Material matters 142 Operator The term bricolage was used by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe an approach to thinking and making where available materials or found objects are assembled and manipulated. Lévi-Strauss sought to distinguish the bricoleur from the engineer who pursued optimal solutions and new material to solve a problem. For Lévi-Strauss, in contrast to the engineer, The “bricoleur” is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with “whatever is at hand”, that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or 3.17 International Garden Festival, Jardins de Métis/ Reford Gardens, You Are Here Garden (2002) by Christopher Bruce Matthews and Taco Iwashima, image courtesy of Michel Laverdière, Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens, GrandMétis, Quebec, Canada Does this make you think about what is displaced when you select materials for a landscape? What do you think the beneficial consequences are of this project? Or negative?
Material matters 143 enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.80 Günther Vogt proposes a third term, operator. For Vogt, “bricoleur – usually a collector – interweaves pre-existing materials with great skill in accordance with this concept, the engineer behaves rationally. He establishes rules, in our instance for the landscape, defines objectives, and searches for the best method of achieving them.”81 The operator is “adept at both approaches, and exploits each according to the project in question.”82 Look at the courtyard for the Urban Outfitters Headquarters, designed by D.I.R.T. Studio, in Philadelphia. The site was previously a Navy shipyard, one of the first in the country. To save tons of concrete, asphalt, and brick from entering the landfill and to commemorate the men and women who worked on the yard over the span of 150 years, Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T. Studio salvaged this material and regenerated it as part of the landscape scheme, harvesting “precious debris for reuse.”83 Harvester Designing the landscape for the Legislative Assembly Building in Yellowknife, Canada, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander developed a method of harvesting plants from the site as the plant material source. She collected plant tissues and seeds from the site prior to the building construction, brought them to Vancouver 3.18 Urban Outfitters Landscape (2005–2011) by lead designer, Julie Bargmann, founder and principal, D.I.R.T. Studio; David Hill, project landscape architect and Jen Trompetter, project manager, both also of D.I.R.T Studio, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Can you see how Bargmann was working like a bricoleur or operator?
Material matters 144 where they were propagated, and when they reached maturity she returned them to the Yellowknife site for replanting. Oberlander also employed this technique in the East Three School in Inuvik. Located 200 km north of the Arctic Circle, Inuvik’s growing season was extremely short with approximately 30 days of complete darkness during winter, and like Yellowknife, there was no access to nurseries. Harvesting seeds and tissues from plants already growing on the site has enabled Oberlander to install plant material she knew would thrive in the Arctic’s harsh conditions.84 Bio-mimicry Bio-mimicry involves the creation of materials, structures, and systems that mimic biological entities and processes. While the theory is new to many disciplines, bio-mimicry has been employed in landscape design for a long time. The gardener, architect, and Member of Parliament, Sir Joseph Paxton, for example, used the structure of the Victoria amazonica as an inspiration for his design of the Crystal Palace in 1851. Paxton was impressed by the lily’s organic structure and What do you think the consequences are to this approach to plant material? 3.19 Planting Approach for the Legislative Assembly Building, by Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, diagram by Bryan Beça, Yellowknife, Canada
Material matters 145 placed his daughter Anne on its pads to demonstrate their strength.85 According to Margaret Flanders Darby, “What Paxton learned from the lily was that great horizontal surfaces – in a leaf or a roof – could be largely supported with the extra stiffness provided by the ridge-and-furrow configuration of his greenhouse roofing system.”86 The hollow cast-iron support columns also served as gutters transporting rainwater to the ground. Since the glass panels were faceted, the roof allowed for the penetration of light in the morning and afternoon. Bio-mimicry in design typically resembles the biology it is modelled on. Look at image of Solar Ivy by Samuel and Teresita Cochran, and Benjamin Wheeler Howes. Using printable solar panels that can be attached to a wire mesh, the shape and colours of the panels resembles the leaves of an ivy plant. The solar panels also share a similar function with ivy as well. Whereas ivy converts light energy from the sun into chemical energy that enables it to grow, Solar Ivy harvests solar energy that is connected to an inverter or battery to provide energy for use by people.87 3.20 GROW, a product of Solar Ivy, at the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibit at the MoMA, image courtesy of Kenny Louie, https:// creativecommons. org/licenses/by/2.0/ Do you see how this is bio-mimicry? Can you think of some consequences of selecting this material instead of ivy plants?
Material matters 146 Bio-design Inspired by Industrial Ecology, which posits that industrial processes can be “designed to resemble ecosystems wherein every waste product becomes a raw material for another process,” bio-design exploits processes in living organisms in an attempt to produce materials that are more sustainable.88 Evocative Design, a biomaterials company, grows their material products. Cultivating material such as mycelium, the thread-like branching filamentous structure found in fungus, in agricultural waste, Evocative Design can produce numerous types of materials, such as structural composites and bricks. Consulting to the architecture firm The Living, Evocative Design grew bricks with discarded cornstalks and mushroom parts in moulds developed by 3M. Since the production of bricks is carbon-intensive (firing requires a good deal of energy that in many cases is produced with coal), the grown bricks produce less carbon and use less water than fired bricks. Look at Hy-Fi, by The Living for the 2014 Young Architects Program at the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 in New York. After the exhibit is removed, a “local non-profit, Build It Green, will compost the bricks and turn them into fertilizer.”89 3.21 Hy-Fi (2014) by The Living for the Young Architects Program at The Museum of Modern Art, image courtesy of David Benjamin, Long Island City, New York, USA
Material matters 147 Consequentialism debated Within the field of environmental ethics there are disagreements among consequentialists around actual consequences versus expected consequences. Actual act consequentialists say that morally right actions are those where the actual value of the consequence of your action (the selection of readily available local material, for example, will limit transportation) is greater than the actual value of the consequence of selecting any other material available to you. Expected act consequentialists say that morally right acts are those where the expected value of the consequences (the selection of wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, for example) is greater than the expected value of the consequences of doing otherwise. Philosophers Avram Hiller and Leonard Kahn point out that, “When the consequences of one’s actions are reliably predictable, the differences between actual and expected consequences are small.”90 When it comes to more complex situations, for example how the climate will in fact change and its impacts in 100 years, the difference can be significant. An actual act consequentialist would judge the rightness or wrongness of our enactment of policies now based on the value that the actual consequences of this enactment will have in, say, 100 years. An expected act consequentialist would judge the rightness or wrongness of our enactment of policies now with reference to our current expectations regarding the value of the consequences of these actions.91 In this sense, landscape architects are typically expected act consequentialists. In most cases awards are given out in the present for the expected consequences of actions, not 100 years after the landscape is constructed. Another concern among consequentialists is: what constitutes a good or a bad consequence? Typically the status of good or bad consequences is related to states of well-being, freedom, and equality, and the extent of the consequences. Risk and relative risk, too, are related factors in consequentialism. Increasingly, risk avoidance has played a significant role in the design of landscapes, particularly in North America and in England. Earlier I discussed the important role that materials play in children’s development. Unfortunately, the word “risk” has changed from a neutral term meaning the probability of a given outcome to its equation with an undesirable event or the causes of these events.92 Due to perceived risks many materials and elements have been removed from the landscapes designed for children. This material has included basic landscape elements such as plants, sand, and building materials. The mushroom-based biomaterial could have been moulded into any shape, why do you think they wanted to create something that took the form of a traditional fired brick?
Material matters 148 However, children need to take risk to develop and risk-taking results in positive consequences for children’s health.93 Risks are not hazards, which have no clear benefits. Taking risks or risky play denotes “a situation whereby a child can recognize and evaluate a challenge and decide on a course of action.”94 Climbing a tree, for example, prompts a child to assess the height and strength of a branch – considerations that are not needed with standardized equipment. The child psychologist Ellen Sandseter has developed the emerging theory of risky play. She defines risky play as thrilling and exciting play that includes the possibility of physical injury.95 Types of risky play include playing at height, speed, near dangerous elements (e.g., cliffs, trees, water, fire), and with dangerous tools (knives, saws, and axes). Sandseter argues that there should also be the potential for disappearing or getting lost in a landscape as a form of risky play. Primary reading for consequentialism Avram Hiller, Ramona Ilea, and Leonard Kahn, Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics. Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk).” Samuel Scheffler, ed. Consequentialism and Its Critics. NOTES 1. Udo Weilacher, Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1996), 14. 2. Marc Treib and Dorothée Imbert, Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 77–93. 3. Bruno Latour, “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45, no. 15 (2014): 1–18. 4. Erwin Viray, “Why Material Design?” Material Design: Informing Architecture by Materiality (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2011), 8–9 (8). 5. Steve Hinchliffe, “’Inhabiting’ – Landscapes and Natures,” The Handbook of Cultural Geography, eds. Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, and Nigel Thrift (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002) 207–226 (217). 6. George Novack, Origins of Materialism: The Evolution of the Scientific View of the World (New York: Merit, 1965), 24. 7. Joyce Hill Stoner, “Definitions of Material Culture,” Miscellaneous Objects, accessed 21 January 2016, http://miscellaneousobjects.blogspot.ca/2008/07/definitions-ofmaterial-culture.html. 8. Tim Richardson, Futurescapes: Designers for Tomorrow’s Outdoor Spaces (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2011), 50. 9. Elizabeth K. Meyer, “Post-Earth Day Conundrum: Translating Environmental Values,” Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), 187–244 (196). 10. Richard E. Ripple and Verne Norton Rockcastle, Piaget Rediscovered (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1964), 8. 11. Robert Smithson “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape,” Artforum (February 1973), 62–68. Were you able to take risks as a child?
Material matters 149 12. Michael Bérubé, “Materialism,” New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, eds. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 210–211. 13. Ibid. 14. Christopher Henry, “Stone River – Jon Piasecki,” ArchDaily, 13 October 2011, accessed 6 April 2015, www.archdaily.com/?p=173867. 15. Marshall McLuhan and Lewis H. Lapham, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: MIT Press, 1964; 1994), 7. 16. Mark Federman, “What is the Meaning of The Medium is the Message?” accessed 21 January 2016, http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm. 17. Interaction Awards 2014, “Avena+ Test Bed – Agricultural Printing and Altered Landscapes, Royal College of Art,” accessed 21 January 2016, http://awards.ixda. org/entry/2014/avena-test-bed-agricultural-printing-and-altered-landscapes/. 18. Tafline Laylin, “Benedikt Groß Brings Digital Printing to Precision Farming,” Inhabit, 23 August 2013, accessed 21 January 2015, http://inhabitat.com/benediktgros-brings-digital-printing-to-precision-farming/avena-test-bed-by-benedikt-gros-6/. 19. Stan Allen, “Points and Lines,” SCI-Arc Media Archive, 24 February 1999, accessed 21 January 2016, http://sma.sciarc.edu/video/stan-allen/. 20. Stan Allen, “Introduction: Practice vs. Project,” Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2000), xiii–xxv (xiii). 21. Philip Bethge, “New Branch of Architecture: Grow Your Own Skyscraper,” Spiegel International, 22 July 2009, accessed 21 January 2016, www.spiegel.de/international/ germany/new-branch-of-architecture-grow-your-own-skyscraper-a-636716.html. 22. Ibid. 23. Thomas Schropfer, “Modulating: Transformation by Shaping and Texturing,” Material Design: Informing Architecture by Materiality (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2011), 88–105 (99). 24. Robert McAnulty “What’s the Matter with Material?” Log, No. 5 (Spring/Summer 2005): 87–92 (89). 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 90. 27. Jeffrey Kastner and Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1998) 32. 28. Jane Gillette, “Can Gardens Mean?” Landscape Journal 24, no. 1 (2005): 85–97 (82). 29. David Leatherbarrow, “Material Matters,” Architecture Oriented Otherwise (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 69–94 (91). 30. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1849), 48. 31. William Robinson, The Parks, Promenades and Gardens of Paris, Described and Considered in Relation to the Wants of Our Own Cities (London: John Murray, 1869) 61. 32. Ann Komara, “Concrete and the Engineered Picturesque: The Parc des Buttes Chaumont (Paris, 1867),” Journal of Architectural Education 58, no. 1 (2004): 5–12 (9). 33. See Dorothée Imbert, The Modernist Garden in France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 38. 34. Christopher Tunnard, Gardens in the Modern Landscape (London: The Architectural Press, 1938; 1948), 103. 35. Ibid. 36. Rosalind Krauss, “The Double Negative: A New Syntax in Sculpture,” Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: The MIT Press, 1977; 1981), 243–288 (266). 37. Jonathan Vickery, “Organizing Art: Constructing Aesthetic Value,” Museums in the Material World, ed. Simon Knell (New York: Routledge, 2007), 214–229 (222).
Material matters 150 38. Kenneth Frampton, Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture ed. John Cava (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 2. 39. Field Guide to the La Garrotxa Volcanic Zone (La Garrotxa Volcanic Zone Natural Park, Catalonia, Spain, 2012), 65. 40. Julian Raxworthy, “Parc de Pedra Tosca in Les Preses, Spain,” Topos 55 (2006): 91–94, 92. 41. Günther Vogt, Miniature and Panorama: Vogt Landscape Architects, Projects 2000–12 (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2012), 135. 42. Ibid., 175. 43. Alice Foxley, Distance & Engagement: Walking, Thinking and Making Landscape (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2010), 206. 44. Arne Saelen, Urban Landscapes: Arne Saelen (Barcelona, Spain: Loft, 2012), 120. 45. Lori Fazari, “Don’t Tell Him It’s Fake,” Globe and Mail, 27 April 2007, accessed 10 June 2015, www.theglobeandmail.com/life/dont-tell-him-its-fake/article684437/. 46. Susan Hines, “Ulterior Exterior MoMA’s New Roof Garden Is Cloaked with Meaning rather than Plants,” Landscape Architecture, November 2005, accessed 10 June 2015, https://www.asla.org/lamag/lam05/november/feature3.html. 47. Stephanie Ross, What Gardens Mean (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 179. 48. Osbert Guy Stanhope Crawford, Archaeology in the Field (London: Phoenix House, 1953), 51. 49. Frederic William Maitland, Domesday Book and Beyond: Three Essays in the Early History of England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907), 15. 50. Gavin Lucas, Understanding the Archaeological Record (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 115. 51. Hayden Lorimer, “Caught in the Nick of Time: Archives and Fieldwork,” The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography, eds. Dydia DeLyser, Steve Herbert, Stuart Aitken, Mike Crang, and Linda McDowell (London: Sage, 2010), 248–273. 52. Oscar Aldred, “Time for Fluent Landscapes,” Conversations with Landscape, eds. Karl Benediktsson and Katrin Anna Lund (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 59–78 (70). 53. Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 51–52. 54. Geoffrey J. Martin and Preston E. James, All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas (New York: John Wiley, 1993), 193. 55. Udo Weilacher, Syntax of Landscape: The Landscape Architecture of Peter Latz and Partners (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), 26. 56. Aldred, “Time for Fluent Landscapes,” 59–78 (66). 57. Ibid., 68. 58. Weilacher, Syntax of Landscape, 28–29. 59. Ibid., 29. 60. Dieter Kienast, “Between Tradition and Innovation,” Dieter Kienast (Basel: Birkäuser, 2004), 64–66 (65). 61. Udo Weilacher, “The Garden as the Last Luxury Today,” Contemporary Garden Aesthetics, Creations and Interpretations, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2007), 81–95 (89). 62. Bustler, “Taylor Cullity Lethlean wins Landscape of the Year Award for the Second Year in a Row,” 7 October 2014, accessed 12 June 2015, www.bustler.net/index.php/article/ taylor_cullity_lethlean_wins_landscape_of_the_year_award_for_the_second_yea/. 63. Rebecca Krinke, “Overview: Design Practice and Manufactured Sites,” Manufactured Landscapes: Rethinking the Post-Industrial Landscape, ed. Niall Kirkwood (London: Spon Press, 2001), 128.
Material matters 151 64. Ann Hamilton, “Teardrop Park,” accessed 21 January 2016, www.annhamiltonstudio. com/public/teardroppark.html. 65. Eelco Hooftman, “GROSS. MAX,” Landscape Architecture Core? Harvard Design Magazine no. 36 (2013): 68–69 (68). 66. Brenda Bender, “Contested Landscapes: Medieval Time to Present,” Material Culture: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, ed. Victor Buchli (London: Routledge, 2004), 42–51. 67. Elizabeth Kryder-Reid, “Marking Time in San Gabriel Mission Garden,” special issue on Time, eds. Sonja Duempelmann and Susan Herrington, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes: An International Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2014): 15–27 (19). 68. Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus? A Few Steps toward a Philosophy of Design (with Special Attention to Peter Sloterdijk),” Keynote lecture for the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, 3 September 2008, 6. 69. Avram Hiller and Leonard Kahn, “Introduction: Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics,” Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics, eds. Avram Hiller, Ramona Ilea, and Leonard Kahn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), 1–16 (3). 70. Larry Alexander and Michael Moore, “Deontological Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2015 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed 21 January 2016, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/ethics-deontological/. 71. Daniel Holbrook, “The Consequentialistic Side of Environmental Ethics,” Environmental Values 6, no. 1 (1997): 87–96 (92). 72. Tani E. Bellestri, “Utilitarianism,” Green Issues and Debates: An A-to-Z Guide, eds. Howard S. Schiffman and Paul Robbins (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2011), 475–477 (477). 73. Heath Schenker, “Women, Gardens, and the English Middle Class in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550–1850, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 337–360. 74. Susan Herrington, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander – Making the Modern Landscape (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013). 75. Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus?” 9. 76. Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,”Artforum (September 1968): 82–91 (83). 77. Robert Smithson, “Symposium,” Earth Art, ed. Nina Jager (Ithaca, NY: Andrew Dickson White, Museum of Art, 1970), 63–79 (67). 78. Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, 44. 79. Ibid. 80. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, trans. George Weidenfeld (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962; 1966), 17. 81. Günther Vogt, “Shadows of Landscape,” Landscape Architecture’s Core? Harvard Design Magazine no. 36 (2013): 130–135 (131). 82. Ibid. 83. Julie Bargmann, “Dirt Studio’s Brooklyn Navy Yard Visitors Center,” accessed 21 January 2016 www.dirtstudio.com/#bny. 84. Susan Herrington, “Designing above the Arctic Circle,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 8, no. 2 (2013): 44–51. 85. Margaret Flanders Darby, “Joseph Paxton’s Water Lily,” Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550–1850, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 255–283 (265). 86. Ibid., 273. 87. William Bostwick, “The Ripple Effect: Solar Ivy,” Metropolis Magazine (March 2010): 104.
Material matters 152 88. William Myers, Bio Design: Nature, Science, Creativity (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), ii. 89. Avinash Rajagopal, “Behind The Living’s 100% Organic Pavilion for MoMA PS1,” Metropolis, 10 February 2014, accessed 24 June 2015, www.metropolismag.com/ Point-of-View/February-2014/MoMA-PS1/. 90. Hiller and Kahn, “Introduction: Consequentialism and Environmental Ethics,” 5. 91. Ibid., 5–6. 92. Sven Ove Hansson, The Ethics of Risk: Ethical Analysis in an Uncertain World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 93. Mariana Brussoni, Rebecca Gibbons, Casey Gray, Takuro Ishikawa, Ellen Beate Hansen Sandseter, Adam Bienenstock, et al., “What is the Relationship between Risky Outdoor Play and Health in Children? A Systematic Review,” International Journal of Environmental Research on Public Health 12 (2015): 6423–6454. 94. David Ball, Tim Gill, and Bernard Spiegal, Managing Risk in Play Provision: Implementation Guide (London: Play England, 2012), 120. 95. Ellen Sandseter and Leo Kennair, “Children’s Risky Play from an Evolutionary Perspective: The Anti-phobic Effects of Thrilling Experiences,” Evolutionary Psychology 9 (2011): 257–284.
153 4 Language In its broadest sense, “The term language designates any signifying whole (system) be it verbal, musical, visual, gestural, etc. We speak a language of architecture, a language of music or a language of landscape.”1 This chapter concerns theories of design as a language, as a means to communicate through design. The idea that landscapes could be designed to communicate ideas prompted speculations that landscapes could be read or interpreted as texts, which in turn spurred debates on interpretation and meaning. If a designer can communicate ideas, how do people interpret these ideas from the landscape? What if their interpretation was different from the designer’s intent? Can landscapes mean or must they? If landscapes can mean, what are the rules structuring this meaning? As the philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) notes, If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal and may be assimilated to so-called rules of thumb . . . It is always possible to argue for or against an interpretation, to confront interpretations, to arbitrate between them, and to seek for an agreement, even if this agreement remains beyond our reach.2 Indeed, when landscape design was conceived as a language, landscape theory reached its most self-critical phase, because debates over language and meaning were central to disputes within the humanities. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF TYPOLOGY Look at the historic typologies of homes on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, created by the US National Park Service. Typology is the classification of artefacts by type and these types can be grouped by different categories – formal, historical, thematic, etc. The development of What is the drawing comparing and contrasting? How is this a typological study?
Language 154 typologies or classification systems for architecture and landscape architecture can be traced back to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century zeal for encyclopaedias and dictionaries. The architectural theorist Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849) as well as John Claudius Loudon (1783– 1843) sought to provide an organized language representing the designed environment. Loudon, for example, wrote numerous encyclopaedias for a wide range of topics related to the landscape – including agriculture, plants, trees and shrubs, gardening, and architecture. According to the architectural theorist Sylvia Lavin, the gravitation to encyclopaedias and dictionaries in architecture during this time period was a consequence of the growing belief that language was an artificial system, one not created by God, but invented by rational thought.3 Thus, Quatremère de Quincy’s analysis of historical buildings was filtered through his theory of type, which was free from theology or a concern with chronological developments or cultural events. The theory of type or typology was later revived by architects between the 1960s and 1980s, as a critique of modern architecture. Disillusioned with the modern tenets of design, which purportedly derived form from function and ignored historical precedents, architects such as Giulio Carlo Argan, Aldo Rossi, Rafael Moneo, Jorge Silvetti, and Alan Colquhoun looked to the historical development of urban spatial types as a source of design. Rafael Moneo argued, for example, that “Theoreticians of the Modern Movement rejected the idea of type as it had been understood in the nineteenth century, for to them it meant immobility, a set of restrictions imposed on the creator who must, they posited, 4.1 Historic Typologies of Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, National Park Service (2010), public domain
Language 155 be able to act with complete freedom.”4 In contrast to the notion of typology as a set of restrictions, these architects viewed typology as a generative source for design. Aldo Rossi, quoting Quatremère de Quincy in his book, Architecture of the City, distinguished a type from a model, noting, The word “type” represents not so much the image of a thing to be copied or perfectly imitated as the idea of an element that must itself serve as a rule for the model . . . The model, understood in terms of the practical execution of art, is an object that must be repeated such as it is; type, on the contrary is an object according to which one can conceive works that do not resemble one another at all.5 For Rossi, the rules of type stipulated the essential principle of architectural design. He posited, “Typology presents itself as the study of types of elements that cannot be reduced further . . . The process of reduction is a necessary, logical operation, and it is impossible to talk about the problem of form without this presupposition.”6 In other words, since type was not an identical copy or model, it involved invention or design; thus, architects could employ type to not only analyse the built environment, but also to generate new ones. In this sense, a typology of landscapes in design doesn’t mean copying types of design, but distilling their rules or inner logic. Take for example a common agricultural type, the orchard, which is an intentionally planted area of trees, typically containing fruit trees or nut trees. In many cultures orchards are laid out in a regular grid in low densities to provide light and air to each tree, and to enable access for maintenance and harvesting. They can also be laid out in a quincunx pattern or along the contours of a slope, and the exact spacing of the trees will be based on their variety and where the orchard is located. Since this is an agricultural type, a consistent tree layout and spacing will determine the maximum number of trees per unit area. The trees’ need for air, water, light, and human access is fulfilled by the fact that they have this regularized layout, or what can be referred to as the orchard’s internal logic. The key starting point to employing typology as a design method starts with this internal logic. The role of typology in design was also explored in landscape architecture. Inspired by Dame Sylvia Crowe and Mary Mitchell’s book, The Pattern of Landscape (1988),7 the landscape planner and forester Simon Bell wrote Landscape: Pattern, Perception, and Process (1999).8 Bell was concerned in particular with our perception of natural patterns (such as spirals, meanders, explosions, branching, and packing and cracking) and how they were expressed in patterns created by people. Importantly, he stressed how long-term processes shaped these types of patterns. He notes, Pattern type is also determined by flow dynamics such as turbulence or eddies . . . These patterns are easy to observe in liquid. Other flows are of stress
Language 156 or energy, not directly visible, but inferred by indirect evidence such as stress fractures in wood, sand dunes produced by the wind or the structure of bones, evolved to respond to stresses, whilst minimizing the use of materials.9 Underscoring the linkage of cultural types, the landscape architects Cynthia Girling and Kenneth Helphand wrote Yard, Street, Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space to help designers and planners engaged in the design of new communities through use of a scaled networked typology.10 Their analyses of the basic building blocks of landscape types ranged from private yards to neighbourhoods to playgrounds, and local and regional park systems that are connected by corridors linking vehicular, bicycle, and pedestrian movement. Type continues to be a source of inspiration for landscape architects. In Composing Landscapes (2008) the landscape architecture professor Clemens Steenbergen stressed the transformational potential of types. He writes, three successive dynamic phases can be distinguished in transformation as a design process: decomposition (in which the historical material is investigated and the useable elements isolated); processing (in which they are once again confronted with a given situation and a new programme); and synthesis (in which a new functional and visual-spatial relationship is created).11 Why typology matters Typology is important because it concerns the language of the design disciplines, whether in landscape architecture, architecture, or urban design. While these types will overlap – for example the piazza is common to both landscape architecture and urban design – it is important for students to be aware of these types. The architectural theorist Alan Colquhoun notes, “we are not free from the forms of the past and the availability of these forms . . . if we assume that we are free, we have lost control over a very active sector of our imagination, and of our power to communicate with others.”12 This statement attests to two different and equally valuable contributions made by typology: internally within the process of design and externally to the public experiencing the design. Typology concerns types specific to landscape architecture and the internal logic of these types, but it does not “advocate the reversion to an architecture which accepts tradition unthinkingly,”13 rather one that transforms the types. In this way, typological explorations can operate critically. Building upon the work of the philosopher, linguist, and critic Roland Barthes, who argued, “There is nothing more essential for a society than to classify its own languages,” and “that language is never innocent,”14 Jorge Silvetti proposed a “criticism from What if you returned to the orchard example? If you performed these three steps, what might you design?
Language 157 within” in his widely read essay, “The Beauty of Shadows” (1977).15 Criticism from within uses architectural language, but it also subverts its conventional linguistic usage. For Silvetti, this critique should not be a one-liner or simply commentary – it should impact the way you think about the world. This practice not only enables the designer to be reflective and critical of language, but create new, unexpected associations, exposing “certain meanings of the work that are otherwise obscured by ideological veils.”16 And this is the beauty of shadows, for, like language, shadows cast a form out of the light that is not an exact replica of the object that it portrays. Second, and importantly, non-designers often readily understand types. They have most likely experienced an orchard or an allée before. They might not know that a walkway lined with trees or tall shrubs is called an allée, but they know that this spatial type leads somewhere. A typological approach to design is also valuable to students who feel that it gives them a starting point for design, particularly for urban projects. As the urban designer David Walters and artist Linda Brown argue, “It helps establish workable patterns of urban forms and spaces quickly at the outset of a project, setting out a framework that can be enriched by the subtleties of site circumstances.”17 Typology in action Morphological types The urban theorist, painter, and architect Camillo Sitte (1843–1903) was one of the earliest critics of modern urban types, such as the “apartment-house block system,” and the forced geometries of plazas with their monuments or fountains at their centres.18 He lamented the open spaces built during his lifetime and argued, “They often serve no other purpose than to allow for more air and light, or to bring about a certain interruption in the sea of houses, at most, to provide freer views of a large building.”19 Interestingly, Sitte’s critique led him to conduct a morphological study of urban spatial types throughout Europe. The study was published as Der Städtebau nach seinem künstlerischen Grundsätzen (City Planning According to Artistic Principles) in 1889. Sitte favoured the incrementally conceived urban open spaces from the Middle Ages and Renaissance periods. To convince readers of their value he presented plan views of numerous urban plazas from these eras, showing their similarities and how practical use gave shape to their form. For example, he found that the centre of these older plazas was kept free from fountains, statues, or other monuments. He explained that these plazas were not only social spaces used for household water collection, but they also served as thoroughfares of movement across the space. Since the plazas were not initially paved, the movement of people and horses created rutted pathways crisscrossing the space. So when a fountain is to be installed, it obviously will not be set in the midst of the deeper ruts, but on any of the islands that lie between the lines of communication. If the
Language 158 community gradually grows larger and acquires wealth, then the square will be graded and paved, but the fountain remains where it stood . . . one can understand why fountains and monuments do not lie on the main axes of the traffic, not in the middle of the squares, nor in line with central portals.20 Sitte’s work was published in English beginning in 1945, and he greatly influenced postmodern urban designers, landscape architects, and architects. Yet, many typologies created by landscape architects employ plant materials, which on their own change over time, and thus alter the original type. Look at the image of Oerliker Park, designed by Schweingruber Landscape Architects and Hubacher and Haerle Architects. Located on the site of former industrial lands north of Zurich, Switzerland, the park’s design accounts for morphological change. The designers created an open space system and forest, but also employed ideas from forest management – strategic interventions in the project after its initial installation – as part of their design. The park’s landscape How can typologies in landscape architecture account for these changes? 4.2 Oerliker Park (2001) by Schweingruber Zulauf Landscape Architects and Hubacher and Haerle Architects, image courtesy of Grün Stadt Zürich, https:// creativecommons. org/licenses/ by-sa/3.0/deed.en, Zurich, Switzerland
Language 159 architects planned grids of 700 European Ash (Fraxinus excelsior), 104 Silver Birch (Betula pendula), 64 Wild Cherry (Prunus avium), 40 Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), and 33 Princess (Paulownia tomentosa) trees.21 The trees were selected for their hardiness, but also for their pattern of growth and contrasting colours. To compensate for the slender callipers of the young trees, they were spaced on a 13-foot on-centre grid around the park’s central open space. The forest management scheme for the park included a programme of thinning and eventually removing some trees to produce additional spatial volumes within the park. From 2015 to 2025, over 350 trees will be evenly removed from the southern part of the park to create a quincunx pattern. After 2025, the removal of less than 100 trees will create additional open space. Garden types Given the lengthy history of garden design, the chronological documentation of garden types reveals a wide variety of forms. The garden historian Tom Turner identifies 24 garden types from ancient Egypt to postmodern styles.22 Italian Renaissance gardens, known for their rectilinear, axial spaces, and linear water channels provided a point of departure for the Spirulina fountain, designed by Do you have any ideas what the removed trees could be used for? 4.3 Spirulina fountain (2015) by Bureau A, image courtesy of Bureau A, Parc des Evaux, Switzerland
Language 160 Bureau A, in Geneva, Switzerland. In particular, the gravity-fed watercourses of sixteenth-century Italian gardens inspired their design. According to Bureau A, the “form and dimensions of the fountain quote the water cascades of the Villa Aldobrandini built in 1550 in Frascati, Italy.”23 “The fountains double as a breeding ground for spirulina, a highly nutritious blue-green algae.”24 Bureau A harvests the algae with fabric filters that trap the microalgae. Spirulina can be used to make smoothies, dips, pudding, and juice. Little feet/big feet Using the practice of binding women’s feet as an analogy for European decorative landscapes and women’s natural feet as an analogy for his vernacular agricultural typology, the landscape architect Kongjian Yu has proposed a “big foot” revolution for landscape architecture in China. According to Yu, “For most of a thousand years, Chinese girls were forced to bind their feet so they could marry citified elites, since their natural, ‘big’ feet were associated with provincial people and rustic life.”25 Yu charges that this aesthetic of the small, dysfunctional foot (women whose feet were bound could barely walk) is much like the design types imported from Europe into Chinese cities during the nineteenth century – these landscapes were decorative featuring ornamental plants and fake rocks, and they didn’t function ecologically. He notes, “The aestheticized landscape defined by the privileged urban minority prior to the twentieth century are now eagerly sought by the masses, whose peasant ancestors had struggled to become city dwellers. These migrants, just like the peasant ‘big foot’ girls, are eager to bind their feet.”26 As an alternative, Yu proposed a big foot aesthetic, whereby designed landscapes take their cues from vernacular agricultural types that function in the cultivation of crops, but also operate ecologically. Look at the landscape by Turenscape for the Yellow Dragon Cave Theatre, Wuling River, Hunan Province. The path in the image defines the edge of a polder. The polder landscape is an alternative to the disruptive dam systems that obstruct water flow along alluvial plains of the Wuling River. Turenscape’s design borrowed from a very old Chinese water and agricultural management system dating back to 2200–2100 BCE.27 This gravity-fed system allows for flow across the agricultural fields, which simultaneously reduces the impact of flooding and maintains a consistent water depth required for the rice to grow. What elements have remained the same and what elements have they transformed? Do you know why the water in the fountain is green?
Language 161 Aletheic image The architect Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926–2000) developed the theory of the aletheic image in his widely read book, Genius Loci, Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1980).28 Like other designers during his time, he was dissatisfied with the technocratic dimensions of modernism, and he sought to base architecture on the concept of genius loci. Norberg-Schulz’s early attempts to link phenomenology with design involved his theory of topology,29 which referred to the spatial organization of historical works of architecture and landscape architecture as it is lived. For Norberg-Schulz, through the physical exploration of historic sites topology was revealed to you. For example, Cetona, one of the many circular hilltop towns of Tuscany, Italy, is an example of topology. As you wind your way up the main street of the town you trace with your body’s movement the geomorphology of the town itself. Norberg-Schulz’s theory of the aletheic image was intended to inspire new designs grounded in the patterns of nature. Aletheic refers to Heidegger’s use of the Greek term aletheia, which means truth as revealing or disclosing encounter. Norberg-Schulz thought the rock outcroppings in the Bohemian mountains provided the aletheic image for the curvilinear façades of Bohemian architecture because of their similar formal qualities.30 Resembling the sculpted rock formations, the exterior walls of the architecture were fashioned the same way with curving edges. 4.4 Landscape for the Yellow Dragon Cave Theatre (2010) by Kongjian Yu/Turenscape, image courtesy of Kongjian Yu, Hunan Province, China Can you see how this landscape is a version of Yu’s “Big Foot” theory? The concert hall (in the background) appears to borrow from a similar idea, do you know why the roof of the hall is slanted? Polder landscapes are not unique to China, are there other vernacular polders?
Language 162 Look at the image of Citygarden, by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, in St Louis Missouri. Located just blocks away from the Mississippi River, the tripartite scheme of the park recalls the three different agricultural or alluvial patterns of the river. The northern precinct contains a 168-meter-long arching wall of Missouri limestone that represents the limestone river bluffs that have been carved by the Mississippi. The floodplain area is subject to the water flows of over 100 vertical water jets for children’s play. While the lowland precinct recalls one of the river’s most defining characteristics with a 351-meterlong meandering seat wall. Archetype The psychologist Carl Jung (1875–1961) advanced two conceptual layers of the unconscious – the personal and the collective. According to Jung, “The personal layer ends at the earliest memories of infancy, but the collective layer comprises the pre-infantile period, that is, the residues of ancestral life.”31 Jung posited that the content of the collective unconscious possesses universal archetypes, 4.5 Citygarden (2009) by Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, St Louis, Missouri, USA Do you think the meandering seat wall provides an aletheic image of the river?
Language 163 which have reoccurred throughout history and culture. These Jungian archetypes could manifest themselves in personalities. The wise old man – you may have witnessed him in the character Albus Dumbledore in the Harry Potter series or Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, who are examples of this personality archetype. Yet, Jung also proposed the idea of transformational archetypes. These are not personalities, but are typical situations, places, ways and means, that symbolize the kind of transformation in question. For Jung, “Like the personalities, these archetypes are true and genuine symbols that cannot be exhaustively interpreted, either as signs or as allegories. They are genuine symbols precisely because they are ambiguous, full of half-glimpsed meanings, and in the last resort inexhaustible.”32 Interestingly, Jung found these symbols of transformational archetypes in the imagery of Tarot cards. While Freud viewed the act of making art as part of the process of sublimation, Jung thought the collective unconscious was inspirational for artists. Archetypes encountered in the world could trigger lost memories of the collective unconsciousness due to cryptomnesia, which means to store the memory, but forget its source. Jung provided an example of how the unconscious informed the conscious in the human psyche. A professor was walking with a student past a farm when suddenly; apparently out of nowhere, “images of his childhood began to surge up.”33 Perplexed, the professor walked back to the farm with the student and discovered the smell of geese as the source of this interruption. As a child he had spent time on a farm that had geese, whose distinct smell had formed a lasting impression. Sensing this odour as an adult, it produced the memory-images of his childhood. Jung concluded that even if we do not consciously remember a particular smell, “the unconsciousness will inhale the ‘odour.’”34 While I’m not completely convinced by the Tarot card example given by Jung, the idea that landscapes communicate subconsciously is promising, and there are certainly types of landscapes, the labyrinth for example, that reoccur across times and cultures. The landscape architect Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (1900–1996) was inspired by archetypes and viewed landscape design as a way to communicate subconsciously to people through the design. He also thought this activity should be kept to oneself. “Tell no one, if you can, for this is a message from one subconscious to another, and the intellect spoils such things.”35 More recently, archetypes have played a role in the work of landscape architect Kim Wilkie. Look at the image of Orpheus, by Kim Wilkie at Boughton Park in Northamptonshire. The inverted grass pyramid descends 7 meters below the existing ground level where a square pool of water reflects the sky. Orpheus is the archetypal personality of the “inspired singer” and the use of water has been a transformational archetype in literature and landscapes. A journalist for the Telegraph was quite sceptical of Wilkie’s design proposal (particularly the Fibonacci symbol he created next to the inverted pyramid). Yet, once she visited the park, she exclaimed,
Language 164 But then, but then . . . You stop in your tracks and this extraordinary deep pit 50 meters square at the top opens out, with sloping terraces that lead down to a square, black pool at its base. There are times when you know you are in the presence of a great work and this was one of them. Is it partly the scale, partly the inversion of Olympus and Hades, the balance of heaven and hell, the contemplation of life and death? I cannot define what it is that trips the sensory triggers and made me stop chatting to friends, minding the rain, sneering at Fibonacci. It was bigger than everything, not just physically, but spiritually.36 Typology debated Typology has been critiqued from a number of different perspectives. The architects Lynda Schneekloth and Karen A. Franck note that the use of type in the design process relies too heavily on replicating the image of a particular type rather than employing typology (or typing) as a starting point for creating new forms and space. They state, Type is enormously useful. It explains the world to us, it makes sense for us. And it does this, usually without our having to think about it: we accept knowledge of the world structured and interpreted through type. Type is suggestive rather than true. This is its power, but also its problem. We assume the truth, and we 4.6 Orpheus (2009) by Kim Wilkie, image courtesy of Kim Wilkie, Northamptonshire, England Why do you think Orpheus aroused such a reaction in the journalist?
Language 165 assume agreement when, in fact, this is not in the nature of typing nor of the struggle to form and change spatial practice.37 The urban designer Alex Wall thinks formal typologies are inadequate for describing and responding to current urban conditions. Unlike Sitte’s traditional cities, for example, which possess a central core and are distinct from the countryside, contemporary urbanism is polycentric and networked across regional and global spaces. Wall notes, “familiar urban typologies of square, park, district, and so on are of less use or significance than are the infrastructures, network flows, ambiguous spaces, and other polymorphous conditions that constitute the contemporary metropolis.”38 Wall also points out that these traditional urban typologies tend to accommodate limited programmes, when in fact expanding as well as densifying urban environments need a layering of diverse programming. The landscape architect Jill Desimini has proposed the idea of “development typologies” in describing Stoss Landscape Urbanism’s work in Detroit. These typologies are physical and functional and they are located in relationship to land uses that, according to Desimini, push the boundaries of traditional zoning categories to include specific visions and performance metrics . . . There are five broad categories: community open spaces which encompass traditional recreational and civic open spaces, ecological landscapes that create floral and fauna habitat, blue and green infrastructures which address storm water needs citywide, working and productive landscapes that expand existing agricultural and energy operations, and transitional landscapes that celebrate the art and event installations for which the city is known.39 The forms of these developmental typologies map onto pre-existing forms of Detroit’s urban landscape. These forms are characterized by not only the city’s abandoned infrastructure, buildings, and industry, but also its extensive gridiron street system and the low-lying lakebed plain of former ancient lakes and glacial deposits. Primary reading for typology Karen A. Franck and Lynda H. Schneekloth, Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design. Cynthia L. Girling and Kenneth I. Helphand, Yard, Street, Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space. Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City. Clemens Steenbergen, Composing Landscapes: Analysis, Typology and Experiments for Design. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF SEMANTICS Man, for many philosophers both ancient and modern, is the “representational animal,” homo symbolicum, the creature whose distinctive character is the creation and manipulation of signs – things that stand for or take the place of something else.40 (William J. Mitchell, Critical Terms for Literary Study, 1990)
Language 166 Here, Mitchell claims that humans are unique for their propensity to represent, express life, not simply live life as other animals. Mitchell’s claim can be traced back to the work of the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) who thought that humans were distinct from other animals in generating symbols, and that the creation of symbols was salient to all spheres of life, ranging from language and myths to the arts and sciences. Since symbols were so ubiquitous, Cassirer proposed that they should replace reason as the unifying structure of culture.41 How symbols functioned as a language to mediate experience also figured in Cassirer’s theories. He maintained, The world of language and the world of art offer us direct proof for this prelogical structuring, for this “stamped form” that precedes and underlies the work of concepts . . . We have already made this clear in the case of language, but it holds equally for the organic nature of the arts. Sculpture, painting, and architecture seem to have a common object.42 For Cassirer, symbolic forms precede concepts and knowledge and as such symbols provide key questions in semantics – the study of meaning. Semantics is considered a forerunner and a branch of semiotics and linguistics, the study of language.43 Another important dimension of the way symbols figure in experiences as prompted by representations is the hybrid nature of their sensory and intellectual apprehension. In describing optical experiences with lines drawn on a page, Cassirer states, Such an experience is never composed of mere sensory data, of the optical qualities of brightness and color . . . as sensory experience it is always the vehicle of a meaning and stands as it were in the service of that meaning. But precisely therein it is able to perform very different functions and through them to represent very different worlds of meaning.44 Cassirer’s philosophical interest in symbols, language, and meaning influenced numerous arts, including art history and art criticism. At the Warburg Institute Cassirer’s student, Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), brought this focus on symbolic values and semantics to art history.45 In Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, Panofsky countered analyses based on formalism and revolutionized scholarship in art history. Panofsky took particular aim at Wolfflin’s formalist account, which held that the content of art remained the same throughout history, with only the formal aspects changing based on style. Panofsky’s approach sought to interpret the changing symbolic values of a culture, which he thought would elude art historians who only conducted formal analyses. Do other animals represent or express life? What ways do humans represent or express?
Language 167 Like a detective, Panofsky pursued the intrinsic meaning of symbolic values, which he claimed, “underlies and explains both the visible event and its intelligible significance.”46 To achieve this, he proposed a synthesis of formal analysis with the study of images, stories, and allegories in the accretion of meaning. He notes, “by transferring the results of this analysis from every-day life to a work of art, we can distinguish in its subject matter or meaning the three same strata.”47 These strata included the primary or natural subject matter (pre-iconographical description), the secondary or conventional subject matter (iconographical analysis), and the intrinsic meaning or content (iconographical synthesis).48 Looking at the image of the Studley Royal Water Garden, a pre-iconographical description involves identifying the forms, lines, and colours as representations of ponds as mirrors of the sky and on this cool rainy day in Yorkshire the ponds’ “expressional qualities”49 are sombre. An iconographical analysis entails the recognition of these as the Moon and Crescent Ponds of the Studley Royal Water Garden, whose realization became the prime occupation of John Aislabie (1670–1742) after he was expelled from Parliament.50 Aislabie was a subscriber to John James’s Theory and Practice of Gardening (1712), an English translation of Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville’s Théorie et la pratique du jardinage. The book explained the design, installation, and maintenance of formal parterre gardens and it influenced the layout of the water gardens at Studley Royal starting from 1718.51 An iconographical synthesis involves the realization that Aislabie’s employment of a simple vocabulary of forms paid homage to the restrained gardens of Williamite England over the ostentatious Whig values expressed at gardens like Stowe.52 4.7 Studley Royal Water Garden, North Yorkshire, England Do you see the different phases of analysis?
Language 168 Building upon the use of symbols, and their semantic affordances, the philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906–1998) transferred these theories to aesthetics in Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (1968).53 For Goodman non-linguistic forms such as pictures, music, dance, and architecture referred in different symbol systems. These works possessed, “different functions and bear different relations with the worlds they refer to. Hence, artworks require interpretation and interpreting them amounts to understanding what they refer to, in which way, and within which systems of rules.”54 The linguistic versus nonlinguistic refer differently, but as the philosopher Jennifer Robinson points out, “works of art are now commonly understood as meaningful entities, with cognitive value, requiring interpretation rather than passive appreciation.”55 She also notes that Goodman, like the theorists you will read about in post-structuralism, maintains that, “language and art do not merely reflect an antecedently existing world but help to create new ones.”56 Goodman built upon Languages of Art during his career, and in 1985 he turned to analysing architecture, writing “How Buildings Mean,” a chapter that thanks the landscape architect Laurie Olin for his invaluable help.57 Goodman states “buildings allude, express, evoke, invoke, comment, quote; that are syntactical, literal, metaphorical, dialectical; that are ambiguous or even contradictory!”58 He didn’t believe that all buildings mean, rather he sought to discover how some works of architecture function like works of art – and this is when they mean. Why semantics matters How landscapes could mean became important to a number of different practitioners in the 1980s. To some extent this interest came from exposure to earthworks, land art, and public art created by artists. These art movements were part of the wider conceptual art movement that privileged a work of art’s concept or underlying idea over its form or mimetic character. As you read about in the Material Matters chapter, earthwork artists in particular influenced landscape architects because they often shared a similar palette of materials with landscape architects, such as terrain, water, sun, shadow, plants, rocks, concrete, manufactured objects, etc. Moreover, earthwork and land artists attempted to say something about the context of their work as a source of their work’s significance. A concern with meaning also stemmed from a dissatisfaction with the overprescriptive approach to design that resulted in aesthetically dull landscapes. In 1983 the landscape architect George Hargreaves penned a brief manifesto on the future of landscape architecture, critiquing the traditional design process which he saw as (a) understand the site (emphasis on natural phenomena); (b) fit the functional program of land use; and (c) make it beautiful . . . For urban plazas there is the blond/dark brown color scheme with an asymmetric ground plane pattern
Language 169 incorporating level change, and always centered on a feature (water, sculpture, etc.) The park grounds have to be English picturesque: mounds (often the wrong scale); spatially clumped plantings; a colorful understory; and of course curvilinear water features . . . No matter how much site analysis was done, built works of landscape architecture fell into a few easy categories.59 He concluded that in the future, the expression of symbolism, mysticism, and humanism will become a preoccupation. Time, nature, and culture will serve as physical media and subject. Light, shadow, sky, rain, plants, dirt, debris, people of all types, and manmade elements that intensify and abstract what is already there will become the focus of simpler, more receptive compositions and non-compositions.60 Five years later, in his widely read article, “Form, Meaning and Expression in Landscape Architecture,” Olin critiqued design practices that ignored the connection between forms and their meaning. He thought this work offered, “at best a second- or third-hand emotional or artistic encounter.”61 Olin described how Panofsky laid the groundwork for analysing the semantic interpretation of art from the past, and how this approach was relevant to the design of landscapes. He posited that similar to the communicative interpretations of non-verbal arts, such as painting and architecture, landscapes too could be decoded and thus deliver meaning. Both Hargreaves’s and Olin’s critiques of contemporary landscape architecture prompted debate, but they also expanded the conception of design – going beyond the functionalist bubble diagram as the progenitor of design to a conception of design that explored a landscape’s ability to express and communicate to others. Goodman’s own account of why meaning matters in art and architecture also emphasized how these practices construct worlds, and contribute to their making. He concluded “How Buildings Mean” by asking, why it matters how and when a building means, I think that a work of architecture, or any other art, works as such to the extent that it enters into the way we see, feel, perceive, conceive, comprehend in general . . . A building, more than most works, alters our environment physically; but moreover, as a work of art it may through various avenues of meaning, inform and reorganize our entire experience. Like other works of art – and like scientific theories, too – it can give new insight, advance understanding, and participate in our continual remaking of a world.62
Language 170 Semantics in action Denotation Goodman’s conception of denotation concerns description and representation. For Goodman, “it involves any labelling, any application of a symbol of any kind to an object . . . Buildings are not texts or pictures and usually do not describe or depict. Yet, representation does occur in salient ways in some architectural works.” Goodman found that most frequently, “prominent parts of the building represent” rather than the whole.63 In denotation semantic movement travels from “the symbol to what it applies to as a label.”64 For example, he discovered denotation operating in the towers of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família in Barcelona because they represented nearby mountains. For Goodman, “They are revealed as startling representations when we come upon the tapering conical mountains a few miles away at Montserrat.”65 Parts of the Sagrada Família, specifically the towers, denote parts of this Catalonian mountain, particularly the geomorphology of its peaks. So what the towers of the Sagrada Familia mean, entails understanding their reference to these local mountains. 4.8 The Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família by Antoni Gaudí, image courtesy Arnaud Gaillard, https:// creativecommons. org/licenses/ by-sa/1.0/deed.en, Barcelona, Spain
Language 171 Literal exemplification According to Goodman, “Whether or not a building represents anything, it may exemplify or express certain properties . . . and this is one of the major ways that architecture means.”66 Travelling in the opposite direction, exemplification moves “from symbol to certain labels that apply to it or to a property possessed by it.”67 Goodman used a fabric swatch to explain literal exemplification. A swatch of cloth exemplifies certain aspects of the cloth, not its size or cut, but certainly its texture and colour. Goodman also saw literal exemplification in architecture. He described a building, where the structure is openly visible to people, as an example of it exemplifying characteristics of its structure.68 The structure is literally supporting the building and exemplifying that fact. While Goodman uses a function of a building, the structure, that is exemplified, it need not always be a function. Look at the image of the Village of Yorkville Park, by Schwartz Smith Meyer Landscape Architects, Inc. and PWP Landscape Architecture, in Toronto. The park is located in a former nineteenth-century village (now a part of Toronto) known for its Victorian row houses. Inspired by the Victorian practice of collecting specimens from the natural world, such as bugs and plants, in collection boxes, they compartmentalized the park into discrete segments, each displaying a Canadian landscape type. In the area exemplifying the Canadian Shield (a Precambrian continental shield covering eight million square kilometers) they placed a literal chunk of this bedrock formation in the park. The rock was extracted from northern Ontario in pieces, brought to Toronto, and reassembled. 4.9 Mountains near Montserrat, image courtesy Torero from nl, https:// creativecommons. org/licenses/ by-sa/3.0/deed.en, Catalonia, Spain
Language 172 Metaphorical exemplifications According to Goodman, metaphorical exemplifications are expressions, for, “not all the properties (or labels) that a building refers to are among those it literally possesses.”69 For example, he noted that a building might be “jazzy” without deploying any musical instruments. The building’s design identifies something (the forceful rhythm and improvisation of a musical genre) as being liken to something unrelated (a high-rise apartment building), thus highlighting the similarities between the two. Look at the image of the Lurie Garden, Millennium Park, by Gustafson Guthrie Nichol. With a background in fashion design, Kathryn Gustafson often 4.10 Village of Yorkville Park (1994) by Schwartz Smith Meyer Landscape Architects and PWP Landscape Architecture, image courtesy of Turner Wigginton, Toronto, Canada Can you see the how the rock is like the fabric swatch described by Goodman? Are there aspects of the Canadian Shield that you can know by experiencing this park? Are there aspects of the Canadian Shield that you can’t know by experiencing this park?
Language 173 employs metaphors that relate to human form, but these forms are made from earth or plants.70 Gustafson started her design process by writing a list of words and phrases that she associated with Chicago. As Cheryl Kent retells, “One was ‘City of Big Shoulders’ from Carl Sandburg’s famous 1914 poem, Chicago.”71 Gustafson worked with the metaphor of the body and Chicago’s landscape history to create a series of zones: The Shoulder Hedge, The Light Plate (the prairie before Western settlement), the Dark Plate (the trees before the Chicago fire), and The Seam (the meeting of past with the present). Gustafson doesn’t think that most people will interpret these metaphors, rather they were a way “to give shape and coherence to the garden.”72 Yet, Charles Waldheim certainly made these associations. He described The Shoulder Hedge as “muscular” and “appearing to support the gleaming headdress of Gehry’s music pavilion.”73 He also noted that along with the other Plates, “together they resemble a muscular and armored torso.”74 4.11 The Shoulder Hedge at the Lurie Garden, Millennium Park (2004) by Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, image courtesy of Cynthia Girling, Chicago, USA Can you see the metaphor in the Shoulder Garden? Would you call it corporeal-like, just as Goodman found a building jazzy?
Language 174 Allusion For Goodman, allusions are chains of references made through features of architecture that allude to other examples of architecture, which might contradict each other or reinforce one another. What makes an exemplification a type of allusion is the chain of referents made through the features (organization, colour, etc.) of the design in other features of other designs. Goodman gives the example of parts of a Michael Graves building as alluding to Egyptian or Greek architecture.75 This can happen in landscape architecture as well. Look at the image of the Blue Stick Garden, by Claude Cormier, installed at Hestercombe Gardens. Originally designed for the International Garden Festival in Grand-Métis, Canada, Cormier sought to allude to the perennial border gardens designed by Elsie Reford at the historic Reford Gardens (located next to the festival site). Reford based her design on the great perennial borders of the Edwardian garden artist, Gertrude Jekyll. Trading perennial plants for wood sticks; Cormier’s garden is composed of 3,500 garden stakes. Each stake is painted blue on three sides and orange on the fourth. When you first walk into the Blue Stick Garden, you are surrounded by blue, the collective hue of the stakes. However, when you turn around to exit and expose your eye to the orange side of the stakes, the entire garden turns orange. 4.12 International Garden Festival, Jardins de Métis/ Reford Gardens, Blue Stick Garden (2004) by Claude Cormier + Associés, image courtesy of Yvan Maltais, Jardins de Métis/ Reford Gardens, Hestercombe Gardens, Somerset, England
Language 175 Sensory meaning Goodman’s semantic theories included sensory experiences beyond the visual. Sensorial experiences, such as smell and touch, can contribute to cognitive interpretations of a landscape, and since landscapes are typically outside and are often intense sensory environments with changing temperature, light, smell, and wind, they can be superior vehicles for meaning. The developmental psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was one of the first psychologists to identify sense experience as a key source for our conceptual knowledge and the foundation blocks of meaning in developing children. More recently neurological studies concerning the biological foundations of consciousness in adults have also found that our senses contribute to our rational thinking; challenging the notion that knowledge cannot be derived from sensation. Marc Treib has also highlighted the contributions of sensory experience to meaning: In the past, sensory pleasures have served to condition meaning. Consider the expression of taste in the selection and arrangement of cut flowers in Japan or the ecstasy of religious experience that underwrote so much CounterReformation art and architecture. Sensory experience moved the viewer, causing him or her to reflect upon religious meaning as well as one’s position in the universe – powerful stuff indeed.76 A common strategy in using sensation as a vehicle for meaning is the emphasis on one sensorial input over others, such as a sound garden or a scent garden. Look at the image of California Scenario by Isamu Noguchi. His design denotes six different geographical areas in California, including: Forest Walk, Land Use, Desert Land, Water Source, Water Use, Energy Fountain, and The Spirit of the Lima Bean (in homage to the agricultural heritage of Southern California). The design has been criticized for not providing enough shade for visitors. I have argued that being exposed to the sun is part of the scenario; it is connected to Noguchi’s intent to communicate something about the Southern California landscape. The intensity of feeling the heat on your skin is part of its meaning. What parts of the Blue Stick Garden allude to Reford’s and Jekyll’s gardens? How are movement and colour different from these gardens? Why do you think Blue Stick was resurrected in the gardens of Hestercombe? What do you think?
Language 176 Semantics debated Whether gardens and landscapes can or must mean sparked a lively debate between Laurie Olin, Marc Treib, Jane Gillette, and me.77 In short, Olin sought to explore how landscape architects might invent meaning through their design work. Describing the landscape architect Richard Haag’s work at Gasworks Park and the Bloedel Reserve, Olin noted, “many of the best works of the moment are inquiries into the validity of past expressions and their extension into the present, as well as being new and healthy creations of their own.”78 I agreed with this idea, but Treib was skeptical of the whole enterprise, particularly those who intentionally sought to design landscapes that communicate an idea. He maintained, “What the designer intends in the design may or may not be manifest, appreciated, or understood by those experiencing the place.”79 Gillette agreed with Treib, but further added that gardens were an inferior conveyor of meaning, particularly when compared to literature. Goodman (who was not part of the debate) made the point that, “Even when a building does mean, that may have nothing to do with its architecture. A building of any design may come to stand for some of its causes or effects, or for some historical event that occurred in it or on its site.”80 This is true with landscapes as well. Think of the grassy knoll associated with the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963. The grassy knoll was put into the international public consciousness, despite the fact that it was simply a grass median between the parking lot for the Texas School Book Depository and Elm Street. 4.13 California Scenario (1982) by Isamu Noguchi, image courtesy of Marc Treib, Costa Mesa, California, USA
Language 177 Moreover, it is important to remember that the meaning conveyed by a landscape architect is not necessarily the correct one. To determine how landscapes and gardens can mean, we need to consider different perspectives involved in the construction of meaning by the design community and those using the garden or landscape. They all have variable intentions, and from a single garden they will most likely mine different interpretations. For many landscape architects, people using the landscape offer the “most correct” interpretation. The non-professional may not interpret a landscape the way a designer intended, but this does not render the landscape meaningless. Rather, it suggests multiple interpretations. There is a great deal to learn about the human imagination in comparing different interpretations, particularly regarding public landscapes. Traditionally it is the critic who writes about the meaning of gardens. Because landscape architecture magazines play an educational role for practitioners, academics, and students, critics will often describe a designer’s intentions in their analysis of the work. However, these intentions are not presented as the only correct meaning. Instead, by revealing the intent and meaning of a garden from the designer’s perspective, others may be inspired to consider similar approaches. The meaning of landscapes, as interpreted by critics, is valuable because it can situate a work of landscape architecture within the field of practice, enriching and diversifying the audience. This theory of meaning coincides with the philosopher Arthur Danto’s ontology of art. For Danto, something is art when it becomes embedded in the discourse among art critics and theorists about art. In other words, meaning is constructed amongst designers working in and writing about landscapes, by virtue of this discourse. Treib also argued that landscape architects should be less concerned with conveying meaning in their landscapes, and more involved with creating landscapes that are pleasurable to all the senses. Gillette agreed with this point and found it an important task of the designer. I think designers can communicate through their design work, but they can also provide great pleasurable places as part of their meaning. Pleasure does not need to be cut off from a landscape communicating an idea. All four critics appeared to agree on significance, which differs from meaning. Ultimately, the meanings ascribed to landscapes are often why they are cherished and maintained over time. The duration of time that can be spent experiencing a landscape makes available meaning through memory. This is a process that can lead to a landscape having great significance, a point stressed by Treib. Primary reading for semantics Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies. Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Stephanie Ross, What Gardens Mean. Marc Treib, editor, Meaning in Landscape Architecture & Gardens: Four Essays, Four Commentaries.
Language 178 THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF SEMIOTICS We are able to infer from smoke the presence of fire, from a wet spot the fall of a raindrop, from a track on the sand the passage of a given animal, and so on.81 (Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics, 1976) Eco thought the world was full of inferences. Some of these inferences were intended, some of these were unintended, and some were naturally occurring, such as the wet spot as an indicator of rain. For Eco “there exist acts of inference which must be recognized as semiotic acts.”82 Semiotics is the theory of signification, which involves both “the process of generating meaning as well as the meaning that has been produced.”83 In other words, it entails the study of signs and symbols and also their use in the interpretation of meaning, and takes language as a model instance. The linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky traced semiotic studies to the work of Enlightenment philosophers.84 However, it was Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) who thought of semiotics as a distinct endeavour. He posited, “since language was a system of signs linguistics ought to be part of a larger science of signs” and not a subcategory of philosophy.85 In the last decades of the nineteenth century Saussure introduced his students to the term “semiologie” or semiology. You will be reading more on Saussure in the next section, regarding Structuralism. Both semiotics and semiology concern the use of language, and depending on the theorist, language could be constituted by auditory sounds, written text, films, advertisements, landscape, cars, architecture, etc. A particular given in both semiotics and semiology is the arbitrary nature of language. This book you are reading has nothing to do with the fact that it is called a “book.” The tree outside your window has nothing innately to do with the word “tree.” English speakers have only agreed to call that woody perennial plant a tree. Some students find this revelation startling because, unless you are bilingual, you are not always aware of the arbitrary assignment of meaning in language – it seems natural to call a tree a tree. However, there are some key differences between semiotics and semiology. “In contrast to semiology, which studies sign systems and their organization (e.g. traffic codes, sign language), semiotics concerns itself with how meaning is produced.”86 Semiotics greatly expanded its range of application from linguistics to “all sensory stimuli that could create another idea in the receiver’s mind”87 by including unintentional and natural sources of signs. This broadened view of semiotics was significantly advanced by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914). Peirce proffered his own version of signification, chiefly in a triad or three-part system of interpretant, representamen, and object. For Peirce, What do you think the Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco means by this statement?
Language 179 A very broad and important class of triadic characters (consist of) representations. A representation is that character of a thing by virtue of which, for the production of a certain mental effect, it may stand in place of another thing. The thing having this character I term a representamen, the mental effect or thought, its interpretant, the thing for which it stands, its object.88 Thus, the interpretant is a sentient being who uses other signs to define a sign. The representamen is a sign determined by the object, and the object is what it is meaning. For example, you (the interpretant), encounter the California Scenario plaza by Isamu Noguchi. You see various sculptural forms, plantings, and a watercourse (the representamens). Since you are a student of landscape architecture, you know this is California Scenario and these elements represent aspects of California’s geography (the object) (see Figure 4.14). Peirce’s system differs from Saussure’s binary oppositions or Greimas square (discussed in the Structuralism section) for not only its diagrammatic shape, but also the important role that interpretation plays in signification. For example, not everyone will interpret California Scenario as you did. A quick check on Yelp shows a number of different interpretations. Although many people did know that the landscape represented California, and one person even took their children there to learn about the geography of the state, multiple interpretations are good. The point is that Noguchi’s objective (to portray California’s geography) guided the design’s forms and materials, and this in turn prompted people to interpret the landscape. To understand the relationship between the sign vehicle (representamen or the signifier) and what the sign stands for (object or signified) numerous semioticians have used the philosopher John Stuart Mills’s terminology – denotation and connotation. To denote means the sign vehicle literally possesses the attributes. Yet, words carry emotional, political, and cultural associations in addition to their literal meanings, and this is what connotation tackles. To connote means to 4.14 Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic triad Representamen the form of the sign Interpretant making sense of the sign using other signs Object that to which the sign refers
Language 180 produce the varied illusions and myths that make language appear natural. For example, green connotes the attribute of greenness (fresh, sustainable, young and naive), and denotes all things and people who possess those attributes (avocados, a landscape architect, Cleopatra regretting her dalliances with Julius Caesar when she was a young woman). Umberto Eco expanded the idea of denotation and connotation to include his theory of sign-functions, which function to mean differently depending on the socio-cultural context; thus taking on numerous meanings. In 1986 Eco published the essay, “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture,” positing that “all cultural phenomena are, in reality, systems of signs, or that culture can be understood as communication – then one of the fields in which it will undoubtedly find itself most challenged is that of architecture.”89 Eco describes three codes for architecture: the technical (beams, floors, column, etc.), the syntactic (the spatial types), and the semantic code, which concerns denotative and connotative meanings. Explaining that a throne denotes seating, but connotes royalty, he shows how architecture can denote by communicating “a possible function”90 and connote by building upon this function by symbolizing an ideological or sociological type. A room might denote a place for gathering, but it connotes, “ideologies of inhabitation (common room, dining room, parlour).”91 In landscape design, a walkway defined by an allée of mature oak trees denotes by enabling me to move from one location of the garden to another. This same walkway connotes grandeur because of the magnificent scale of the trees. It might connote a type of garden as well, a formal one. And if the trees are English Oaks they connote ideologically, as old money, since these trees are slow-growing and their maturity signals that they were planted long ago. Connotation may also involve figures of speech, which are common tropes used by writers and artists to prompt the reader’s or viewer’s imagination. A figure of speech is a word or a phrase that carries meaning differently from its literal meaning. Figures of speech are departures from the conventional denotations of words. “Often the vividness of the picture in our minds depends upon comparisons. What we are trying to imagine is pictured in terms of something else familiar to us, and we are asked to think of one thing as if it were something else.”92 Poetry employs figures of speech to help the reader visualize an idea or feeling. The landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn argued in The Language of Landscape that figures of speech aid in the design and interpretation of landscapes. Spirn charged, “Landscape is scene of life, cultivated construction, carrier of meaning. It is language.”93 Why semiotics matters Semiotics matters because as a student of landscape architecture you will be charged with producing designs that denote and even connote to other people. Kati Lindström, Hannes Palang, and Kalevi Kull stress that the Peircean sign model is particularly useful in landscape studies because it includes the
Language 181 triad of the physical sign, the object or meaning, and our understanding of it, which describe the meaning-making process of landscape design.94 They note, “Landscapes, like languages, consist of signs, that is, independent identifiable meaningful units.”95 They also argue that semiotics, “gives a good methodological basis for discussing the relations that the symbolic and material aspects of landscapes may have for different communities. It also provides a solid descriptive framework for understanding how different communities . . . may live in different landscapes on the same physical grounds.”96 Thus, Peircean semiotics may also include the role of interpreters in producing meaning as well. Like Roland Barthes, Eco argued that semiotics is valuable to expression in numerous cultural forms. Importantly, both Barthes and Eco used semiology and semiotics critically. While Barthes employed semiology to reveal the myths contemporary to his times, semiotics in Eco’s hands is a device that divulges pre-existing cultural systems and ideological codes in both his non-fiction and fictional works. In Theory of Semiotics Eco argued, “the interpreter of a text is at the same time obliged both to challenge the existing codes and to advance interpretive hypotheses that work as a more comprehensive, tentative and prospective form of codification.”97 Consider The Name of the Rose, Eco’s first novel. Written in the genre of a detective novel, the year is 1327 and its main character, the Franciscan monk William of Baskerville, and his assistant Adso of Melk travel to an Italian monastery to debate theological issues; however, a series of deaths compel William to use his uncanny interpretive powers to solve the crimes. Probing matters of interpretation, authorship, and the polemics of meaning, Eco produced a story of historical and theological intrigue and semiotic analyses in action. “The ability to read and interpret signs recurs throughout the narrative as a leitmotif closely associated with William.”98 For Eco, William must interpret signs to solve the murder. Unfortunately, for William, he never solves the murders; thus, the truth is never discovered. Indeed, “The Name of the Rose demands that we question interpretations, and settle for something less than definitive answers,”99 a hallmark of Eco’s semiotics. While Spirn doesn’t cite Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or Gertrude Stein’s famous line “rose is a rose is a rose,” or Shakespeare’s “What’s in a name? that which we call a rose,” her chapter, “A Rose Is Rarely Just a Rose: Poetics of Landscape,” certainly alludes to the connection between literature and how landscapes can mean. Spirn demonstrates the potential of using devices, such as figures of speech, employed in literature to produce meaning in the design of landscapes. Spirn views these devices as ways of expanding the idea of landscape beyond its role as a setting for a building. She argues, “The failure to recognize the potential figurative power of landscape in its own right, not simply as a backdrop or a frame for a building is common. Yet all but a few figures and tropes some of which turn specifically on wordplay (onomatopoeia) are present in landscape architecture.”100 You will read about select examples of Spirn’s theories in the following semiotics in action.
Language 182 Semiotics in action Emphasis According to Spirn, “emphasis” in the design of a landscape can provide cues to meaning in the landscape. She notes, “Placing emphasis on one thing requires downplaying the importance of something else, and this raises questions. Why emphasize one thing over the other? And to what end?”101 In poetry, emphasis is achieved through the repetition of words or phrases. While Spirn cautions against using too much emphasis, she reveals a number of different techniques to achieve emphasis, such as placement, framing, alliteration, rhythm, exaggeration, and distortion. Look at the image of Green Varnish, in the courtyard of the Contemporary Art Museum of St Louis, by Nomad Studio. A warped layer of sedum practically fills the 200-square meter space. The landscape architects William E. Roberts and Laura Santin of Nomad are trying to communicate how we “varnish” or cover up and ignore inconvenient truths about the environment, such as climate change. According to Roberts and Santin, “Green Varnish explores the necessity of hiding inconvenient realities with polite beauty. A green fabric elegantly covers all the inopportune facts.”102 4.15 Green Varnish (2015) by Nomad Studio, image courtesy of William E. Roberts, St Louis, Missouri, USA
Language 183 The wall reads, “We live in denial within a vanishing landscape.” Anomaly For Spirn, a landscape anomaly is one that is incongruous to its setting, time, or order. Several different types of anomalies are offered by Spirn, including an anastrophe, which “is an inversion of the normal or expected order for emphasis, or humor, or priority.”103 An anastrophe can give significance to a phrase or sentence. The Star Wars character Yoda does this frequently. In Star Wars 5: The Empire Strikes Back Yoda tells Luke Skywalker, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” The first time I saw Caixa Forum Museum Vertical Garden by Patrick Blanc, I was fascinated by the numerous shrubs and grasses emerging from the side of this seven-storey building. I’ve seen plenty of Cornus sanguinea (common dogwood), but never protruding from a vertical surface. It prompted me to think about the way you conventionally view plants. Look at the image of Caixa Forum Museum Vertical Garden. Another example of an anomaly is an anachronism. For Spirn, an anachronism involves a reinterpretation of historic forms in a current context. An anachronism is used to draw attention to history and its connection to current times. Shakespeare’s plays are often presented in different times than when they were originally written. For example, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival presented As You Like It in 2005, but the set and costumes date from the 1960s, and the music was arranged and played by the band Barenaked Ladies. The intent was In Peirce’s semiotics, what are the interpretant, the representamen, and the object in Green Varnish? How do you think distortion and exaggeration are at work here? How has the turned-up edges of Green Varnish suggested something underneath, and thus the act of covering something? Do you think they needed the quote to further communicate their idea? Do you think Yoda would sound as all-knowing if he instead said “We are luminous beings, not this crude matter”? Do you think as green walls become more prevalent that they will lose their ability to serve as an anomaly?
Language 184 to reveal that a comedy written in 1599 has themes that reverberate with other periods of human history. Look at Curtis “50 cent” Jackson Community Garden, in Queens, designed by the landscape architect Walter Hood. Hood asked himself “Could you make a garden in a working class community that looked like it belonged in a rich neighbourhood? What would happen if you gave them parterres, if you gave them something that looked like you needed to care for it?”104 Hood was inspired by the cutwork of the Garden of Tender Love and the colourful lettuces and vegetables in the parterres of the Potager garden, both at the garden at Château de Villandry in France. Interestingly, Villandry was designed in the twentieth century to recreate Renaissance gardens. Joachim Carvallo 4.16 Caixa Forum Museum Vertical Garden (2007) by Patrick Blanc, Madrid, Spain, 2007
Language 185 designed three main gardens at Villandry (Potager, Ornamental, and Water) to represent the hierarchical, social positions of animals, servants, and owners.105 As the landscape historian Elizabeth Barlow Rogers observes, the layout of the garden reflects Carvallo’s “own belief in class hierarchy and social order.”106 At the 50 Cent Garden, Hood combines the garden vocabulary (Potager) with the garden type (Ornamental garden). Allegory In Spirn’s analysis of metaphor she identifies allegory as a figure of speech that has been used for many years in the design of landscapes. An allegory is an extended metaphor where hidden meanings are revealed to evoke stories that describe principles of right and wrong actions and the nature of human 4.17 Curtis “50 cent” Jackson Community Garden (2007) by Walter Hood, image courtesy of Hood Design Studio, Queens, New York, USA Can you see how Hood denotes these two compartmentalized gardens in his own design for the park? What do you think Hood is connoting? Do you think he is trying to erase these divisions in his own anachronism? Hood may also be connoting something about the garden’s sponsor since Curtis Jackson is a Rapper.
Language 186 character. The sociologist Michel Conan argues that people’s movement through Renaissance and Baroque gardens, such as Tivoli and Versailles, involves reflection on the allegorical scenes made available by the gardens’ design and layout. He contends that their designs were instrumental in helping visitors “reflect upon their choice and discover clues that enabled them to reconstruct the metaphorical meaning attached to their decision.”107 Look at the image of Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe’s John F. Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede, which employs allegory. An acre of land overlooking the fields of Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was sealed in 1215, was given to the United States in perpetuity for the memorial. For Jellicoe, “the path sequence is an allegory of human experience of life, death, and spirit” as visitors venture from the darkness of the woodland and up to the light of the hillside.108 The allegory begins with a mown grass path cutting across a low meadow. Its mowing denotes the desire lines left by previous visitors. The path leads to the wicket gate where you enter a shadowy woodland and a steep path of 60,000 granite sets, “the wild woods of life.”109 Atop the hill, a stone monument greets the visitor. Jellicoe was insistent that the “lettering on the stone covers the whole surface, so that it is not so much an inscription upon it as an expression of the stone itself, it is as it were the stone speaking.”110 A nearby American Scarlet 4.18 John F. Kennedy Memorial (1965) by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, Runnymede, England
Language 187 Oak “flames each year into November, as if to provide a salutatory reminder of man’s violent spirit.”111 To the north another stone path travels to two pairs of stairs leading up to two monumental seats with views across Runnymede and the River Thames. The view symbolizes “the opening of the landscape of hope in the allegory.”112 Paradox and irony Spirn finds the world teaming with landscape paradoxes. A paradox refers to the use of ideas that are contradictions at first glance, but upon a closer look they could be true and lead to deeper meaning.113 Irony and paradox “are closely related and often combined. Both are dualisms, but irony contrasts surface meaning and underlying reality.”114 The landscape architect Ken Smith uses irony to comment upon contemporary culture. According to the critic Nina Rappaport, Smith designs landscapes as a form of cultural criticism, and “offers an ironic view of contemporary life, imbuing his work with content in a subtle manipulation of form, material, and texture that encourage observers to perceive their environment with new meaning.”115 For Rappaport, the ironic is always suggested by the play between meanings in Smith’s work. Look at the image of WallFlowers by Ken Smith, in New York City. WallFlowers is an ongoing project of artificial flowers that Smith first developed in the bathroom of his New York City loft and years later he installed an expanded version of it on the façade of Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. According to Smith, silk flowers were adhered with safety pins to giant flowers that he and his associates cut from brightly coloured erosion control fabrics.116 These were then attached to a scrim of fluorescent orange construction fencing that draped over the façade of the former mansion of industrial magnate, Andrew Carnegie. Smith claimed that many of his clients wanted flowers in their gardens and that “WallFlowers is my attempt to investigate the persistence of cultural interests in flowers in the context of my long-time interest in design’s simulation of nature as an art form.”117 Can you see how Jellicoe’s design attempts to tell an allegory of life and death? Do you think that people who know nothing of Jellicoe’s intent will read anything into his design? What is the irony of using the landscape construction material to create flowers? Does this project make you think differently about the potential for erosion control fabric?
Language 188 Semiotics debated Like structuralism and other language-based theories, semiotics was criticized for its ahistorical stance. The sociologist Dominic Strinati argues, “codes and signs are not universally given, but are historically and socially specific to the particular interests and purposes which lie behind them . . . Meaning is manufactured out of historically shifting systems of codes, conventions, and signs.”118 Jellicoe’s memorial means differently now than it did a year after President Kennedy’s assassination. Hood intentionally used a garden motif from a garden of a wealthy doctor in a part of the city that struggles economically. A parterre de broderie does not naturally denote wealth and status; the relation is 4.19 Cooper Hewitt Triennial WallFlowers (2007) by Ken Smith Landscape Architect, image courtesy of Ken Smith, New York City, USA
Language 189 ontologically arbitrary as it is assigned by a particular culture. Yet, Hood’s intentions are anything but arbitrary. He knows that in Western culture these embroidered landscapes are associated with wealthy owners of European gardens. So how landscapes serve as sign vehicles is arbitrary, but why they do, is not. Within landscape architecture there have been numerous supporters of semiotics in design. The landscape architecture professor Karsten Jorgensen, for example, argues that experiences with landscapes are latent with stories and myths. He views semiotics as a valuable strategy for landscape design, and notes, designing an outdoor space becomes a semiotic action: the landscape architect produces “statements” that will be responded to by future users of the area. In a semiotic context, therefore, landscape elements no longer merely constitute the “means” or “building material” of landscape architecture, rather, they form a “repertoire” of expressions that may be used to make certain statements within an area.119 Catherine Howett in her article, “Systems, Signs, Sensibilities: Sources for a New Landscape Aesthetic,” posits that theories taken from semiotics can be applied to landscape design to tap the communicative dimensions of design. Howett notes, “A better understanding of the sign-systems available to us will contribute to a revitalized, freshened imagery in the landscapes we design.”120 She argues that such an understanding of sign-systems will lead designers beyond the conventional compositional devices that typically reproduce the pastoral landscape. She described Richard Haag’s design for Gas Works Park as an example of a landscape that communicated this new aesthetic. Gas Works Park was one of the earliest post-industrial parks to keep its hulking industrial structures as signs of its former use. For Howett, “Haag’s plan forced people to consider not just the degree of positive visual and spatial interest possessed by this relic of an outdated technology, but what its meanings might be for the community it had served for fifty years.”121 The philosopher Marcia Muelder Eaton argues that semiotics holds important implications for interdisciplinary approaches to theoretical and applied problems in landscape architecture. She contends that landscapes function like signs in natural languages and like signs they mirror cultural differences. Landscapes, she posits, signify in large part what a particular culture or subculture values more generally.122 Yet, she cautions that in using semiotics to develop new forms and aesthetics in landscape architecture, the designer must share a similar language and value with the public she is trying to communicate with. For example, the structures saved by Haag as part of his design for Gas Work Park heralded a new language for the design of post-industrial landscape, which, as you know, was repeated throughout the world. Yet, during the early years of the Gas Work Park, the public living near the park didn’t understand or like this new language. This attitude has changed, but it took a while.
Language 190 Primary reading for semiotics Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics. Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Sanders Peirce: Collected Writings. Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF STRUCTURALISM Aesthetics and science. Art and ecology. Culture and nature. Architecture and landscape. City and country. Public and private. Reason and emotion. Male and female. Man and woman. Why do landscape architects so frequently describe the world and their work in pairs? Either–or. This or that. One or the other. Perhaps this tendency to rely on pairs, binary terms, reflects an essential attribute of the activities of the landscape architect who is involved in shaping and forming the land – “nature” – to accommodate human use and to embody cultural values. Or is this trait an attribute of a larger societal norm? What does it mean to structure the world into binaries?123 (Elizabeth K. Meyer, “The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture,” 1997) Here, Meyer is pointing out a common trope in thinking about the world and describing it – binary terms. As a theoretical framework, structuralism holds that a set of relations structures our thoughts and that this structure can be found in language and other social and cultural phenomena. Ferdinand de Saussure founded structural linguistics, which laid the groundwork for the basic analyses of structuralism used in other fields, particularly semiotics (the study of signs and symbols and their use and interpretation).124 Saussure analysed the underlying structure of language as a system of signs. In his Course in General Linguistics (based on student notes) he posited that signs comprise the association of the signifier with the signified.125 This process is called signification. The signifier is the conveyor of meaning and the signified is what it means. Saussure was mainly concerned with words and sounds, and he primarily addressed intentional language; however, his basic premise regarding the sign was transferred to other fields, which expanded the signifier to include cultural and physical things, and unintentional and intentional acts.126 Roland Barthes used the example of a bouquet of red roses to explain signification in his book, Mythologies (1957), in which he analysed the contemporary myths of petite-bourgeoisie culture and presented them as a semiological system (which you will return to in Post-structuralism in the next section). In his example of language, the roses are the signifier; the signified What do you think it means to structure the world into binaries? Can you think of a landscape architecture project that expresses binary thinking as part of its design?
Language 191 is the meaning or content of the bouquet of red roses, which in Western culture means passion. Together they equal the sign, which are passion-weighted roses.127 What is critical about signification regarding structuralism is the relational quality of meaning and the arbitrary nature of signs. Roses don’t naturally signal passion, they are assigned this by culture, so signs are culturally constructed. Ferdinand de Saussure notes, “Polite formulas, for instance, though often imbued with a certain natural expressiveness (as in the case of a Chinese who greets his emperor by bowing down to the ground nine times), are nonetheless fixed by rule; it is this rule and not the intrinsic value of the gestures that obliges one to use them.”128 A bouquet of red roses means passion in many Western cultures, but certainly not all cultures. It could be an insult in a culture where it is not customary to give red roses to loved ones. An important consequence of this theory maintains that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary, so signs are arbitrary.129 By arbitrary, Saussure does not mean that “the choice of the signifier is left entirely to the speaker . . . I mean that it is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified.”130 This idea that signs are arbitrary is often attributed to deconstruction, but in fact it can be traced back to Saussure. Saussure also argued that the way you recognize a sign is relational in that it is produced by its difference from other things. For Saussure, “it is understood that the concepts are purely differential and defined not by their positive content but negatively by relations with other terms of the system.”131 Signs are understood through a network of similarities and differences. Thus, in the English language, I know the furry creature sitting at my feet is a “dog” because he is not a cat, he is not a human, he is not a space alien, and so forth. Since structural analyses tend to focus on differentials, attention is given to binary structures, a sign’s most basic opposition. Open Closed In Out Up Down 4.20 Roland Barthes’s signification in language language 1. Signifier a bouquet of red roses MYTH 2. Signified passion 3. Sign passion weighted roses 1 SIGNIFIER 111 SIGN 11 SIGNIFIED