Landscape Theory In Design

 Language 192 Ferdinand de Saussure influenced the anthropologist and ethnologist, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), who you read about in the Material Matters chapter. Lévi-Strauss brought structuralism into his theory of culture and mind in his studies of myths as language, which radically transformed anthropology as well as other fields. He provided one of the most enduring examples of structural analysis in his book The Raw and the Cooked (1969). According to Lévi-Strauss, “Starting from ethnographic experience, I have always aimed at drawing up an inventory of mental patterns, to reduce apparently arbitrary data to some kind of order, and to attain a level at which a kind of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the illusions of liberty.”132 Lévi-Strauss sought to reveal the unconscious and hidden mental structures or patterns that gave rise to the myths he observed. He sought, “to not show how men think in myth, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.”133 Analysing mythic thought structures of the Bororo people in Brazil and Bolivia, and tribes in other South American countries, he argued that people understood the world through binary oppositions. Lévi-Strauss wanted “to establish the existence of an isomorphism between two oppositions, that of nature and culture, that of continuous and discrete quantities.”134 By identifying differential binary opposite structures (raw and cooked or moist and dry) that were common to such diverse groups of people, Lévi-Strauss aspired to reveal the basic and universal structures fundamental to all humans. Raw is something in its natural state; cooked is its modification by culture. All cultures have states of raw and cooked in their food preparation; some cultures will eat some food raw and others will eat that same food cooked, fish for example. Lévi-Strauss was not so interested in what they ate, rather how this binary structure existed for all cultures. Why structuralism matters Structuralism influenced numerous fields of study, including landscape architecture. In 1979 Rosalind Krauss adapted the Klein Group, a diagrammatic method used in structural analyses, in her essay, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” In this article Krauss attempted to account for the earthwork art and land art that had been emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, for she had claimed, “Sculpture had entered a categorical no-man’s-land: it was what was on or in front of a building that was not the building, or what was in the landscape but was not the landscape.”135 Referring to Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys (1978) by the artist Mary Miss, Krauss recognized that she could no longer rely on the formalist methods of critique established by Clement Greenberg or standard historical methods, which categorized the chronological development of artwork. Instead of “elaborate genealogical trees,” Krauss suggested “the possibility of looking at historical process from the point of view of a logical structure,”136 which might account for this work. Thus, instead of describing how Miss might have been influenced by previous artists (elaborate genealogical trees) Krauss looked to structuralism. Krauss employed a semiotic square based on the Klein Group diagram, but you can warm up using the square invented by the structuralist semiotician

Language  193 Algirdas Greimas. He developed the Greimas square as a way to reveal how meaning is produced from signification, chiefly the identification of a sign (S) with its opposition, contradiction, and negation. It is based on the premise that: S1 is the sign for open S2 is the sign for closed –S1 is the sign for not open –S2 is the sign for not closed S1 and S2 are in opposition because open and closed are opposites, and their axial movement is complex because how can something be closed and open at once? –S1 and –S2 are in opposition because not open and not closed are opposites, and their axial movement is neutral because something that is not open and not closed is neither. S1 and –S1 are contradictory because open and not open are contradictions to the same idea. S2 and –S2 are contradictory because closed and not closed are contradictions to the same idea. S1 and –S2 are complementary because open and not closed are complementary states. S2 and –S1 are complementary because not open and closed are complementary states. (open) S1 (closed) S2 (not open) –S1 (not closed) –S2 oppositions contradictory complementary 4.21 The basics of the semiotic square

 Language 194 Inspired by this structuralist methodology Krauss noted, “Sculpture, it could be said, had ceased being a positivity, and was now the category that resulted from the addition of the not-landscape to the not-architecture. Diagrammatically expressed, the limit of modernist sculpture, the addition of the neither/not, looks like this.”137 Krauss began with neutral oppositions: Referring to the Klein Group, she argued, “By means of this logical expansion a set of binaries is transformed into a quaternary field which both mirrors the original opposition and at the same time opens it. It becomes a logically expanded field which looks like this.”138 I’ve added examples of built works that I think might fit Krauss’s terms. So instead of defining the new earthwork art as works that were specific to a particular medium, an approach advanced by Greenberg’s medium-specificity, Krauss created a field of binary oppositions, contradictions, and complements, which expanded the field of art, literally and metaphorically. Krauss not only viewed this structuralist field as a method of analysis, but also as a tool in the production of art. She argued that, “The Field provides both for an expanded and infinite set of related positions for a given artist to occupy and explore, and for an organization of work that is not dictated by the conditions of a particular medium.”139 Years later, reflecting on her use of the diagrammatic method borrowed from structuralism, Krauss stressed the generative potential of the Klein Group. Not-landscape Not-architecture Sculpture 4.22 Krauss’s Klein Group with examples landscape prospect park marked sites spiral jetty not landscape not prospect park site-construction partially buried wood shed sculpture reclining figure architecture the parthenon axiomatic structures field rotation not architecture not the parthenon complex both the parthenon and prospect park neuter neither the parthenon nor prospect park

Language  195 But the universe I am mapping is not just a binary opposition, or axis; it is a fourfold field, a square. And its logic is that the generating opposition can be held steady over the whole surface of the graph, extending into the other two corners . . . This graph, of course, a Klein Group. For Lévi-Strauss, for Greimas, for structuralists generally, the interest of the Klein Group was precisely in this quality of rewriting so that what might seem the random details of cultural practice . . . emerge as a set of ordered transformations, the logical restatements of a single, generating pair of oppositions.140 While it is unclear whether landscape architects followed through in making a Klein Group diagram as part of their design process, Krauss’s interest in binary oppositions as a starting point in analysis and design influenced a wide range of designers and scholars. Elizabeth K. Meyer wrote the influential essay “The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture” to acknowledge Krauss’s method and to explore an approach to landscape design that expanded thought beyond binary oppositions. “Landscape architecture must be allowed to speak a language that, first, avoids binaries and operates in the spaces between boundaries of culture and nature, man and woman, architecture and landscape; and second allows us to question the very premise upon which our knowledge of landscape architecture is based.”141 She thought this approach would foster a more nuanced collaboration between landscape processes and the design process where “the site and the designer are collaborators.” The landscape architect Karen M’Closkey noted that Krauss’s essay as well as the artists she featured in her essay were “extremely influential in reinvigorating the theoretical and the conceptual underpinnings of the idea of ‘landscape’ – the terms, methods, and representations around which site is constructed.”142 Indeed, at the time of Krauss’s writing in 1979, many landscape architects were reacting against, in Peter Walker’s words, the “Huge quantity of mediocre development work whose sheer size has become a symbol of the mindless market-oriented expansion of suburban development.”143 These disenchanted landscape architects looked to the art world, particularly to earthworks and land art, which were not clearly defined as sculpture, architecture, or landscape architecture. As the editors of the Journal of Landscape Architecture observed in 2013, the new possibilities for an expanded field for landscape architecture has continued into the twenty-first century.144 Structuralism in action Distance/engagement For Günther Vogt, structuralism, particularly the work of Lévi-Strauss, plays a significant role in the design process of the office.145 Describing “a structuralist mind set: the perception as a product of complex interplay between human beings and animate and inanimate nature,”146 Vogt’s work begins with

 Language 196 the scientist and the poet, the researcher and the searcher, the design and analysis, panoramic and miniature, and distance and engagement – culminating in designed landscapes that ultimately synthesize binaries. Look at the image of Novartis Campus Green, in Basel. Referred to by the landscape architect Alice Foxley as a hybrid park and square of “limestone terraces and planted topography,”147 it was inspired by a field trip to the karst landscape in the Swiss Alpine region of Glarnerland. Vogt’s office studied this landscape up close (engaged) and through aerial mapping (distant). A karst is a hydrogeological formation created by the dissolution of layers of soluble rock, such as limestone. In Switzerland karsts are characterized above ground by an expansive surface terrain of limestone pavements, but below ground, they are defined by a vast network of conduits and large caves with turbulent water flow.148 Vogt translated the principles of the karst “into a hybrid language combining aspects of geological topography and texture with precise architectural geometry” in physical modes that blur analysis and design.149 4.23 Novartis Campus Green (2010) Vogt Landscape Architects, image courtesy of Günther Vogt, Basel, Switzerland

Language  197 Familiar/strange Pop exploits the binary perceptions of the familiar and the strange. The term was coined by the artist Richard Hamilton in 1957. Penned in a letter to the architects Alison and Peter Smithson, regarding an exhibition, Hamilton wrote that pop art, “is Popular (designed for a mass audience), Transient (short-term solution), Expendable (easily forgotten), Low Cost, Mass Produced, Young (aimed at youth), Wicked, Sexy, Gimmicky, Glamorous, Big Business.”150 Pop art has been a rich source for architects, such as Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi, as well as landscape architects because it employs objects designed for a mass audience. As Adriaan Geuze claims “I love pop art because it’s about mass society. After all, I work in Randstad, where around six million people live in a very small area. There is not a single square meter that has not been worked at least ten times.”151 Indeed, Martha Schwartz, Claude Cormier, Ken Smith, and Adriaan Geuze have all created gardens and landscapes in the vein of the familiar and strange. “Penetrating the mechanics of signification,” Umberto Eco argues that, “the pop operation consists of taking a particular aspect of this civilization of Do you see how the built project blurs geological topography and architectural geometry? 4.24 The Bagel Garden (1979) by Martha Schwartz, image courtesy of Alan Ward, Boston, USA

 Language 198 signs, objects, and images and transposing it.”152 He notes, “an object exists: this object in its normal context; has a meaning. I take it into another context and it changes its meaning . . . Russian formalist called this ostranenie, which can be translated as ‘making strange’ and at once we are forced to read it by a different code.”153 Eco offers several ways of transposing, including multiplication, such as the serial reproduction with variation as seen in Andy Warhol’s Marilyn and insertion “the real object into another manipulated context.”154 This is precisely what Martha Schwartz did in her temporary installation, The Bagel Garden. Look at the image of this garden. As you can see, the hedges of this residential yard enclose 96 lacquered bagels (a mixture of salt and pumpernickel) laid out upon a ground of coloured gravel normally used for aquariums. The Bagel Garden appeared on the January 1980 cover of Landscape Architecture magazine. In her article she explained that the bagels were “locally made, shade tolerant, inexpensive, and low maintenance.”155 Syntagmatic/paradigmatic Barthes identified two axes of language in Saussure’s theory: the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic (or associative). The syntagmatic plane is an analysis of syntax (rules or principles governing sentence structure). It “is a combination of signs in a chain of speech where each term derives its value from its opposition to what preceded and what follows.”156 The paradigmatic plane involves analysis of the signifying system where the signs are based on association. Look at Figure 4.25 showing how the syntagmatic axis runs horizontally, so meaning arrives via the positioning of the signifiers, here verbs and nouns. Turner helped the ladybug has a different meaning than the ladybug helped Turner, and certainly Mohit caught the cougar is different from the cougar caught How has Schwartz transposed the real into another manipulated context? 4.25 Syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis syntagmatic Turner helped the lady bug u ".;::::; ro Zinnia saw the leopard E Cl '6 ~ Mohit caught the cougar ro C. Dom walked the dog

Language  199 Mohit. Paradigmatic runs vertically and meaning is derived from a set of similar types of signifiers, people, verbs, and animals that are differentials. Barthes also thought that these differentials send messages about different cultural contexts and customs as well. Turner could be in a garden, Zinnia might be at a zoo, Mohit could be in the forest, and Dom might be in his neighbourhood. This is because many Western cultures associate ladybugs with gardens, leopards with zoos, cougars with forests, and dog walking with neighbourhoods. Barthes was known to apply his theories to everyday life encounters, from fashion to cuisine to architecture. He refers to the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic in a building, noting each linguistic unit is like a column in a building of antiquity: this column is in a real relation of contiguity with other parts of the building, for instance the architrave (syntagmatic relation); but if this column is Doric it evokes in us a comparison with other architectural orders, the Ionic or the Corinthian; and this is a potential relationship of distribution (associative relations).157 Along similar lines, look at the image of Cattedrale Vegetale at Arte Sella, in Valsugana, Italy. In 2001, the artist Giuliano Mauri arranged 80 hornbeam saplings in a series of wood frames that each form a column of a church nave. Over time, the framework helps shape the hornbeam trees, but this dead wood will eventually rot away leaving the trees to form the nave. 4.26 Cattedrale Vegetale (2002) by Giuliano Mauri, image courtesy of Pava, https:// creativecommons. org/licenses/ by-sa/3.0/it/deed.en, Valsugana, Italy

 Language 200 Structuralism debated Critics have questioned the structuralists’ insistence on synchronic methods, which focused on the systemic association of relations, and their neglect of diachronic approaches, which emphasize historical development through cause and effect chains or historical processes. The literary critic Terry Eagleton, for example, warned against strict structuralist approaches. Eagleton argued, For the hardest forms of structuralism they were universal, embedded in a collective mind which transcended any particular culture, and which Lévi-Strauss suspected to be rooted in the structures of the human brain itself. Structuralism, in a word, was hair-raisingly unhistorical: the laws of the mind it claimed to isolate – parallelisms, oppositions, inversions and the rest – moved at a level of generality quite remote from the concrete differences of human history.158 Lévi-Strauss’s use of structuralism was also critiqued for ignoring the power of people to assert meaning in their own world, “and to attempt to alter them in different ways. Just as it is impossible to understand culture without taking history into account, so it is easily impossible to understand it without taking account of human agency.”159 Returning to the signification of red roses, I could start a movement of giving loved ones bouquets of daisies, if I really wanted, no? This was a point of contention in Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical battle with Sartre. While the two intellects shared similar interests in dialectical processes, Sartre’s existentialism countered two main themes cogent to Lévi-Strauss’s brand of structuralism – history and freedom. Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism was in reaction against historical and evolutionary methods used in anthropology. For the human rights lawyer Bernard E. Harcourt, “the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss offered a theoretical avenue that valued other cultures, especially non-Western cultures . . . By studying non-Western cultures and praising them, Lévi-Strauss was offering a living example of the value of the Other.”160 In this sense, LéviStrauss sought to demonstrate how you and the tribal people of South America are the same because you share universal structures of the human mind. Yet, according to Bernasconi, Sartre, “Above all, wanted to show that if one takes existing society as a given, one overlooks the history which creates that society, and in particular one overlooks the extent to which human beings make society by their activity . . . Society is a set of human relations and it would be better to understand the individual as constituted by those relations than vice versa”.161 Thus, for Sartre, studying non-Western people is not enough, for if we ignore Can you see how the hornbeam trees and frame serve as linguistic units in an instance of syntagmatic? Can you see the associations made with churches in Italy as examples of paradigmatic?

Language  201 how people in the West historically formulated non-Western people as Other, we will fail to learn from the problems with creating categories such as the Other, and how Others might free themselves from this category. This highlights Sartre’s problem with freedom in the structuralism advanced by Lévi-Strauss. For Sartre, Lévi-Strauss downplayed the self as an agent in society in order to pursue the study of universal structures that the individual re-enacted. Structuralism was also a reaction against existentialism, which privileges individual experience and choice. “In sharp contrast to structuralism, which begins from the intersubjectivity of shared meaning, the point of departure for existentialism is the individual meaning giver”162 in relation to others. Sartre thought that it was not the invariant structures of the human mind that you and I share as humans, but freedom, and the responsibility toward freedom once you have realized your bad faith. The Sartrean term, “bad faith,” is a lie to oneself that is made to avoid responsibility towards freedom.163 Sartre explains the theory of bad faith by way of the enthusiastic waiter, who acts like being a waiter with overenthusiastic comments about the food, quick movements that produce a serviette on your lap, and an unchecked eagerness to serve. For Sartre, these behaviours typify a waiter, they are not what the waiter as a human is actually thinking about the restaurant or the customers, or the food served. “Sartre believes that we are in bad faith if we do not seek freedom for all, because it amounts to deceiving ourselves about the nature of freedom.”164 Within landscape architecture, Meyer ultimately cautions against binary oppositions, particularly man and nature, as they have gendered nuances with the coding of woman as nature.165 As I argued in On Landscapes, “woman– nature coding” has served to both legitimize and confine the role of women in society, as Other to be interpreted and protected. When women are aligned with nature, they may be excluded from culture.166 Indeed, binary categories are often thought of today as oppressive; think of the transgender movement that has questioned the very basic binary terms of male and female. As Meyer points out, binary terms should lead to hybrid states and they should “allow us to question the very premise upon which our knowledge of landscape architecture is based.”167 It is precisely these goals that post-structuralists would champion. Primary reading for structuralism Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF POST-STRUCTURALISM Post-structuralism is not a unified theory or school of thought, but rather a descriptor for a set of critiques proposed by individuals (some who were originally structuralists, like Roland Barthes). Many critics are considered post-structuralists,

 Language 202 but I will limit my discussion to the theories of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. As the prefix “post” suggests, post-structuralism critically expanded the semiological study of meaning with regard to language, the arbitrariness of the sign, the fact that you are not always aware of structures operating in society, and that differences and similarities form structures. Yet, poststructuralism also reacted against many tenets of structuralism (see Figure 4.27). The origins of post-structuralist thought are often attributed to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). In particular, Nietzsche’s critique of truth, his emphasis on interpretation and differential relations of power and his attention to questions of style in philosophical discourse thus became central motifs within the work of the post-structuralists as they turned their attention away from the human sciences and towards philosophical critical analysis.168 One of the earliest critics of structuralism was Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), who invented deconstruction, which sought to challenge assumptions made in Western metaphysics. Derrida conceived of deconstruction in three different ways from 1967 to 2004; eventually employing it to prevent violence and render justice as his work increasingly turned to questions of politics and ethics.169 However, his first version of deconstruction probed the linguistic assumptions in Saussurean structuralism. Derrida agreed that signs were arbitrary; yet, he also thought that the network of signs and meaning was not fixed or stable. This instability of meaning was part of Derrida’s critique of the Western philosophical practice of privileging speech over writing in the dialectical process. This process held that written words represented speech; thus, speech was more proximate to thought than writing.170 Derrida exposed the problems with this supposition by examining spoken versus written expressions. Might derived from attitude towards structures universal truths thought patterns your identity priority given to relationship to methods associated with structuralism linguistic models fixed structures shape thought and meaning shared among all humans can be reduced to basic categories bound by universal structures author anti-humanism synchronic (ahistorical) modernism post-structuralism continental philosophy structures are arbitrary rejection of universal truths plurality and relative to culture mediated by culture and media reader posthumanism ideologically situated, critical postmodernism 4.27 Structuralism versus post-structuralism

Language  203 and mite, for example, have different meanings, but this is only revealed in written form, not when spoken. If I say the words out loud, another person may not know what I am referring to – the power wielded by someone or sesame seedsize arachnid. “The difference in spelling is ‘written,’ for it can only be read not heard; when spoken the difference is lost.”171 Furthermore, distinguishing mite from might depends heavily on context. For Derrida, another problem with the dialectical process was the assumption that the progress of knowledge emerged from opposing forces – good and evil, man and woman, nature and culture. Yes, binary thinking again. In “Speech and Writing According to Hegel” (1971) Derrida examined Georg Ludwig Hegel’s (1733–1799) dialectical method. Hegel, like Plato, privileged speech over writing and, according to Derrida, Hegel’s attempts to overcome the false constructions of dualisms were hindered by his privileging of speech. For Derrida “the pre-eminence of the phoni is one with the essence of metaphysics.”172 Like structural analyses, philosophy also employed binary oppositions and Derrida charged that these oppositions were not in “peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand.”173 Thus, to deconstruct this hierarchy Derrida invented the strategy he called, “différance,” which is a play on the verb différer, meaning both to differ and to defer. Différance makes evident that the relationship between the signified and the signifier is continually and indefinitely differing and deferring. It is due to this infinite process that texts are said to have no stable meaning. Deconstruction “negates any intrinsic meaning of the texts and locates meaning only outside of it,”174 denying any stable, intrinsic meaning. Another critique levelled at structuralism was the universality of structures. As a structuralist Lévi-Strauss sought to find patterns that could be found in the wilds of South America as well as suburban London. He thought as humans we share the same patterns of thought. As Harcourt points out, Foucault, who was troubled by this idea, asked, “What does it mean that we find patterns and closed systems of meaning?” and “how is it that any one interpretation becomes convincing and at what price?”175 In other words, how do you come to understand that something is true and what do you give up when you believe that it is true? To answer this question Foucault turned to a discursive history, in Discipline and Punish (1975; 1977) and History of Sexuality (1976; 1978). “On Foucault’s account, modern control of sexuality parallels modern control of criminality by making sex (like crime) an object of allegedly scientific disciplines, which simultaneously offer knowledge and domination of their objects.”176 Using his method of genealogy, Foucault showed that knowledge about institutions, such as prisons, and sexuality are not the result of a progressive unfolding of influences and causes – perspectives that unify these historical entities and their progress. On the contrary, “Foucault’s point is rather that, at least for the study of human beings, the goals of power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated: in knowing we control and in controlling we know.”177 For example,

 Language 204 he argued that the very construct of childhood was used to control and produce what society thought human nature, as a biological phenomenon, should be.178 Knowledge, for Foucault, cannot be separated from power because those in power institute norms, through knowledge in the sciences, for example, and you internalize and monitor to ensure that you conform to those conventions. In other words, the price you pay for believing and internalizing these norms is your identity. Describing herself as a “practical Marxist–feminist–deconstructionist,” Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak proposed that deconstruction could unmask powerful binary oppositions and reveal their hidden oppressive hierarchies, which privileged a gendered subjectivity. “Subjectivity encompasses individual consciousness, emotions, and unconscious thoughts and desires,” and since this subjectivity was almost always male and Western, individuals who did fall into this category were silenced.179 Spivak translated Derrida’s De la grammatologie into English and later she wrote the highly influential essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”180 that helped define postcolonial studies. The term “Subaltern” was coined by the Marxist theoretician and politician Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) to describe people who are economically dispossessed and subject to the hegemony of the ruling classes. Building on the work of both Derrida and Foucault, as well as Edward Said’s theory of orientalism, Spivak applied the term Subalterns to those people formerly under colonial power, who are still subjected to its legacy. She showed how the banning of Hindu practices, such as sati, revealed a silent Subaltern in the history of colonial India. Sati is the traditional practice whereby wives can commit suicide after their husband’s death by self-immolation. She argued that the British colonizers were horrified by this practice, and while they thought they were saving Hindu women from Hindu men, they failed to ask Hindu women about their own opinions regarding this act. Thus, Spivak revealed a chasm between the more nuanced understanding of this historical practice as understood by the colonized and the discourse generated by the colonizers. Spivak also took aim at those in the West who engaged in Subaltern Studies. As a female born in Calcutta and teaching in academic institutions in the United States, she cautioned, “the intellectual has to learn to be critical of her own roles in patriarchal culture and postcolonial theory and unlearn her approach to the subject.”181 In other words, when Western intellectuals speak for Subalterns they are seemingly unaware that they are re-inscribing the colonial hegemony of the ideology of Other. Why post-structuralism matters Post-structuralism ultimately challenged some of the most basic premises of structuralism, and so modernism. According to philosopher Alan D. Schrift, post-structuralist thinkers reflected the “Nietzschean–Freudian–Marxists spirit of the times . . . they turned away from the social sciences and towards a philosophical–critical analysis of writing and textuality (Derrida); relations of

Language  205 power, discourse, and construction of the subject (Foucault),” and the exposé of the gendered subjectivity and the hegemonic legacy of colonialism (Spivak).182 This criticality prompted other disciplines (including landscape architecture) to question given conventions and attitudes that defined individual practices. The philosopher Christopher Norris notes, “Deconstruction neither derives nor really flees the common sense view that languages exist to communicate meaning. It suspends that view for its own specific purposes of seeing what happens when the writs of convention no longer run.”183 Since the “weakening of the ‘real’ (an original, authentic, stable referent, experience, and meaning) is both a topic and an effect of postructuralist inquiries,”184 basic assumptions in design, such as the connection between function and form, the role of experience in interpretation, and the incorruptibility of landscape as nature were challenged. Post-structuralist theories are valuable because they have the potential to not only critique landscape architecture projects, but also the project of landscape architecture. The broader and more critical notion that post-structuralist theories might reveal and disrupt assumptions in landscape architecture – its conventions, myths, and placement in culture – has been explored in historical accounts of landscape architecture, in particular. In 1994 the landscape architect Heath Schenker posited that the history of landscape architecture has been described to students as a series of works by “master designers” – almost exclusively male.185 Using Norman T. Newton’s classic textbook, Design on the Land (1971), as an example she showed how attempts to rewrite women into this conventional approach to history in effect marginalized women’s contributions. Newton’s method, similar to many historians before him, echoed art historical practices, which focused on the chronological development of periods (the Baroque, then the Picturesque, etc.) and the genius designer who defined the epoch (Le Notre, Vanbrugh). Since women were denied status as “prodigal designers,” in history, there were few women to discuss in a history of landscape architecture. As an alternative, Schenker examined nineteenthcentury Birmingham, England, through a feminist historical lens that included actions beyond the role of genius designer in the creation of landscapes. Thus, by challenging the conventional approach to telling the history of landscape architecture, she was able to provide a more inclusive history that included both men and women. More recently, histories of women and landscape architecture have been explored. In 2015 Sonja Dümpelmann and John Beardsley compiled a history of women and modern landscape architecture in their book, Women, Modernity, and Landscape Architecture. Post-structuralism in action Deconstruction The architect Bernard Tschumi was one of the first designers to link Derrida’s deconstruction to the design of a landscape by involving Derrida in his winning proposal for the Parc de la Villette competition. Tschumi’s scheme for the park

 Language 206 involved a combination of points (the roughly 10 x 10 x 10-meter bright red follies), lines (paths and thematic gardens), and planes (large expanses of grass, gravel, and water). Instead of using a more common ordering principle, such as symmetry, Tschumi assembled these features in layers. While points, lines, and planes defined the geometrical features of early geographic information systems in the 1970s, Tschumi’s layering was not used for analytical purposes. The folly structures themselves provided Tschumi with a key example of deconstruction and post-structuralist thinking regarding the sign. According to Tschumi, the “strict repetition of the 10 x 10 x 10 meter folly is aimed at developing a clear symbol for the park, as strong as the British telephone booth or the Paris Metro gates.”186 He also charged that the follies meant nothing because they were signifiers (images) rather than signified (the idea).187 This proposition was supported by Derrida’s essay “Point de folie maintenant l’architecture,” which accompanied Tschumi’s portfolio La Case Vide: La Villette. While the park had yet to be constructed, Derrida validated the follies as embodiments of the urge to deconstruct; thus, aligning the park’s design with deconstruction. Derrida claimed, “These follies destabilize meaning, the meaning of meaning, the signifying ensemble of this powerful architectonics. They put in question, dislocate, destabilize or deconstruct the edifice for their configuration.”188 Thus, by denying the follies the very basic requirement of a programme, Tschumi was deferring their meaning, and destabilizing the very notion that structures should have a function. 4.28 Folly by Bernard Tschumi for Parc de la Villette (1987), image courtesy of Dominic McIver Lopes, Paris, France

Language  207 Look at the image of one of the follies. While they were intended to accommodate no prescribed function, over the years they have been used and interpreted in various ways. One folly is now home to a Hamburger Quick Restaurant and Wikipedia says the follies serve to orient people in the park. Différance reveals the relationship between the signified and the signifier as continually and indefinitely differing and deferring, denying any intrinsic meaning of the follies. Textuality Both Derrida and Foucault described the “textuality” of human experience in their post-structuralist theories. The historian Saul Cornell surmises, “Derrida expands the text to encompass all areas of human activity, while Foucault effectively shrinks the text to a mere affect of discourse.”189 For Derrida, textuality asserts that the meaning of a text is not authorized by the writer, or, in landscape architecture, by the landscape architect – rather there should be multiple interpretations. After his involvement with the Parc de la Villette competition ended, Derrida claimed that it was the individual architect who was in need of deconstruction. He posited, “deconstruction is never individual or a matter of the single, self-privileged authorial voice. It is always a multiplicity of voices . . . And you can take this as a rule: that each time deconstruction speaks through a single voice, it’s wrong, it is not deconstruction anymore.”190 In a different vein, “Foucault treats particular texts as the products of larger structures of meaning and power which he labels discourses. Foucault sees all human activity shaped by discourses, which become the means by which various fields of human knowledge are constituted, organized, and enforced.”191 This idea of textuality stresses the culpability of language to stand in for meaning – a condition that establishes a need for critical interpretation. “Objects of study such as historical events, institutional practices, or cross cultural relationships may therefore be seen as systems of signs to be deciphered and interpreted, rather than as realities to be recorded.”192 Look at the image of DIN A4 at the German Institute of Standards in Berlin. Designed by Richard Weller with Cornelia Müller and Jan Wehberg, this courtyard serves mainly as a viewing space from the offices above. According to Weller, the main feature of the design is an A4 piece of paper “scaled up to become a 16 x 7 meter black granite slab tilted from a height of 1.5 meters . . . The enlarged A4 granite slab not only bears the institute’s (DIN) letter head, but also stainless steel letters and signs beginning with Babylonian script that appear to tumble down the page.”193 The Deutsches Institut für Normung e.V. (DIN) or the Do you see the différance in Tschumi’s approach to the follies? Do you think that by not programming these follies, people visiting the park could use and interpret these structures on their own accord?

 Language 208 German Institute for Standardization, established the sizes of paper used in all types of offices, as well as tens of thousands of standards for technology, urban development, and energy logistics. The Latin letters, A, H, S, U, F, M, T, in particular can be seen above, and emphasize Derrida’s idea of textuality. Weller revealed that the letters speak “of Babel and the entire efforts of language as the standardized system to be meaningfully attached to the phenomenal world . . . we were asked if the massive brooding stone tablet held a cryptic message. It does not.”194 4.29 DIN A4 (1993) by Richard Weller in Association with Müller Knippschild Wehberg (MKW) landscape architects, image courtesy of Richard Weller, German Institute of Standards, Berlin, Germany Do you think DIN is a discourse in Foucault’s sense of the term? Do you think they spell something? What do you think this means?

Language  209 Third space The postcolonial writer Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of “third space” proposes an alternative to the dichotomies of colonizer/colonized, master/servant, Christian/ Hindu, or other oppositional power relations. He posited that sites of enunciation and representation – including the geographical imagination – are examples of these spaces where individuals and cultures interact. He gave the example of Hindu peasants in northern India who were asked by Christian colonists to convert to Christianity. For Bhabha, it would be easy to interpret this as simply a binary situation between “a muscular colonial Christianity that was keen to convert and an indigenous religious tradition that resisted conversion,” but what Hindu peasants did was “produce supplementary discourses as sites of resistance and negotiation.”195 The Hindu peasants replied that they would be happy to convert, but they could only believe the colonists if they admitted that they didn’t eat meat. In effect, for Bhabha, “That which was given is reinscribed and transvalued, so that the Christian missionary has to relocate his doctrinal position. A phrase that was . . . doctrinally secure becomes retranslated in its colonial enunciation, and opens up another site for the negotiation of authority, both symbolic and social.”196 One of Bhabha’s approaches to third space involves hybridity whereby the “signs of cultural memory and sites of political agency”197 are redrawn. According to Bhabha the hybrid moment is when the “transformational value of change lies in the rearticulation, or translation, of elements that are neither . . . but something else besides, which contest the terms and territories of both.”198 In their book, Deccan Traverses, the architects and landscape architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha describe how the East India Company, through both scientific and artistic endeavours, constructed the identity of Bangalore as the “Garden City of India.” Mathur and da Cunha reflect on some of the beautiful remnants of this garden city legacy today. However, they also observe, Of course, there was another side to these projects, the side that used things they singled out and knowledge that they constructed to administer a foreign hand. Here, survey fixed boundaries and defined properties for the purpose of revenue; sketches and paintings were a means of statistical documentation; plant studies and introductions served the company’s economic objectives. These were colonial enterprises and they served not merely to exploit, but also to construct the land, its image, and its self image.199 Why do you think they did not make words from the letters? Equally important, why would you think that a written element of an alphabet should be telling you something? What does that say about textuality?

 Language 210 In their examination of the colonists’ maps, texts, sketches, and other imagery, Mathur and da Cunha found that the voice of the colonized had been marginalized in the construction of its identity as a garden city. Moreover, local knowledge had been disregarded in the colonists’ understanding of the Indian subcontinent’s hydrology and geomorphology. One example is the colonists’ confusion over the Deccan Plateau, an area known as the land of a thousand tanks. Prior to colonization, tanks had been constructed to collect rain and run-off while “bunds” or embankments were built across swales.200 Together, bunds and tanks functioned as an evenly distributed system. However, the colonial engineers insisted that the flow of water moved hierarchically, like a natural system, with water moving from tributaries to larger flowing waters. Mathur and da Cunha note, “contrary to the engineer’s view there is no dominant water course in the land of a thousand tanks . . . it was more political than physical, dependent on managed sluices more than natural resources.”201 Look at the drawings produced by Mathur and da Cunha. Which drawing is the re-inscribed practice and which drawing is the colonial engineer’s conception of the Deccan Plateau? 4.30 From Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain by Anuradha Mathur/ Dilip da Cunha, image courtesy of Anuradha Mathur/Dilip da Cunha 4.31 From Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain by Anuradha Mathur/ Dilip da Cunha, image courtesy of Anuradha Mathur Why do you think Mathur and da Cunha wanted to create this map? Do you see the maps as a third space?

Language  211 Post-structuralism debated Derrida’s deconstruction, and its perceived conflation of language and thought, has been one of the most debated theories among the post-structuralist propositions. The architectural theoretician Robin Evans argued that since deconstruction concerned the study of language and writing, there emerged “some confusion about whether architecture is being made like language or the study of language.”202 Indeed, much discussion focused on the role of the signifier and the signified, components in the analysis of language more than the way one might choose to write. Echoing a similar sentiment, the philosopher Edward Winters posited, “the study of languages as whole systems independent of their actual uses is an abstraction away from the life of language.”203 In other words, when language is studied as a conceptual system of the signifier, the signified, and the sign, it will not tell you much about the language as a lived experience. Moreover, experiences with landscapes cannot always be described as an abstract play of the signifier, the signified, and the sign. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker argued that language was not the same as thought, “not the only thing that separates humans from other animals, not the basis of all cultures, and not an inescapable prison house, an obligatory agreement, the limits of our world, or the determiner of what is imaginable.”204 He also condemned semioticians who viewed the storehouse of knowledge in the human brain as couched in words and sentences. He asked: “What did you read on the page before this one? I would like to think that you can give a reasonably accurate answer to the question.”205 Now try to write down the exact words you read on those pages. Chances are you cannot recall a single sentence verbatim, probably not even a single phrase. What you remembered is the gist of those passages – their content, meaning, or sense – not the language itself. Cognitive scientists model this “semantic memory” as a web of logical proposition images, motor programs, strings of sound, and other data structures connected to one another in the brain.206 However, the biggest debate over deconstruction involved the architect Peter Eisenman and Derrida himself. After Tschumi had won the Parc de la Villette competition, it was decided that the planes in his scheme would be divided into smaller gardens designed by different architects and landscape architects (and are very popular today). Tschumi brought Eisenman and Derrida together to co-design one of these gardens. Their collaboration on the garden entailed approximately seven meetings and numerous correspondences from 1985 to early 1990. Initial accounts of the design collaboration were positive for both Eisenman and Derrida. In 1988 Derrida wrote, “Why Eisenman Writes Such Good Books,” but he admitted that he initially thought “the discourse would be Try it, really.

 Language 212 my realm and that architecture ‘properly speaking’ – places, space, drawing, the silent calculation, stones, the resistance of materials – would be his.”207 In turn, Derrida decided to design his own element for the garden, a gilded metal object that “at once would resemble a web, a sieve, or a grill (grid).”208 As revealed in their book, Choral L Works (1997), their collaboration suffered from misunderstandings on the nature of the design project and deconstruction. What disturbed Derrida the most was “Eisenman’s reliance on traditional rhetorical modes,” the very binary and dialectical processes that Derrida critiqued.209 Derrida also struggled to engage Eisenman in a discussion on the actual garden. In April 1986, Derrida pleaded with Eisenman, “I understand in a very abstract way, but why don’t you explain the physical aspects.”210 By 1989 their collaboration had completely deteriorated. The project was over budget and their garden scheme had taken over other designers’ gardens. While we will never know the true extent of their relationship, correspondences between Derrida and Eisenman (published in 1990 in Assemblage and later in Choral L Works) attest to a bitter and complex relationship. Derrida pleaded to Eisenman, “I would have spoken perhaps of my own displacement in the course of ‘choral work’ but here it is you who must speak . . . When did we begin to work together, had we never done so, on this Choral Work that is not yet constructed but that one sees and reads everywhere? When will we stop?”211 A few months later Eisenman quipped, “perhaps what I do in architecture, in its aspirations and in its fabric, is not what could properly be called deconstruction.”212 Undoubtedly referring to their garden project, Eisenman also wrote, “you see, Jacques, when you leave your own realm, when you attempt to be consistent, whatever that might mean in architecture, it is precisely then that you do not understand the implications for deconstruction in architecture – when deconstruction leaves your hands.”213 Primary reading for post-structuralism Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction. NOTES 1. Bronwen Martin and Felizitas Ringham, “Language,” Key Terms in Semiotics (London: Continuum, 2006), 113. 2. Paul Ricoeur, “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered a Text,” From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John B. Thompson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), 144–183 (160). Was Eisenman correct, that Derrida should not be the sole author of deconstruction?

Language  213 3. Sylvia Lavin, “The Republic of the Arts,” Quatremère de Quincy and the Invention of a Modern Language of Architecture (New York: MIT Press, 1992), 158–175. 4. Rafael Moneo, “On Typology,” Oppositions 13 (Summer 1978): 22–45. 5. Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy, quoted in Aldo Rossi, Architecture of the City (New York: MIT Press, 1984), 40. 6. Ibid., 41. 7. Sylvia Crowe and Mary Mitchell, The Pattern of Landscape (Chichester: Packard, 1988). 8. Simon Bell, Landscape: Pattern, Perception, and Process (New York: E & FN Spon, 1999). 9. Ibid., 22. 10. Cynthia L. Girling and Kenneth I. Helphand, Yard, Street, Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space (New York: Wiley, 1994). 11. Clemens Steenbergen, Composing Landscapes: Analysis, Typology and Experiments for Design (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2008), 297. 12. Alan Colquhoun, Modernism in the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays 1980– 1987 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 74. 13. Ibid. 14. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Editions du Seuil 1953, 1968), 16. 15. Jorge Silvetti, “The Beauty of Shadows,” Oppositions 9 (1977): 43–61. 16. Ibid., 45. 17. David Walters and Linda Brown, “Devices and Designs: Sources of Urbanism,” Design First (Oxford: Architectural Press, 2004), 83–93 (85). 18. Christiane Crasemann Collins and George R. Collins, Camillo Sitte, the Birth of Modern City Planning (New York: Rizzoli, 1986). 19. Ibid., 143. 20. Ibid., 160. 21. Gina Crandell, Tree Gardens: Architecture and the Forest (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2013). 22. Tom Turner, Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 BC–2000 AD (Abingdon: Spon, 2005). 23. Designboom, “Spirulina Fountain by Bureau A Acts as Cultivating Garden Folly in Geneva,” accessed 21 January 2016, www.designboom.com/architecture/bureaua-spirulina-fountain-garden-folly-parc-des-evaux-confignon-geneva-01-16-2015/. 24. Ibid. 25. Kongjian Yu, “The Big Foot Revolution,” Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu, ed. William S. Saunders (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2012), 42–49 (42). 26. Ibid., 44. 27. Catherine Seavitt, “Yangtze River Delta Project,” Scenario 03: Rethinking Infrastructure, Spring 2013, accessed 21 January 2016, http://scenariojournal.com/ article/yangtze-river-delta-project/. 28. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980; 1979). 29. See Christian Norberg-Schulz, Intentions in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966; 1965). 30. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci, Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, 98. 31. Carl Gustav Jung, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 7: Two Essays in Analytical Psychology, eds. and trans. Gerhardt Alder and R.F.C. Hull (New York: Bollingen, 1972, 1953), 77. 32. Ibid., 38.

 Language 214 33. Tjeu van den Berk, Jung on Art: The Autonomy of the Creative Drive (New York: Routledge, 2012), 4. 34. Ibid. 35. Geoffrey Jellicoe, “Jung and the Art of Landscape: A Personal Experience,” Denatured Visions: Landscape and Culture in the Twentieth Century, eds. Stuart Wrede and William Howard Adams (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991), 124. 36. Mary Keen, “New Landscape at Boughton: Kim Wilkie’s Gateway to the Underworld,” The Telegraph, 7 August 2009, accessed 22 April 2015, www.telegraph.co.uk/ gardening/gardenstovisit/5988456/New-landscape-at-Boughton-Kim-Wilkiesgateway-to-the-underworld.html. 37. Karen A. Franck and Lynda H. Schneekloth, “Type: Prison or Promise,” Ordering Space: Types in Architecture and Design, eds. Karen A. Franck and Lynda H. Schneekloth (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994), 15–38 (30). 38. Alex Wall, “Programming the Urban Surface,” Recovering Landscape, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 233–249 (235). 39. Jill Desimini, “Wild Innovation: Stoss in Detroit” Scenario 03: Rethinking Infrastructure (Spring 2013), accessed 22 April 2015, http://scenariojournal.com/ article/wild-innovation-stoss-in-detroit. 40. William J. Mitchell, “Representation,” Critical Terms for Literary Study, eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 11–22 (11). 41. Edward Skidelsky, Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 49. 42. Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies, trans. Steve G. Lofts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 19–20. 43. Winfried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 103. 44. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume 3 The Phenomenology of Knowledge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 200. 45. Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 44. 46. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Harper & Row, 1972, 1939), 5. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 14–15. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Tessa Goldsmith, Fountains Abbey and Studley Royal Souvenir Guidebook (The National Trust, 2011), 36. 51. John Aislabie, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, accessed 11 July 2014, www.oxforddnb.com/view/printable/252. 52. See Tim Richardson, The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden (London: Bantam, 2008). 53. Nelson Goodman Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968). 54. Alessandro Giovannelli, “Goodman’s Aesthetics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), accessed 22 January 2016, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2010/entries/goodman-aesthetics/. 55. Jennifer Robinson, “Nelson Goodman,” The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, third edition, eds. Berys Gaut, and Dominic Lopes (New York: Routledge, 2013), 179–189 (179). 56. Ibid. 57. Nelson Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other

Language  215 Arts and Sciences, eds. Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin (Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 1988) 31–48 (31). 58. Ibid., 33–34. 59. George Hargreaves, “Postmodernism Looks Beyond Itself,” Landscape Architecture 73, no. 6 (1983): 60–65 (63–64). 60. Ibid., 65. 61. Laurie Olin, “Form, Meaning, and Expression in Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Journal 7, no. 2 (1988): 149–168 (151). 62. Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” 48. 63. Ibid., 36. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 34. 66. Ibid., 36. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 37–38. 69. Ibid., 40. 70. Leah Levy, Kathryn Gustafson: Sculpting the Land (Washington, DC: Spacemaker Press, 1998), 9. 71. Cheryl Kent, Millennium Park Chicago (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011), 108. 72. Ibid., 109. 73. Charles Waldheim, Constructed Ground: The Millennium Garden Design Competition (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2001), 18. 74. Ibid. 75. Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” 42. 76. Marc Treib, “Must Landscapes Mean? Approaches to Significance in Recent Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Journal 14, no. 1 (1995): 46–62 (60). 77. See Marc Treib, ed. Meaning in Landscape Architecture & Gardens: Four Essays, Four Commentaries (London: Routledge, 2011). 78. Ibid., 69. 79. Ibid., xii. 80. Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” 43. 81. Umberto Eco, Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 17. 82. Ibid. 83. Martin and Ringham, “Signification,” Key Terms in Semiotics, 186. 84. Steven Pinker, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 10. 85. Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 22. 86. Martin and Ringham, “Semiotics,” Key Terms in Semiotics, 175. 87. Russell Daylight, “The Difference between Semiotics and Semiology,” Gramma: Journal of Theory & Criticism 20 (2012): 37–50 (37). 88. Charles Sanders Peirce, Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–58): Collected Writings, eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 303. 89. Umberto Eco, “Function and Sign: The Semiotics of Architecture,” Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Lech (London: Routledge, 1997), 182–202 (182). 90. Ibid., 183. 91. Ibid., 194. 92. Carl E. Bain, Jerome Beaty, and J. Paul Hunter, The Norton Introduction to Literature, third edition (London: W. W. Norton, 1981; 1973), 650.

 Language 216 93. Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 15. 94. Kati Lindström, Hannes Palang, and Kalevi Kull, “Semiotics of Landscape,” The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies, eds. Peter Howard, Ian Thompson, and Emma Waterton (New York: Routledge, 2013), 97–105 (97). 95. Ibid., 98. 96. Ibid., 105. 97. Eco, Theory of Semiotics, 129. 98. Christoph Prang, “The Creative Power of Semiotics: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose,” Comparative Literature 66, no. 4 (2014): 420–437 (422). 99. Barry Schwabsky, “Semiotics and Murder: A Review of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco,” The New Criterion, September 1983, accessed 22 January 2016, www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Semiotics-and-murder-6303. 100. Spirn, The Language of Landscape, 216. 101. Ibid., 217–218. 102. Nomad Studio, “Green Varnish,” World Landscape Architecture, accessed 22 January 2016, http://worldlandscapearchitect.com/green-varnish-by-nomad-studioat-contemporary-art-museum-st-louis/. 103. Spirn, The Language of Landscape, 225. 104. Publically Engaged Architecture, “Baisley Park,” Tumblr, 8 May 2013, accessed 22 January 2016, http://anethere.tumblr.com/post/22686092385/baisley-park-jamaicaqueens-ny-walter. 105. Kenneth Woodbridge, “Doctor Carvallo and the Absolute,” Garden History 6, no. 2 (1978): 46–69 (50–51). 106. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, “Landscape and Cityscape as Aesthetic Experience: The Arts and Crafts Movement and the Revival of the Formal Garden,” Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), 375–401 (384). 107. Michel Conan, “Landscape Metaphors and Metamorphosis of Time,” Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2003), 287–317 (297–298). 108. Jellicoe, “Jung and the Art of Landscape: A Personal Experience,” 126. 109. Michael Spens, The Complete Landscape Designs and Gardens of Geoffrey Jellicoe (London: Thames & Hudson, 1994), 92. 110. Ibid., 96. 111. Ibid., 92. 112. Ibid., 94. 113. Spirn, The Language of Landscape, 229. 114. Ibid. 115. Nina Rappaport, “Landscapes as Cultural Criticism,” Ken Smith Landscape Architect: Urban Projects, ed. Jane Amidon (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 133–137 (133). 116. Ken Smith, Ken Smith: Landscape Architect (New York: Monacelli Press, 2009), 176–177. 117. Ibid., 174. 118. Dominic Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 110. 119. Karsten Jorgensen, “Semiotics in Landscape Design,” Landscape Review 4, no. 1 (1998): 39–47 (44). 120. Catherine Howett, “Systems, Signs, Sensibilities: Sources for a New Landscape Aesthetic,” Landscape Journal 6, no. 1 (1987): 1–12 (8). 121. Ibid., 9.

Language  217 122. Marcia Muelder Eaton, “Responding to the Call for New Landscape Metaphors,” Landscape Journal 9, no. 1 (1990): 22–27 (22). 123. Elizabeth K. Meyer, “The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture,” Ecological Design and Planning, eds. George F. Thompson and Frederick R. Steiner (New York: John Wiley, 1997), 45–79 (45). 124. John T. Waterman, “Ferdinand de Saussure – Forerunner of Modern Structuralism,” Modern Language Journal 40, no. 6 (October 1956), 307–309 (307). 125. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger; trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), 66. 126. Daylight, “The Difference between Semiotics and Semiology,” 42. 127. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001, 1957), 113. 128. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 68. 129. Ibid., 67. 130. Ibid., 69. 131. Ibid., 117. 132. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 10. 133. Ibid., 12. 134. Ibid., 28. 135. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring, 1979): 30–44 (36). 136. Ibid., 44. 137. Ibid., 36. 138. Ibid., 37. 139. Ibid., 43. 140. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (New York: MIT Press, 1993), 14. 141. Meyer, “The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture,” 51. 142. Karen M’Closkey, “Introduction,” Unearthed: The Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 1–23 (3). 143. Peter Walker, “The Practice of Landscape Architecture in Postwar United States,” Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review, ed. Marc Treib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 250–259 (255). 144. Bernadette Blanchon-Caillot, Kamni Gill, Karsten Jørgensen, Bianca Maria Rinaldi, and Kelly Shannon, “Editorial Landscape Architecture in an Expanded Field,” Journal of Landscape Architecture (2013): 4–5 (4). 145. Günther Vogt, “Foreword: Between Search and Research,” Distance & Engagement: Walking, Thinking and Making Landscape, ed. Alice Foxley (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2010), 7–23 (10). 146. Ibid., 16. 147. Alice Foxley, “Novartis Campus Green,” Distance & Engagement: Walking, Thinking and Making Landscape, 97–133, (97). 148. International Association of Hydrogeologists, “About Karst Hydrogeology,” accessed 22 January 2016, http://karst.iah.org/karst_hydrogeology.html. 149. Foxley, “Novartis Campus Green,” 110. 150. Rachel Cooke, “Richard Hamilton: A Masterclass from the Father of Pop Art,” 14 February 2010, accessed 22 January 2016, www.theguardian.com/ artanddesign/2010/feb/14/richard-hamilton-interview-serpentine-cooke. 151. Udo Weilacher,“Hyperrealistic Shock Therapy Adriaan Geuze,” Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1996), 229–244, (232). 152. Umberto Eco, “Lowbrow Highbrow, Highbrow Lowbrow,” Pop Art: The Critical

 Language 218 Dialogue, ed. Carol Anne Mahsun (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1989), 219–231 (220). 153. Ibid., 223. 154. Ibid., 225. 155. Tim Richardson, The Vanguard Landscapes and Gardens of Martha Schwartz (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004) 149. 156. Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith, twelfth printing (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 58. 157. Ibid., 59. 158. Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd revised edition, anniversary edition (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 94–95. 159. Strinati, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, 121. 160. Bernard E. Harcourt, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Poststructuralism?” The Law School, University of Chicago, March 2007, note 10, accessed 22 January 2016, www.law.uchicago.edu/files/files/156.pdf, 15. 161. Robert Bernasconi, How to Read Sartre (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 96. 162. Harcourt, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Poststructuralism?” 9. 163. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 67. 164. Bernasconi, How to Read Sartre, 59. 165. Meyer, “The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture,” 49. 166. Kate Soper, “Nature/’nature,’” Futurenatural: Nature, Science, Culture, ed. George Robertson et al. (London: Routledge, 1996), 28. 167. Meyer, “The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture,” 51. 168. Alan D. Schrift, “Introduction,” Poststructuralism and Critical Theory’s Second Generation (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1–17 (6). 169. Leonard Lawlor, “Jacques Derrida,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed 18 June 2009, http://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2014/entries/derrida/. 170. Christopher Norris, Deconstruction Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1991), 30. 171. Joseph Adamson, “Différence,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2000), 534. 172. Jacques Derrida, “Speech and Writing According to Hegel,” 1971, accessed 22 July 2009, http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/hegel.html. 173. Jacques Derrida, Oppositions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982): 41. 174. Hanna Buczynska-Garewicz, “Semiotics and Deconstruction,” Reading Eco: An Anthology, ed. Rocco Capozzi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 163– 172, (167). 175. Harcourt, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Poststructuralism?” 17–18, 20. 176. Gary Gutting, “Michel Foucault,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed 30 October 2015, http://plato.stanford. edu/archives/win2014/entries/foucault/. 177. Ibid. 178. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1990), 104. 179. Victoria Walker, “Feminist Criticism, Anglo-American,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irene R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 39–44 (42). 180. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 66–111.

Language  219 181. Nancy Arden McHugh, Feminist Philosophies A–Z (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 137. 182. Schrift, “Introduction,” 6. 183. Norris, Deconstruction Theory and Practice, 128. 184. Zsyzsa Baross, “Poststructuralism,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irene R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 158–162 (158–159). 185. Heath Schenker, “Feminist Interventions in the Histories of Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Journal 13, no. 2 (1994): 107–112. 186. Bernard Tschumi, “The La Villette Competition,” Landscape: The Princeton Journal of Thematic Studies in Architecture 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985), 201. 187. Ibid., 181. 188. Jacques Derrida, “‘Point de folie – Maintenant’ architecture from Bernard Tschumi, La Case Vide: La Villette 1985,” Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 574. 189. Saul Cornell, “Splitting the Difference: Textualism, Contextualism, and Post-Modern History,” American Studies with American Studies International 36, no. 1 (1995): 57–80 (59). 190. Christopher Norris, “Jacques Derrida in Discussion with Christopher Norris,” Architectural Design Deconstruction II (London: Academy Group, 1989), 11. 191. Cornell, “Splitting the Difference: Textualism, Contextualism, and Post-Modern History,” 59. 192. Manina Jones, “Textuality,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory: Approaches, Scholars, Terms, ed. Irene R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 641–642 (641). 193. Richard Weller, Room 4.1.3: Innovations in Landscape Architecture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 144. 194. Ibid. 195. Homi Bhabha, “Interview with William J.T. Mitchell,” Artforum 33, no.7 (1995): 80–84. 196. Ibid. 197. Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction,” The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994; 2004), 11. 198. Ibid., 41. 199. Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (New Delhi: Rupa, 2006), 3. 200. Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, “Waters Everywhere,” Design in the Terrain of Water, eds. Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha (Philadelphia: Applied Research + Design Publishing with the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, 2014), 8. 201. Mathur and da Cunha, Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain, 105. 202. Robin Evans, Translations from Buildings to Drawings and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 124–125 (125). 203. Edward Winters, “Architecture,” The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, eds. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (London: Routledge, 2001), 519–530. 204. Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 208. 205. Ibid., 210. 206. Ibid. 207. Jacques Derrida, “Why Eisenman Writes Such Good Books,” Rethinking Architecture: A Cultural Reader, ed. Neil Leach (London: Routledge, 2001), 338. 208. Ibid., 342.

 Language 220 209. Jeffrey Kipnis, “Twisting the Separatrix,” Assemblage 14 (1991): 31–61 (45). 210. Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, Chora L Works, eds. by Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser (New York: Monacelli Press, 1997), 82. 211. Jacques Derrida, “Letter to Peter Eisenman,” trans. Hilary P. Hanel, Assemblage 12 (1990): 6–13 (7–8). 212. Peter Eisenman, “Post/El Cards: A Reply to Jacques Derrida,” Assemblage 12 (1990): 14–17 (17). 213. Ibid.

221 5 SYSTEMS LOGIC A system is an array of interrelated or interdependent elements that form a complex whole, and it has spatial and temporal boundaries that can be open, closed, or fluid. Historically, landscape architects have taken a deep interest in natural systems because they are frequently part of what constitutes a designed landscape. Designers have also probed if they are part of the system or in control of it. Systems played a key role in the topic of the first chapter, Forming, because understanding a landscape as a system can involve identifying patterns and forms that are a result of processes in a landscape system. McHarg thought, for example, that by understanding how natural systems operated, you could design with nature, and that the analysis of nature would lead to the most appropriate forms. By the 1990s the idea that design was resolved by creating forms was questioned as the notion of “strategy” emerged as an approach with no singular answer, but rather a series of outcomes where the designer’s response was only one of the many facets of the design process. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF SYSTEMS THEORY AND CYBERNETICS Compare the two drawings. Systems theory is rooted in General Systems Theory (GST) and cybernetics.1 As an alternative to reductionism, systems theory became highly influential during the twentieth century in the sciences, math, sociology, arts, and of course landscape architecture. Systems theory was initially promoted in the sciences as an alternative to scientific methods modelled upon work in physics.2 The goal was to replace the reductionist methods of physics with the study of life systems and, thus, exchange machine metaphors for organic ones. According to Gerald Midgley, an organizational theorist, the problem with mechanistic metaphors is their insistency that “all things in the world (including human beings, organizations and societies) How are they different? What different types of conclusions can you draw about a tree from the two different diagrams?

 Systems logic 222 are like clockwork toys. If we can figure out how they work, then we will be able to change them according to our will, within the limits of the natural laws that they conform to.”3 Alternatively, organic metaphors imply a living structure or organization, a tree instead of a toy, which adapts and changes over time. Even meta-theories like evolution were reconceived to “embrace the idea that organisms co-construct their world rather than passively adapting to it, resulting in the conclusion that organisms are part of what they observe, not separate from it.”4 Biologists, in particular, sought to replace machine thinking with systems thinking. The biologist Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972), for example, promoted GST as the foundation for understanding all living organisms.5 Von Bertalanffy thought GST should supersede Descartes’s ‘Bête machine,’ which explained life by means of physics and chemistry.6 Indeed, Descartes’s model was ill-fitted to describe the self-organizing biological systems that were nonmechanistic. In contrast to the closed system of chemistry or physics, von Bertalanffy envisioned a unified theory that considered systems as complexes of interacting elements, open systems that interacted with their environments. While a biologist by training, his generous definition of a system extended to both human and non-human entities, and inquiry in both the humanities and the sciences. This breadth of scope also further defined systems theory as an interdisciplinary research project. A systems approach is more appropriate to studying living organisms because these organisms are open processes that continuously interact with 5.1 Tree 5.2 Tree twig branch limb trunk transpiration of water Oxygen expelled transport of water. nutrients up tree water uptake and food storage light energy, Carbon Dioxide absorbed transport of carbohydrates from leaves water and Oxygen absorbed

Systems logic  223 their surroundings. For example, if I wanted to study the effects of air pollution on plants, a systems approach would involve an analysis of the plants’ interactions with air movement, soil, water, microbes, nearby plants, sunlight, climate change, etc. In other words, I would investigate the systems that make plant life possible, and this would prompt me to consider the plants as living organisms, not as machines. I would also most likely consult with professionals in other disciplines due to the varied interactions that plants need to thrive. Since landscape architects deal with sites containing multiple natural and cultural processes, systems theory has been advanced by numerous professionals. Echoing the lament of von Bertalanffy, McHarg claimed, “Architects used to say, ‘form follows function.’ This was a kind of manifesto, always illustrated by inorganic systems like utensils and planes and rockets . . . If one looks at organic systems, I think one would have to adapt the statement and say, ‘form expresses process,’ or better still, ‘Process is expressive.’”7 In keeping with systems theory, McHarg also enlisted a multitude of professionals, such as ecologists, foresters, and hydrologists, to collaborate on his landscape architecture projects. Known for his advancement of the map overlay method, which was a precursor of computerized Geographic Information Systems (GIS), McHarg sought to document an exhaustive set of information in an attempt to know a site or a region in its totality. His plan-view overlay drawings distinguished different layers of systems (soils, hydrology, vegetation, etc.) while the content within each layer was spatially isolated and weighted for its suitability for development. The darkest gradations of tones represented areas with the highest value and the lightest tones indicated areas with the least significant value. All of the mapped layers were then superimposed to create a composite map that in McHarg’s words looked something like a “complex X-ray photograph with dark and light tones.”8 Light areas revealed locations that should be developed, while dark areas should be saved from development. McHarg was also influenced by cybernetics. Like systems theory, cybernetics is an explanatory theory concerned with the communication and control of organic and inorganic systems. While it is often debated whether cybernetics is a branch of systems theory or vice versa, a significant feature of cybernetic theory is the introduction of the circular causality of feedback loops.9 The mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) developed the theoretical foundations for cybernetics during the Second World War when he invented a computational device to predict the location of enemy aircraft – an anti-aircraft predictor or AA predictor. “As the AA predictor came to fruition, Wiener came to see it as the articulated prototype for a new understanding of the human–machine relation, one that made soldier, calculator, and fire-power into a single integrated system.”10 This new understanding of human–machine relations influenced an array of people in different fields, especially the ecological theories of Eugene Odum in his classic book, Fundamentals of Ecology. 11 The introduction of feedbacks were vital to anticipating change in ecological systems because positive feedback increased the rate of transformation, while negative feedback decreased

 Systems logic 224 the rate of transformation. Thus, if you could model these feedbacks you could forecast and control landscape change.12 While McHarg gravitated to cybernetics for its ability to control ecosystem change, Lawrence Halprin was inspired by cybernetics’ inclusion of chance as a way of relinquishing control in the design process. Influenced by his wife, the dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin, as well as the emerging cybernetic art of the 1960s,13 Halprin developed “scores” as part of his design process with design professionals, students, and community members. Holding summer programmes for landscape architecture and architecture students, Halprin, in his own words, “wanted them to deal directly with structures in space and to experience the relationship of bodily movement as a major force in design. This was quite different from the usual visual importance they had been concentrating on in their architectural classes.”14 Scores entailed both the singular instructions for individuals and a set of master instructions (revealed to the participants at the conclusion of the workshop) that described the process. While Halprin devised the scores himself, the individual scores and the interactions created through enacting the scores were open to interpretation. According to the landscape designer Margot Lystra, “the open score foregrounded temporal uncertainty, thereby offering a significant departure from the traditional plan, section, and perspective drawings, which were spatially explicit and highly prescriptive.”15 Scores led to Halprin’s development of the RSVP cycles theory, with “S” standing for scores. Ann Komara notes, in RSVP “R” represents human and physical materials, motivations, and aims. “V” stands for Valuation or the analysis and resulting action or what Halprin would describe as the “feedback.” Lastly, “P” represents Performance, the result of the Scores and the style of the process, whether drawing, dance, or a structure made of driftwood.16 Why systems theory and cybernetics matter Systems theory and cybernetics are important to landscape architecture because they take into account process over time. While McHarg and Halprin championed cybernetics for divergent reasons, they both emphasized design process over the end result. Since cybernetics is an explanatory theory it has enabled them to validate their end results by documenting these processes as rationale for their design decisions. McHarg’s was inspired by the natural sciences and his design process sought objectivity in design decision-making, while Halprin’s process was inspired by dance and choreography, so he included people’s subjective feelings as well as his own experiences with natural systems as part of the design decision-making process. The philosopher Darrell Arnold has observed, “systems theory played a levelling role in the fundamental distinctions between humans and animals on one hand, and the organic and inorganic on the other.”17 Indeed, McHarg’s inclusion of the ecological sciences sought to bring the full breadth of natural systems at play on a site or region. For McHarg, natural systems, such as soil formation, had the same right to occupy a layer on his map overlay system as human systems, such as housing values.

Systems logic  225 Alternatively, Halprin’s approach attempted to equalize the role of the designer and non-designer in the design process. Systems theory and cybernetics in action Regenerative landscapes Developed by the landscape architect John T. Lyle, regenerative landscapes go beyond preserving or conserving natural systems to integrate and revive natural and human processes in a cyclical system. For Lyle, regenerative landscapes provided an alternative to linear, one-way systems. “Eventually a one-way system destroys the landscape in which it depends. The clock is always running and the flows always approaching the time when they can flow no more. In its very essence, this is a degenerative system, devolving its own source of sustenance.”18 5.3 Shanghai Houtan Park (2010) by Turenscape/ Kongjian Yu, image courtesy of Kongjian Yu, Shanghai, China

 Systems logic 226 Look at image of Shanghai Houtan Park by Turenscape. By the twenty-first century this 14-hectare alluvial plain along the Huangpu River had reached Lyle’s state of degeneration. The site had been home to a former steel factory and shipyard, and its water received a “water quality ranking of Lower Grade V, the worst on a scale of I–V, and is considered unsafe for swimming and recreating, and is devoid of aquatic life.”19 Turenscape regenerated the living biological and cultural systems of the site, including water filtration and treatment, flood management, habitat creation, food production, and education opportunities. Inspired by the agricultural terraces of China, a planted stepped landscape oxygenates the nutrientrich water, and absorbs suspended sediments and pollutants from the water – performing the natural functions of wetlands. These stepped terraces also accommodate the movement of people who can now reach the river’s edge.20 How is this park a regenerative landscape? If the park had been planted with Yu’s definition of “little feet,” from the Language chapter do you think it would still be considered regenerative? 5.4 Landscape Park in Riem (2005) by Latitude Nord, Munich (district of Riem), Germany

Systems logic  227 Deep forms In 1991 John Lyle wrote the widely read article, “Can Floating Seeds Make Deep Forms?”21 As Joan Hirschman Woodward notes, his question asks readers to think of landscape architecture as floating seeds that disperse, lodge, and sometimes take root, giving physical, designed expression to a particular time and place. If designs are inextricable from the pulse of the landscape processes, such as the flows and cycles of water, soil, wind, energy, and species, they may create deep form.22 Look at the image of Landscape Park in Riem (BUGA Park), formally the MunichRiem airport, by Latitude Nord. Thousands of planted trees take their diagonal formation from regional biophysical processes and cultural practices, such as farming, that also follow this direction. According to the landscape theorist Gina Crandell, By looking at maps of the hydrology and woodland composition of the region, the landscape architects discovered that the largest blocks of existing woodland, as well as the River Isar . . . are both oriented diagonally from the northeast to the southwest. The organization of vernacular field patterns and pathways that overlaid this geography left a similar diagonal imprint on the landscape before the airport was built. Even the primary runway for the former airport followed this direction.23 Cyborgs The term cyborg, or cybernetic organism, was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan S. Kline in the 1960s to describe astronauts that could operate in outer space. “The purpose of the Cyborg, as well as his own homeostatic systems, is to provide an organizational system in which such robot-like problems are taken care of automatically and unconsciously, leaving man free to explore, to create, to think, and to feel.”24 Decades later the feminist Donna J. Haraway introduced her own version of cyborgs.25 For Haraway, cyborgs were not freed from the physical environment or their own homeostatic systems. Rather Haraway’s cyborgs were emancipated from the dominant political and cultural constructs. A hybrid of human, animal, and machine, the cyborg was a “rhetorical strategy and a political method,”26 to critique mainstay feminist identity politics, which still relied on the language dualisms. According to Haraway, “These are the couplings which make Man and Woman so problematic, subverting the structure of desire, the force imagined to generate language and gender, and so subverting the structure and modes of reproduction of ‘Western’ identity, of nature and culture, of mirror and eye, slave and master, body and mind.”27 Similar to the post-structuralist theories discussed in the Language chapter, Haraway viewed these dualisms as instances of domination over women, minorities, animals, workers, and nature. How do you think the trees are like Lyle’s floating seeds?

 Systems logic 228 Cyborg theory marked the commencement of posthumanism, which critiqued traditional Western notions of the body, the self, technology, nature and the environment. The architect Ariane Lourie Harrison posits, Posthuman theory extends the cyborg metaphor beyond the body and into the built environment, imagining designed space itself as a prosthetic and producing new understandings of a “nature” that itself can no longer be conceived as an originary or neutral ground. Fields ranging from sociology to geography have explored the political implications of extending the human body into the environment through science and technology, fueling the debate over the status of nature.28 Indeed the idea that there were “no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism”29 influenced many fields, including landscape architecture. Meyer identified cyborgs as part of landscape architecture’s expanded field. According to Meyer, “the landscape cyborg – a hybrid of human and nonhuman natural processes, of the mechanical and the organic – can occupy the conceptual space between oppositional pairs such as man-made and natural, man and nature, engineering and natural process.”30 Creating robotic hybrids, the artist Gilberto Esparza invents small robotic creatures that thrive in urban and polluted environments by feeding off the energy inherent in these places. His Urban Parasite creatures are made from recycled electronic products. These small snail-like robots move across electric and tel5.5 Plant Nomad (2015) by Gilberto Esparza, “Cultivos” exhibition at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City, 2015–2016

Systems logic  229 ephone wires prevalent in many cities. Esparza’s Plant Nomads, self-sustaining phyto-bots that are machine–plant hybrids, combine animal and plant habits by seeking out water with twelve motorized legs. On-board microbial fuel cells (MFC) drive a current by using bacteria found in the contaminated water, which the plants that crown the top of the creature use and process. According to Esparza, a Plant Nomad “deals with the alienated transformation of this new hybrid species that fights for its survival in a deteriorated environment.”31 Look at the Plant Nomad for the “Cultivos” exhibition at the Laboratorio Arte Alameda in Mexico City. Actor-Network-Theory Initially developed to describe innovations in the sociology of science and technology, the Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) proposed a unique interpretation of networks. Advanced by Latour, as well as Michel Callon and John Law, ANT considers humans and non-humans (including things) as agents in a system. For Latour, sociology is, “best defined as the discipline where participants explicitly engage in the reassembling of the collective.”32 Like cyborgs, ANT is a posthuman theory and it is not a technical network like a train system, which Latour considers only partially an example of ANT. In other words, the Actors in ANT must have agency (the capacity to act) and inscribe the network. The Actor is “something that acts or to which activity is granted by others.”33 Latour argues that ANT overcomes “the tyranny of distance or proximity . . . The difficulty we have in defining all associations in terms of networks is due to the prevalence of geography.”34 ANT has been employed to analyse ecosystems management and the protection of the Stockholm National Urban Park system, while the photographer Andrew Langford has employed ANT theory in the production of his landscape photographs. In both these instances the scientist and the artist breaks down the divisions of humans, nature, and artefacts and considers their networked relations. As Langford notes, “objects and individuals are conceived as the assembled outcomes of networked relations, and spaces and things are, therefore, in a constant state of iteration and transformation through flows and forces of material, human elements and non-human phenomena.”35 Echoing Latour, the architect Anne Tietjen argues that Agency here does not designate an intentional activity, but the actor’s capacity to affect other actors . . . ANT thus directs landscape architects’ attention to the effects of interaction between human and non-human actors. It is the relations between physical structures and natural and socio-cultural processes and not the physical structures themselves we need to be interested in.36 Look at the image of LOLA Landscape Architects’ Ecological Energy Network, an ecological corridor connecting Landgoed Wielewaal and Wandelpark Eckart How is this piece a cyborg?

 Systems logic 230 in the Netherlands. According to LOLA Landscape Architects’ founder, Eric-Jan Pleijster, they combined the electrical infrastructure of the power grid with a linear ecological and cultural landscape. The land underneath the lines (spanning over 1,000 hectares) is designed to accommodate wetlands, plant material, as well as access routes for humans and other animals as an integrated network. The relationship between habitats for humans and non-humans and the immediate needs provided by landscape and the distant needs accommodated by the power line and wetland channels demonstrate how LOLA’s network exploits the tyranny of distance and proximity.37 Systems theory and cybernetics debated Most system-based theories are explanatory in that they describe why something is the way it is. While they are very useful in the analysis phase of design or in assessing design, their role regarding design is firmly tied to documenting this process. While the methods, such as the map overlay system advanced 5.6 Ecological Energy Network (2012) by LOLA Landscape Architects, image courtesy of LOLA Landscape Architects, the Netherlands Do you see how the animals, humans, and non-human phenomena will inscribe the network designed? Do you see how they have agency?

Systems logic  231 by McHarg, influenced a generation of landscape architects to consider design in relationship to natural systems, these methods also reinforced the idea that by adhering to the rules of a system, you would develop an appropriate design response. As Marc Treib has observed, The McHargian view was focused to the point of being exclusive, confusing and conflating two rather different arenas of landscape intervention. To be sure it would be fatuous, if not dangerous, to manage a region without thorough analytical investigation; viable design begins with the study of the natural parameters. But the planning process rarely requires the active form-making and innovation that is central to landscape architecture . . . McHarg’s method insinuated that if the process were correct, the consequent form would be good, almost as if objective study automatically gave rise to the appropriate aesthetic.38 Likewise, the actual participatory contributions of Halprin’s RSVP cycles have also been questioned. The historian Alison B. Hirsch argues that Halprin’s design process was not as participatory as he suggested. Halprin typically designed the scores himself, and, according to Hirsch, during workshops he often ignored the ideas of participants when they differed from his own ideas.39 ANT, in particular, has been criticized. According to Sandra Harding, a philosopher, ANT has been blind to social circumstances, which are conditioned by gender, race, class, and the impacts of postcolonialism. By ignoring these aspects of the social and the political regimes that shape them, ANT is unqualified to promote social justice through changes in policy.40 This point also resonates with the way network systems are frequently described by designers. For example, in Architecture in the Space of Flows (2012) there is a lack of acknowledgment of these very circumstances observed by Harding. Regarding global trade flows, the authors state, “The widespread nodes of the informal economy emerge in a period of transition towards globally oriented market economies, in which the state’s role is more and more confined by optimizing the flows of provisional arrangements.”41 Informal economies involve workers who are not regulated or protected by unions or an established state. Likewise, these flows might entail tankers filled with oil, and the state’s goal in optimizing their flow might result in serious repercussions. Yet, the conceptualization of global, economic trade as simply a network of flows does not prompt these questions. For the cultural theorist David M. Berry this has been the poverty of networks modelled on system theory. “For, of course, our models, whether network-based or otherwise, are simplifications of the world. The network is not ontological, it is analytical, and as such it is restricted in how much it can tell us and how useful it can be.”42 Primary reading systems theory and cybernetics Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Eugene Odum, Fundamentals of ecology. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications.

 Systems logic 232 Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics, or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF INFRASTRUCTURE The world beneath Manhattan is a cake of endless layers, a foundation as deep as the Chrysler building is high. On the top lies a three-inch strip of asphalt. Next comes almost ten inches of coarse concrete. After that, soil, a nasty soil that soaks up chemicals from the street. In another inch or three come the wires – telephone and electric, streetlight and fire alarm, and the newest addition, cable TV – all buried in casings and kept close to the curbs. Gas lines puff away another foot below; water mains gurgle four feet under; steam pipes are buried six feet deep. Every sewer pipe is different (they’re installed at an angle so that sewage is always flowing down), but they’re generally above the vaults of the subways, which vary in depth from a few dozen inches (the Lexington Avenue line) to eighteen stories below (191st Street on the Broadway local). Water tunnels – running 200–800 feet deep – mark the farthest man-built depths.43 (Henry Granick, Underneath New York, 1947) Infrastructure is the network of physical and bio-physical systems that facilitate the necessary operations of daily life. In general, infrastructure moves something from one location to another. It can be the movement of data in a digital infrastructure, the movement of sewage in a city’s network of sewage pipes, or the globally distributed system of standardized shipping containers that move everything from food, to commodities, to extracted resources by ships, trains, and trucks. Historically, the movement of water has been passive, such as the gravity-fed aqueducts built by the Romans to transport water to the city of Rome, and mechanized, such as the Machine de Marly that attempted to pump water up to the fountains at the Gardens of Versailles. Landscape architects have often engaged themselves with infrastructural projects that combine natural systems, technological systems, and their aesthetic appreciation. The landscape historian Michael Lee, for example, has studied the nineteenth-century infrastructure works of Peter Josef Lenné (1789– 1866) whose landscapes addressed the early industrial land uses of Germany. Lenné’s plans for Landwehrkanal, a 10.7-kilometer-long shipping canal running parallel to the Spree River in Berlin, inverted traditional planning practices based on building locations. Instead his plans were guided by open spaces to be preserved and enhanced. According to Lee, “Lenné’s design for the Landwehrkanal was an innovative attempt to transpose Prussia’s water infrastructure technology into an urban setting as the basis for a new metropolitan configuration.”44 It also demonstrated the incorporation of economic, social, and aesthetic uses within this infrastructural project by incorporating a series of tree-line allées corresponding with different segments of the new canal.

Systems logic  233 The work of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted foregrounded the idea of landscape as infrastructure. His 1870s plan for the Back Bay Fens project in Boston was part of the Emerald Necklace, a 445-hectare chain of treelined walkways, parks, and waterways planned with Charles Elliot. The Fens site was heavily polluted from upstream waterways that met the salt marshes of the Charles River (before it was dammed). The newly designed marshes were planted with sedges, rushes, and salt grasses that filtered the water and reduced odours. By integrating the watercourses and planted marshes, Olmsted was creating an early version of green infrastructure. While this type of infrastructure work continued in park systems and other traditional landscape architecture projects, most twentieth-century infrastructure projects were dominated by engineering solutions that replaced human labour with technological systems, which in turn separated different infrastructural needs. The architect Gary Strang, in his article, “Infrastructure as Landscape,” observed that North America had witnessed “a fundamental, systemic change as energy formerly produced by human labor was being generated or collected in remote areas and carried into the city from the surrounding region.”45 Piped rivers, sewer lines, electric poles were isolated from each other and their environment, and were often concealed or camouflaged from public view. Moreover, Strang argued that “Designers have most often been charged with hiding, screening and cosmetically mitigating infrastructure, in order to maintain the image of the untouched natural surrounding of an earlier era . . . They are rarely asked to consider infrastructure as an opportunity, as a fundamental component of urban and regional form.”46 Strang called for the creation of thick and biologically complex landscapes that harnessed infrastructure and celebrated its collective power; thus, linking the natural, technological, and cultural dimensions of infrastructure. Why infrastructure matters One of the most sustained advocates of landscape as infrastructure has been the landscape architect Pierre Bélanger. He argues that given the deleterious state of most twentieth-century infrastructure projects – crumbling roads and bridges, defunct airports and factories, polluted harbours, leaking dams, toxic legacies of military–industrial uses, and choked landfills – it is essential that landscape architects reconceive these systems. Bélanger contends, “Once the sole purview of the profession of civil engineering, infrastructure – which includes the management of water, waste, food, transport, and energy – is taking on extreme relevance for landscape planning and design practices in the context of the changing, decentralizing structures of urban–regional economies.”47 In his redefinition of landscape as infrastructure Bélanger proposes a circulating infrastructural organization to deal with the waste created as a by-product of urban systems. For Bélanger, “Wasting is natural: there is a built-in process to the patterns of urbanization and modes of production that has and always will generate waste . . . The construction of urban ecologies and reclamation of

 Systems logic 234 biophysical processes provide much greater flexibility and adaptive potential than the infrastructural undertakings of a previous era.”48 Infrastructural landscapes are also important for the challenges they present designers. These landscapes are often managed and controlled by numerous regulating authorities, insurance companies, private corporations, and community groups. This managerial complexity coupled with the myriad of professional consultants required to realize a built landscape as infrastructure can pose challenges. Furthermore, innovative projects can be halted – not because of a lack of knowledge and technical ability but by the inability of professionals to give up territory and negotiate the problems encountered when defying the status quo. Infrastructure in action Engineering infrastructure According to landscape theorist Ian Hamilton Thompson, Landscape architects have become interested in infrastructure in two ways, and though these may be linked both theoretically and in practice it’s worth considering them separately. The first mode of practice is associated with infrastructure’s origins in transport engineering. The second involves the conceptual shift that opens up meaningful discussion of “green infrastructure,” posited on the idea that networks of ecosystems provide essential services such as clean air and water and healthy soils.49 5.7 Madrid Rio (2011) by West 8 in collaboration with MRIO Arquitectos, Madrid, Spain

Systems logic  235 Look at the image of Madrid Rio, by West 8 in collaboration with MRIO Arquitectos, in Madrid, Spain. A 6-kilometer-long portion of the main motorway was located below grade and covered with an extensive park system comprising a total area of 80,000 square meters of promenades, small parks, 17 playgrounds, water features, and bridges. By hiding the vehicular infrastructure with a park, the designers were able to reunite the people of Madrid with the River Manzanares, which had been previously severed by the four-lane motorway. Robert Thayer in his book Gray World, Green Heart (1994) questioned strategies of concealment and camouflage. Thayer maintained, “The guilt people feel over the predominance of technology in their lives is most easily revealed by the concealment of technological features by trees, fences, walls, earthforms.”50 He argued that by camouflaging infrastructure that might be detrimental to the environment, you maintain the illusion that you as an individual are neither part of nor responsible for that infrastructure and its consequences.51 Green infrastructure Green infrastructure employs natural elements as an infrastructure to manage water, habitats, and other natural processes as part of the design. Green infrastructure can be witnessed at multiple scales, from the use of planted roofs to absorb water run-off from a building to the regional scale with corridors and patches that facilitate the movement of water and animals. While the first green infrastructure projects were created in parks and rooftops, they are now integrated into neighbourhoods. Look at the diagrams for Washington Canal Park by OLIN. Constructed on three city blocks, which formerly served as a parking lot, the green infrastructure system collects stormwater from not only the park and the park’s pavilions, but also buildings bordering the park. The captured water is cleansed using cisterns and plants in the park and then used for site irrigation, building use, and the park’s fountains. Because of the expansive scope of this green infrastructural system, the park is able to save approximately three million gallons of potable water per year.52 The consumption and burning of fuel by vehicles contribute to air pollution. Given that Madrid Rio provides much-needed recreation spaces for Madrid residents, do you think that in some instances camouflage is OK? How did OLIN’s design response make residents living near the park aware of where the water in the fountains and irrigation was coming from?

5.8 Washington Canal Park (2012) by OLIN, image courtesy of OLIN, Washington, DC, USA

Systems logic  237 Instrumentalism Echoing the concerns raised by Strang, Richard Weller has argued, “A pastoral modernity holds sway in the public imagination, and thus landscape remains popularly defined as the absence of infrastructure.”53 In other words, not only does the public rarely think of landscape as an infrastructure, but also they don’t expect to see infrastructure in a landscape. To remedy this situation Weller proposes that landscape architecture should be the “art of instrumentality, or better still, an ecological art of instrumentality.”54 Instrumentalism is a facet of the pragmatic philosophy primarily associated with Dewey and James (and discussed in the Introduction), which posits that theories should be goal-directed instruments. “For James and Dewey, this holds of all our concepts and theories: we treat them as instruments, as artefacts to be judged by how well they achieve their intended purpose. The content of a theory or concept is determined by what we should do with it.”55 In Art as Experience, Dewey wrote “when things are defined as instruments, their value and validity reside in what proceeds from them; consequences not antecedents supply meaning and verity.”56 In On Landscapes, I described the instrumental imagination, which is strategic because it can enable things in the world, once considered undesirable, to become valuable. Consider, billboards, large-scale signs advertising everything from beer to vacation homes. They are usually seen from freeways, highways and streets, and they are often deemed “eyesores,” elements that detract from the landscape. Look at the diagram for a billboard in the Bujama District of Lima, Peru. Engineers from Peru’s University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) have reconceived billboards as both water filtration devices and water producers. Their first prototype, which takes water from air, exploits Lima’s geography and basic physics, which transform the state of matter from a gas phase into liquid phase. Perched upon bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Lima is the world’s 5.9 Water generating billboard (2013) by UTEC, Lima, Peru condenser air air filter air filter air carbon filter water faucet

 Systems logic 238 second largest desert city and the people living in Lima struggle to obtain water for basic needs. At the same time, there is plenty of water in the air, with humidity levels reaching more than 90 percent on summer days. The billboard advertises the engineering school, but it also serves as a condenser, a device or unit used to condense vapour into liquid. Like the condensation that occurs on your glass of cold lemonade on a warm summer day, the billboard contains five condensers that are cooler than the ambient air. When air contacts the cooled surfaces of the condensers in the billboard, the air cools, and the water vapour condenses into liquid water. “After reverse-osmosis purification, the water flows down into a 20-liter storage tank at the base of the billboard. The billboard generates about 96 liters of water each day, and a simple faucet gives local residents access to the water.”57 Landscape urbanism In her book The Granite Garden (1984), the landscape architect Anne Whiston Spirn revealed that the urban environment was not separate from natural systems; rather cities were teeming with plants and animal life, hydrological and geological systems, and the movement of air. For Spirn, “The city must be recognized as part of nature and designed accordingly.”58 Along similar lines, Charles Waldheim coined the term “landscape urbanism” in the 1990s. According to Waldheim, “landscape urbanism can be read as a disciplinary realignment in which landscape supplants architecture’s historical role as the basic building block of urban design.”59 Waldheim’s theory, combined with the fact that by the 1990s the impacts of climate change, collapsed rustbelt economies, and crumbling infrastructure were undeniable facts, attracted numerous followers in both architecture and landscape architecture, including James Corner, Linda Pollack, Pierre Bélanger, Stan Allen, and Chris Reed. Corner declared four provisional themes defining landscape urbanism: (1) the conception of landscape as processes over time instead of static forms, (2) the staging of surfaces, with surface alluding to urban infrastructure, which “create an environment that is not so much an object that has been ‘designed’ as it is an ecology of various systems and elements that set in motion a diverse network of interaction,”60 (3) the operational or working method for representing “urban geographies that function across a range of scales and implicate a host of players,”61 (4) and the imaginary, which he feels was impoverished in previous planning traditions. Some of the earliest expressions of landscape urbanism can be seen in the 1999 competition for Toronto’s Downsview Park, a 231.5-hectare defunct Do you think that, given the instrumentality of this billboard, it is no longer an eyesore? The billboards tend to be placed along highways, but is that the best place for water collection?

Systems logic  239 military air base (won by Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau); the Freshkills Competition on Staten Island in 2001 (won by James Corner Field Operations), and the High Line competition in Manhattan in 2004 (won by James Corner Field Operations, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Piet Oudolf). The overriding leitmotifs generated by these competitions involved numerous analyses of ecological systems and cultural practices, elaborate and often beautiful diagrams of these processes, and the emphasis on strategy, over designed forms. For Waldheim, landscape urbanism provided the answer to postmodern architecture’s new urbanism movement. In the wake of the social and environmental disasters of industrialization, postmodern architecture retreated to the comforting forms of nostalgia and seemingly stable, secure, and more permanent forms of urban arrangement. Citing European precedents for traditional form, postmodern architects practiced a kind of preemptive cultural regression, designing individual buildings to invoke an absent context, as if neighborly architectural character could contravene a century of industrial economy.62 Look at the image of Bass River Park, in West Dennis, Massachusetts, by Stoss Landscape Urbanism. The site’s salt marsh had been filled, adversely affecting its ability to filter out nutrients and provide habitat. Stoss Landscape Urbanism’s approach involved both short- and long-term tactics. According to Stoss, The strategy looks to establish a varied landscape field – an earthen carpet of hillocks – that supports short- and long-term competition among four vegetal communities characteristic of the region: red cedar meadow, sand plain, wet 5.10 Changing park ecologies at the Bass River Park by Stoss Landscape Urbanism, image courtesy of Stoss Landscape Urbanism, West Dennis, Massachusetts, USA

 Systems logic 240 meadow, and salt marsh. Long-term environmental changes, short-term disturbances, and even use or maintenance practices can subtly or radically shift the balance among vegetal types, allowing one or another community to establish predominance – if only temporarily.63 The site also includes boardwalks and other structures for people as well. Infrastructure debated The biggest controversy regarding infrastructure has been over its theories – particularly landscape urbanism. Landscape urbanists often promoted their cause by critiquing new urbanism. For example, they condemned “new urbanists” for using the neighbourhood as the building block for city-making, and privileging density and walkability over ecological systems as the key measures of a sustainable urbanism. They also critiqued the new urbanists’ preoccupation with form and their reliance on patterns of urban development recycled from older European cities. The new urbanists countered the criticism, producing Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City (2013). The professors Kristina Hill and Larissa Larsen provide the most lucid description of some of the shortcomings regarding both camps. They explained: New Urbanism has tended to make moral arguments that build on the perceived evils of sprawl, adding functional arguments supported by less than complete evidence (for the pedestrian – friendliness of their formal strategies, for example). Landscape Urbanism has claimed authority from landscape ecology, but its proponents are generally more fascinated with science as a source of unresolvable indeterminacies, rather than the progressive construction of theory via hypothesis-testing that would be familiar to most actual scientists.64 The way the two “isms” visually and verbally describe their work is also distinct. While new urbanists usually provide representations depicting the human-scaled dimensions of their design projects, landscape urbanists gravitate towards the sciences with stunningly beautiful matrixes, diagrams, and maps of ecological systems, albeit the science behind this ecology is probably something you learned in Grade 7. Hamilton praised landscape urbanism for its intention to improve ecological environments; yet, he also pointed out the recurrence of “dubious philosophy, unhelpful imagery and obscurantist language that Landscape Urbanism ought to dump.”65 Indeed, a persistent critique levelled in What role do you think the hillocks and the found vegetal communities play in setting “in motion a diverse network of interaction”? Which community do you think will dominate?

Systems logic  241 Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents and other critiques, concerns the often elliptical, dense, military speak used to describe landscape urbanism. Hill and Larsen find that landscape urbanists, “generally engage in a tautological style of debate that is impenetrable,” meaning they unnecessarily repeat the same ideas and terms to describe their theory. Hill and Larsen speculate that, “The characteristics of flexibility, open-endedness, and indeterminacy can be used to avoid specific answers.”66 Interestingly, most of the built projects deemed exemplary of landscape urbanism or new urbanism are not particularly urban. How is Freshkills, located on Staten Island and the suburban fringes of New York City, an example of landscape urbanism? The park’s connections to the city are primarily marked through past events – as a former landfill and as a recipient of debris from the 911 attacks. How does the Lifescape strategy for the park connect with future urban processes? Size aside, how is it different from other landfill reclamation projects? Many new urbanist housing projects, while walkable within the housing development itself, are located in the outer suburbs on green fields with unrealized transit connections. Worse yet, some are gated, further distancing their relationship to the city or other issues that are a part of urbanity. Regarding sprawl, the urban historian Dolores Hayden posits that the emphasis on new building construction, rather than the rehabilitation of existing neighbourhoods, jeopardizes the renovation of existing suburbs.67 Indeed these movements did not anticipate, nor have they addressed, the social and economic challenges faced by cities as predicted by Lefebvre, who complained bitterly that he was being ‘‘pushed out’’ of his Paris apartment as the city was being developed and “museumfied” for touristic development.68 Hill and Larsen propose an Adapted Urbanism or Equitable Urbanism, which addresses climate change, infrastructure, and the health and well-being of the most vulnerable members of society. This is a promising idea given that researchers in the health sciences are increasingly concerned with the way physical environments shape human health. Primary reading for infrastructure Pierre Bélanger, “Landscape as Infrastructure.” James Corner, “Terra Fluxus.” Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design. Gary Strang, “Infrastructure as Landscape.” Charles Waldheim, “Landscape Urbanism: A Genealogy.” THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS OF ALEATORY SYSTEMS This method of work with whatever comes into the patient’s head when he submits to psychoanalytic treatment, is not the only technical means at our disposal for the widening of consciousness. Two other methods of procedure serve the same purpose, the interpretation of his dreams and the evaluation of acts which he bungles or does without intending to.69 (Sigmund Freud, “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis,” 1910)