Landscape Theory In Design

 Systems logic 242 This is Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, explaining some of the key clinical techniques he employed to help root out the psychological problems and repressed feelings of his patients. Freud thought that these methods (spontaneous thoughts, dream interpretations, and Freudian slips) would reveal your subconscious thoughts, which could then be analysed. Freud’s work influenced the surrealists who set out to develop aleatory approaches to writing, poetry, painting, printmaking, and other art forms. Aleatory refers to the systematic integration of spontaneity, chance, and randomness into the design process. In 1917 the poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) coined the term surrealism to describe the ballet Parade, which involved the unlikely collaboration between Pablo Picasso, the composer Erik Satie, the playwright Jean Cocteau, and the choreographer Léonide Massine. Parade was notable for its inclusion of cubist-inspired costumes and jarring sounds made with sirens, typewriters, and airplane propellers that produced what Apollinaire called, “une sorte de sur-réalisme” of modern life.70 Surrealism was later organized as a movement by the dadaist poet André Breton, whose enthusiasm for tapping the unconsciousness came about after using Freud’s methods with patients at a neuropsychiatric centre in Saint-Dizier during the First World War.71 Declaring, “I resolved to obtain for myself what one seeks to obtain from patients, namely a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over which the subject’s critical faculty has no control,”72 Breton defined one of surrealism’s chief features, automatism, or the spontaneous open-ended method of producing words, images, sounds, etc. In addition to these aleatory methods, the surrealists also invented specific parlour games, such as the exquisite corpse. 73 The chief goal of surrealism, according to Breton, was to “bring about the state where the distinction between subjective and the objective loses its necessity.”74 Surrealists critiqued dada artists for losing their spontaneity, but the movement’s criticisms also extended to larger issues concerning mimesis in art, the false hope of rational thought and positivism, and (once again) dualisms in society. Regarding mimesis, Breton argued, “The mistake lies in thinking that the model can only be taken from the exterior world,”75 while the interior, subconscious world lay untapped. Breton charged, “We are still living under the reign of logic . . . It is apparently by pure chance that a part of our mental world, which we pretend not to be concerned with any longer, – and, in my opinion by far the most important part – has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud.”76 Like other theories in this book (the posthuman theory of cyborgs, for example) the surrealists challenged dualist reasoning and binary thinking. Breton quipped, “Everything leads us to believe there exists a certain point in the mind in which life and death, reality and imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low are to be perceived as contradictions.”77 Surrealist methods, in fact, sought to blur perceived distinctions. According to the philosopher Susan Buck-Morss, surrealists did not look

Systems logic  243 to folk culture for inspiration, or as with neoclassicism, tacking the symbols of ancient myths onto present forms, they viewed the constantly changing new nature of the urban–industrial landscape as itself marvelous and mythic. Their muses, as transitory as spring fashions, were stars of the stage and screen, billboard advertisements, and illustrated magazines.78 Surrealism influenced numerous avant-garde movements during the twentieth century in Europe and in North America. In particular, it inspired the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) who thought surrealist shock tactics would provide a counter to capitalism and to bourgeois culture’s adoration of the fetishized commodity. In fact, he concluded in his essay, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” claiming that surrealism was the only movement to fulfil the directives of the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (Communist Manifesto), the 1848 pamphlet on society and politics by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.79 The surrealist’s system of collage and typographical manipulation also inspired the Situationist International (SI). One of SI’s initial aims was to counter the very premises of functionalism in modern urbanism in the post-Second World War era,80 a critique similarly shared with Henri Lefebvre and discussed in the Spatial Practices chapter. For the art historian Tom McDonough, “Extravagance, gratuitousness, and disorientation became their watch words, posed against the increasing hegemony of post-war functionalist architecture, which had triumphed as France desperately tried to address the crisis posed by the four million families displaced during the Second World War.”81 The SI spokesperson Guy Debord (1931–1994) thought “contemporary architecture and urbanism were nothing less than the logic of alienation and reification writ in stone, the capitalist refashioning of space into its own décor.”82 Debord countered this urbanism by developing the concept of psychogeography, which is the study of the effects of the environment on the psychological states and behaviour of people. A popular technique used in psychogeography was the dérive – an unplanned drifting of people through the urban landscape, which was later mapped. Dérives were typically “one day, in the interval of time contained between two periods of sleep,”83 and usually conducted in small groups. For the philosopher Sadie Plant, “to dérive was to notice the way in which certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed.”84 Linking surrealist methods of revealing the unconscious workings of the mind with people’s movement in the city, Debord hypothesized that future cities would be designed for dérives.85 Why aleatory systems matter Since surrealists often addressed the everyday – what is taken for the ordinary in life – their methods are well suited for landscapes. Fernando Magallanes, a landscape architect and professor, explained that some early surrealist explorations

 Systems logic 244 addressed the landscape as a “metaphorical, poetic, and inspirational vehicle for surrealist ends.”86 He described how the surrealist poet Louis Aragon’s unplanned trip to the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in Paris revealed it as a site filled with abstract fictive possibilities and more concrete visible objects, such as oddly placed Greek follies, engineered bridges, and reconfigured artificial landscapes containing magical and psychoanalytical meanings. The animist qualities found in the park objects, the deaths produced from numerous suicide jumps off a bridge in the park, and its tormented quarried past were magical to the writers in the reconfiguring of a surreal place.”87 The surrealists’ aleatory methods are also important to the design process as they were developed to “bypass the circuits of knowledge and to uncover the unconscious life which rationality obscured.”88 In this way their methods can tap intuitive ideas that you may not be consciously aware of. They can also help you start the design process. Christophe Girot incorporates a dériveinspired approach to his first encounter with a site in his widely read essay, “Four Trace Concepts in Landscape Architecture.” He advises landscape architects to start the design process with landing, where “intuitions and impression prevail . . . During landing, nothing is allowed to remain obvious or neutral to the designer; rather everything is apprehended with wonderment and curiosity, with subjective and interpretive eyes.”89 After landing, sometimes designers will create a site impression, a collaged image that captures the Landing encounter. As you will read in Diagramming systems in the final section in this chapter, montages and collages leave room for the imagination by viewers. Moreover, these modes of visualization can also be part of the image-making in your own design process. Corner argued, “As the Surrealists have already shown the power of a physically inhabited and synaesthetic realm can re-enchant the ordinary and make the world magic once again. The tactics of appropriation, collage, abstraction, imaginative projection, and so on are strategies used to prompt free association, providing liberatory mechanisms of construal.”90 Thus, these methods not only open up new ideas in the reception of landscapes, but also in the designer. For example, during my design process for the Hip Hop garden, I collaged historic images of Elsie Reford with contemporary images of plant material that led to plant muses. In this way, aleatory systems are both the means to design and its end. Aleatory systems in action Collage With the publication of his novel, The Hundred Headless Woman: La Femme 100 Têtes (1929),91 the surrealist artist Max Ernst made famous the practice of collage. Ernst initially considered himself a dadaist, but inspired by Freud’s psychoanalytic work, the oneiric (dream-like) qualities of Giorgio de Chirico’s

Systems logic  245 paintings, and the odd assortment of images he found in the advertisements of an illustrated catalogue, Ernst sought to make collage the lifeblood of surrealism.92 While other artists, such as cubists, had used collage, Ernst’s collages referred to his own unconscious, dream life. As his biographer, Evan M. Mauer, observed, “Freud’s discussions of the hidden structures and symbolic meanings of dream-work provided Ernst with the methodological approach of his collage novels and related works of the 1920s and 30s. The analyst’s explanation of dreams as a condensed sequence of symbolic images was essential to the artist’s serial arrangement of collages to represent the dream process.”93 Indeed, the 147 dream-like collages assembled in The Hundred Headless Woman: La Femme 100 Têtes reinforce this idea. Assembled while Ernst was ill and confined to bed, the images were taken from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century magazines and journals. The novel is self-referential; as a child the day Ernst’s pet bird died his sister was born; thus, Ernst’s alter personality (the bird-like human, Loplop) and women provide reoccurring images in the book. Ernst also employed word play, another surrealist tactic. Cent (100), spoken in French, sounds like sans, so the woman is (sans) without a head, and she is also the appellation, “perturbation,” because Ernst was perturbed to learn of the death of his bird and the birth of his sister at the same time.94 Moreover, Ernst repeated compositional structures and differently scaled images, a technique that he thought “reinforces the viewer’s visual memory” and the distorted quality of dreams.95 Also, like a dream, time references are not linear in The Hundred Headless Woman. Ancient Greek goddesses share the same graphic plane as figures contemporary to Ernst’s times. Assessing Ernst’s oeuvre, Mauer concluded, “Throughout his career Ernst sought to increase the visual faculties of both artists and viewers by utilizing elements of chance and techniques of visual automatism to liberate the creative imagination and stimulate 5.11 Hortus Medicus by GROSS. MAX, image courtesy of GROSS. MAX

 Systems logic 246 the process of free association.”96 To be sure this influence can be found in the collages of GROSS.MAX. Look at the collage, Hortus Medicus, by GROSS.MAX Landscape Architects in Edinburgh. As the landscape architecture professor Brett Milligan observed, “They read as open visual text with space for contingency and possibility . . . a reproductive agency that flirts with the reader’s imagination . . . They index themselves as lingering imagined fantasies that reveal notions of what might be, while acknowledging a propositional future that doesn’t yet exist.”97 Displacement In addition to automatism and the oneiric quality of Ernst’s collages, systematic displacement was also promoted “to reveal the latent or unobserved magic of common elements by placing them in an unexpected context.”98 For Ernst, displacement involved, “the fortuitous encounters of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane.”99 Olin described Harlequin Plaza by George Hargreaves as a landscape of displacement. Olin noted that the materials of the plaza can be found in traditional nineteenth-century parks. However, What is new and different (and unsettling to many) is the compositional methods and devices employed. The composition is indebted to strategies developed in painting, especially surrealism. This is a landscape of displacement, distortion, and dislocation. The floor, or pavement, which we usually expect to be a fairly neutral ground quietly holding everything into place, is not only a brightly contrasting and active surface, but its orthogonal patterns are skewed and begin 5.12 Harlequin Plaza by Hargreaves Associates, image courtesy of Hargreaves Associates, Englewood, Colorado, USA What have they done to make this image dream-like?

Systems logic  247 to writhe under the comparatively weightless objects that break and interrupt it more than sit upon it. Walls rise and fall, or are pulled apart, the outsides of which are harsh. Inside between two central walls, things are small, fragile, oddly domestic, and out of place . . . It stimulates and disturbs. It pleases and teases.100 Look at the image of Harlequin Plaza, located in the sleepy suburban town of Englewood, Colorado. The plaza’s asymmetrical black-and-white polished terrazzo, diamond-patterned courtyard, and coloured walls certainly provided a contrast to its context, and its merits were hotly debated amongst landscape architects. However, the owner of the two office towers and plaza complex, John Madden, marvelled at the design. He claimed that Hargreaves had “the concept for the piazza on a matchbook cover.”101 Unfortunately, when Madden sold Harlequin Plaza 15 years later, the new owners removed the plaza due to leaks in the underground parking. Madden confessed, “It was a phenomenal thing Hargreaves had done on a matchbook cover. To me, it was like someone had taken the Gettysburg Address and thrown it out the window.”102 Interestingly, the new plaza was redesigned by EDAW with earth-tone colours, annual displays of flowers, plantings and trees to match its surroundings and provide shade. Transformed objects Objects occupy a special place in the aleatory methods of surrealism, and these include found objects, readymades, perturbed (deformed) objects, natural objects, and transformed objects. According to the surrealist artist Conroy Maddox, “These objects reflect a universe brought back to life. Obeying only the laws of chance or psychic necessity, they establish a kind of canon of the unexpected, lending coherence to a dream world which identifies itself with a new and exciting poetic experience.”103 The landscape architects Jacky Bowring and Simon Swaffield, describing post-disaster landscapes, note that found objects or objets trouvés can function as potent artefacts as they “bear witness to past events.”104 They refer to Ishinomaki, Japan, where a giant can advertising whale meat had been washed up onto the roadway by the tsunami in 2011. “Recognizing its potency as – a ready-made – the can was left in the middle of the road and traffic diverted around it.”105 Transformed objects can also involve the chance juxtapositions of unlikely objects to produce new objects and negate former uses.106 This strategy was developed in homage to the poet Comte de Lautréamont’s phrase, “Beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table” in his poetic novel, Les chants de Maldoror (1869). For many of the surrealist artists, “the sewing machine and umbrella represent seemingly incompatible Do you think there are situations where dislocation heightens recognition of the context?

 Systems logic 248 objects reassembled to form a surprising new image.”107 Transformed objects could be sculpture assembled from found objects or readymades, or utilitarian objects brought together, but, as a rule, they should be unrelated in daily life. According to the historian George Basalla, “First, a utilitarian object is altered so that it loses its primary useful function. If that function is not entirely lost, then it is at least severely impaired. Second, in the process of being transformed, the useful artifact takes on a new function that is symbolic, aesthetic, or educational. Third, the form of the object remains essentially unchanged.”108 The goal of the transformed object is to produce the marvellous. In surrealism, the marvellous represents the unconsciousness and, equally important, the freedom of an object to be no longer tethered to the uses demanded by the culture that made it.109 Look at Blue Tree by Claude Cormier, created for the Cornerstone Festival of Gardens in California. The site Cormier was given for the festival contained a large tree – and it was dying. Cormier wished to remove it, but the festival organizers would not allow him to cut it down. Playing with Photoshop and an 5.13 Blue Tree by Claude Cormier + Associés, image courtesy of Geneviève L’Heureux, Cornerstone Festival of Gardens, Sonoma, California, USA

Systems logic  249 image of his garden site, Cormier began covering the image of the tree with blue paint balls. This led him to drape the tree with 70,000 blue balls that he created by bringing together two unlikely objects, a blue Christmas tree ornament and a ping-pong ball. Détournement The critical method of détournement began with the Letterist International movement, and was later embraced as a key signature of SI. According to Guy Debord, “the fundamental laws of détournement are the loss of importance of each détourned autonomous element – which may go so far as to lose its original sense completely – and at the same time the organization of another meaningful ensemble that confers on each element its new scope and effect.”110 Debord and the artist Gil J. Wolman proposed two types of détourned elements, minor and major. “Minor détournement is the détournement of an element which has no importance in itself and which thus draws all its meaning from the new Can you see how Cormier’s approach involves a transformed object? He has certainly negated the function of the ping-pong ball, but what about the Christmas decoration? 5.14 Would you describe Blue Tree as marvellous in surrealist terms? International Garden Festival, Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens, Jardin de la Connaissance (2010) by 100 Landschaftsarchitektur – Thilo Folkerts – Rodney LaTourelle, image courtesy of Louise Tanguay, Jardins de Métis/ Reford Gardens, Grand-Métis, Quebec, Canada

 Systems logic 250 context in which it has been placed.”111 Minor détournement could involve remixing messages from mass media, for example. A major détournement manipulates something of high ideological value, such as political or religious text. An instrumental dimension of détournement is its subversive intent. For Debord, “Détournement is thus first of all a negation of the value of the previous organization of expression.”112 SI was both a political and an art movement, and it was through the tactics of détournement in film, painting, advertisement, and other visual images that they sought to undermine the power and authority of late capitalism. While early SI examples of détournement clearly borrowed from surrealist collage, the aleatory or open-ended methods of this practice became increasingly less concerned with the subconscious, and much more directed to the conscious, critical mind. Look at the image of Jardin de la Connaissance by Thilo Folkerts of 100 Landschaftsarchitektur and Canadian artist Rodney LaTourelle. Created for the Les Jardin de Métis International Garden Festival in Quebec, the designers détourned approximately 40,000 books by assembling them outdoors to create rooms and seating. Mushrooms and mosses were applied to accelerate their natural détournement as the books decomposed back into the forest from where their paper first originated. According to the designers, “Seedlings and insects have activated the walls, carpets and benches. Mushrooms – those cultivated and those who have come by themselves – have made the garden their home. Many of the originally bright colours of the books have faded. Culture is fading back into nature.”113 Aleatory systems debated Surrealism attracted female artists and it helped expand the subject matter of their investigations more than any other modern art movement.114 However, feminist scholars have critiqued the sexist stereotyping of women in many examples of surrealist art, and their role as “an object” to be cut up, fragmented, and collaged. In Surréalisme et sexualité (1971) the feminist Xavière Gauthier posited that the surrealist woman is a purely male invention.115 Mary Ann Caws, the literary critic, furthered, that the surrealist woman is, “Headless. And also footless. Often armless too; and always unarmed, except with poetry and passion. There they are, the surrealist women so shot and painted, so stressed and dismembered, punctured and severed: is it any wonder she has (we have) gone to pieces?”116 Yet the historian Whitney Chadwick has showed that female surrealists disregarded these early objectifications of women, and instead helped pave a path to work that “gave new artistic form to some of the conflicts confronting women in the Do you think the types of book left to rot in the garden make a difference? If the designers used religious books or political texts, would the Jardin de la Connaissance become a major détournement?

Systems logic  251 early twentieth century.”117 Referring to the work of Leonora Carrington, Léonor Fini, and Meret Oppenheim, Chadwick argued, “The image of the female body, conceived not as Other but as Self, anticipated a feminine poetics of the body – imaging and celebrating the female body’s organic, erotic and maternal reality – that would fully emerge only with the feminist movement of the 1970s.”118 In landscape architecture, Olin eventually questioned the usefulness of surrealist methods. On Harlequin Plaza, he notes, I do think it transgresses the boundary between what is acceptable and understandable in private and what is welcomed and desirable in public. This does not imply a double standard but rather that we have different needs as individuals and a group. What people may indulge themselves on private estates may be of arguable justification when proposed for the public realm . . . Harlequin Plaza is, nevertheless, a watershed in American landscape composition and imagery. It has opened up possibilities that did not exist before its brash appearance.119 Primarily, these opportunities involved considering a design as a foil (in the sense of literature, a contrast) to context instead of simply blending into context. Alternatively, Magallanes argues that landscape architects borrow surrealist approaches to design. “Theory, imagery, and techniques help birth ideas that break from the traditional. Contemporary landscape architects are not surrealist, they are designers who seek to mine the surrealist spirit.”120 He also points out that some well-established landscape architects may not have called themselves surrealists, but some of their work echoes surrealist theories. Indeed, the landscape architect, sculptor, and stage set designer Isamu Noguchi – whose career has been defined by blurring distinctions between art and landscape, East and West, design and art – was influenced by surrealism.121 Primary reading for aleatory systems Alistair Brotchie, A Book of Surrealist Games. Max Ernst, The Hundred Headless Woman: La Femme 100 Têtes. Sigmund Freud, “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis.” Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City. Franklin Rosemont, editor. What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings. THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS FOR DIGITAL SYSTEMS Trick question: was there any digitally-encoded art before the invention of the electronic computer? Answer: yes! A Midsummer Night’s Dream is digitally encoded because it is written in the English alphabet . . . Of course, Shakespeare’s plays aren’t digital art and Shakespeare wasn’t a digital artist. Neither was Bach. The lesson is that there’s more to digital art than digital encoding. Digital art involves computer-based encoding in a common digital code.122 (Dominic McIver Lopes, A Philosophy of Computer Art, 2010)

5.15 Planting scheme by Philip Belesky, image courtesy of Philip Belesky

Systems logic  253 As the philosopher Dominic McIver Lopes notes, the digital has a long history in the arts, from the use of the alphabet in the writing of a sonnet or the employment of musical notation in the creation of a symphony. However, with the development of the computer, which uses a binary digital code of zeros and ones, and its powerful ability to process these data, the term digital has become more closely associated with this technology. Landscape architects were early adopters of computer systems. The architectural historian Antoine Picon has suggested, “the applications of computing to geography and landscape are as old if not older as those concerning architecture.”123 The landscape architecture professor Carl Steinitz, for example, used SYMAP mapping programs, which prefigured geographic information system (GIS) for environmental planning projects as early as 1967. IMGRID, however, was the first grid-based spatial analysis tool written expressly for landscape architects, and eventually landscape architects like C. Dana Tomlin wrote their own software programs, such as the Map Analysis Package (MAP).124 In the early 1980s Tomlin also developed a key component featured in many GIS products today, Map algebra.125 Using basic algebraic operations, Map algebra provided a language to express a model (a sequence of operations) as a script.126 In GIS, this script enabled two or more map layers to produce a new map. While landscape architects have used computer-aided drafting (CAD) systems since the 1990s, in the past decade two interrelated computational strategies – parametric and algorithmic design – have provided unique approaches to traditional design. Parametric literally means to set constraints or parameters in the design process, and it is based on procedures. Referred to as parametric modelling, Jillian Walliss et al., argue that this modelling “shifts focus to the performative aspects of landscape, placing emphasis on effect, thereby creating a closer alignment between forms and systems.”127 Algorithms are the more detailed instructions in a computer program. Algorithmic design involves the manipulation of script for a particular type of computer program. When designers work directly with code, there is a move away from visual form-making to form and its relation to code. Philip Belesky at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, for example, has created script that automatically matches the water, soil, and salinity of terrain to needs and tolerances of plant species to create a planting plan. “In each case, a planting palette has been created, and each species’ tolerances for soil saturation (top) and water salinity (bottom) are identified and placed along a spectrum. The resulting planting plan script then automatically matches the tolerances of each species to the conditions at each spatial point.”128 The landscape architecture professor Nadia Amoroso links landscape architecture’s gravitation to digital tools back to the profession’s deep interest in process and how ecological outcomes could be modelled. Indeed, data-driven mapping and analysis can handle large quantities of diverse information, and this remains a driving interest as more recently developed GIS software, such as ArcMap, has enabled landscape architects to export information to 3D design

 Systems logic 254 software, such as Rhinoceros. Amoroso describes how Stoss Landscape Urbanism uses this software as a source of feedback in the design process. The “digital tools allowed the team to test the ephemeral conditions of the site. A variety of versions were tested in Rhino at this preliminary stage in order to troubleshoot all possible volumetric and topographical assumptions.”129 Another benefit of using digital tools in design regards output. According to Sean Cubitt, a professor of media and communications, “From the standpoint of the computer, any input will always appear as mathematical, and any data can be output in any format. Effectively, an audio input can be output as a video image, as text, as a 3D model, as an instruction set for a manufacturing process, or any other digital format that can be attached to the computer.”130 This versatility, explains Lopes, is due to the fact that “computer programs handle input and output in a common format (e.g. binary code), so they’re blind to the type of data that come in as input or exit as output.”131 Not only has the nature of the output diversified, but digital tools have also bridged the gap between design and the physical generation of form. Amoroso described how the computer played a role in direct form-giving in her University of Toronto studio. Students selected action words (not unlike Richard Serra’s approach) like ripple, flow, bump, carve, or pinch that served as parameters. They “abstracted them into experimental forms using 3D Studio MAX and Rhinoceros” and eventually they fabricated them into models using CNC machines and 3D-plotters.132 Of course, digital design tools were predated by analogue design aides. As Hargreaves recalls, “this involved setting up perspectives, trying to master drawing techniques, and planning and crafting models.”133 Analogue design methods typically entailed hand-drawing and drafting, and they dominated design, representation, and production in landscape architecture until the rise of computer-aided design work. A plan view of a landscape drawn by hand is considered analogue because it attempts to provide an analogy of the world experienced, say looking down from an airplane over your design. It attempts to create a one-to-one approximation between the two. “Computers are devices designed to run computational processes”134 that rely on a set of instructions, which are mathematical in nature, and perform certain tasks, such as cropping. The algorithm is not something that you see when using software, but when you receive an update this typically means that there has been an improvement made to certain algorithms functioning in the older version of the program. While analogue hand-drawing and digital devices for drawing are often seen as separate enterprises, the landscape architects Bradley Cantrell and Wes Michaels argue that analogue approaches underlie most of the digital media used today.135 As they suggest, think of the terminology, such as paint bucket or eraser, used in computer programs. These terms denote the function of analogue work. Why digital systems matter Computer digital systems matter because they have become fundamental to most aspects of your life. Considering my own experience with the computer, it

Systems logic  255 has grown exponentially. I wrote my first high school term paper on a computer that my father had built himself. It displayed on a television screen encased in a blue-painted plywood box (not sure why he painted it blue). Now I am surrounded by digital computers and most things in my life have been converted to data. David Berry has even ventured that we now have a digital identity, a quantified self. “The digital has become the paradigmatic means of explaining what it means to live and work in the post-industrial democracies – this I call computational identity thinking.”136 For Cantrell and Michaels digital design is significant to landscape architecture because of its editability and efficiency in the design process. They refer to editability “as the ability to alter, change or update various aspects of a drawing in order to maintain flexibility as the design process progresses.”137 Prior to digitally aided design, a tremendous amount of human labour in an office was spent physically erasing (albeit with electric erasers) and redrawing dimensions of the design from the conceptual stages to change orders made during the construction process. Cantrell and Michaels describe efficiency in several ways, “automation, replication, and transformation. Digital media, based in computing, creates a paradigm that embraces the reuse of drawings and symbols through scaling, rotating, and effects. Most repetitive tasks can be automated when working with digital media.”138 Thus, like editability, efficiency saves time as it eliminates the copying of drawings, such as planting details, which might be used numerous times in different projects. The fluency in which 3D digital modelling can anticipate and display landscape change is also an important contribution of computational systems. Parametric modelling allows landscape architects to visualize forms and structural tectonics that might be very difficult, if not impossible, to model with physical models created by hand. According to Jillian Walliss et al., “One of the most significant advancements in digital technologies has been the ability to intuitively model non-Euclidean and continuous surfaces in three dimensions.”139 Think of the elaborate bridges designed by West 8, a firm that was an early adopter of digital design. Digital fabrication matters because it links computer design with production or manufacturing. It allows students to experiment directly with prototypes that enable the exploration of ideas, spaces, forms, and materials.140 Digital fabrication may also challenge the episteme of standardization produced by the economic benefits of mass production. Look up from reading this book. If you are in a room, the doors, windows, and the chair you are sitting on are undoubtedly standardized. Even if you are lucky enough to be reading this in a park on a nice sunny day, the bench or the Ikea picnic blanket you are sitting on, the light posts, the trash bins, the drinking fountains, are standardized as well. Benches and other site features may come in different colours or surfaces, but the one you are sitting on is identical in size and shape to thousands of others. While much design thinking and discourse focuses on sites and their systems, landscape architects frequently rely on populating their landscapes

 Systems logic 256 with integrated, mass-produced objects. This has happened because it is more economical for the mechanical manufacturing industries to mass produce standardized elements. Mario Carpo, an architectural historian, argues that the digital will promote the idea of nonstandard production. For Carpo, If the continuity between digital design and fabrication tools had been first exploited to showcase pieces of unique and sometimes virtuosic formal difficulty, the accent now shifted toward the technical and social implications of a fully integrated design and production chain. The capacity to mass-produce series of nonidentical items led to a new range of theoretical and practical uses . . . Industrial mass production used to depend on mechanical matrixes, molds, or casts of which the upfront cost had to be amortized by reusing them as many times as possible. But due to the elimination of mechanical matrixes, digital fabrication tools can produce variations at no extra cost.141 In short, he surmises that custom design is realizable as standardization will no longer be the most cost-saving method of production. Digital systems in action Synthetic patterning Patterns, arrangements, or sequences of comparable forms, have a long history as a heuristic in landscape design. Think of the “parterre of embroidery” found in historic French gardens. In 1709 Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville wrote La théorie et la pratique du jardinage that demonstrated the use of a grid to lay out a parterre’s embroidered surface, which was typically made of coloured stone, gravel, and crushed marble framed by a green hedge.142 His garden theory book was so popular with the rising middle class (eager to improve their more modest domestic sites) that it was revised and reprinted several times.143 Striking visual patterns can also be seen in the tiled courtyard walls of the Alhambra, in Granada, Spain, which are geometrical in origin. At the Alhambra, rotating squares generate the multiple-pointed stars made of ceramic tiles. For example, the eight-pointed star is created by overlapping two squares at 45 degrees.144 Peter Walker, Martha Schwartz, and Claude Cormier have also employed patterns in their work. Defining patterns at the human scale as “characterized by repetitive geometries that aggregate to create an overall spatial organization . . . based on repetition and recurrence (both formal and temporal),” Karen M’Closkey argues that patterns are visual indications of process. “Patterns, as diagrams of process carry the potential to bind together oppositional categories that still seem to plague discussions in landscape architecture – systems versus composition, representation versus performance, matter versus symbols, vision (distance) versus immersion (multisensory).”145 Since computers “can be programed to recognize the distinctive shape of the pattern from the data” they

Systems logic  257 5.16 Drawings for Dew Point, by PEG Landscape Architecture, image courtesy of PEG Landscape Architecture, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA 5.17 Dew Point (2010) by PEG Landscape Architecture, image courtesy of PEG Landscape Architecture, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

 Systems logic 258 very efficiently and with great alacrity, make digital systems uniquely qualified to produce patterns.146 Moreover, in concert with the development of digital fabrication, these patterns can be quite complex. The Not garden and Not again garden by Karen M’Closkey and Keith VanDerSys of PEG office of landscape architecture reference the traditional knot gardens, comprised of low plant material that intersect to form a repetitive pattern. However, M’Closkey and VanDerSys generated their patterns using digital modelling tools and laser-cutting fabrication. Weed control fabric was cut to mimic the traditional planting beds, and was later seeded. According to Amoroso, the Not garden tested “the basic carrying capacity of the geo-textile, while the latter, larger version experimented with a more intricate pattern and expanded the plantings to include flowering, drought tolerant species.”147 In PEG’s project, Dew Point, they followed a similar approach, except for this project the pattern was made by applying moisture retardant to the paving. The retardant was applied with a sprayer over templates cut from chipboard. Transposing Based on a system of “reading and transposing,” Michel Desvigne has developed a design method that abstracts an aerial view of a landscape. Captured by a scanner and transferred to an orthonormal grid, this image served as the compositional device for planting and hardscape.148 Look at Michel Desvigne’s rooftop design for Keio University, Tokyo. Isamu Noguchi originally designed a welcoming room, sculptures, and a garden here in the 1950s, which were torn down as a result of the redevelopment of the university. Desvigne’s design pays tribute to Noguchi, who often abstracted natural elements and systems in his design work. According to Gilles A. Tiberghien, a philosopher, his approach to the project was more of a system than a motif. “The initial landscape, which was literally scanned, was embodied in a checkerboard made up of slabs, which were themselves pierced with holes of varying sizes. The idea was not to faithfully reproduce a natural setting, but rather an empirical system whose artifice is obvious.”149 Based on the scanned patterns analysed, the slabs for the roof were either solid, perforated with circular holes (ranging from 150cm, to 200cm, to 300cm, to 375cm in diameter) or they were extruded in reference to Isamu Noguchi’s prayer stools.150 The perforated slabs contained a variety of trees, shrubs, and water spouts. How did digital systems help the designers conceive of this design? Can you see how it is ephemeral?

Systems logic  259 5.18 Drawing for rooftop design by MDP Michel Desvigne Paysagiste for Keio University, image courtesy of MDP Michel Desvigne Paysagiste, Tokyo, Japan 5.19 Rooftop design (2005) by MDP Michel Desvigne Paysagiste for Keio University, image courtesy of MDP Michel Desvigne Paysagiste, Tokyo, Japan

 Systems logic 260 Faceting Faceted models involve groups of polygons, typically triangular in shape, that are represented as a volumetric mesh that can be easily manipulated to create different gradients and patterns of surface. According to Andrea Hansen, principal of Fluxscape, Faceted surfaces, more perhaps than any other digital artifact, are direct results of the software in which they are designed. A common cross-pollinator between geographic analysis and landscape design is the TIN, or Triangulated Irregular Network: a tessellated surface formed between geographic coordinates in GIS (Geographic Information Software) that can be exported and manipulated in 3D modeling software.151 While faceting lends itself easily to terrain, it can also inform structures. Look at Dymaxion Sleep by Jane Hutton and the artist, Adrian Blackwell. Inspired by Richard If Desvigne transposed a different site, a city for example, how do you think this would affect the design? Do you see the connection with the extruded prayer stools and the planted areas? 5.20 International Garden Festival, Jardins de Métis/ Reford Gardens, Dymaxion Sleep (2009–2013) closed, by Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell, courtesy of Louise Tanguay, Jardins de Métis/Reford Gardens, GrandMétis, Quebec, Canada

Systems logic  261 Buckminster Fuller’s intermittent sleeping schedule, which alternated between 30 minutes of sleep and six hours of waking time, and his Dymaxion World Map, Dymaxion Sleep provides planes of nylon netting that when folded up create a faceted enclosure. When unfolded, children and adults can suspend themselves over the smells of lemon geranium, mint, lavender, and fennel planted below. Topology Topology, the study of continuous surfaces, traces its roots back to theoretical geography and thematic cartography, and specifically the work of William Warntz, Director of Harvard University’s Laboratory for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis. During the 1960s, While others saw surfaces as cellular, the Laboratory emphasized topology, fundamental to Triangular Irregular Networks (tin) and similar software. Warntz was primarily interested in thematic surfaces, such as population, income, and continentality, and his theory of the topological structure of surfaces based on points (peaks and pits; passes and pales), lines (ridges and courses), and areas (hills and dales) works equally well for thematic and physical surfaces.152 5.21 International Garden Festival, Jardins de Métis/ Reford Gardens, Dymaxion Sleep (2009–2013) opened, by Jane Hutton and Adrian Blackwell, courtesy of Robert Baronet, Jardins de Métis/ Reford Gardens, Grand-Métis, Quebec, Canada How do you think digital systems helped the designers conceive this design?

 Systems logic 262 Warntz was interested in how surface conditions and spatial distributions were informed by social and economic data. However, landscape architects and architects have concerned themselves with the programmatic requirements of surfaces. Look at the image of Southeast Coastal Plaza in Barcelona, by Teresa Galí-Izard with Foreign Office Architects (FOA). Hansen identifies topology as a factor in conceiving this landscape. “A single unit (a crescent shaped paver) is deployed across the site, changing from pathway to amphitheater, skate ramp, and retaining wall.”153 Alternatively, Christophe Girot has theorized that topology is about how a tree meets the ground and how water sounds as it runs over a stone. We believe in crafting comfort and beauty out of landscapes in the many ways we entrust our world with deeper meaning. Topology is about developing a new set of disciplinary tools capable of responding fully to a continual terrestrial situation, and it is precisely this continuity that gives us more insight and potential when developing solutions.154 5.22 Southeast Coastal Plaza (2003) by Teresa Galí-Izard, Barcelona, Spain This plaza extends for hundreds of meters; do you see how topology allows for the expression of a continuous surface?

Systems logic  263 Bringing his theory of topology into his Landscape Visualization and Modeling Laboratory (LVML) at ETH Zurich, Girot is currently designing a landscape for the Sigirino Depot, a landscape that is literally the by-product of tunnels dug through the Alps to accommodate train lines. According to Brett Milligan, “3.7 million cubic meters of pulverized gneiss mined from within the Sotto Ceneri mountain range will be amassed on the Sigirino hillside, raising its finished elevation over 150 meters.”155 While it will not be complete until 2020, 3D analysis visualization technology has enabled his team to design this material into a complex system of paths and water collecting areas as part of the topological landscape. Digital systems debated David Berry posits, Theoretically the “digital” is an empty signifier that has suffered from a lack of critical attention particularly in relation to its ideological deployment, but also its ahistorical usage even in avowedly critical work. Empirically, of course, and also technically, the “digital” has stood for a particular method of discretization, although too often this is collapsed into 0s and 1s and the binary structure underlying most computation today. In this sense, the “digital” has served too often as a descriptive term and hence has avoided, in some sense, critical attention itself.156 Indeed, while digital tools have generally been accepted as part of landscape architecture, their actual influence on the design profession is still not completely understood. Digital computer systems and their ability to generate intricately curving forms and meshes has had a profound effect on architecture since the 1990s, particular in the work of Greg Lynn, Zaha Hadid, and Frank Gehry. How has it also shaped landscape design? Hansen makes the observation that with computer-aided drafting systems that can rapidly calculate equations for curvatures, “landscapes today increasingly employ the geometry of nature – curves, tributaries, gradients – to seamlessly blend into their natural settings or reintroduce nature into an urban setting.”157 Digital computer systems not only affect form-making, but they may also shape your own design thinking. Drawing and writing by hand versus using your mouse and keypad engage different parts of the brain, and some scientists suggest that the design process benefits when working by hand versus the computer. Researchers in Turkey compared interior designers’ use of free-hand sketching Does this suggest a return to the pastoral tradition in design that seeks an idealized version of nature that camouflages the presence of human intent or infrastructure? Is this a new computational pastoralism?

 Systems logic 264 compared with computer use. They found that hand-drawing increased “perception of visual–spatial features, and organizational relations of the design, production of alternative solutions and better conception of the design problem.”158 Drawing by hand also stimulates more parts of the brain and engages your ability to store and recall information (your memory). Probably your memory because you would have to think about what kind of tree you are capable of drawing and what type. Is it in winter or in spring? Now draw a tree using a selection from your favourite computer program. In terms of the digital’s ideological deployment, most discussions have concerned the digital’s efficacy in producing hyperreal scenes of proposed landscapes. Hyperrealism in landscape architectural imagery suggests that a representation resembles a photo-like version of reality. Achieved through programs like Photoshop, these visualizations exhibit textured detail, atmosphere, and correct shadowing that can sometimes fool people. Linking hyperrealism to the postmodern critic Jean Baudrillard’s conception of hyperrealism, which posits that these images can come to control consciousness, Karl Kullmann, a landscape architect, argues that “hyper-real visualisations assume a position of authority over the viewer that is primed for exploitation . . . Even where no deception is intended, the constructed design rarely approximates the image that was intentionally presented as its accurate simulation.”159 This type of existential power was demonstrated to me last year when I was visiting with friends, who were not designers, in London. They were very excited about a renovated square recently constructed in the city. They raved about its design and they were pretty sure their friends had seen it as well. When I visited this fabled square, it was the same as the last time I saw it a few years ago. Apparently, they saw hyperreal images of the proposal in the newspaper and thought it had been constructed. Van Dooren claims, “A concrete victim of digital developments I want to mention is the collage as a representational type. Today’s drawing and the technical possibilities for photoreality seem to speak against rough non-realistic drawings like collage. But especially in landscape, reality is a troubled concept, as we mainly speak about time frames of 15 up to 50 years.”160 Both Kullman and Catherine Dee argue for literal gaps in the imagery that enable the viewer to imagine the future, and of course not confuse the imagery with what does or will exist in the future. Kullman calls for a “loose-realism” in digital and analogue Take out a piece of paper and draw a tree. What did you need to draw the tree by hand? What did you need to know to draw the tree with the computer?

Systems logic  265 representations. These “techniques retain potentiality (and avoid determinancy) by requiring points of view from both the author and the viewer, potentially drawing closer together the author–subject diaspora.”161 Dee contends that “erasure rarely gains status of treasured tool in the design studio, although erasure has many important functions . . . Erasure supports contingency and openness, serendipity, and a tracking of changes in time, idea, and form.”162 Primary readings for digital systems Nadia Amoroso, Digital Landscape Architecture Now. Bradley Cantrell and Wes Michaels, Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture: Contemporary Techniques and Tools for Digital Representation in Site Design. Mario Carpo, Algorithm and the Alphabet. Dominic McIver Lopes, A Philosophy of Computer Art. Karen M’Closkey, “Synthetic Patterns: Fabricating Landscapes in the Age of ‘Green.’” THEORETICAL GROUNDINGS FOR DIAGRAMMING The drawing is only a diagram, and we have made it a diagram in order to show with the utmost possible clearness the relative areas, and the symmetry and fairness of their distribution.163 (Charles Eliot, General Principles in Selecting Public Reservations and Determining Their Boundaries, Boston Metropolitan Park System, 1902) To be sure, there is one type of drawing that has most successfully lent itself to the design process and to understanding the landscape as a system. This type of drawing is the diagram. Here, the landscape architect Charles Eliot (1859–1897) is describing a key virtue of the diagram – its ability to explain and persuade. A diagram is usually a simplified drawing showing the workings of something over time and space, and amongst its parts. It is one of the oldest forms of communication, and diagrammatic representations of systems are applicable to a wide range of fields from their use in proofs in logic to the explanation of signification in semiotics. 164 Diagramming has a long history of use in landscape architecture as well. The landscape theorist Anita Berrizbeitia explains how developments in the natural sciences prompted Charles Eliot to explore new representational techniques, indicating an epistemological shift in landscape architecture. Combining maps with scalable reference systems, Eliot created diagrams to rationalize his park proposals. For local commissioners he mapped the park systems in Paris, London, and Boston at the same scale, and superimposed a scaled grid over each map to make comparisons. He also created a diagram that showed the relationship of park system components and their distribution across metropolitan Boston to each other and to the State House with concentrically scaled rings.165 Jacky Bowring and Simon Swaffield note the prevalence of diagramming in landscape architecture, particularly during the twentieth century. The Ecoscores created by Lawrence Halprin, Ian McHarg’s dune formation diagrams in the

 Systems logic 266 opening pages of Design with Nature, the man/place diagrams of Alle Hosper, and Kevin Lynch’s visual survey diagrams, are just a few examples. Bowring and Swaffield posit that landscape architects use diagrams “both as analytical tools and as generative expressions of design imaginings . . . Like metaphors, diagrams ‘carry’ ideas into another form, and the process of abstraction can involve a leap of faith in terms of comprehension.”166 In Design with Nature, for example, McHarg produced a series of cross-sections to explain dune formation and to demonstrate that the Dutch dike design system – comprised of a Guardian (Waker), Sleeper (Slaper), and Dreamer (Dromer) – was akin to designing with nature. Bowring and Swaffield also describe how, “the diagrammatic ‘language’ of edge, node, district, and landmark developed by Lynch to summarize the way people experience the urban fabric has become embedded in landscape architectural education and practice at multiple scales.”167 Lynch’s classic study, published in Image of the City (1960), revealed the physical and spatial elements that enabled people to understand and navigate through the urban landscape. Interviewing people in Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, Lynch found that people used specific features to create mental representations or mental maps of what the city contained and the way it was organized. These features included paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks. Lynch concluded that if designers and planners gave clarity and prominence to these features in their work, this would increase people’s ability to make sense of complex landscapes such as cities. Thus, these features served as a heuristic for the designer. Landscape urbanists and the eidetic operations (techniques that both imagine and project new landscapes) of James Corner also champion the use of diagrams. In Corner’s view the imaginative potential of the diagram serves as a counter to the conception of landscape drawing as a pictorial representation or simply a technical endeavour. For Corner, the diagram, mental map, or spatioorganizational image was closer to the conception of landscape as landschaft than landskip. “In landskip, the making of a picture participates in and makes what is to be pictured. In landschaft the formation of synaesthetic, cognitive images forge a collective sense of place and the relationship evolved through work.”168 In other words, since diagrams aim to explain and they can be generative in the design process, they are more akin to the German term landschaft, which includes social as well as political dimensions of the landscape. Diagrams are less like the term landskip, which privileges the landscape as a view. Corner and others frequently cite OMA’s competition proposal for Parc de la Villette as inspiration for this representational strategy – where “dismantling and isolation of layers and elements in plan not only proposes a productive working method, akin to montage, but also focuses attention on the logic of making the landscape rather than on its appearance per se.”169 Architectural references to diagramming have been influenced by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, and their theory of rhizomes. A second companion to their book Anti-Oedipus (1972), A Thousand Plateaus (1980)

Systems logic  267 formulates a relationship between power and subjectivity where “capitalism constantly opens new markets of desire that capitalism must rigidly control in order to survive.”170 Deleuze and Guattari seek to remove these limitations “in order to free the desiring-machines and dismantle the subject and the State.”171 As postmodern thinkers influenced by post-structuralism, and particularly Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari rallied against many aspects of structuralism as discussed in the Language chapter, such as binary logic. They argued for multiplicities of interpretations, and the production of the new as a continuous, centreless, rhizomatic system. Indeed, the rhizome occupies a special place in their project, and serves as a visual concept of the diagram, as initially conceived by Foucault. For Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomes should replace the role that the tree has played in not only the analysis of language, but also as an image and concept for societies in general. They contend, Binary logic is the spiritual reality of the root-tree. Even a discipline as “advanced” as linguistics retains the root-tree as its fundamental image, and thus remains wedded to classical reflection . . . Binary logic and biunivocal relationships still dominate psychoanalysis (the tree of delusion in the Freudian interpretation of Schreber’s case), linguistics, structuralism, and even information science.172 While some trees spread by rhizomes (live oaks, for example), the appeal of the rhizome is its lack of unified formation and indeterminate space of reproduction. They posit, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be . . . A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggle.”173 Another important dimension of rhizomes as “a diagram type”174 is its relationship with the past. For Deleuze and Guattari, “all of the tree logic is a logic of tracing and reproduction . . . The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing . . . Tracing is closed and traces the past, what was, while the rhizome is entirely oriented towards an experimentation in contact with the real.”175 Deleuze furthered his exploration of the diagram and rhizomes in his book Foucault. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault introduced the concept of the diagram as a way of understanding the visual and discursive functioning of physical and social systems such as prisons, hospitals, and schools as they “formalizes function and gives them aims” (to punish, to care, to educate).176 Deleuze stressed that this formalizing function was the diagram, and he claimed, “The diagram is no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map, a cartography that is coextensive with the whole social field.”177 As the art historian Jakub Zdebik explains, The diagram displays relations of forces and translates them from one system to another. The mechanics, through which it performs this task is difficult to discern since the diagram is non-representation. The diagram consists of abstract forces (e.g. surveillance) that make up a particular system (e.g. prison system) and can be applied to another system (e.g. schools or barracks).178

 Systems logic 268 Why diagramming matters Since diagrams can show relational forces over time and space, and amongst different aspects of the landscape, they are valuable to the design process. As Bowring and Swaffield argue, they can reflect both social and ecological systems. Some of the most basic design diagrams used in landscape architecture, such as the modernist’s use of the bubble diagram, for example, helped determine the relationships between numerous human uses. For the landscape ecologist Richard T. Forman, who charges, “Form is the diagram of force,”179 the diagram enables him to explain complex natural systems, such as the key variables determining the minimum width of streams and river corridors.180 Given the complexity of change in landscapes, van Dooren argues, “time, change and dynamics deserve more attention being very specific features of landscape architecture. The emblematic example is the park, which needs decades to mature. We strive for representing time in a more educative, and strategic ways. This may inspire us to study representations in other disciplines.”181 Information visualization, for example, concerns the legibility of visual displays of information and data. This visualization can take the form of cartographic images, graphs, scatter plots, flow charts, or other types of diagrams. As Lauren Manning, a communications designer, observes, “visualization is more effective than a large, incomprehensible data set in that it sifts out what is pertinent and presents it in a legible form.”182 Information visualization’s most prolific and persuasive champion is the statistician, political scientist, and artist Edward Tufte. The following will demonstrate some of his theories on the visual display of information in diagramming. According to Tufte, “to document and explain processes, to make verbs visible, is at the heart of information design.”183 Diagramming in action Layering and separation Layering information about systems can be difficult because you can introduce “non-information patterns and textures simply through their combined presence. Josef Albers defines this visual effect as 1+1= 3 or more, when two elements show themselves along with assorted incidental by-products of the partnership.”184 Albers’s theory lies at the heart of layering – the use of white space on paper or the screen. Look at the diagram based on Alber’s idea. The Bauhaus trained painter, Albers, cautioned that when diagramming, you must be aware that white space is perceived as a graphic element. This is why one plus one does not equal two. Tufte notes that colour can be used for the same types of information, measurement for example, which adds coherency to the layering. Small areas of intense saturated colour can also be effective for communicating the most important information.185 In the diagram explaining water purification, Stoss Landscape Urbanism uses white space as part of the diagram’s composition and small areas of colour to clearly communicate this important function of the designed landscape. one graphic element three graphic elements 5.23 From Albers’s 1 + 1 = 3

Systems logic  269 Micro/macro readings Tufte’s theory of Micro/Macro Readings recommends that “to clarify, add detail . . . Micro/Macro designs enforce both local and global comparisons and, at the same time, avoid disruption of context switching . . . it is not how much empty space there is but rather how it is used.”186 This might seem like a surprising statement because adding detail might make a diagram too busy, but Tufte argues that we need a simple overall scheme with micro level detail. “Simpleness is an aesthetic preference, not an information display strategy, not a guide to clarity. What we seek is a rich texture of data, a comparative context, and understanding of complexity revealed with an economy of means.”187 Look at Figure 5.25 from the Schoolyard Park competition. The entry was design by Yasuaki Tanago, Shinya Minami, and Yasuyuki Sakuma. Their overall scheme involves corridors in both the landscape and the architecture. The macro idea is simple and legible, but so is the micro-world of their proposal. Small multiples For Tufte, “Small multiple designs, multivariate and data bountiful, answer directly by visually enforcing comparisons of changes, of the differences among objects, of the scope of alternatives . . . constancy of design puts the emphasis on changes in data, not changes in data frames.”188 Since landscape architects 5.24 Minneapolis Riverfront diagram (2011) by Stoss Landscape Urbanism How would this diagram be different if the entire scheme was rendered? Notice the role that numbers play in the diagram, and how their placement doesn’t involve arrows or callout that interfere with the image.

 Systems logic 270 work with existing sites, this always provides an opportunity to compare before and after conditions. This is what Humphry Repton, a landscape designer frequently cited by Tufte for both praise and criticism, did so well in his Red Books. However, what Tufte proposes here is the duplication of similar images to show change, rather than pulling the flap back to see Repton’s brilliant design. Tufte warns that it’s difficult to make the long-awaited comparisons among geographic distributions “so comparisons should be small in size, to be enforced within the scope of the eye span.”189 Look at the proposal for the Hannover City 2020 ideas competition, by LOLA Landscape Architects. Other advice From typeface to the display of information, Tufte advises on textual information as well. He cautions against “label clutter,”190 which is avoided in both LOLA’s and Stoss’s diagrams. Moreover, you should obviously avoid typefaces that are difficult to read. Tufte also stresses that ALL CAPS CAN GRAB YOUR ATTENTION, BUT 5.25 Schoolyard Park 13 acres competition entry (2002) by Yasuaki Tanago, Shinya Minami, and Yasuyuki Sakuma Can you see that by displaying the same tree with different pavilion configurations you can compare the alternatives to each other? Can you see how LOLA uses “small multiples”?

Systems logic  271 THEY ARE MORE DIFFCULT TO READ compared with words in sentence-case formatting. This is why most highway signage is not produced in all upper-case letters. Motorists driving at high speeds must be able to read these signs quickly, so they can respond, and the combination of upper- and lower-case letters is more legible. Tufte also warns against “data imprisonment” favouring cartographic lines and the subtle uses of colour, and what he calls the strategy of the “subtraction of weight” to free data for its comprehension.191 In general, colours should be analogous, otherwise the information is not weighted, and “when everything is emphasized nothing is emphasized.”192 Look at Land Value by Bill Rankin. Diagramming debated Bowring and Swaffield point out that there are sensorial dimensions of landscapes that are difficult to be designed or explained by diagramming. They note, while designers such as Lynch and Halprin sought to diagram movement through space, the forms of expression remain primarily objective. The phenomenological, felt, experiential landscape, however, is characterized by subjective response, and it is these aspects which exceed the graphic capacity of diagramming . . . smell, for example, cannot even be represented, let alone diagrammed, as the only language of expression we have for the olfactory dimension is text, and even that relies on the language of analogy.193 5.26 Treehugger Pavilions for Hannover City 2020 ideas competition by LOLA Landscape Architects, image courtesy of Eric-Jan Pleijster If the diagram was differently coloured do you think it would be more difficult or easier to read? Do you see how Rankin has used white space?

 Systems logic 272 As you read in the Theoretical Groundings for Diagramming at the beginning of this section, the prevalence of the diagram emerged as it was influenced by Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory and later promoted by architects and landscape architects. Given Deleuze’s and Guattari’s lack of knowledge regarding the biological aspects of actual rhizomes, do you think their theory is still valid? Should it be renamed? The diagram was also promoted, particularly by Corner, to avoid the nostalgic, pictorial images conferred by landskip. He argued for a “shift away from landscape as an object of appearance to processing information, dynamics of occupancy, and the poetics of becoming. Whereas these processes may be imaged, they are not necessarily susceptible to picturing.”194 In short, he thinks if you made diagramming integral to your design process, you would avoid designing a landscape chiefly for its visual appearance, particularly its appearance as a pastoral scene. Primary reading for diagramming James Corner, “Representation and Landscape: Drawing and Making in the Landscape Medium.” James Corner, “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Edward R. Tufte, Beautiful Evidence. Edward R. Tufte, Envisioning Information. Jakub Zdebik, Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization. NOTES 1. Suzanne Witzgall, “Art as an Open System: Complexity and Interaction in Art since 1960,” Living Systems, eds. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau (Barcelona: Arts Santa Monica, 2011), 29 (29–37). 2. Darrell Arnold, “Systems Theory: A Mixed Theory,” Traditions of Systems Theory: Major Figures and Contemporary Developments, ed. Darrell Arnold (New York: Routledge, 2014), 10–20 (10). 3. Gerald Midgley, Systemic Intervention Philosophy, Methodology, and Practice (New York: Springer, 2000), 2. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Karl Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, revised edition (New York: Penguin , 5.27 Land Value (2006) by Bill Rankin (www.radicalcartography.net) If you avoid thinking about how something looks, will you avoid designing a landscape that is nostalgic and pictorial?

Systems logic  273 1969). The groundwork for a General Systems Theory (GST) began in the 1920s at the Institute for Experimental Biology or “Prater Vivarium” in Vienna. The experimental biologists of Prater Vivarium did not want to passively study biological process, as promoted by Ernst Haeckel in “well-constructed analytical experiments from which they hoped to derive causal explanations” (see Manfred Drack, Wilfried Apfalter, and David Pouvreau, “On the Making of a System Theory of Life: Paul A. Weiss and Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s Conceptual Connection,” Quarterly Review of Biology 82, no. 4 (2007): 349–373 (352)). They also felt mechanistic physical laws were inadequate for studying living systems. 6. Drack et al., “On the Making of a System Theory of Life: Paul A. Weiss and Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s Conceptual Connection.” 7. Ian McHarg, “The Ecology of the City,” AIA Journal 38, no. 5 (1962): 101–103 (102). 8. Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969), 35. 9. See John T. Lyle, Design for Human Ecosystems: Landscape, Land Use, and Natural Resources (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999). 10. Peter Galison, ‘The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision,” Critical Inquiry 21, no.1 (1994): 254–255. 11. Odum, Eugene. Fundamentals of ecology. Philadelphia, Saunders, 1971. 12. Lyle, Design for Human Ecosystems: Landscape, Land Use, and Natural Resources, 130. 13. See Witzgall, “Art as an Open System: Complexity and Interaction in Art since 1960,” Living Systems. 14. Lawrence Halprin, “The Rebellious Sixties,” A Life Spent Changing Places: Lawrence Halprin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 113–150 (132). 15. Margot Lystra, “McHarg’s Entropy, Halprin’s Chance: Representations of Cybernetic Change in1960s Landscape Architecture,” special issue on Time, eds. Sonja Duempelmann and Susan Herrington, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes: An International Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2014): 71–84 (78). 16. Ann E. Komara, Lawrence Halprin’s Skyline Park (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), 133. 17. Arnold, “Systems Theory: A Mixed Theory,” 11. 18. Lyle, Design for Human Ecosystems: Landscape, Land Use, and Natural Resources, 5. 19. Michela de Poli and Guido Incerti, “Shanghai Houtan Park,” An Atlas of Recycled Landscapes, ed. Luca Molinari (Milan: Skira, 2014), 140–143 (140). 20. William S. Saunders, “Landscape as a Living System: Houtan Park Shanghai Expo Park,” Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu, ed. William S. Saunders (Basel: Birhäuser, 2013), 164–183. 21. John T. Lyle, “Can Floating Seeds Make Deep Forms?” Landscape Journal 10, no. 1 (1991): 37–47. 22. Joan Hirschman Woodward, “Foreword,” Design for Human Ecosystems: Landscape, Land Use, and Natural Resources (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999), v. 23. Gina Crandell, Tree Gardens: Architecture and the Forest (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2013), 88. 24. Alexis C. Madrigal, “The Man Who First Said ‘Cyborg,’ 50 Years Later,” Atlantic, 30 September 2010, accessed 22 January 2016, www.theatlantic.com/technology/ archive/2010/09/the-man-who-first-said-cyborg-50-years-later/63821/). 25. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). 26. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist–Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” The Cybercultures Reader, eds. Barbara M. Kennedy and David Bell (London: Routledge, 2000), 291–324 (291).

 Systems logic 274 27. Ibid., 312. 28. Ariane Lourie Harrison “Introduction: Charting Posthuman Territory,” Architectural Theories of the Environment: Posthuman Territory (New York: Routledge, 2013), 3–36 (8). 29. N. Katherine Hayles quoted in Ariane Lourie Harrison, “Introduction: Charting Posthuman Territory,” Architectural Theories of the Environment: Posthuman Territory, 7. 30. 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 (53). 31. William Myers, Bio Design: Nature, Science, Creativity (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 218. 32. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 247. 33. Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory. A Few Clarifications plus More than a Few Complications,” special issue of the Danish philosophy journal, accessed 22 January 2016, www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-67%20ACTOR-NETWORK.pdf, 7. 34. Ibid., 4. 35. Andrew Langford, “In Transition,” Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation, eds. Davide Deriu, Krystallia Kamvasinou, and Eugénie Shinkle (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 75–80 (76). 36. Anne Tietjen, “Translations – Experiments in Landscape Design Education,” Nordic Design Research Conference 2013, Copenhagen-Malmo, accessed 22 January 2016, www.nordes.org. 37. Jan-Eric Pleijster, “Natural Urban Landscapes,” lecture to the Swedish Association of Architects Oyster All-Inclusive conference, Stockholm, 18 September 2015. 38. Marc Treib, “Nature Recalled,” Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (Sparks, NV: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 31. 39. Alison B. Hirsch, “Scoring the Participatory City: Lawrence (& Anna) Halprin’s Take Part Process,” Journal of Architectural Education 64, no. 2 (2011): 127–140 (139). 40. See Sandra Harding, “Modernity’s Misleading Dream: Latour,” Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 23–48. 41. Peter Mortenbock and Helge Mooshammer, “Trade Flow: Architecture of Informal Markets,” Architecture in the Space of Flows (New York: Routledge, 2012), 117–134 (118). 42. David M. Berry, “The Poverty of Networks,” Theory, Culture & Society 25 (2008): 364–372 (365). 43. Henry Granick, Underneath New York (New York: Robert E. Sullivan, 1947; 1991), 12. 44. Michael G. Lee, “Infrastructure as Landscape Embellishment: Peter Joseph Lenné in Potsdam and Berlin,” Technology and the Garden, eds. Michael G. Lee and Kenneth I. Helphand (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2014), 169–197 (184). 45. Gary Strang, “Infrastructure as Landscape,” Places 10, no. 3 (1996): 8–15 (12). 46. Ibid., 11. 47. Pierre Bélanger, “Landscape as Infrastructure,” Landscape Journal 28 no. 1 (2008): 79–95 (91). 48. Pierre Bélanger, “Landscape Infrastructure, Excerpt from ‘Infrastructural Ecologies: Fluid, Biotic, Contingent,’” Landscape Architecture’s Core? Harvard Design Magazine no. 36 (2013): 154–157 (156). 49. Ian Hamilton Thompson, “Essence-less Landscape,” Landscape Architecture’s Core? Harvard Design Magazine no. 36 (2013): 24–35 (28). 50. Robert Thayer, Gray World, Green Heart: Technology, Nature, and Sustainable Landscape (New York: Wiley, 1994), 74.

Systems logic  275 51. Ibid., 96. 52. Landscape Architecture Foundation, Case Study Briefs, Washington Canal Park, accessed 23 January 2016, http://landscapeperformance.org/case-study-briefs/ canal-park. 53. Richard Weller, “An Art of Instrumentality: Thinking Through Landscape Urbanism,” The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 69–85 (73). 54. Ibid., 77. 55. Christopher Hookway, “Pragmatism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Spring 2015 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed 23 January 2016, http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/pragmatism/. 56. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Putnam Capricorn, 1958), 154. 57. Kiona Smith-Strickland, “A Billboard that Condenses Water from Humidity,” 25 April 2013, accessed 23 January 2016, www.popularmechanics.com/science/green-tech/ a8875/a-billboard-that-condenses-water-from-humidity-15393050/. 58. Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 5. 59. Charles Waldheim, “Landscape as Urbanism,” The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 35–53 (37). See also Charles Waldheim, “Landscape Urbanism: A Genealogy,” Praxis 4 (2002): 10–17. 60. James Corner, “Terra Fluxus,” The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 21–33 (31). 61. Ibid. 62. Waldheim, “Landscape as Urbanism,” 38–39. 63. Stoss Landscape Urbanism, “Bass River Park,” accessed 24 January 2016, www. stoss.net/projects/9/bass-river-park/. 64. Kristina Hill and Larissa Larsen, “Adaptive Urbanism,” Landscape Urbanism and Its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City, eds. Andrés Duany and Emily Talen (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2013), 215–230 (222–223). 65. Ian Thompson, “Ten Tenets and Six Questions for Landscape Urbanism,” Landscape Research 37, no.1 (2012): 7–26 (24). 66. Hill and Larsen, “Adaptive Urbanism,” 219–220. 67. Dolores Hayden, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003). 68. Henri Lefebvre, “The Urban in Question,” Writings on Cities, eds. E. Kaufman and E. Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 209. 69. Sigmund Freud, “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis,” American Journal of Psychology 21, no. 2 (1910): 181–218 (200). 70. Catherine Miller, Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Claudel et le groupe des six (Belgium: Pierre Mardaga Éditeur, 2004), 139. 71. Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 57. 72. André Breton, “What is Surrealism?” Theories in Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 410–417 (417–411). 73. Annette Shandler Levitt, The Genres and Genders of Surrealism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), 2. 74. Breton, “What is Surrealism?” 417. 75. André Breton, “Surrealism and Painting,” Art in Theory 1900–1990, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 440–446 (442). 76. André Breton, “First Manifesto of Surrealism,” Art in Theory 1900–1990, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000) 432–440 (434).

 Systems logic 276 77. Quoted in J. H. Matthews, Introduction to Surrealism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1965), 48. 78. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 256. 79. Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” Modernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Rainey (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 1087–1095 (1091). 80. Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City, ed. Tom McDonough (London: Verso, 2009) 2. 81. Ibid., 6. 82. Ibid., 29. 83. Ibid., 82. 84. Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (New York; London: Routledge, 1991; 2002), 59. 85. McDonough, The Situationists and the City, 78. 86. Fernando Magallanes, “Landscape Surrealism,” Surrealism and Architecture, ed. Thomas Mical (New York: Routledge, 2005), 220–233 (221). 87. Ibid., 222. 88. Jean La Marche, “Surrealism’s Unexplored Possibilities in Architecture,” Surrealism and Architecture, ed. Thomas Mical (New York: Routledge, 2005), 220–233 (275). 89. Christophe Girot, “Four Trace Concepts in Landscape Architecture,” Recovering Landscape, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 59–67 (61). 90. James Corner, “Representation and Landscape: Drawing and Making in the Landscape Medium,” Word & Image 8, no. 3 (1992): 243–275 (268). 91. Max Ernst, The Hundred Headless Woman: La Femme 100 Têtes, trans. Dorothea Tanning (New York: George Braziller, 1981). 92. Richard Rainwater, “Max Ernst, Printmaker,” Max Ernst: Beyond Surrealism: A Retrospective of the Artist’s Books and Prints, ed. Richard Rainwater (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 3–36 (8). 93. Evan M. Mauer, “Images of Dream and Desire: The Prints and Collage Novels of Max Ernst,” Max Ernst: Beyond Surrealism: A Retrospective of the Artist’s Books and Prints, ed. Rainwater, 73. 94. Ibid., 63. 95. Ibid., 68. 96. Ibid., 69. 97. Brett Milligan, “GROSS. MAX and Promiscuous Collage,” Free Association Design, 2 March 2010, accessed 24 January 2016, https://freeassociationdesign.wordpress. com/author/bmilligan/. 98. Levitt, The Genres and Genders of Surrealism, 12. 99. Ibid., 10. 100. Laurie Olin, “Form, Meaning, and Expression in Landscape Architecture,” Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens: Four Essays, Four Commentaries, ed. Marc Treib (London: Routledge, 2011), 22–70 (30). 101. Greenwood Village History 1850–2000, accessed 25 January 2016, www. greenwoodvillage.com/index.aspx?NID=1463. 102. Ibid. 103. André Breton, “Inaugural Breaks 1947,” What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings, André Breton, ed. Franklin Rosemont (New York: Monad, 1978), 371. 104. Jacky Bowring and Simon Swaffield, “Shifting Landscapes in-between Times,” Landscape Architecture’s Core? Harvard Design Magazine no. 36 (2013): 96–105 (100).

Systems logic  277 105. Ibid. 106. Alistair Brotchie, A Book of Surrealist Games, ed. Mel Gooding (London: Shambala Redstone, 1995), 107. 107. Nathan Paul Eburne, Surrealism and the Art of Crime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 49. 108. George Basalla, “Transformed Utilitarian Objects,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 4 (1982): 183–201 (183). 109. Breton, “Inaugural Breaks 1947,” 341. 110. Guy Debord, “Situationist International, ‘Detournement as Negation and Prelude,’” Art in Theory 1900–1990, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 696–698 (697). 111. Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement,” Situationist International Anthology, revised and expanded edition, 2006, trans. Ken Knabb, accessed 25 January 2016, www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm. 112. Debord, “Situationist International, ‘Detournement as Negation and Prelude,’” 697. 113. Thilo Folkerts and Rodney LaTourelle, “Jardin de la Connaissance by Rodney LaTourelle and 100 Landschaftsarchitektur – update,” Dezeen magazine, 15 August 2012, accessed 25 January 2016, www.dezeen.com/2012/08/15/jardin-de-laconnaissance-by-rodney-latourelle-and-100-landschaftsarchitektur-update/. 114. Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society, fifth edition (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 309. 115. Xavière Gauthier, Surréalisme et sexualité (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). 116. Mary Ann Caws, “Seeing the Surrealist Woman: We Are a Problem,” Dada/ Surrealism 18 (1990): 11–16 (11). 117. Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society, 315. 118. Ibid., 311. 119. Olin, “Form, Meaning, and Expression in Landscape Architecture,” 33. 120. Magallanes, “Landscape Surrealism,” 228. 121. Valerie Fletcher, Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculptor (Washington, DC: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 2004), 48. 122. Dominic McIver Lopes, A Philosophy of Computer Art (London; New York: Routledge, 2010), 3. 123. Antoine Picon, “Substance and Structure II: The Digital Culture of Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Architecture’s Core? Harvard Design Magazine no. 36 (2013): 124–129 (124). 124. Nick Chrisman, “Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at the GSD became GIS,” (Redlands, CA: ESRI, 2004), 5, accessed 15 May 2015, www.gsd. harvard.edu/gis/manual/lcgsa/HarvardBLAD_screen.pdf. 125. Paul A. Longley, Mike Goodchild, David J. Maguire, and David W. Rhind, “Geographic Spatial Modelling with GIS,” Information Systems and Science (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2011), 403–423 (414). 126. Ibid., 417. 127. Jillian Walliss, Heike Rahmann, Zaneta Hong, and Jorg Sieweke, “Pedagogical Foundations: Deploying Digital Techniques in Design/Research Practice,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 3 (2014): 72–83 (76). 128. Philip Belesky, “Processes and Processors,” accessed 25 January 2016, http:// philipbelesky.com/projects/processes-and-processors/. 129. Nadia Amoroso, Digital Landscape Architecture Now (London: Thames & Hudson, 2012), 12. 130. Sean Cubitt, “Analogue and Digital,” Theory, Culture & Society 23 (2006): 250–253 (250). 131. Lopes, A Philosophy of Computer Art, 64. 132. Amoroso, Digital Landscape Architecture Now, 11.

 Systems logic 278 133. George Hargreaves, “Foreword,” Digital Landscape Architecture Now, ed. Amoroso, 7. 134. Lopes, A Philosophy of Computer Art, 49. 135. Bradley Cantrell and Wes Michaels, Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture: Contemporary Techniques and Tools for Digital Representation in Site Design (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 2. 136. David Berry, Critical Theory and the Digital (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 19. 137. Cantrell and Michaels, Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture, 14. 138. Ibid. 139. Walliss et al., “Pedagogical Foundations: Deploying Digital Techniques in Design/ Research Practice,” 74. 140. Ibid., 82. 141. Mario Carpo, Algorithm and the Alphabet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), 41. 142. Virgilio Verceloni, European Gardens: An Historical Atlas (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 78. 143. Michel Conan, “Introduction,” Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550–1850, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2002), 3. 144. Rafael Hierro Calleja, Granada and the Alhambra, trans. Nicola Jane Graham (Granada: Ediciones Miguel Sánchez, 2005), 41. 145. Karen M’Closkey, “Synthetic Patterns: Fabricating Landscapes in the Age of ‘Green,’” Journal of Landscape Architecture (Spring 2013): 16–27 (26). 146. Berry, Critical Theory and the Digital, 126. 147. Amoroso, Digital Landscape Architecture Now, 216. 148. Gilles A. Tiberghien, “A Landscape Deferred,” Intermediate Natures: The Landscapes of Michel Desvigne, ed. Delphine Costedoat (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2009), 151–179 (173). 149. Ibid., 171. 150. Ibid., 173. 151. Andrea Hansen, “From Hand to Land: Tracing Procedural Artifacts in the Built Landscape,” Scenario 01: Landscape Urbanism, eds. Sarah Kathleen Peck and Eliza Shaw Valk, Fall 2011. 152. Chrisman, “Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at the GSD became GIS,” 7. 153. Hansen, “From Hand to Land: Tracing Procedural Artifacts in the Built Landscape.” 154. Christophe Girot, “Topology – A New Measure of Quality in Landscape Architecture,” accessed 25 January 2016, http://girot.arch.ethz.ch/research/designprecision-topology/archives-design-precision-topology/topology-a-new-measureof-quality-in-landscape-architecture. 155. Brett Milligan, “Decade Hillside: The Sigirino Depot,” 6 June 2011, accessed 26 January 2016, https://freeassociationdesign.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/ decade-hillside-the-sigirino-depot/. 156. David Beer, “Interview with David Berry on Digital Power and Critical Theory,” Theory, Culture, & Society, 1 May 2014, accessed 26 January 2016, http://theory culturesociety.org/interview-with-david-berry-on-digital-power-and-critical-theory/. 157. Hansen, “From Hand to Land: Tracing Procedural Artifacts in the Built Landscape.” 158. Zafer Bilda and Halime Demirkan, “An Insight on Designers’ Sketching Activities in Traditional versus Digital Media,” Design Studies 24, no. 1 (2003): 27–50. 159. Karl Kullmann, “Hyper-realism and Loose-reality: The Limitations of Digital Realism and Alternative Principles in Landscape Design Visualization,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 9, no. 3 (2014): 20–31 (22). 160. Noel van Dooren, “Speaking about Drawing,” Topos: The World of Landscape Architecture 80 (2012): 43–54 (54). 161. Kullmann, “Hyper-realism and Loose-reality,” 30. 162. Catherine Dee, “Plus and Minus: Critical Drawing for Landscape Design,” Thinking

Systems logic  279 and Drawing: Confronting an Electronic Age, ed. Marc Treib (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 60–71 (66). 163. Charles William Eliot, General Principles in Selecting Public Reservations and Determining Their Boundaries, Boston Metropolitan Park System, 1902. 164. Sun-Joo Shin, Oliver Lemon, and John Mumma, “Diagrams,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, accessed 25 January 2016, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2014/entries/diagrams/. 165. See Anita Berrizbeitia, “Geology and Temporality in Charles Eliot’s Metropolitan Park System, Boston (1892–1893),” Special Issue on Time, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2014): 38–51. 166. Bowring and Swaffield, “Shifting Landscapes in-between Times,” 143. 167. Ibid., 145. 168. James Corner, “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes,” Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner, (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 152–169 (161). 169. Ibid., 164. 170. Timothy S. Murphy, “Gilles Deleuze,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory, ed. Irena R. Makaryk (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2000), 288–290 (289). 171. Ibid. 172. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 5. 173. Ibid., 7. 174. Ibid., 16. 175. Ibid., 12. 176. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 211. 177. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (New York: Continuum, 2006), 30. 178. Jakub Zdebik, Deleuze and the Diagram: Aesthetic Threads in Visual Organization (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012), 24. 179. Richard T. Forman, Land Mosaics: The Ecology of Landscapes and Regions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5. 180. Ibid., 245. 181. Van Dooren,“Speaking about Drawing,” 53–54. 182. Lauren Manning, “Visualizing Information,” Scenario 01: Landscape Urbanism (Fall 2011), ed. by Sarah Kathleen Peck and Eliza Shaw Valk, accessed 25 January 2016, http://scenariojournal.com/article/lauren-manning/. 183. Edward R. Tufte, “Explaining Magic,” Visual Explanations (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997), 54–72 (55). 184. Edward R. Tufte, “Layering and Separating,” Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990), 53–65 (53). 185. Ibid., 63. 186. Edward R. Tufte, “Micro/Macro Readings,” Envisioning Information, 37–51 (50). 187. Ibid., 151. 188. Edward R. Tufte, “Small Multiples,” Envisioning Information, 66–79 (67). 189. Ibid., 76. 190. Edward R. Tufte, “Words, Numbers, Images – Together,” Beautiful Evidence (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2006), 82–121 (120). 191. Edward R. Tufte, “Links and Causal Arrow,” Beautiful Evidence, 64–81 (71). 192. Tufte, “Layering and Separating,” 65. 193. Jacky Bowring and Simon Swaffield, “Diagrams in Landscape Architecture,” Diagrams of Architecture, ed. Mark Garcia (Chichester: Wiley, 2010), 141–152 (150). 194. Corner, “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes,” 159.

280 Glossary Accelerated perspective The technique of accelerated perspective involves the intentional exaggeration of a perspectival view. For example, if you would like to exaggerate the depth of a path you would narrow the width of the path as it moves away from a particular viewing point. Since objects get smaller as they recede from view, this will have the effect of making the path appear longer than it would if you had designed the width of the path to remain constant. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Illusionary Space Aesthetics Aesthetics is the philosophy of art and it considers the formal qualities, judgments, attitudes, and experiences of various art forms, including the built environment and thus landscapes. Aesthetics emerged as a topic of philosophic debate in the eighteenth century when British philosophers developed theories of taste. These theories supplanted the absolute standards of beauty and proportion forged since the Renaissance. By the twentieth century, investigations in aesthetics included attitudes or the state of mind when appreciating an artwork as well as the nature of aesthetic experiences. Today, aesthetics is a growing field addressing numerous art forms and practices throughout the world. Used in the Introduction; Chapter 1 Forming: Formalism; Chapter 4 Language: Typology, Semantics, Semiotics, Structuralism; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Systems Theory and Cybernetics, Infrastructure, Aleatory Systems, Diagramming Analogon Analogon is a term used in Jean-Paul Sartre’s (1905–1980) theory of the imagination. An analogon is the physical matter that invites you to perceive it as a representation of something, someone, or a mental image. Through the imaginary process, the analogon assumes the place of what the physical matter represents. For example, a photograph of someone can stand, for a moment, for that person, and prompt you to ascribe the feelings you have regarding that person to the photograph. You know the photo is not that person, but the analogon invites you to make those associations. Analogons are particularly powerful if they concern a person who is deceased, and this is why you often see people bringing physical matter or analogons (a photo of the person or her favourite toy) to memorials. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Phenomenology

Glossary  281 Anamorphosis The technique of anamorphosis manipulates the rules governing perspective to distort an image or a view. The correct or intended view or image is only comprehended by occupying a specific vantage point or by using special optical devices. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Illusionary Space Avant-garde From the French term for “advance guard” (a unit of the French army that advances ahead of other units), “avant-garde” was first used in the nineteenth century to describe innovative art that broke with traditional artistic conventions to envision a new future for society. By the mid-twentieth century, avant-garde art was considered an alternative to kitsch art, which is the German name for art that is cheap and garish, and often exhibits an exaggerated sentimentality. A continuous theme found in avant-garde art is its insistence on rule breaking, experimentation, and originality. Used in Chapter 1 Forming: Interventions; Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Spatial Constructs; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Aleatory Systems Bête machine Bête machine is a doctrine advanced by René Descartes (1596–1650) who thought that machines were apt metaphors for explaining the behaviours of non-human animals. Descartes believed this because he thought non-human animals lacked an awareness of their own existence. For Descartes, humans were the only animals to be conscious of themselves. Used in Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Systems Theory and Cybernetics Binary Binary structures concern two terms that are mutually opposed to each other, such as tall versus short. Binary oppositions can be either a contradiction, such as open versus not open, or they can be contrary, such as open versus closed. The semiotician Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992) developed contradiction and contrary binary oppositions as key components of his semiotic square, which he thought provided the basic structure of meaning. Used in the Introduction; Chapter 4 Language: Semiotics, Structuralism, Post-structuralism; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Aleatory Systems, Digital Systems, and Diagramming Bourgeois public sphere The sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas developed the term “bourgeois public sphere” in his book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: – An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Habermas gave a historical–sociological account of spaces where the bourgeois, or middle class, came together as a public. He observed a proliferation of these types of spaces, such as salons and coffee houses, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, France, and Germany. These social spaces were sites of political and artistic debates, but they were transformed, according to Habermas, with the expansion of capitalistic economies, the uneven distribution of wealth, and the rise of media. These changes in Western culture relocated

 Glossary 282 communication on political issues, in particular, to mass media and advertisements, diminishing the contributions made by the middle class in the public sphere. Used in Chapter 1 Forming: Interventions; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Aleatory Systems Bracket When you walk down the street you experience people, animals, physical objects, other people, feelings and thoughts, and you probably consider them just to be there – existing. You don’t question if they exist or what they are really. In other words, you take them for face value. The sidewalk, the trees, the mailbox, and the squirrel racing by your feet are phenomena that are separate from you and they existed before you walked down the street. The philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) called this a natural theoretical attitude, a stance that he critiqued in scientific inquiries. Husserl sought to break with this attitude by employing his phenomenological technique called bracketing. For Husserl, bracketing involves suspending judgment in an experience in order to perceive and describe objects of your external reality. Much like the way a bracket in writing works to enclose a word so as to isolate it from the context of a sentence, bracketing in phenomenology distils the essence or common structure of phenomena. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Phenomenology Bricolage For Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), bricolage refers to the thought processes of the bricoleur, who uses whatever is at hand to create something. In contrast, the engineer uses precise materials and calculations to construct something. Used in Chapter 3 Material Matters: Consequentialism Capital Capital refers to money, but in the Marxist sense of the term, capital is the wealth that produces more wealth. For example, if a capitalist owns a mine, she owns not only the money the mine generates but also the land, the structures associated with the mine, the machinery, and the hired miners – this is her capital. In this Marxist definition, capital is an expanding system. By hiring the miners, who use the machines and raw materials of the land to create surplus money, she is in the position to generate more capital. Cultural capital is associated with the work of sociologist and philosopher Pierre Bourdieu, and it refers to the non-monetary assets that promote social mobility. Monetary assets are economic resources you have at hand, while cultural capital entails knowledge, skills, education that you have acquired. For example, you might earn a university degree that may open up career opportunities that you might not have had if you had only completed high school. Used in Introduction Commodification Commodification is a Marxist term for the transformation of a relationship, formerly not commercialized, into a commercial relationship,

Glossary  283 involving buying and selling. Thus, it is the transformation of something into a commodity. Sports have often been described as undergoing commodification. While playing sports began as a source of fun and exercise, in many instances it has transformed into a multimillion dollar commercial industry. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Contested Space Critical practices In landscape architecture and architecture, critical practices are approaches that incorporate critique as part of the generative process of design. In other words, design becomes the vehicle for criticism. Martha Schwartz’s use of bagels as a material in her Bagel Garden (Figure 4.24) is an example. Her design response was a critique of landscape architects’ focus on plants as the primary material for all gardens. Critical practices can be traced back to the 1970s in the architect Jorge Silvetti’s conception of a “criticism from within” (see Chapter 4 Language: Typology). This approach was part of the return to language and the gravitation to typology in both landscape architecture and architecture. Thirty years later the architect Stan Allen proposed that theoretically driven critical practices should be future-oriented, as he critiqued typology as too concerned with the past, and unsuitable for addressing twenty-first-century urbanism. Used in Chapter 3 Material Matters: Materiality Dialectic or dialectical Derived from the Greek verb “to converse,” dialectics can be traced back to the philosopher Socrates (470 BCE–399 BCE) in the fifth century BCE. However, it was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–1831) sense of the term dialectic, as a mode of thought that unites opposites, which influenced Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) and their theory of dialectical materialism. Hegel’s contemporary Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) provided one of the most well-known explanations of dialectics: a reconciliation of first a thesis with its antithesis to generate a synthesis. Used in the Introduction; Chapter 3 Material Matters: Materiality, Consequentialism; and Chapter 4 Language: Semantics, Post-structuralism Discourse Discourse refers to the way knowledge is formed and made true. The philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) use of the term regards specific language communities, such as the prison system or the medical field, which not only construct a shared language and method of thinking, but also define the limits of knowledge. This is why Foucault views discourse as power – because discourse constitutes the province of knowledge and the community understood to be in possession of knowledge. Used in Chapter 4 Language: Semantics, Post-structuralism Discursive practices In Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) sense of the term, discursive practices relates to the operations of discourses. They are the constellation of culturally specific procedures, rituals, and rules for producing and distributing different forms of knowledge and power, and the creation of identity.

 Glossary 284 Used in Chapter 3 Material Matters: Materiality; Chapter 4 Language: Poststructuralism; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Diagramming École des Beaux-Arts While the term originates with the National School of Fine Arts in Paris, it also refers to a school of thought in landscape architecture and architecture that was practiced and taught primarily between 1893 and 1929 (between the Chicago Columbian Exposition and the Great Depression). Landscape designs reflecting the École des Beaux-Arts tradition revived older styles from Ancient Greece and Rome, Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque-era Europe. These styles could be mixed within one design as well. Used in Chapter 1 Forming: Formalism Empathy Empathy’s meaning has changed over time. Today, for example, empathy is often equated with sympathy, or our ability to identify with the feelings of others. When it was initially introduced to the design professions in the mid-twentieth century, empathy inspired landscape architects to express feelings and emotion through their designs. An asymmetrical layout of site features, for example, was thought to create movement in the eye and a sense of freedom and movement. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Spatial Constructs Exchange-value Exchange is the practice of swapping something for something else with the condition that you will be receiving an equivalent in return. In exchange-value societies, this exchange is mediated by money. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Contested Space Existentialism Existentialism is not an organized philosophical movement; rather several philosophers and thinkers have been identified as existentialists, including Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), and Albert Camus (1913–1960). Themes addressed by existentialists include the consequences of the absurdity of existence and the commitments we share towards freedom. Existentialists also believed that philosophy should not be treated as an objective science or a form of remote contemplation, so many existentialists “lived out” their philosophy through literature. Thus, existentialism is both a philosophical and literary endeavour. For example, in Sartre’s novel, Nausea, the 30-year-old protagonist Antoine Roquentin learns that his existence is superfluous. He does this while looking at a root of a chestnut tree, which grows without him or without reason. This experience brings on nausea as he realizes that like the root his existence is absurd. Nausea reveals this state of existence and Sartre selected the word nausea because it is an uncontrollable sensation, rather than an idea. Used in Chapter 4 Language: Structuralism; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Digital Systems

Glossary  285 Exquisite corpse In the surrealist game, exquisite corpse, each player draws or pastes down an image on a sheet of paper, which is then folded to hide it from the view of the next player, who does the same before passing it on to the next person. Once finished, the entire sheet of paper is unfolded to reveal a collective image. This game was promoted by surrealists for its emphasis on chance, unpredictability, and group interaction. Used in Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Aleatory Systems Fetishized commodity The term fetish finds its origins in anthropology. Western anthropologists used “fetish” to describe the charms and other magical objects sacred to the Africans living in Guinea. In Marxist thought the term commodity refers to merchandise, wares, and other commercial goods (although now “commodities” refer to food and resources that are traded on the market) in the capitalist system of an exchange-value society. The emphasis on exchange-value is important because in an exchange-value society the labour required to produce the commodity is not necessarily an inherent part of its value. The oft-exploitive relationship between labour and the commodity is hidden. Pairing “fetishized” with “commodity,” like the charm that holds powers beyond what can be detected from the physical charm itself, the fetishized commodity is revered as possessing something that is transcendent from its inherent material. Think of the cult following that iPhones possess. Used in Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Aleatory Systems Gardenesque Coined by the gardener and writer John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843), gardenesque refers to a theory of planting design that emphasized the display of exotic, specimen plants. These plants were placed in distinctively shaped arrangements, such as in circular beds, that enabled people to view each plant at its best. The gardenesque style was in some ways a reaction to the nineteenth-century antiquarian Quatremère de Quincy’s critique that landscape gardens that looked indistinguishable from what nature could produce should not be considered art. Thus, the defined planting beds and the exotic specimens of gardenesque gardens signalled to viewers the status of the garden as an art form. Used in Chapter 3 Material Matters: Consequentialism Genealogy Genealogy is Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) critical approach to history. He proposed genealogy as an alternative to ahistorical descriptions of the past (through typology for example) or developmental trajectories (as witnessed in most history textbooks). Foucault thought these histories painted an illusion of progress as an inevitable outcome of time and place that ultimately privileged the viewpoint of those writing the history. For example, landscape architecture history is typically presented to students in North America with a Eurocentric viewpoint with the idea that as political hegemony shifted around the Mediterranean, Europe, England, and later the United States there was an

 Glossary 286 inevitable progression of landscapes and gardens. In contrast, genealogy constructs narratives that can be used to critique the present. Used in Chapter 4 Language: Post-structuralism Genius loci A Latin term, genius loci is typically used to describe the atmosphere of a specific place. Originally the term was inscribed on Roman altars dedicated to the protective spirit of a region. British philosophers and writers later revived the term in the eighteenth century. Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), for example, used the term genius loci in The Moralist (1709) to describe the relationship between nature, beauty, and moral truth. Genius loci was also expressed in the design of landscapes during this time period. For example, the entry drive to Castle Howard in North Yorkshire, England, was not flattened with grading. Rather, the drive rolls over the hilly terrain so that visitors can feel ancient geomorphology or genius loci. Used in Chapter 4 Language: Typology 6.1 Entrance drive to Castle Howard, York, England

Glossary  287 Haha A haha is a vertical barrier that facilitates an uninterrupted view of the landscape from the house. It can be made using a retaining wall or a steep slope. Hahas were first described by Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville (1680–1765) in his book, La théorie et la pratique du jardinage (1709). Hahas were used extensively in eighteenth-century landscape gardens in Britain because you could look out and see grazing animals as part of the view, but the animals were unable to come up to the house because of the vertical barrier. Used in Chapter 3 Material Matters: Truth of Materials Hedonism Hedonism describes a type of value associated with classical utilitarianism in which the only thing good for its own sake is pleasure or happiness. All goods are pleasure or means that ultimately lead to pleasure. For example, the classical utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) thought pleasure was an intrinsic feature of good, while bad was associated with pain. In the twentieth century the philosopher G. E. Moore (1873–1958) criticized the hedonistic value theory advanced in classical utilitarianism. He believed in the promotion of good, but thought there should be a plurality of what could be deemed good beyond simply pleasure. Used in Chapter 3 Material Matters: Consequentialism Hegemony Hegemony describes social and political relations whereby the ruling class dominates the subordinate class. This domination is so complete that the dominant class’s worldview is enshrined as the cultural norm and perceived as natural and inevitable, rather than culturally constructed and debatable. In this sense, the power of hegemony is derived from its invisibility because as one class becomes dominant it becomes common sense to accept this hegemonic relationship. Used in Chapter 1 Forming: Form Generation; Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Spatial Constructs; Chapter 4 Language: Post-structuralism; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Aleatory Systems Hermeneutics Referencing the Greek god Hermes, who delivered and deciphered messages from the divine to mortals, hermeneutics concerns interpretation. While hermeneutics was initially concerned with the interpretation of biblical texts, by the nineteenth century it involved the analysis of non-religious texts in the determination of the author’s intentions. In the twentieth century philosophers such as Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Hans Georg Gadamer (1900–2002), and Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) provided diverse insights into hermeneutics. Heidegger, for example, claimed that phenomenology was hermeneutics, meaning the aim of phenomenology sought to interpret experience. Through a highly structured hermeneutical method, Heidegger proposed that the most primordial type of knowing could be revealed. Alternatively, Ricoeur argued that interpretations would vary depending on the reader’s cultural background. Today hermeneutics applies to a range of artefacts beyond

 Glossary 288 written texts, including landscapes. In his article, “A Discourse on Theory II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the Alternative of Hermeneutics,” James Corner proposed hermeneutics as an approach to the theory and practice of landscape architecture. By exploring situational interpretation and metaphor, Corner thought that landscape architects could overcome positivism, the use of paradigms, and the avant-garde, which he viewed as tyrannies that limited the imaginative process. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Phenomenology Heuristic A heuristic is a rule-of-thumb method or shortcut. You probably know the distance of your stride, one meter in length for example. This knowledge can then be used as a heuristic to determine how long a street is by walking and counting your steps. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Spatial Constructs; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Digital Systems, Diagramming Iconology First proposed by Erwin Panofsky, iconology is an alternative to iconography, which concerns the identification, description, and classification of visual images and symbols of historical art. Iconology takes this analysis a step further by situating the work of art in its cultural and historical context and identifying how the work elaborates underlying notions of nationhood, religion, time period, or class. With iconology art could be treated like other historical documents, such as texts. The literary critic W. J. T. Mitchell later made iconology part of his ideological analysis of images in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Used in Chapter 4 Language: Semantics Idealism In philosophy, idealism claims that reality is fundamentally mentally constructed, and this immaterial aspect of reality has priority over the material dimensions of reality. For example, you are reading this book. You see the book, the words and images on the page. You can touch the book or turn the pages, etc. These perceptions all happen within your mind, where you form an image of the book. An idealist would assert that aside from your immediate perceptions there is no such thing as an external objective world of books because reality takes place in your mind. A materialist would disagree and claim that there is an independent objective reality of books outside of your mind. Used in Chapter 3 Material Matters: Materiality Ideology Ideology comprises the conscious, but often unconscious, shared beliefs and values held by an individual or group of people. When a critic uses the term ideology it is usually employed to reveal that these beliefs are untrue. Like hegemony, ideology’s power rests in its invisibility. Ideological beliefs are typically taken for common sense and they are rarely subject to debate. Ideology has been theorized by numerous individuals over the course of the twentieth century, and the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (1918–1990) argued that

Glossary  289 you are unable to live without ideology. It is an inescapable fact of life. In his theory of ideological state apparatus, he argued that ideology represents the imaginary relationship between you and your material existence, and it is practiced through some type of state apparatus, such as religion, school, or media. He also contended that ideology operated in more subtle ways in daily interactions. Analysing language, for example, may reveal hidden assumptions. When someone uses the term “natural,” such as, “it’s only natural that you don’t excel at grading and drainage because you’re female,” this statement uncovers certain beliefs held by the speaker regarding gender and technical competence that the speaker may not be aware of, but this ideology is revealed through the use of language. Used in the Introduction; Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Spatial Constructs, Contested Space; Chapter 3 Material Matters: Materiality; Chapter 4 Language: Post-structuralism; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Aleatory Systems, Digital Systems In-situ Taken from the Latin phrase, in-situ means literally “on site.” If you design a landscape in-situ that means you are designing it on site and not back at the studio or office. Used in the Introduction; and Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Spatial Constructs Medium-specificity Developed by the art critic Clement Greenberg, who emphasized the material of an artwork as the defining aspect of that work, medium-specificity expanded earlier critiques of paintings, which might have incorporated the study of an artist’s brushwork, for example. Greenberg’s medium-specificity championed paintings that emphasized the flat, painted canvas over paintings that attempted to create the illusion of depth. Paintings that stressed the flatness of the painted canvas specifically expressed the uniqueness of painting in comparison to other arts, such as sculpture. Used in Chapter 3 Material Matters: Materiality; and Chapter 4 Language: Structuralism Metaphor A metaphor is a technique of describing something by calling it something else. Typically the two terms are far removed from each other but have some characteristics in common. Consider your studio and a pigsty; you could say, “I should clean up this pigsty,” for example. You are not saying that the studio is literally home to a group of omnivorous domesticated mammals with big snouts. You are telling me that the studio is a stinking mess. The goal of metaphors is to transfer qualities of one person, place, or expression to another in order to heighten the readers’ or listeners’ interpretation. Also see synecdoche. Used in Chapter 4 Language: Semantics, Structuralism; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Systems Theory and Cybernetics, Aleatory Systems, Diagramming

 Glossary 290 Mimesis Mimesis dates back to the work of Plato and Aristotle, and it is chiefly concerned with the way art imitates reality. Aristotle considered drama in the tragedies as an imitation of life, for example. During the twentieth century mimesis was brought into question with the emergence of paintings that did not attempt to represent three-dimensional reality. In 1964, discussions on mimesis shifted to sculpture when Andy Warhol created Brillo boxes. Warhol’s artwork, a series of the boxes made of painted plywood, looked very much like the boxes of real cleaning pads you could purchase in the supermarket. In fact when Brillo boxes were sent for exhibition in Canada, customs refused to give it the special tax status of an artwork and taxed them as a commercial product. The philosopher Arthur Danto called this “the paradox of mimesis” and he questioned what made something art. Used in Chapter 1 Forming: Formalism; Chapter 3 Material Matters: Consequentialism; Chapter 4 Language: Semantics; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Aleatory Systems Mnemonic Taken from the Greek word mnemonikos, which means “of or pertaining to memory,” mnemonic devices can be a pattern of letters, ideas, rhymes, and associations that assist in memory. You’ve probably developed some mnemonic techniques for your plant identification courses. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Memory and Space Neo-Kantian Philosophers, theorists, and art critics who are called NeoKantians are individuals who have revived some dimension of the philosophy formulated by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). The revival of Kantian philosophy dates back to nineteenth-century Germany, but more recently in the twentieth century the art critic Clement Greenberg identified his conception of modern art with Kant. Used in Chapter 4 Language: Semantics Ontology In philosophy ontology examines what exists and what the basic features and relations are that constitute something that exists. It is the latter sense of the term, what makes something what it is, which theory addresses. Thus, an ontological theory of landscape architecture might speculate on what makes something a work of landscape architecture. Used in Chapter 1 Forming: Formalism; Chapter 3 Material Matters: Materiality; and Chapter 4 Language: Semantics, Semiotics Orientalism Developed by Edward W. Said, orientalism concerns the misrepresentation of the East by the West, and it is closely tied to the term Other. For Said, orientalism reinforces a Eurocentric prejudice against people from Arab and Islamic cultures by conflating different groups in these cultures as one undifferentiated Other. Used in Chapter 4 Language: Post-structuralism

Glossary  291 Other In post-structural theories the term Other is used to describe individuals or communities who are excluded or marginalized from the dominant power group, and whose identities are often reproduced by the West as separate entities that are interpreted through discursive practices, especially stereotypical images. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Spatial Constructs, Contested Space; Chapter 4 Language: Structuralism, Post-structuralism; and Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Aleatory Systems Quincunx Derived from the Latin quinque (five) and uncia (twelfth), quincunx originally referred to the Roman currency, five-twelfths. It also refers to a planting pattern traditionally used for laying out trees in an orchard. The pattern resembles the five side on a dice with dots at four corners to form a square with one dot in the centre of the square. This pattern was spaced to provide ample sun to the trees as well as access for harvesting. Used in Chapter 2 Spatial Practices: Spatial Constructs Reductionism Reductionism in the sciences claims that concepts, explanations, and methods used in one scientific field can be used to elucidate another domain of science. The use of physics to describe the working of biological phenomena is an example. Used in Chapter 5 Systems Logic: Systems Theory and Cybernetics Revelatory landscapes In 1998 a special issue of Landscape Journal featured the exhibition, “Eco-Revelatory Design: Nature Constructed/Nature Revealed.” Chaired and edited by Brenda Brown, Terry Harkness, and Douglas Johnston. 6.2 Quincunx pattern, public domain