Beyond the visible

During a walk in the banlieue of Paris, the landscaper Bernard Lassus and the philosopher Massimo Venturi Ferriolo rediscovered the ability to perceive and construct a landscape, combining environmental awareness with identity and memory.

During that walk, they detected and revealed a collection of small gardens built by inhabitants in their own few square meters. Those gardens are imaginary and comfortable places pleasant to the spirit. Here, the ‘underdogs’ of the contemporary city dream ‘landscapes’ and interpret them with the few resources they have available. The basis of these small works is the desire for creation and invention, together with the need for a space in which people can fix their own imagination, i.e., modeling their own spaces according to their imagination and dreams.

The inhabitants of the banlieue are unconscious and habitual ‘builders of landscape’ such as Edoardo and Carlotta, characters of Goethe’s Elective Affinities. The small gardens are representation and also sign of human intervention. They are physical and abstract places, full of meanings. Projections and instinctive memories are realized there. These spaces are real places, which can be pictured and ‘measured’ with a project, but they are also intangible and not really computable. They are both relations places and representation places. The small gardens are first dreamed and then made.

The public spaces, such as parks, gardens and squares are complex translation of a landscape. In Architecture, the landscape is an artistic interpretation like it occurs in the cinema, in the literature and in the arts in general. The seamless and disjointed patchwork of the contemporary city makes a complex relationship between what gives the above-mentioned identity and what doesn’t. This patchwork enhances superficiality and makes the landscape similar to the reject, the Junkspace theorized by Rem Koolhaas.

“If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace”.

In a similar context, the voids are support for representation of  ’landscape’, being the land where to create collective identity spaces. The frantic race to complete occupation of territory has left ‘precious’ scars on urbanized land, a Sprawlscape of voids waiting to become something else. These places are Junkspace and Third Landscape. They are ready for new experimentations and new uses but, at first, they are waiting for being recognized. They need originality and relationship with the surroundings, at the same time.

The landscape design may consider the topography; existing signs and paths of perception, but it also have to consider the need for an identity. Besides, the visual stereotypes could be considered too. Finally, the landscape design must talk with the environment, i.e., the population that requires and welcomes it. The ancestral need to redeem anonymous places can be filtered by the (artistic) interpretation of landscape. It is possible to search the main point of view with an “Inventive analysis”, such as Lassus.

 ”By locating and checking the ‘scale visual and tactile’ and that the site offers, see the parallel memory, place names, stories and local legends, investigate its history. By analysing the existing uses to discover the places that was concealed from the rigors of everyday life and is about to disappear”.

John Dixon Hunt gathers crucial meeting in the work of the French artist, i.e., appearance/reality, exterior/interior, global/local, tactile/visual, horizontal/vertical, and the whole/the part. Thanks to these meetings, it is possible to reveal the ‘claimed stories’ by the same places often mentioned by Wim Wenders, i.e., the hidden stories waiting to be photographed, perceived or simply evoked.

In any world’s banlieue, the street, the square and the sidewalk became residual waste, a mere remaining of the plan self-built by people who, step by step, have shaped an area similar to them. Consequently, voids and buildings exist in flexible relationships and in a spectacular diversity as systems overlapping in total randomness. A sum of residential architectures apparently arranged without any reason left urban voids. These often become not understood, refused, underestimate and deteriorated. The voids and open spaces are an important playground where to play the game of the induced process of upgrading to these suburbs, exporting here the necessary quality of centrality through a representative character. It’s important the ability to listen to these places, the rediscovery of a hidden quality to evoke, – the natural and architectural existing and those subtle relationships that tell a more uncertain relation – sometimes distant, sometimes very close – between people and own landscape.

We can found the identity on the balance between tangible and intangible values, through the aesthetic research which aims to cultivate the differences in a context where the heterogeneity, the “freestyle” and a strong individualistic character (of the landscape and of the population) suggest other topics than cryptic linguistic virtuosity.

We can try ‘compatible’ interventions such as ‘figurative facts’ not only formal, but saturated with lasting value.

We can try devices designed to introduce ethical and aesthetic landscape qualities, which can also put an emphasis on recognition/ responsibility of the people that welcomes them.

The voids of our cities can be thought of as machines built to accommodate extraordinary appropriation by the public, transforming an intimate and reserved landscape, in a place of the collective activities of all kinds, in ‘own landscape ‘, regardless of planning or of the standard technique: large and poetic objects to the free play of imagination.

As the “Third Landscape” is “an area for many species that do not fit elsewhere“, these spaces can be considered the area for many activities, functions, materials, and freedom are incompatible with the consolidated city. This is a unique opportunity for research and enhancement.

For the European Landscape Convention: “There is no landscape without an observer” and the architecture has the role of catalyst and generator of it. The landscape design is primarily a program of awareness, communication and participation. It has the task of producing an aesthetic vision, to direct our gaze to the interpretation of the landscape as a manifestation of the people, claiming the pedagogical role that architecture should be.

Like the cinema, the literature, the poetry, also the architecture relies on the specific elements of their language, an aesthetic judgment on the landscape and, like a two-way relationship, represents a device through which retrace and expand our perception. As Eugenio Turri argues “the cinema depicts a reality that fruition for a large number of people; it provides insights and suggestions that ultimately affect the vision of others and extend so incalculable self-awareness and sense of life”.

In general, the art push the look ‘beyond the visible’, revealing – often – what would normally is overlooked. Michelangelo Antonioni with its ability to tune into a place always makes the context such as part of a story managing to grasp the ‘specific’.

In the Profession Reporter movie, through movement and character of figures, the director shows a landscape clearly ‘invisible’ on the screen. Watching a context without figures, where there is not any representative character, where there is not landscape, where the wind lifting the dust and deletes even the horizon, the protagonist Locke and his friend Maria said:

Locke: there is a hole in oil pan

Maria (sitting quietly in the car): it is beautiful here, right?

Locke: yes… it is very nice…

Polder Garden

Polder Garden – bird’s eye view Campus Delft

Last year Michael van der Meer, the director of the Science Centre and Rolf Hut from the Faculty of Civil Engineering asked us to design the ‘smallest polder of the Netherlands’ at the Campus of TU Delft. We invited 5 students (Lowin van der Burg, Marij Hoogland, Linda Nijhof, Emma Ottevanger and Cem Steenhorst) from the faculty of Architecture, who invested quite some time next to their regular study program, to make a design. Denise Piccinini and myself from the department of Landscape Architecture coached them.

The project should demonstrate, especially to foreign guests and children, who visit the Science Centre, a typical piece of the man-made Dutch landscape.

Furthermore the polder should explain the principles of water management of the lowlands. Rain drops fall into the polder, are collected in the ditches, flow to the main canal and are discharged via the screw pump onto the ring canal that surrounds the polder.

Since the polder is very small and situated next to the Science Centre, neighboring a future international housing block we decided to design the polder as being garden. The image of the design should convince decision makers who are involved in planning process of TU Delft campus, that this Polder Garden can become an educational and spatial interesting hotspot. And moreover the first polder we, the Dutch, build in the Netherlands after having finished South Flevoland in 1968!

What did I expect landscape design to be?

Reblogged from paul roncken:

What was I thinking when I decided to study landscape architecture? Did I really expect to design whole landscapes? Meet rich enough clients so I could play with their lands and tell them what fancy big trees to buy or chop, what holes to dig to fill with water or what mountains to create for a backdrop? What age was I, Seventeen!

Read more… 461 more words

Ethical Planting

Each time I visit an urban park I take note of the choice of plants in the design. Not just because I am interested in plant species or their aesthetic or sensorial qualities, but also because I an interested in the ethical and ecological notions behind a planting design. Questions like: do plants have ‘rights’? and what is a native and what is an exotic plant? impact ideologies and approaches to nature conservation, ecology and planting design. These questions have surfaced in the design competition for the Singel park in Leiden, won earlier this year by Lola Landscape architects from Rotterdam and Bureau Karst from Switzerland. Lola’s planting concept for the competition accentuates the diversity of green spaces around this six-kilometer long linear park by proposing a ‘necklace’ of different plantings featuring plants from around the world.  Under the theme ‘cosmopolitan nature’, their idea is to showcase plant communities from international plant-geography zones similar to that of Leiden, from North and South America, South Africa, Madagascar, Australia, China and Japan. It promises a spectacular array of plant material on a scale unprecedented in a Dutch public park. The Leiden Hortus Botanicus, also situated in the park, has been invited to develop and manage the planting, an opportunity for the botanical garden to re-invent itself and its relationship to the city and the world in a new public park.

Despite the scale and originality of the idea however, it did not attract the unanimous approval in Leiden that other aspects of their scheme did. Doubts were raised about management and maintenance: would these exotic plants take over the park and out-compete native species? Ideological discussions also emerged. Why use ‘foreign’ plants? What was wrong with using plants which were native to the area? A political analyst might interpret this response as a reflection of the rise of populist political ideologies promoted by the likes of the PVV. This analysis might be newsworthy, but surely it would be too simplistic? Lets take a look at it.

Motivations for using native plants vary, from a simple interest and concern for local plants and biodiversity to adepts of concepts such as phytogeography and phytosociology. Phytogeography is the demarcation of plant species into specific plant districts around the world, determined by their biotic, abiotic and cultural landscape conditions. Phytosociology is the study of the relationships between individual species in these plant ‘communities’. Adepts of phytogeography and phytosociology promote the exclusive use of plants from the phytogeographic zones only. These concepts have increasingly influenced garden and landscape design in the last hundred years, leading to the Heemtuin movement in the Netherlands, and parks such as the Jac. P. Thijjse park in Amsteleveen by Chris Broerse and Koos Landwehr from the 1930s.

There is however, a major ethical problem with phytogeography and phytosociology. If we look at it from a bio-centric worldview, we humans are part and parcel of the natural world and all organisms have their own intrinsic value. We therefore have no fundamental right to decide the fate of another organism and the decision to contain plants within their phyto-geographical district must be deemed wrong as we are deciding for plants where they can and can’t grow, based on our own interpretation of where they are considered to belong or not. Phytogeography and phytosociology must then be seen as an anthropocentric approach as we are the ones determining where plants are to grow, based on our own insights, with ourselves and our own futures as the primary focus. This is fine, were it not that few adepts of phytogeography and phytosociology would consider themselves anthropocentric. There is also a more fundamental problem here: Who are we to decide they only ‘belong’ in one particular district and not in another? They may do well in specific phyto-geographic conditions and with particular neighbours, but who is to say they mightn’t do better in different circumstances on the other side of the globe? And if we were to apply the same rules to humans, wouldn’t we certainly be infringing on fundamental human rights? Suddenly a scientific concept starts to display political undertones. Concepts such as phytogeography have been linked to dubious political ideologies in the past: Jewish people were prohibited from gardening with native plants in Nazi Germany, a doctrine linked to the emergence of phytogeography and phytosociology.

Opponents of the Lola’s planting concept face another dilemma: how does one determine what is a ‘native’ and what is ‘exotic’? From the perspective of evolutionary biology the concept of ‘native’ and ‘exotic’ is certainly fluid. Plants and plant communities are anything but static organisms, developing and adapting to different circumstances over time. Native or exotic thus depends on when one starts and stops the deep-time clock. It is also a question of cultural history, particularly in the Netherlands. Many of the plants we now consider native, migrated here in the holds of cargo ships or war fleets or were introduced by new cultures, first from Europe, later elsewhere. Dutch nature has been termed a ‘mosaic of memories’ by the biologist Piet Schroevers, a curious inter-relationship between shifts in biodiversity and periods of discovery, trade and contact between the Netherlands and the rest of the world.

Plant ethics also plays out differently in different types of green space. In parks, planting design is not only about the choice of plants and plant communities for phyto-geographic goals, but also for spatial, temporal and sensorial effects in this most complex and fascinating of urban public spaces. Plant ethics in urban gardens, parkways, remnant landscapes and natural areas however, may be another question entirely. Lola’s winning design has re-opened the Pandora’s box of ethical and ecological problems for landscape architecture in planting design – something academics and practitioners need to explore and debate if they are to offer some alternative viewpoints to approaches based exclusively on science. To start the debate I propose we cease using the terms ‘native’ and ‘exotic’ and start a broader debate between botanists, gardeners, landscape architects, historians, anthropologists and philosophers on planting in the global metropolis.

Glass flowers

Actually, I had come to New England to see the Indian summer. But Superstorm Sandy had, among the havoc it had worked on the entire eastern seaboard of the United States, blown away the remaining leaves in the New England forests, and brought a period of hawkish weather in its wake. My colleagues had more Indian summer in their own backyard.

As it was, it was not nature that took my breath away, but its meticulous reproduction: nature as seen through the eyes of a nineteenth-century artisan. Harvard Museum of Natural History seemed a good pastime for another cold, windy day, since I had been told of its collection of glass flowers. But I had not imagined what I saw there: 4,400 models that replicate the tiniest details of plant anatomy with astounding precision. Are they really glass? One can’t help repeating the same question that every visitor asks.

Leopold Blaschka was a glassworker from Bohemia, manufacturing glass eyes. In 1853, Leopold was suffering from ill health and was prescribed a sea voyage. He travelled to the United States and back, using the time at sea to study and draw sea animals. He discovered he could make replicas of marine invertebrates in glass, making models much better than the previous methods of presenting such creatures: drawings, pressing, photographs and papier-mâché or wax models. He constructed an aquarium at his house, in order to keep live specimens from which to model.

One day the director of the Botanical Museum at Harvard saw these glass replicas in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and he traveled to Dresden to convince Leopold and his son Rudolf, who was in the business with him, to produce a botanical collection for him, wanting something that would convey the beauty and vitality of the plant kingdom and through which he could interest a large viewing audience. Dried or preserved plants and various plant products would not stand up well over a period of time, and at that time plant replicas made of wax or papier-mâché were crudely done.

Leopold, and later Rudolf, continued to make glass models for Harvard until 1938, cultivating plants in their own backyard, visiting greenhouses and eventually traveling around the world to study the plants, make drawings and color notes, and collect and preserve specimens to take back to the workshop in Germany.

In a letter to the financers of the project, the director described the creation of a Phlox that he witnessed: “[…] they drew first of all a rough sketch of the relations of all the flowers to each other and to the leaves, and then began to mix some glass with colors to get the right tints. The corolla is drawn and formed from a tube of glass. Then the petals are formed and melted to the tube of the corolla. The stamens are melted in next, and then the whole thing is placed in an annealing oven to remain for a few hours. It took Mr. B. just an hour and a half to make the tubes and petals of the three flowers. It required about an hour to put in the stamens and add the calyx. Next, the buds with their twists are made and all are fastened to wires covered with glass. All of these are next fastened to a stem with leaves and the product is then ready for a little paint which is added with great skill where it is required. The molding of the shapes is effected by means of ordinary pincers and tweezers. With these clumsy tools they fashion the flat plates and turn them in any way they please. With little needles fastened in handles, they make the grooves and lines and figurings of the edges. But although you may see him touch a flat piece of glass with his little metallic tools, you know that it is no ordinary touch which suddenly shapes it into a living form.”

The amazing thing is that no secret process ever went into the manufacture of the models. All the techniques employed were known to glassworkers of the period. The only difference was the combination in one individual of the meticulous skill, unmatched patience, accurate observation, and deep love of the subject that the two Blaschkas brought to all of their work. These models have been described as “an artistic marvel in the field of science and a scientific marvel in the field of art.”

Isn’t that the perfect example of what landscape architecture is all about?

Colour, colour and colour

The girl next door enters our livingroom, drops down on a chair and looks out into the garden. ‘He, you have a new tree!’ I look out of the window – a new tree? But instantly I understand what she is looking at – our Rhus Typhina (azijnboom) – it looks like it is set on fire, just like the whole garden is. These colours are amazing! Talking to friends from England, Germany and other parts of the Netherlands we conclude that during this autumn (2012) the colours of trees and shrubs are exceptional intense. This fact probably can be explained by whether circumstances.

In the mean time I ask myself why for example grass is not colouring that much, it still looks green to me. Imagine cows grazing on red grass! Wow, the world would go crazy.

Green is associated with freshness and is emotional speaking the colour of hope and peace. And as we know green is the most common colour in nature. The match between our emotions and the main colour of nature doesn’t seem to coincide. Technically speaking plants are green because of their chlorophyll. The question remains, why do trees and shrubs discolour in autumn? Of course the biochemical process of withdrawing the chlorophyll can explain it. But more interesting, what is the impact of this process to our heart? I am, and so do all the others I spoke to, enjoying these autumn colours very much, seeing these bright yellows and reds delivers energy. These colour explosions might help us to overcome the coming long, dark cold winter. Or … are there any other suggestions?

As persons interested in landscape and landscape architecture we could call ourselves lucky to work with colour and/or enjoying them. Working with, and enjoying colours, is next to working with time processes, with movement, with smell and taste very specific to landscape architecture. Therefore these aspects should have a prominent position within the curriculum of our master of Landscape Architecture. Please let me know if you agree.

Enjoy the autumn and get inspired!

Mapping the unexpected

“All perceiving is also thinking, all reasoning is also intuition, all observation is also invention.” This quote of Rudolf Arnheim was the starting point of the 4 hour mapping workshop for graduate students [1]. Two landscape types, graphite, paper, cups and silverwork were the means to explore mapping as a tool in landscape architecture.

The two landscape types were taken from J.B. Jackson’s seminal book ‘The Vernacular Landscape’, where he described the political and the vernacular landscape. By the political landscape he meant those spaces and structures designed to impose or preserve an unity and order on the land, or in keeping with a long-range, large-scale plan (well-defined territories, public spaces, large-scale production landscapes). The vernacular landscape is one where evidences of a political organization of space are largely or entirely absent (absence of defined, permanent spaces).

After a lively discussion the structures of the political landscape were set up in wet graphite following a set of rules. Step by step this landscape evolved according to the master plan. After a while, the initial setup was overlaid with dusty graphite using natural forces such as water and ‘wind’ (since it was in a classroom we had to simulate by blowing ). The result was a landscape of unexpected beauty showing human interventions confronted with natural patterns.

 

 

The vernacular landscape was created by a succession of spontaneous actions. At the moment we began, patterns of graphite started to evolve responding to the field conditions set by the table and the tools used. Some structures stayed and became part of an incremental process, others disappeared. Sometimes nature took over and added another layer. In the end the landscape was like a palimpsest presenting the result of the dialogue between processes of inhabitation and natural forces through time.

 

 

While reflecting on the mapping exercise we wondered how we could use this in the practice of landscape architecture. What could we learn from this? In both cases the initial intervention remained and became a modus operandi for the development of landscape by natural and sociocultural processes. This intervention can be architectural in nature, or more practical, but always precise and geared to achieve certain goals in space and time. Close reading of real-life landscapes all over the world reveals the unexpected beauty and logic of spatial organisation in this types of landscape. Examples can be found on e.g. http://geopathology.posterous.com/, such as:

 

 

This landscape in the delta of the Vjoses River, Albania (north to the right), where an occupation grid is superimposed on the fertile river landscape. This grid establishes a modular system and alternating pattern of parcellation, drainage canals and roads, which can be extended seaward, to obtain new land created by processes of accretion (in Dutch: aanwas).

 

 

Or this landscape in the North-East of Iran (north to the left), where the pattern of agricultural fields is closely related to the structure of an alluvial fan, taking advantage of the geological processes of erosion and sedimentation. Interventions are geared to optimize use of water and fertile sediment.

To conclude: by mapping physical, biological and cultural aspects we can understand the organization of space, how landscapes were created and how they change. It reveals certain ways of defining and handling space and time. In that respect “mappings are neither depictions nor representations but mental constructs, ideas that enable and effect change. It is a tool to explore and create new realities. Mapping is already a project in the making”, as James Corner puts it.

[1] The graduate students who created the maps: Anna Ioannidou, Nikolaos Margaritis, Lisanne van Niekerk and Mariska van Rijswijk; the workshop was led by John Lonsdale and Steffen Nijhuis.