Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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and woven maple, dogwood and willow saplings. In every
case, Dougherty’s work exhibits individual sensibility,
stylistic consistency, and a complexity grounded in spontaneous
imagination.
The saplings act as fluid fractals and enigmatic metaphors,
as in Peter Eisenman’s computer renderings for
the Staten Island Institute for Arts and Sciences and the
curved trace for the Aronoff Center for Design and Art,
University of Cincinnati. In both cases, as in Richard
Serra’s work, the reference to contextualism is generated
by vacillating waves, modulation and torques. In a
peculiar way, Serra and architects such as Frank Gehry
and Greg Lynn, have prepared the way for artists such
as Patrick Dougherty to participate in contemporary art
and architecture discourse. Specifically, The Spin Offs
installation at the De Cordova Museum and the Sittin
Pretty installation at the South Carolina Botanical Garden
are examples of Dougherty’s use of architectural symbolism
and spatial type as a starting point of riffs that
take the mind and body to another place – essentializing
the spatial aspects of architecture while undermining its
fundamental requirements of sculptural form. Experiential
differences between these sculptures and “actual
architecture” are brought into tension, forcing the viewer
to re-evaluate normative, or mainstream architectural
structure – including norms for traditional landscape
transformation. The success of the speculation lies in the
insertions ability to resist the normative conditions in the
urban-void, by recasting its visual qualities in relation to
conditions of its physicality – consequently, affecting the
ways in which the urban-void is used and experienced.
As projects, these landscape insertion serve as compelling
visions for a new way of thinking about the role of
contemporary art in urban landscapes, and the role of
landscape architect as curator and urban-protagonist.
The projects engage themes of the relationship between
landscape and architecture and borrow expressions
from the genre cotemporary artistic practice, including
non-normative modes. In describing this phenomenon in
contemporary landscape/architectural practice, Moshen
Mostafavi has written: “ The temporality of landscapes
renders them forever incomplete, and this incompletion
can be seen as an antidote to the implicit finitude of
zoning … As a framework for the imagination, landscape
produces new insights in response to the contemporary
urban situation. It allows one to describe that territory in
terms of an equal, although artificial, dialogue between
building and landscapes. Yet this dialogue is not limited
by the traditional definition of the terms ‘building’ and
‘landscape’, it allows for the simultaneous presence of
the one within the other, building as landscape, landscapes
as buildings. And in this lies the potential to
redefine the parameters of each discipline – architecture
and landscape architecture – in relation to each other.
By forcing us to rethink fundamental questions such as
“what is building? And what is landscape? These new hybrids
add to the existing repertoire of material elements
with which we construct future urbanisms” – reference
to the consummation and mutually beneficial association
that could ferment between architecture and landscape in
the form of landscape urbanism. [Mostafavi 2003: 07].
This emergent shift in disciplinary alignment represents
an adjustment in tactics of disciplinary appropriation,
operational strategies and an evolving philosophy in the
planning, design and development of human environments.
With development pressures, and more than half
the world’s population now residing in cities, it is more
imperative than ever to develop inventive and imaginative
solutions, and in some cases more temporalized
interventions that reframe the context of realities in the
urban landscape – where the urban void is an active and
adaptive surface open to [re]vision and [re]envisioning.
Thus, the notion of temporality – or in the case of this
essay and study-project, temporality as agency in the [re]
writing and [re]covery of urban void[s] – merits critical
consideration in a medium that is dynamic and subject to
the unpredictable forces and accelerant of change, both
visible and invisible. In considering the works of Merleau-Ponty
[Phenomenology of Perception], J.J. Gibson
[The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception], Walter
Benjamin [illuminations], and John Whiteman [Criticism,
Representation and Experience in Contemporary Architecture];
and the subject of “Temporality in Landscape”
Corner has written: Because ones relation to things are
in “dynamic flux”, one never experiences the same experience
without variations in conditions and meaning –
which means that the symbolic meaning associated with
landscape and architectural space shifts as “conditions of
the experience” evolve [Corner 1992:148].
Reflecting on this complex condition, described as
“dynamic temporal” in his major text on existentialism
[Being and Nothingness], John-Paul Sartre has written:
“observing temporality more closely we establish the
fact of succession; that is, the fact that a particular after
becomes a before, that the present becomes past and
the future a former-future… The future is the continual
possibilization of possibles…” [Sartre 1994: 129]. A fact
recognized by Willem Jan Neutelings in describing the
‘paradoxical phenomena’ found in most European cities.
He has written: “ the programmatic density does not lead
to a high building density as in traditional city centers.
A minimum of spatial facilities can create a maximum of
mass events. A ‘roped-off’ field is sufficient for huge spectacles;
a few letters on the side of a shed can pull a vast
crowd; a section of raised motorway can become a market
kilometers long, a black carpet with white stripes, is
the daily stage for a choreography enacted by hundreds
of thousands.” [Neutelings 1994: 59].
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