51–64. 54. See also Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin, “Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty and Sartre: What is Phenomenology?” The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, third edition, eds. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (New York: Routledge, 2013), 126–136. 55. Robert Bernasconi, How to Read Sartre (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 26. 56. Günther Vogt, “Foreword: Between Search and Research,” in Alice Foxley, Distance & Engagement: Walking, Thinking and Making Landscape (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010), 8. 57. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary, trans. Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge, 2004), 188. 58. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 26–27. 59. Ibid. 60. Hazel E. Barnes, “Sartre’s Ontology: The Revealing of Making and Being,” The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 14. 61. Thomas Flynn, “Jean-Paul Sartre,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2013 Edition), accessed 28 May 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/. 62. John Beardsley, “Hidden in Plain View: The Land Art of Maya Lin,” Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 2006), 85–103, 89. 63. Joseph S. Catalano, A Commentary of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 161. 64. Barnes, “Sartre’s Ontology: The Revealing of Making and Being,” 26–27. 65. Ibid., 39. 66. Michel Conan, The Crazannes Quarries by Bernard Lassus (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2004) 86. 67. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Imagination, trans. Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf (New York: Routledge, 2012). 68. Bernard Lassus, The Landscape Approach (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 183. 69. Weilacher, Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art, 111. 70. Margaret Whitford, “Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Sartre’s Philosophy: An Interpretative Account,” The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, ed. Jon Stewart (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 48–65 (53). 71. Bernasconi, How to Read Sartre, 26. 72. Jonathan Hale, “Critical Phenomenology: Architecture and Embodiment,” Architecture & Ideas 12 (2013): 23. 73. Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 58. 74. Ibid., 58. 75. See Torkel Hafting, Marianne Fyhn, S. Molden, May-Brit Moser, and Edvard Moser, “Microstructure of a Spatial Map in the Entorhinal Cortex,” Nature 436 (2005): 801– 806, and Takuya Sasaki, Stefan Leutgeb, and Jill K. Leutgeb, “Spatial and Memory Circuits in the Medial Entorhinal Cortex,” Current Opinion in Neurobiology 32C (30 October 2014): 16–23. 76. Juhani Pallasmaa, “Space, Place, Memory and Imagination: The Temporal Dimension

Spatial practices  111 of Existential Space,” Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape, ed. Marc Treib (New York: Routledge, 2009), 16–41 (18). 77. Mattias Kondolf, “River, Meanders, and Memory,” Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape, ed. Marc Treib (New York: Routledge, 2009), 117. 78. Donlyn Lyndon, “The Place of Memory,” Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape, ed. Marc Treib (New York: Routledge, 2009), 64. 79. Mattias Kondolf, “Liberty and Human Access for a Peri-urban River: Restoration of the Aire, Geneva,” The River Chronicle (7 October 2014): 38–39, accessed 20 January 2016, http://issuu.com/archizoom/docs/the_river_chronicle1?e=3753097/9671038# search. 80. Georges Descombes, “Displacement: Canals, Rivers, and Flows,” Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape, ed. Marc Treib (New York: Routledge, 2009), 123. 81. Lassus, The Landscape Approach, 53. 82. Conan, Crazannes Quarries by Bernard Lassus, 90. 83. Lassus, The Landscape Approach, 65. 84. Daniel M. Abrahamson, “Make History Not Memory,” special issue on “Constructions of Memory,” Harvard Design Magazine (Fall 1999): 78–83 (78). 85. Ibid., 83. 86. Henri Lefebvre, quoted in “Critique: Space as Concrete Abstraction,” Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory, Łukasz Stanek (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 133–164 (155). 87. Henri Lefebvre, quoted in “Research: from Practices of Dwelling to the Production of Space,” Henri Lefebvre on Space, Stanek, 109. 88. Stanek, in “Critique: Space as Concrete Abstraction,” Henri Lefebvre on Space, 145. 89. Henri Lefebvre, “The Production of Space,” Rethinking Architecture, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge), 139–146 (143). 90. Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, eds. and trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996; 2000), 209. 91. Christine Boyer, “Cities for Sale: Merchandising History at South Street Seaport,” Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 181. 92. Chihsin Chiu, “Streets versus Parks: Skateboarding as a Spatial Practice in New York City,” Urban Environments, Environmental Design Research Association 38th Annual Conference, 101–107, accessed 29 May 2015, www.edra.org/content/ streets-versus-parks-skateboarding-spatial-practice-new-york-city. 93. See “New Design for Eduard-Wallnöfer-Platz Public Square / LAAC Architekten + Stiefel Kramer Architecture,” ArchDaily, 2 August 2011, accessed 7 May 2015, www. archdaily.com/?p=155050. Also see Karl Grimm and Dagmar Grimm-Pretner, “Urban Landscape in Motion,” accessed 29 May 2015, www.playground-landscape.com/en/ article/view/905.html. 94. Patricia L. McGirr, “Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Landscape and Gender in the Twentieth Century,” Shared Spaces and Divided Places: Material Dimensions of Gender Relations and the American Historical Landscape, eds. Deborah L. Rotman and Ellen-Rose Savulis (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003) 62–85 (81). 95. Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear: Risk-taking and the Morality of Low Expectation (London: Continuum, 2002), 9. 96. Helen Woolley and Alison Lowe, “Exploring the Relationship between Design Approach and Play Value of Outdoor Play Spaces,” Landscape Research 38 (2013): 53–74.

112 3 Material matters Materials – their use, handling, and assemblage – are critical dimensions of the designed landscape. Their criticality is due to the fact that people often come into direct contact with the materials of a landscape. Materials can also communicate. The landscape theorist Udo Weilacher contends, the “Material becomes the medium which influences the figurative and symbolic message of the work.”1 Since materials constitute the physical attributes of the landscape, how the material is produced – extracted, harvested, moulded, or grown – has powerful ecological and social consequences. After the Second World War landscape architects were eager to use materials made newly available to civilians. Previously restricted war-related materials and modes of fabrication became fungible resources for landscape architects and architects. Both professions employed post-war materials, commodities, and systems to generate a modern design vocabulary. Mass-produced and globally distributed, many materials came to symbolize modern landscape architecture. Consider Garrett Eckbo’s ALCOA Forecast garden from 1956. Sponsored by Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), the garden promoted aluminium as the perfect exterior material that was lightweight, non-rusting, and easily perforated for uses like overhead trellises.2 Yet by the late 1980s the Brundtland Report, coupled with the acknowledgment that the climate was rapidly changing due to human activities, prompted many landscape architects to consider the ecological consequences of their material selection. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF MATERIALITY Matter is produced by letting time flow from the past to the present via a strange definition of causality; materiality is produced by letting time flow from the future to the present, with a realistic definition of the many occasions through which agencies are being discovered. The paradox of the present situation is that this point is much more obvious to many scientists than it is for most other people.3 (Bruno Latour, “Agency at the time of the Anthropocene,” 2014) Materiality provides a theoretical lens for design as it goes beyond an understanding of material as only matter – its substance, shape, volume, and surface

Material matters  113 – to the way materials serve as an intermediary between the present and the future. In the opening quote this is how the philosopher of science Bruno Latour distinguishes matter from materiality. If you read his definition carefully, matter flows from the “past to present,” while materiality is future directed. What you anticipate materials will do in the future, the way materials interact over time, with each other, and how they are interpreted shape key questions regarding materiality.4 Latour’s version of materiality is part of the actor-network theory that you will read about in the Systems chapter. What is important to materiality here, is its relationship to material semiotics, which expands the study of meaning from traditional concerns with language to material processes and technological devices, which bear meaning. As the geographer Steve Hinchliffe observes, “Material semiotics most significantly enables a recognition of human and non-human times and spaces and the roles in the co-constitution of worlds.”5 Moreover, Latour also emphasizes agency, “the many occasions through which agencies are being discovered.” Agency, here, means the ability of a human or object to act and this idea will be more specifically addressed in the section on Consequentialism at the end of this chapter. The origins of materialist thinking can be traced back to pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. The ancient conception of materialism holds that nature is the fundamental source of all phenomena in the universe – from what you feel and think to the celestial system. This conception also maintains, “Nature exists independently of mind but that no mind can exist apart from matter. The material world existed long before mankind or any other being came into existence.”6 In the eighteenth century Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789) published The System of Nature or, the Laws of the Moral and Physical World, which portrayed the universe within a philosophical materialist framework. He contended that every event or action, even thoughts and feelings, were the result of interactions of physical matter governed by natural laws. This version of philosophical materialism suggested that everything, including your consciousness and thought (mind), is causally contingent upon matter. Of course, Idealists and scientists have debated this conception of materialism as new conceptions of matter emerged in physics. Since materialists denied the existence of the spirit, materialism is at odds with most religious conceptions of the universe. The important aspect of philosophical materialism here is the fact that you shape material, a specific type of matter, in design, and in doing so you have the opportunity to consider and express those causal dependencies between mind and matter. In addition to philosophical materialism, materiality is also shaped by its usage in material culture studies, which originally developed out of archaeology, anthropology, and sociology. The goal of material culture studies is to glean knowledge on a particular group or society through an analysis of their physical artefacts – their objects, resources, and spaces – from gardens to architecture to mugs to pin cushions. As Professor of Material Culture Joyce Hill Stoner defines it, “Material Culture is the unpacking or mining of both historic and everyday

 Material matters 114 objects to find the embedded ideas and concepts that define the surrounding society.”7 Hence, studying a specific landscape, its material qualities and properties will convey something to you about the people and animals that shaped that landscape – their beliefs and conventions. Reinforced in Latour’s contemporary definition of materiality, material in material culture is valued for not only its physical properties, but also for its interpretive potential. Why materiality matters Materiality is to landscape architects as words are to writers. Like a writer, a landscape designer must not only understand the properties of materials, but also their communicative dimensions. Materiality matters because it constitutes the physical matter that people interact with long after the design project is completed. Materials are touched, walked upon, or sat on – to name a few interactions – and anticipating the specific experiences arising out of these interactions is often a key objective for designers. The landscape architect Andrea Cochran reflects on the use of gravel for walkways and its auditory experience. She notes, “there is a sensual quality when you walk on something and you hear the sound. This idea of using materials to shape experience of a space is central to my work.”8 As Latour notes, materiality also concerns itself with communication. In landscape architecture, earthwork artists and land artists inspired many designers to select and shape materials in order to communicate something about their landscape design – its reference to a site’s history or a specific culture or natural system. Earthwork artists and land artists share a similar palette of materials with landscape architects: terrain, water, sun, shadow, plants, rocks, concrete, manufactured objects, etc. Meyer has suggested that earthworks, such as Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, and Robert Irwin’s Nine Spaces, Nine Trees resonate with landscape architects because “Their creators employed formal presence to focus attention on a place and its particular qualities – its ancient natural histories, its deep time, its recurring natural cycles and processes – that were almost invisible to a culture of distraction and disengagement.”9 Materiality is also connected to learning, particularly for those who can’t read or write, such as young children. The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget’s constructivist view of learning contends, Knowledge is not a copy of reality. To know an object, to know an event, is not simply to look at it and make a mental copy or image of it. To know an object is to act on it. To know is to modify, to transform the object, and to understand the process of this transformation, and as a consequence to understand the way the object is constructed.10 For young children, the materiality of a landscape is vitally important because they develop and learn about the world through the exploration of objects and

Material matters  115 materials. Children engaged in spontaneous sensory exploration of the physical world will pull, tug, put things in their mouths, and invent stories about the materials they see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. This is how they learn, so the materials of landscapes designed for children are vitally important. Materiality in action Dialectical materialism As discussed in the introduction, the dialectical process finds its roots in the Western philosophical tradition as a method of debate involving contradictory ideas or opposing forces. The philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770– 1831) proposed a dialectical approach as an alternative to linear processes in the development of knowledge. Hegel’s dialectical process involved thesis, antithesis, and their continual unification to arrive at a synthesis. In his article, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” the earthwork artist Robert Smithson interpreted dialectics as physical processes and he described the parks designed by Olmsted as a form of dialectical materialism.11 Combining dialectics and materialist philosophical traditions, Karl Marx’s (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels’s (1820–1895) dialectical materialism holds that it is not just your consciousness that determines who you are, but your social being and the artefacts of your society. In other words, “the conditions of material existence themselves are determinative of the very means by which we understand them and ourselves.”12 The streets, arterial roads, and highways that you travel everyday help define your consciousness. It is a dialectic because these thoroughfares are not isolated objects but are materials altered by human subjectivity – the streets are obediently dotted with recycling bins every Tuesday morning, rummage sale signs are posted at highly visible intersections, and graffiti is spray painted on the sound barrier walls lining the highway. Marx’s materialism is dialectical because it is an interaction between who you think you are (human subjectivity) and the material world created by labour or material production.13 Look at the image of Jon Piasecki’s Stone River in New York State. Piasecki built the 244-meter-long path (800 feet) by hand through the woods. He hauled almost 400 tons of stone by wheelbarrow and laid each stone in relation to each other and to the plants, trees, fallen logs, and the existing stone walls that he encountered. Reflecting on his own labour, Piasecki notes, Today, design and fabrication are generally distinct entities. Labour is devalued. Unknown people toil to make our things. Machines spew out the stuff of our needs and desires and the making of them dehumanizes the production class and despoils the land. Of course the machines are essential, and some disconnect between design and fabrication is inevitable, but this project openly asks if perhaps our fascination with the virtual over the actual, or with design over build, has gone too far?14

 Material matters 116 3.1 Stone River (2009) by Jon Piasecki, image courtesy of Jon Piasecki, New York State, USA Do you agree that landscape architecture and society in general devalues physical labour? Why do you think he created it all by himself, why didn’t he have a building party?

Material matters  117 Medium is the message The term medium is closely related to materiality and refers to the means of doing something or how something is communicated or expressed. Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980), a philosopher of communication theory, coined the term “message is the medium” to describe how media can profoundly modify the way we think and behave. For McLuhan the message was this change and a medium is “any extension of ourselves.”15 “McLuhan always thought of a medium in the sense of a growing medium, like the fertile potting soil into which a seed is planted, or the agar in a Petri dish. In other words, a medium – this extension of our body or senses or mind – is anything from which a change emerges.”16 He also thought that too much emphasis was placed on the content of inventions and not the way the invention delivered its content. Thus, the message of a social networking site is not the content of the site, but the way it changes the way we collaborate or the way we fund special projects or technological inventions, and socialize in general. Look at the image of Avena+ Test Bed by the artist Benedikt Gross. The 11.5-hectare field (28 acres) in Unterwaldhausen, Germany, was planted with 85 percent oats (Avena sativa) and with 15 percent of 11 different wildflowers and herbs. The way Gross planted this field, however, was very different from standard field planting methods. Using algorithms and Global Positioning System (GPS) enhanced with Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), he digitally mapped out the planting location of the oats, wildflowers, and herbs. He then 3.2 Avena+ Test Bed – Agricultural Printing and Altered Landscapes (2013) by Benedikt Gross, image courtesy of Benedikt Gross, Unterwaldhausen, Germany

 Material matters 118 rode a specialized tractor that enabled him to sow the seeds with precision, a pixel resolution of three by three meters.17 According to Gross, “You could say in the last 50 years everything was about mechanisation to increase scale and efficiency, but the next thing in farming is digitalisation and precision farming, where everything is going to be mapped right down to the single plant.”18 By increasing the diversity and placement of plants in the field, Gross envisions this new way of planting as an alternative to monoculture agriculture, a practice where genetically similar or identical plants are planted in rows over a large area. Monoculture planting has limited habitat value, and it often requires pesticides because of the likelihood of mass crop failure due to extreme climate changes and the inundation of diseases, pathogens, and pests. Material practices Championed by the architect Stan Allen, material practices involve activities that transform material “to produce new objects and new organizations of matter.”19 Allen argues that, “Although they work to transform matter, material practices necessarily work through the intermediary of abstract codes such as projection, notation, or calculations. Constantly mixing media in this way, material practices produce new concepts out of the material and procedures of the work itself.”20 Allen distinguishes material practices from materiality per se. He posits that material practices are only provisionally indebted to material. Look at the image of Ferdinand Ludwig’s, Oliver Storz’s, and Hannes Schwertfeger’s Footbridge, along Lake Constance in Germany. A raised 2.5-meterhigh metal structure was first built and then young willows trees were entwined in the structure itself. As the willows grew, they supported more of the load. After a few years a structural engineer granted a “botanical certificate of fitness.” The certificate signalled that it was time to remove the structure’s support columns so that the willow trees held up the walkway on their own. “Each structure is a blend of fiction and reality . . . We have to subject ourselves to the tree’s own structural rules,”21 says Storz. Trees replace columns and their roots replace the typical foundation footing, making a new type of footbridge. How do you think this experiment could change the way we plant landscapes? What do you think of the pattern he created? How do you think he harvested the oats? What types of calculations do think the designers had to make to determine the number of willow trees? Do you think Footbridge is provisionally indebted to materials, or could other materials be used?

Material matters  119 As the designers point out, it’s “not quite as easy as it sounds. For instance, there is the ‘risk of strangulation’ if metal fasteners obstruct the flow of sap. The architects have already had to tack on ‘sap bypasses’ made from branches to keep their botanical building material alive.”22 Encoding Encoding expresses the way a material is shaped or manipulated in the design. “In the process of materials there is an opportunity to layer information about the process itself. Such formwork markings can become the dominant logic of a modulated form.”23 Concrete, for example, and the way it is formed is often a source of encoding. Look at the image of Fenchurch Garden, designed by Paul Hensey and Remo Pedreschi for the Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show. Fabric formworks for reinforced concrete enable designers to create concrete elements that express how the concrete was formed using fabric 3.3 Footbridge (2005) by Ferdinand Ludwig, Oliver Storz, and Hannes Schwertfeger, image courtesy of Ferdinand Ludwig, Lake Constance, Germany Why do you think they selected willow? What else did the designers need to consider about the tree, aside from its structural logic?

 Material matters 120 membranes that waste less material compared to other forming systems, such as wood framing. Materiality debated Materiality developed in the design fields as an alternative to critical practices developed in the late twentieth century. As the architect Robert McAnulty notes, “Old-school critical practice, concerned with analysis, interpretation, and representation was dismissed.”24 Designers sought theories that were normative rather than discursive, and instrumental to creating an ecologically sound environment rather than concerned with revealing the ideological aspects of design. “For the new materialism, even the most seductive of forms must be held to a higher standard – do they meet some unspoken ‘performance’ criteria?”25 McAnulty also argues that materialist ideas are often positioned as the antithesis to formalist concerns with design. Yet, he notes, “By emphasizing material’s performance over formal configuration, the antiformalist argument fails from the outset. It is impossible to separate matter from form. Matter is never without shape; the medium is always already formed.”26 3.4 Fenchurch Garden, by Paul Hensey/ Elysium Design with Remo Pedreschi, Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh, image courtesy of Remo Pedreschi, Royal Horticultural Society Chelsea Flower Show 2009, London, England What does this encoding say about the construction process and the nature of concrete?

Material matters  121 For landscape architects, much of the materiality is already there. Not only the weather, but also the existing conditions of the site have material qualities. One dimension of materiality that has been debated in landscape architecture is the theory of medium-specificity. Developed by the art critic Clement Greenburg, medium-specificity asserts that the material of an artwork is the defining aspect of that work. Greenberg’s theory was dominated by a teleology, “in which art history identifies itself with a process of purification, each art pared down to its essence, to the specific qualities of its medium.”27 For traditional categories of art, such as painting for example, paint on canvas defined a painting as a painting. But what are the medium-specificities conventional to landscape architecture? This was a question posed by Jane Gillette in her article, “Can Gardens Mean?” Gillette provided a list of garden elements “water in the form of lakes, rivers, and fountains; paving of all sorts; walls, benches, statuary; grading; follies that range from grottos to temples; and flower, trees, stones, and shrubs” as the media of gardens.28 In “Gardens Can Mean” I explained that artists have continuously challenged the medium-specific categories of art. Movements and people as diverse as the Bauhaus, Walter Benjamin, Andy Warhol’s factory, and earthwork artists have sought to make conventional categories more porous, and not specific to a material. Many categories of art were challenged because they were unable to fully account for our current world of mass production, digital media, and cultural difference. Landscape architects and designers have also challenged the medium-specificity of the conventional list of materials used in landscapes. In the numerous gardens and landscapes created by Martha Schwartz, Ken Smith, and Claude Cormier, the use of materials contemporary to our own times has been explored. Primary reading for materiality Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS FOR THE TRUTH OF MATERIALS Materials . . . matter because of the ways they can be treated. Neither stone nor glass possess any essence or “truth,” nor is one or the other singularly apposite to our time. The whole matter rests on the ways the materials are shaped and transformed, the ways they become what they had not been before, the ways they exceed themselves.29 (David Leatherbarrow, “Material Matters,” 2009) Here the architectural theorist David Leatherbarrow is referring to the “truth” of materials, a subject that has troubled designers since the art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) brought the question of the “honest use” of materials to the forefront of design thinking in the nineteenth century. In The Seven Lamps

 Material matters 122 of Architecture (1849), Ruskin envisioned that each lamp would serve as a guide to material selection in the design process. His advice was largely in reaction to industrial materials, such as wrought iron, that were increasingly employed in architecture and engineered structures during his lifetime. Ruskin’s proposed grammar included: Sacrifice – human craft in service of God; Truth – honest use of materials and structure; Power – to impact the human mind with massing, light, shadow; Beauty – ornamentation inspired by nature; Life – buildings should be made by human hands with the rhythms they afford; Memory – buildings should respect the culture where they have been designed; and Obedience – avoiding originality for its own sake. 3.5 Parc des ButtesChaumont railing, Paris, France

Material matters  123 In particular Ruskin was against camouflaging material or making a material look like it was something else. He argued, “to cover brick with cement, and to divide this cement with joints that it may look like stone, is to tell a falsehood.”30 The truth of materials also informed William Robinson’s assessments of parks in France. During his visit to Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris, Robinson reproves the use of artificial rock. “Instead of true rockwork” we find “plastering over heaps of stones . . . A hole is left and there is this mass from which may spring a small pine or an ivy, but the whole thing is incapable of being divested of its bald character.”31 Look at the image of the railing designed for the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. According to the landscape historian Ann Komara, the engineer Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand (1817–1891) designed “throughout the park stair risers and hand railings in reinforced concrete that imitate wood logs or tree limbs.”32 More than 50 years after Alphand’s design work in Paris, reinforced concrete was used for its expressive potential, rather than its imitative capabilities. At the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris (1925), Robert Mallet-Stevens, working with the sculptors Jan and Joël Martel, created trees made of concrete panels to exploit the versatility afforded by reinforced concrete in their garden, Jardin de l’habitation moderne. Unfortunately the trees were not well received as critics found them an unfortunate joke.33 Look at the image of Robert Mallet-Steven’s concrete trees. What would Robinson not approve of? 3.6 Jardin de l’habitation moderne (1925) Robert MalletStevens with Jan and Joël Martel, public domain, Paris, France

 Material matters 124 A concern for “the truth of materials” continued to occupy modern architects and landscape architects during the twentieth century as designers distrusted illusion, particularly historical illusion. The honest use of material became a tenet of modern architecture and early speculations on modern landscape architecture followed suit. In Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1938, 1948), Tunnard contended “there is no artificiality where there is no attempt to disguise materials. Most concrete paving aims at being a substitute for stone; the deception is even encouraged in laying, when crazy or random courses give a path or terrace of this material an ill-conceived air of inappropriateness in any surroundings.”34 Tunnard preferred the pavers at St Ann’s Hill House, “which do not pretend to be other than they are; the texture and shape of each slab is as precise and formal as a machine – there is no attempt to make them appear natural.”35 Minimalist sculptors also avoided illusion and personal expression in their work, relying, instead, on the arrangement of building materials, such as fired bricks, or industrial fabrication in order to erase any sign of the artist’s hand. Describing the minimalist work of artists, such as Carl Andre and Donald Judd, the art critic Rosalind Krauss explains, “these artists reacted against the sculptural illusionism which converts one material into the signifier for another: stone, for example, into flesh – an illusionism that withdraws the sculptural object from literal space and places in a metaphorical one.”36 The minimalist artists’ selection of non-conventional art material also sought to transform traditional interpretive practices – from the artist as the generator of meaning – to the audience. For minimal art, “meaning,” is not internal to the work of art, embodied in composition and originating in the mind of the artist; it has no “artistic” conventions, detail or incident that would even prompt us to consider the possibility of intrinsic content. Rather, for any meaning to exist at all, that meaning must be actively created within our reflective apprehension of it.37 Why truth of materials matters The honest use of materials is linked to their tectonic and expressive capabilities. Thus, it is particularly valuable for designers to understand these capabilities. As Frampton suggests, the tectonics of material construction can form the poetic dimension of design. He notes, “I am not alluding to the mere revelation of constructional technique but rather its expressive potential. Inasmuch as the tectonic amounts to a poetics of construction it is art, but in this respect the artistic dimension is neither figurative nor abstract.”38 In essence, the most basic character of a landscape’s expression can be the way it has been constructed with material. How does this use of concrete differ from the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont railings? Is one more honest than the other?

Material matters  125 Moreover, typically sites for landscape architecture projects already have material qualities, the site’s soil and bedrock for example. By using and reshaping or revealing site material you can communicate something about the site before it was designed, a subject discussed in the next section. This practice can also reduce the impact that the design makes on environmental systems, a subject that will be discussed in detail in the last section of this chapter, Consequentialism. Truth of materials in action Tectonic expression Materials possess a tectonic logic, physical capabilities that pertain to their properties, which can be expressed in design. The strength of a material, its buoyancy, its flexibility, or its aspect when cut or sanded can serve as tectonic expressions. Loose material has an angle of repose, and this is expressed at Pedra Tosca Park. Look at the image of the park by RCR (Rafael Aranda, Carme Pigem, Ramón Vilalta) Architects. The park covers the Olot volcanic field and is geologically very special with 40 volcanic cones and numerous lava flows.39 Pedra Tosca Park, was once farmed and the thick layers of basalt boulders (2 to 3.7 Pedra Tosca Park (2004) by RCR Architects, public domain, La Garrotxa Volcanic Zone Natural Park, Catalonia, Spain

 Material matters 126 1.5 meters thick) needed to be cleared to make the land tillable. The designers used this solidified volcanic lava and CorTen steel (or weathering steel given that it quickly oxidizes, creating rust that actually strengthens the material) to define the entrance and exit ways to the new park and to express both the cultural and natural history of the region. The landscape architect, Julian Raxworthy, notes “The detail of the walls is miraculously simple: about 500 millimetres wide slabs of steel standing approximately two metres tall in a palisade arrangement, with 75 millimetre gaps between them, through which one can see the rocks piled behind.”40 Geomorphic agents Look at the terraces at the Novartis Campus Park by Vogt Landscape Architects, in Basel, Switzerland. During the design process, which included extensive field trips, map analyses, and model-making, a found “hidden landscape” of unusual glacial sediments was discovered in the Rhine Valley embankments. Vogt Landscape Architects sought to act as agents in expressing this material and the Can you see the tectonic expression? What do the piles of rock say about this type of material’s angle of repose? What do think determined the size of the gaps? 3.8 Terraces at Novartis Campus Park (2006–2016) by Vogt Landscape Architects, images courtesy of Christian Vogt, Basel, Switzerland

Material matters  127 design was conceived “as a model of the prehistoric Upper Rhine Valley.”41 The terraces served as a mimesis of the valley’s geomorphology at a miniature scale to be observed by the park users.42 Combining clay and Rhine gravel excavated from the parking garage that lies beneath the park, the terraces were installed to create channels for the park’s pathways. Once the material was stable its gravelly texture was revealed and expressed by etching and chiselling into the terrace.43 Aspects of stone Aspect is the transformation of a material as a result of tooling and natural colour. Designers can reveal the different striations and veins of stone through different surface treatments. Look at the image of Ole Bulls Plass, a public square named after the violinist and composer Ole Bull in Bergen, Norway. Designed by the landscape architect Arne Saelen, this careful meditation on stone employs two types – local grey gneiss with pink veins and pink granite – and seven different aspects: “raw, rough picked, fine picked, flamed, sawn, hone, and polished” to create a subtly diverse set of colours and textures.44 Can you see how the texture and the scoring give the effect of glacial striation? 3.9 Ole Bulls Plass (1993) by Arne Saelen, image courtesy of Arne Saelen, Bergen, Norway

 Material matters 128 Material allusion Materials can allude to or refer to site conditions that might not be visible to people. Look at the steps designed for North Bethesda Market in Maryland by Nelson Byrd Woltz. According to principal Thomas L. Woltz, the region rests upon sedimentary bedrock, but given the site’s urban condition, people were rarely aware of its presence. To allude to this underlying Triassic period rock Nelson Byrd Woltz selected paving quarried from locally sourced stone. Artificial, but not fake This statement is frequently made by the landscape architect Claude Cormier, who refers to his landscapes as artificial – but not fake. Fake to Cormier is a material that is meant to deceive, to look indistinguishable from something it Can you see how the rain enhances the aspect of the stone in this plaza? 3.10 Steps designed for North Bethesda Market (2008–2010) by Nelson Byrd Woltz, image courtesy of Eric Piasecki/OTTO, Rockville, Maryland, USA There are probably many landscape architects who use locally quarried rock, but can you see how this detailed design of the stairway highlights this material allusion?

Material matters  129 is not. Synthetic turf for example is fake. For Cormier, “Artificial still refers to something authentic . . . like a canopy of trees in a forest, even if it’s a sky-blue canopy made of fibreglass.”45 Look at the image of Claude Cormier’s Lipstick Forest at the entrance to the Montréal Convention Centre. Collapsing two seemingly distant phenomena – the dignified beauty of trees with the glamorous innuendo of cosmetics and the viscosity of resin – Lipstick Forest demonstrates that landscapes are not merely the distant pleasures of sight. The forest contains giant tree trunks rendered in resin to mimic the forms of trees in a nearby park. Referring to the Montréal Lipstick Kiss logo, the trunks are painted glossy shades of pink for that “just applied” look. Truth of material debated In landscape architecture, by the 1980s designers began to reject modern tenets, such as “the truth of materials” in their work. For example, in 1986, Martha Schwartz designed with plastic topiary shrubs, plastic flowers, and metal forms covered in AstroTurf to resemble neatly clipped hedges for the Splice Garden in 3.11 Lipstick Forest (2002) by Claude Cormier + Associés, image courtesy of Jean-François Vézina, Montréal Convention Centre, Canada Do you see how these are not fake trees, but artificial ones? What would fake trees look like?

 Material matters 130 Cambridge, Massachusetts. Indeed, in some instances it was only viable to use fake material, prompting designers to draw from unexpected sources as part of their design process. For the rooftop of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, for example, the landscape architect Ken Smith could have no live plants or heavy materials, so he created Camouflage Garden, employing 185 plastic rocks, 560 artificial boxwoods, glass, and recycled rubber mulch. The composition of this material was derived from the camouflage pattern of his skateboarding pants!46 As noted previously in the “Truth of materials in action,” Claude Cormier likes to distinguish fake materials from artificial ones. For Cormier, if plastic is shaped to look like a plant or concrete paving is imprinted to look like stone, this is fake. Plastic formed into pink plastic balls is artificial, as it is truthful to a synthetic material that can be easily moulded into this shape. Yet, sometimes budget or scarcity might prevent the use of a particular material. There also might be ethical reasons (think of fake fur) that would lead a designer to select a material that gives the illusion of another material. There is certainly a long-standing tradition in landscape and garden design to employ materials that represent something else. Think of the traditional Japanese garden, which is often full of materials that reference other things. In the karesansui gardens or dry gardens of Japan, for example, sand or gravel refers to water. The raking of this material into ripple-like formations also brings to mind wave effects in water. Materials representing things other than what they are can be witnessed in Western gardens as well. The philosopher Stephanie Ross clarifies, however, that this is not an example of illusion. During a visit to a karesansui garden you are not deceived into thinking that you can take a swim in the sand. Likewise, during a visit to Stourhead Garden you would not actually think that the central lake is the Mediterranean. Rather, the lake alludes to this sea as part of Virgil’s epic, The Aeneid, one of the central themes of the garden. Ross describes this experience as a type of two-foldedness whereby “we are simultaneously aware of the physical and the virtual garden.”47 As discussed in illusionary space in the Spatial Practices chapter, there are design elements or techniques that are employed precisely to create illusion. The haha, for example, gives an illusion from the house that grazing animals in the distance are part of the garden. In fact, the etymology of the term haha is thought to come from the surprise upon realizing that you were about to fall from a retaining wall. Materials can also be handled in a way that makes you think of the material in a different way. I’ve often thought that the wall made with recycled railway tracks at Portland’s Tanner Springs Park by Ramboll Studio Dreiseitl have been placed in a way that makes this normally hard material appear almost like fabric. Look at the image of Tanner Springs Park. Do you think claims to “the truth of materials” can be over-weighted by feelings of moral superiority?

Material matters  131 Primary reading for truth of materials William Robinson, The Parks, Promenades and Gardens of Paris, Described and Considered in Relation to the Wants of Our Own Cities. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Christopher Tunnard, Gardens in the Modern Landscape. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF PALIMPSEST The surface of England is like a palimpsest, a document that has been written on and erased over and over again; and it is the business of the field of archaeology to decipher it. The features concerned are of course the roads and field boundaries, the woods, the farms and other habitations, and the other products of human labour; these are the letters and the words inscribed on the land.48 (Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, Archaeology in the Field, 1953) Here, the archaeologist Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford (1886–1957) employs the term palimpsest to describe a landscape. 3.12 Tanner Springs Park (2010) by Ramboll Studio Dreiseitl, Portland, Oregon, USA What do you think?

 Material matters 132 One of the earliest uses of the term palimpsest in relationship to landscape – both figuratively and literally – was Frederic William Maitland’s (1850–1906) nineteenth-century description of an English landscape ordinance map as a “marvellous palimpsest.”49 Studying this map as a palimpsest, he was able to decipher the historic settlement patterns, particularly Germanic versus Celtic communities. Palimpsest refers to the ancient practice of writing and erasing and writing again over the same surface, such as parchment paper or vellum. With time, the writing surface accrued faint traces of former texts called the scriptio inferior or the “underwriting,” which were later interpreted by scholars. The archaeologist Gavin Lucas argues that the term palimpsest emphasizes the material aspect of writing as well as the memory-laden material acts of inscription. What is underwritten as well as overwritten, scripto secunda, is part of the site’s material story. Indeed the landscape “palimpsest encapsulates the dual process of inscription and erasure.”50 Since the landscape serves as the material evidence of past cultures and natural events, Crawford’s metaphor was adopted by both archaeologists and geographers studying landscapes, particularly those working in the English language.51 These studies often represented both natural and cultural changes in the landscapes as a series of distributed layers. As the landscape archaeologist Oscar Aldred points out, “the palimpsest takes a particular view on the material accumulation of events, viewing these in terms of sequence as if a linear temporality; one of accumulation of one layer and then another, in which previous layers are shadows of their former self.”52 While the theory of palimpsest was initially used to describe rural landscapes, it also has been used to analyse memorials and monuments designed for urban landscapes in the twentieth century. In his analysis of memory practices in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York City, Professor of German and Comparative Literature Andreas Huyssen argues that public memory-making, like a palimpsest, is selective, and that much of the selection process is in service to politics and the formation of an urban identity in a global context. In particular Huyssen singles out the city of Berlin as a palimpsest urban landscape. There is perhaps no other major Western city that bears the marks of twentieth-century history as intensely and self-consciously as Berlin. This city text has been written, erased, and rewritten throughout that violent century, and its legibility relies as much on visible markers of built space as on images and memories repressed and ruptured by traumatic events.53 Material palimpsest has been advanced by designers as an analytical method and design approach as well. In each usage, the landscape serves as the parchment paper upon which natural and cultural changes make imprints over space and Do you know why he would compare the landscape to a written document?

Material matters  133 time. Natural changes might include rocks left by glaciers, while cultural changes might include the addition of structures or the subtraction of earth. Of course, these two types of activities, natural and cultural, interact with each other over time. For example, deforestation by humans increases soil erosion and flooding, which then prompts the erection of dykes. What is crucial to palimpsest is to consider the simultaneity of these layered changes and their interactions. Why palimpsest matters Palimpsest offers a conception of landscape design as a material exhibit of multiple temporal and spatial events and artefacts. This theory is particularly helpful with projects where communicating the history of the site is paramount to the design brief. The geographer Paul Vidal de La Blache (1845–1918) argued that palimpsest means to “understand the correspondence and correlation of things, whether in the setting of the whole surface of the earth, or in the regional setting where things are localized.”54 Palimpsest also serves as an underlying theory in the landscape architect Peter Latz’s approach to design. As Udo Weilacher reveals, Peter Latz knows from experience that it is very rare for the various levels of a landscape to be completely undisturbed. Each new use added to a landscape disturbs what is already there to a certain extent, and brings its own characteristic structures with it. These then manifest themselves as an information layer in their own right. What qualities the historical and contemporary levels have, whether they are still complete or fragmented, whether they can be completed or repaired, or whether it might make more sense to replace them completely with new information layers are questions landscape architects have to address constantly when designing.55 Palimpsest in action Residuality Residuality is put forth by Aldred as a way of thinking about the accumulated and removed layers of the landscape. “Residuality depends on the relations within its networked assemblage and the way in which the residual elements work together when gathered with other entities.”56 What is pertinent to the designer’s use of residuality is the emphasis on the changeability of materials and elements for future use. “The ability to change while remaining a recognizable material form in terms of their residuality is perhaps a key issue that needs to be explored in landscape.”57 Look at the image of the garden wall at the Latz office in Ampertshausen, Germany, where they have carefully retained the site’s material memory. As Weilacher recounts, “a whole series of enclosing and retaining walls in Amperthausen are obviously made of reused builders’ rubble, old roof tiles, used paving stones, shapeless lumps of concrete, bleached wooden planks

 Material matters 134 and similar things.”58 And in keeping with the theory of palimpsest this material communicates something to visitors in their garden. Weilacher argues that these remnant materials “tell a story of their own that cannot be overlooked – possibly recalling the days when bricks were still made by hand, perhaps complaining about demolition of carefully built barns, commenting on the increasing uselessness of old sheds.”59 Palimpsest revealed Sometimes features of a site’s palimpsest can be hidden from view, scriptio inferior, and it is the task of the designer to reveal this hidden dimension as a scripto secunda. A beautiful example of a hidden palimpsest revealed is the K Garden by the landscape architect Dieter Kienast. Look at the image of Dieter Kienast’s earthen wall from his garden in Zurich. The structure is 10 meters (33 feet) long, 60 centimeters (2.4 inches) thick, and 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) in height and it was built with tamped layers of loam. Kienast says, “the layers of soil 3.13 The garden wall of Peter and Anneliese Latz (1991) by Latz + Partner, image courtesy of Monika Nikolic, Ampertshausen, Germany Can see how this material might tell you something about the site’s history?

Material matters  135 remain invisible in their various shades of brown. The wall shows a lovely mutable picture, which changes in colour and structure depending on the time of day and year. It has thus become the bearer of the image of the ordinarily hidden earth.”60 Weilacher also adds, pure soil, pure dirt is not just a construction material but a medium with its own inherent history, mythology, and meanings, interacting with all other elements in the garden and reacting sensitively to changes in the surrounding microclimate: whenever the humidity in the air rises, the wall reacts immediately and intensifies its natural play of colors.61 Future palimpsest Material palimpsests need not only refer to the past. They can also project into the distant future as well. Look at the image of 100 Forests by Taylor Cullity 3.14 Earthen wall at the K Garden (1994) by Kienast Vogt Partner, image courtesy of Udo Weilacher, Zurich, Switzerland Can you see the soil layers? How does the earth wall express the structure of the soil?

 Material matters 136 Lethlean with Tonkin Zulaikha Greer in Canberra, Australia. The 250-hectare landscape for Australia’s National Arboretum commemorates Canberra’s widespread, devastating fires of 2003. Each forest is comprised of threatened or ethnobotanically significant single-species from around the world. “The forests, each 2–3 hectares in size, are arranged via a grid across the undulating topography.”62 Fictional palimpsest As a working method, palimpsest enables the landscape architect to select what elements to reveal or cover as part of the design process. The landscape architect Rebecca Krinke posits that a palimpsest also invites the designer to add fiction to the site. She writes: “Thinking of the site as a palimpsest allows designers to utilize the site’s layers of history to reveal aspects of the site, or even to add a new layer of self-conscious fiction.”63 In other words, fictional palimpsest enables the designer to intervene with invented constructions that might not be derived from the site, but they’ve been added to prompt imaginative interpretations. Look at the image of Ice-Water Wall at Teardrop Park, designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. The existing site was previously filled land along the Hudson River shoreline. With the episodic layering of chunks of blue stone that arc out of the ground to the height of 9 meters high and 56 meters long, the Ice-Water Wall may prompt all types of interpretations. The artist Ann Hamilton, 3.15 National Arboretum Canberra 100 Forests (2011) by Taylor Cullity Lethlean and Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects, image courtesy of Taylor Cullity Lethlean and John Gollings, Canberra, Australia

Material matters  137 who worked on the project with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and Michael Mercil, describes the wall as “recalling a natural history of the Hudson River Valley, these sections might also recall the processes of quarrying, or of masonry. But this stonework neither comes from nor quite belongs to any of those things. And because it was never any other built thing, the stonework is not a ruin.”64 Teardrop Park was designed for children and with the intent that the very materials of the landscape would provide a source of play and imaginative engagement. Palimpsest debated Palimpsest is in opposition to a design process that treats the site as a blank slate or tabula rasa. Thus, there has been sustained interest in palimpsest by many landscape architects. Eelco Hooftman, landscape architect at GROSS. MAX, contends, “We never have a tabula rasa; it’s nearly always an existing site that needs a new chapter in its process of transformation . . . I think this idea of projects is not only about redesign but also about recycling pieces of fabric into new projects.”65 Indeed, a palimpsest conception of design can allow for a richly textured portrayal of the past and future through its materials. However, this theory also demands critical decision-making by the designer. 3.16 Ice-Water Wall concept drawing at Teardrop Park, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, New York City, New York, USA Do you think the wall’s fictional quality will prompt children to imagine all types of things, like pretending that it is a mountain or a dragon? IcewalLConcept Sketch Icewall_Under Construction IcewalLQuarry Mock-up IcewalLOn Site

 Material matters 138 Palimpsest involves both the underwritten as well as overwritten material, and the designer often functions like a curator, selecting what material will be divulged to people and what material will remain hidden. For politically contested landscapes this can pose problems for those individuals and social groups who are underwritten in the palimpsest. This situation potentially creates what Brenda Bender calls a proprietor palimpsest, where those in power ultimately decide the appropriate interpretation of historical and cultural material.66 While Bender addresses the proprietor palimpsest of Stonehenge and its appropriation by the heritage industry, a wave of postcolonial studies scholars have critiqued proprietor palimpsests, particularly ones regarding indigenous people in North America. For example, consider the mission gardens created by the Franciscans during the eighteenth century in California. Today, these renovated gardens, with their chapels, extensive gardens, plaques, memorials, and ruins have been retained as idyllic educational retreats for those tourists willing to pay a small fee to visit. Employing a postcolonial critique of the history of these mission gardens and their current design features, the anthropologist Elizabeth Kryder-Reid finds that the renovated garden elements function to situate the mission gardens in a broader history of California’s origins, overwriting commemoration and Christian heritage-making while erasing the legacy of these missions as sites of forced labour. Indeed, these missions were instrumental in the Spanish colonization of the indigenous people in what is now California. By telling this underwritten history of oppression Kryder-Reid, “offers an alternative, challenging the imbalance of power in contemporary cultural heritage practices and opens space for silenced voices and perspectives.”67 Primary reading for palimpsest Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, Archaeology in the Field. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF CONSEQUENTIALISM More exactly, it is as if materiality and morality were finally coalescing. This is of great importance because if you begin to redesign cities, landscapes, natural parks, societies, as well as genes, brains and chips, no designer will be allowed Can you see how the mission gardens are a proprietor palimpsest? What material might you include in these gardens to make them more balanced in their message? Do you think that if individuals or groups are only represented through their material artefacts that you run the risk of not helping this group if they are still repressed?

Material matters  139 to hide behind the old protection of matters of fact . . . By expanding design so that it is relevant everywhere, designers take up the mantle of morality as well.68 (Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps toward a Philosophy of Design,” 2008) In his lecture to the Design History Society, Latour stresses the morality of material. Morality is the practice of ethics, and this position is best explained by consequentialism. The normative theory of consequentialism has received renewed interest in environmental ethics and public policy, and, as Latour argues, it is highly relevant to design. Moreover, consequentialism has direct ties with landscape architecture regarding materiality as it “holds that the rightness or wrongness of an agent’s action depends solely on the value of the consequences of this action, compared to the value of the consequences of any other action that the agent could have undertaken.”69 Consequentialism is often contrasted with deontological ethics in which actions and decisions are predicated upon conformity with a moral norm, or an adherence to a set of rules. The philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was influential in the development of deontological moral theories. Kant thought the “only thing unqualifiedly good is a good will.”70 In other words, an act or decision is deemed right or wrong depending on the actor’s or decision-maker’s motivation. The intention of an agent is the basis of moral evaluation and “a right action is one motivated through a sense of duty.”71 For example, today is your birthday and I surprise you by giving you a kitten. Unfortunately, the fur and dander make you cough and wheeze and you break out in a rash. The consequentialist would say that given the outcome of this action, it was not good because it gave you an allergic reaction. Given the imperative to furnish you with a birthday present and my best intentions, a deontologist would say I wasn’t in the wrong. My intentions were good as I conformed to the norm of giving a friend a birthday present. Utilitarianism is a type of consequentialism that has been tied to landscape designers during the nineteenth century. Utilitarianism holds “that an ethical person should base his/her actions on the promotion of the greatest good (pleasure) for the greatest number of people.”72 Philosophers Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) advocated utilitarianism as key to social and political reforms, such as the abolition of slavery. In fact Bentham influenced the landscape designer and author John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) who brought utilitarianism to his promotion of botany, horticulture, and landscape gardening as a type of social reform. Loudon, who invented the theory of gardenesque, rejected the idea that knowledge in these areas was the province of an upper-class educated elite. Loudon’s particular reform agenda sought to improve the middle class by educating them on plant knowledge, garden design, and even city planning because he believed this knowledge promoted the greatest good. He also thought the middle class would represent the majority of English society in the future, and he was able to reach this population not only through books but also through the increasingly popular periodical

 Material matters 140 publication – the magazine. Thus, in keeping with utilitarianism, Loudon was addressing the greatest number of people.73 Utilitarianism was eventually overshadowed by consequentialism as utilitarianism was condemned for its narrow interpretation of good. Most proponents of consequentialism rejected the idea that all values could be condensed into a single effect. In turn, consequentialists proposed a more pluralistic theory of value, opening a range of outcomes. Classical utilitarianism was also criticized for its hedonism, which views pleasure as the only intrinsic good and pain as the only intrinsic bad. Why consequentialism matters The very materials that landscape architects work with are integral to the wellbeing of both the animate and the inanimate, and this operates at a scale from the detailed features of a site to the global transportation of materials. Thus, material use often rests upon consequentialist premises. Material – its selection, extraction, transportation, assemblage, and its material production – is often at the heart of the ethical decisions made in a landscape design project. In keeping with the definition of materiality, the consequences of a project’s material can be deeply tethered to its materiality – what you think the project contributes, its status, its performance, and its contributions. The consequentialism of materiality can provide the opportunity to make decisions that may have the best outcomes. In the late 1980s the planner and architect Peter Oberlander placed a report in the hands of the landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander. He said, “Cornelia, this document will change the way you practice.”74 The report was written by the Brundtland Commission and it was called Our Common Future. It gave evidence of the critical need to work towards a sustainable future at a global level and that this work would involve all sectors of society, including landscape architecture. Peter Oberlander was correct and it did impact many professions, especially as the effects of climate change were made evident. Indeed, Latour points out, “none of the elements necessary to support life can be taken for granted.”75 The impact that design has on natural systems and processes has been deemed so important that measurements, such as “ecological footprints” and “carbon neutral,” have become central to designing and evaluating the performance of designed landscapes. Landscape architects have developed their own toolkits, assessment packages, checklists, and modelling programmes to predict the impact of their designs. Even deontological rules have been created, such as the Green Rating Systems and Best Practices manuals, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED), and the Living Building Challenge to promote adherence to design decision-making that will minimize damage to environmental systems. While initial developments of these codified practices started with materials, they now address the entire building process. Consider the work of Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, who demanded that the contractors of the CK Choi building and landscape separate out and recycle their daily lunches!

Material matters  141 While much thought has been given to impacts on natural systems and processes, materials also influence human health and well-being, and you will return to this consideration at the end of this section in “Consequentialism debated.” Consequentialism in action Displacement In 1967 the artist Robert Smithson examined industrial lands around New Jersey. The sheer scale of movement of earth and rock intrigued him. Equally, he was fascinated by the machinery used to extract and transport this material, which included digging machines, drills, explosives, and rippers – the steel-tooth rakes attached to tractors.76 These observations inspired his series, Non-Site. “The site, in a sense, is the physical, raw reality of the earth or the ground that we are not really aware . . . Instead of putting something on the landscape, I decided it would be interesting to transfer the land indoors, to the Non-Site, which is an abstract container.”77 Non-Site, such as the one displayed in 1968, entailed five diminishing-sized wooden bins arranged in forced perspective with each bin containing chunks of limestone from Franklin Mine in New Jersey.78 The bins were accompanied by a two-dimensional representation of the Franklin Mine site, with markers indicating the places where the material had been collected. Smithson’s piece creates a dialectic between the site and Non-Site through displacement. This dialectic changes not only the object of displacement and its original context, but where it is displaced to – the museum. For Smithson, “The earth to me isn’t nature, but museum. My idea is not anthropomorphic. It’s related to man and matter rather than man and nature.”79 Non-Site revealed how the materials selected for a landscape design not only change the project site but also transform other sites through extraction, whether rock, soil, or plant materials. Look at the image of the You Are Here Garden, for the Métis Garden Festival in Métis-sur-Mer, Quebec. The designers, Bruce Matthews and Taco Iwashima, cut a square shape of wild meadow from a nearby area of the festival grounds and literally transplanted it to create their garden (it was placed back in its original location after the Festival concluded). A plastic tarpaulin draped across the entrance to their garden shows an image of the bare square-shaped plot of soil in a meadow. Do you think it is possible to really determine the best consequences of material selection and use given the myriad of materials available to you today? Can we really know how the materials we design with today are going to impact long-term outcomes?