Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture

Ellen Braae, Henriette Steiner, Ellen Braae, Henriette Steiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317042990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Planificación urbana y paisajismo

The Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture considers landscape architecture's increasingly important cultural, aesthetic, and ecological role. The volume reflects topical concerns in theoretical, historical, philosophical, and practice-related research in landscape architecture – research that reflects our relationship with what has traditionally been called 'nature'. It does so at a time when questions about the use of global resources and understanding the links between human and non-human worlds are more crucial than ever.

The twenty-five chapters of this edited collection bring together significant positions in current landscape architecture research under five broad themes – History, Sites and Heritage, City and Nature, Ethics and Sustainability, Knowledge and Practice – supplemented with a discussion of landscape architecture education. Prominent as well as up-and-coming contributors from landscape architecture and adjacent fields including Tom Avermaete, Peter Carl, Gareth Doherty, Ottmar Ette, Matthew Gandy, Christophe Girot, Anne Whiston Spirn, Ian H. Thompson and Jane Wolff seek to widen, fuel, and frame critical discussion in this growing area.

A significant contribution to landscape architecture research, this book will be beneficial not only to students and academics in landscape architecture, but also to scholars in related fields such as history, architecture, and social studies.

PART I

Landscape in the rear-view mirror

Historicizing the field

1

Culture, nature, a punkt in spice

Peter Carl

Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.¹

Even in a tale full of conversation, music and song, it is unusual for Gabriel Conroy to hear snow (‘falling faintly [… ] faintly falling’). The famous conclusion to James Joyce’s short story ‘The Dead’ is, as with Gretta Conroy listening to her past at the top of the stairs, ‘like a symbol of something’. Snowflakes are invisible until they pass by a darker background (day) or as shadows falling through light (night). Conversely, they make the normally invisible air rhythmically apparent in a way that rain, fog or dust do not. Snowflakes’ supposedly infinite hexagonal variation—all different in their sameness—are like people or their thoughts, their words, histories, memories or their souls. The capacity for snow to recreate things is captured by Mario Soldati:

Whilst having lunch, he watched the snow falling against the dark russet background of the Palazzo Carignano. The snow, resting on the baroque cornices, on the mouldings of the windows, on the play of recesses and decoration, repeated—fatally and exactly rediscovered—the light traces of the pen of Guarini, when, in his first rapid sketches, he had imagined the faç ade of the palazzo. [… ] The snow simplified everything, like a great designer.²

Conversely, for Wallace Stevens, also listening, it is the imagination, or human culture, which ‘beholds’ something where in fact there may be nothing but implacable natural processes:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.³

And then of course snow melts, in a pathos of slush and meltwater, to become next year’s snow. Accordingly it is plausible that Gabriel Conroy heard lightly falling what most people call ‘time’. However, because time as such and in the singular occurs only in philosophy or modern physics, ‘temporalities’ is preferred here. It is always temporality-of-something-somewhere. Moreover, as regards our own participation in temporalities, it is in fact the ephemeral present that is most obscure; we necessarily use our recollections or experience or memories or customs or traditions to anticipate or fabricate possible futures.

Stephen Dedalus’ remark that ‘history is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake’⁴ must be set within the cyclic history of Vico which permeates Finnegans Wake. The contest between linear and cyclical temporalities in Finnegans Wake finds linear sentences striving to complete themselves, like streams constantly encountering obstacles of portmanteau words, archaic or imported languages, elaborate puns, raw sounds, battles, drunken rants, prayers, allusions, people with multiple identities from history or myth or just publicans in Dublin, and so on. Joyce’s lilting Dublin accent reading the Anna Livia Plurabelle chapter of Finnegans Wake (which concludes with the metempsychosis of two washerwomen into a tree and a stone⁵ ) is like natural music: the transformation of the Liffey into language becomes the turbulent bubbles, splashes, currents of innumerable temporalities. The mytho-philosophic water of Thales or the river of Heraclitus is recovered, suggesting that riverlanguage mediates between earth and world.

It is in this context that one appreciates Lefebvre’s effort to situate rhythm with respect to linear and cyclic temporalities, to observe the mid-century turn to concrete particulars and the embodying conditions, to deploy music as the leading metaphor in his rendering of the phenomena of rhythm, and to speculate—after rejecting a laboratory of rhythmanalysis—that the rhythmanalyst ought to be a poet.⁶ Indeed, after remarking the ubiquity of rhythm—from electrons and cell processes to the juices and viscera of plants, animals, people, to the seasons and celestial cycles—he speaks of ‘a garland of rhythms [… ] as if the artist nature had foreseen beauty [… ] that results from all its history’⁷ echoing Soldati’s ‘great designer’. With the dual life of Gaston Bachelard in mind—both interpreter of scientific epistemology and, through the rubric of reverie, author of reinterpretations of the four elements—Lefebvre precedes his advocacy of poetry with the desire to make of rhythmanalysis a ‘science’ (presumably intending the more general sense of ‘scientia’, before experimental science). His own interpretative method appears to take the form of philosophically informed description of, for example, the polyrhythmy he observes in Parisian streets and squares.

Perhaps because Lefebvre is troubled by the contemporary mediatized superfluity of fragmentary information, references and messages, he devotes only a few sentences to ritual contexts, where rhythm dominates. Against Eliade’s over-insistence upon a radical distinction between the sacred and the profane, we find that rituals are rooted in what people do anyway (praxis), but attuned to rhythm: voices and words move towards song or poetry; noise is clarified into the music of drums, flutes, horns or strings; bodily movements become procession, dance or significant postures; temples acquire colonnades or buttresses scrupulous with their measure, as well as images, statuary and ornament suffused with rhythm. All this is for the sake of establishing conditions propitious for communicating with deities and their claims from the deep context (animals, plants, earth, weather, heavens); and the places where this happens are generally ­lavish in their size, materials, ornament, overall orderliness, staffing, languages and comportment by comparison with everywhere else. We should imagine a stratification of depth of meaning descending from ritual (temple) to ceremony (palace) to drama or festival to conventions, norms or customs to habits. The role of plants and animals as manifestations—claims—of the divine, not to mention the mythic topographies of earth and heavens, teach us that the nature-culture continuum was then quite distributed. To the entropic arrow of history and the rhythmic or cyclic temporalities that permeate the continuum, we must add the time-out-of-time of ritual, ceremony, drama or festival, whose capacity for re-enactment (memory) allows recovery of original conditions in the context of history. Where, indeed, does nature leave off and language begin; should the continuum be called culture or nature; are thought or technology the opposite of nature; is there anything that is not nature; is rhythm a principal attribute of what the philosopher’s term Being (if so, are the vibrations of an electron, the subdivisions of cells, the articulation of a faç ade, the metre of a poem, the typicality of human situations all variations on the one thing, rhythm) (Figure 1.1)?

Figure 1.1 Evenki Shaman tent and platform, Siberia, with fish-souls and animal supports, using live and harvested trees, 1907. © Makarenko, A.A.

This phenomenon is not confined to Bronze Age urban or tribal cultures, but manifests itself as well in contemporary empirical science. Although Latour continues to explore how matters of fact, from science, might be reconciled with matters of value, from culture, his early ethnography with Steve Woolgar⁸ treats the Salk Institute for Biological Studies as an institution for producing statements. Through testing in the laboratory and debate among researchers, these statements move from a condition of contest, even scorn, to a condition of out-there-and-unchangeable, whereupon the statement generally loses its drama and personalities and is simply accepted as a ‘fact’. Explicitly adducing Bachelard (‘phenomenotechnique’, laboratory apparatus as ‘reified theory’) and—by observing the derivation of ‘fact’ from Latin facere, ‘to make’—indirectly adducing Vico’s principle of verum esse ipsum factum (‘the truth is made’), the combination of laboratory craft, debate, writing and politics by which facts are constructed and validated leads Latour and Woolgar to embed scientific research practice in wider social customs and behaviours not dissimilar to the primarily civic concerns of Vico. Despite the objections of the scientists that they were discovering, not constructing, facts, this early version of what later became Actor-Network-Theory strove to understand the deep background to our procedures for understanding. It did not, however, go so far as to see the Salk, or their book, as places where nature understands itself; nor did it venture as far as Lefebvre’s poet or Bachelard’s reverie, although Latour and Woolgar speculate on the degree to which their ethnography might be ‘fiction’. Nor, finally, did the authors imagine they were writing myth, often wrongly seen to be a preliminary form of the ‘explanation’ provided by experimental science (via, for example, the gnostic texts of post-sixteenth-century alchemy). The analogical, narrative character of myth, embodied in rites, stories, urban distinctions, etc., has always been more congenial for ethical ontologies than has Enlightenment science; and it is easier to speak of a continuum when not beholden to claims from certainty (distinct from ‘truth’, which is vaguer and more profound, holding a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Contributors
• The role of landscape architecture research
• PART I Landscape in the rear-view mirrorHistoricizing the field
• PART II The art of archiving landscapes Tools for capturing moving relationships
• PART III Urban stories from a green planet
• PART IV Designing with the past in the future
• PART V Philosophy of landscape architecture
• Index