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

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60 “massive change, required – nine axioms for the future of landscape (architecture)” Joern Langhorst 1 , Kathleen Kambic 2 1 Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Colorado Denver, Campus Box 126. PO Box 173364, Denver, CO, 80217, USA (email joern.langhorst@ucdenver.edu) 2 Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Colorado Denver, Campus Box 126. PO Box 173364, Denver, CO, 80217, USA (email kathleen.kambic@colorado.edu) Abstract Landscape architecture is failing to develop and influence large scale landscapes in appropriate and effective ways. The majority of work done on large scale projects is monopolized by other fields. The issue is part lack of self criticism of landscape architecture’s methods and part denial as to the nature of contemporary projects. It is imperative that the discipline begins to critique and revise its perspective and design approaches to better create meaningful landscapes. Through a discourse on the state of this discipline and profession and its approaches to projects, it is possible to reevaluate and regenerate the field of landscape architecture. Nine axioms dissect and analyze the issues landscape architecture faces. Key words landscape research methodology, non sites, landscape as framework, project size. Landscape Architecture has failed to influence, let alone design landscapes, especially on a large scale. Whilst there are numerous projects that deliver on the promise to create landscapes and places that are culturally relevant and ecologically appropriate, most are on a smaller scale or were developed under exceptional conditions and are, by many practitioners, labeled elitist. We acknowledge the importance of such “showcase” projects, but the innovative approaches and insights so far have failed to influence the wider practice of landscape architecture and remain the exception. If landscape architecture wants to avoid obsolescence and fulfill its potential as an agent of change in the development of culturally relevant and ecologically suitable places, it needs to radically transform and reground itself in the contemporary scientific, socio-cultural, economic, ecological and artistic discourses. This paper will clarify both the limits and consequences of contemporary practice. Landscape Architecture has not participated in any significant way in the continuous, vast, intentional and often radical change of immense swaths of landscapes. It has been disconnected from the relentless forces and interests underlying the commodification and the making of landscape”), such as agriculture, mining, urban and exurban development. Landscape Architecture’s involvement, if any, usually focuses on small areas or aspects of those immense changes, for example the mitigation of environmental impacts. While none of the criticisms presented in this paper are new, we posit the acute need for landscape architecture to recognize itself as a mode of cultural production, located in the actualities of a social, economic and ecological processes. Participation in this endeavor requires one to engage in the messy political and economic negotiations that pretext most land use decisions, and abandon a value system that is inherently conservative and predominantly rooted in aesthetics and applied ecology (see Botkin 1990, Pilkey 2007). This paper does not offer panaceas. In order to explore the validity and efficacy of these axioms considerable additional research and experimentation is required. The necessary and consequential discourse on the future of landscape is based on the following nine axioms: 1. Landscape happens. Landscape architecture is involved in only a very small percentage of the landscape. Even where landscape architecture did not avoid partaking in the construction of larger landscape systems altogether, it consciously abandoned its historic broad involvement in favor of a limited focus on a small part of planning and building projects. [1] 2. Landscape is process. Landscape is not a product that can be manufactured. Landscapes are continually evolving, with or without any acts of human interference. Whilst the “othering” of nature enabled the exploitation of nature for the advancement of human agendas, it also proves to be an almost insurmountable obstacle to the understanding of natural and cultural systems as interconnected, inseparable and nested. This understanding is critical to the realization of the potentials of both landscape as agency and locus of meaningful dwelling, and of landscape architecture as a discipline that facilitates the relationship between humans and their environments (see Harvey 1996, 120-75 and 210-40; Soja 1996, 53-105 ). This continuous change that characterizes landscape, its being “in process,” (Berleant 1992) challenges landscape architecture’s key assumption: the ability to control and predict any landscape condition, Each project is considered a product, a marketable commodity where involvement ceases once it is built. But, landscapes
61 4. Landscape architecture is still relying on conventions of the picturesque, despite assertions to the contrary and to the idea of “performance over form”. One of the predominant traditions of western landscape architecture is the translation of landscape paintings into build form – or better, into landscape – resulting in the picturesque landscape garden of 18th c. England. These “pastoral” landscapes were (and still are) considered highly attractive, based on their predominantly visual characteristics. Howett states, “(W)e are still worlds away from achieving the widespread and consistent application and interpretation of ecological principles on the designed landscape... We have for the most part been guilty of turning our backs on this ethically compelling opportunity, and our addiction to the picturesque aesthetic is principally to blame” (Howett 1987). [4] Fig. 1: Honolulu International Airport, 2004 (photo: Langhorst) are not built – this is a fatal misunderstanding, rooted in the idealization of a describable, static target condition that focuses more on form than performance. Even if it is changed, the landscape immediately responds to this input [2] by further change and adaptation. Instead of focusing on the defined target condition, often against a system’s response, landscape architecture needs to stay continuously involved in a project. Building is just the first step in participating in the ongoing evolution of any landscape project, changing the discipline’s role more to a long-term consultant or manager of change, interfacing with economic, socio-cultural, and ecological processes and agents. 3. Landscape is a direction, not a destination. Landscape Architecture must redefine the “project” not as a product but as the ongoing guided evolution and management of the landscape. Landscape is a set of nested systems (Skyttner 2006, Wolfe 1998). The amount of variables in even one of those systems is too big to make precise predictions on how it might respond to specific inputs with even a modicum of accuracy (Waldrop 1992). The illusion of control central to the idea of landscape as building can only be sustained by focusing on landscape’s formal properties, such as spatiality and materiality. The moment the focus shifts to performative aspects of a design, any prediction becomes imprecise and fraught with uncertainty. Landscape Architecture needs to engage this open-endedness and account for it in its designs and scenarios. This by no means invites a relativistic understanding. On the contrary, speculations in future landscape conditions and processes need to be based in a thorough analysis and modeling of existing and future systems processes and properties, and at best will render a range within which system properties and processes will vary, [3] favoring incremental and scenario-based approaches. Aesthetic preferences, based on the agricultural landscape practices of 1850s Europe, are often considered models for landscapes high in biodiversity, habitat connectivity, buffer capacity, etc. The inevitable consequence of this approach are landscapes that are unreflective of (and try to be uninfluenced by) contemporary ecological, economic and cultural conditions and hence inappropriate and unsustainable. 5. Landscape Architecture is habitually mired in “programism” [5] and / or functionalism, leading to inflexible, limited-purpose landscapes. It is inevitable that landscapes are changed from an “existing to a preferred situation” based on functions they need to fulfill. [6] Most landscapes today are limited in purpose and are understood as passive entities; as ground upon which functional requirements are projected and imposed. This is eminently clear in large tract housing developments in the Unites States. They have a priori goals developed previous to the discovery of the location or site. [7] This programistic approach [8] requires an act of conscious erasure of the rich and diverse forces and qualities present to prepare the site to receive the program elements, a reduction of place to tabula rasa. [9] “Using the well-established forms of projection drawing the designer reduces the site, through this representation, to a condition of static receptivity, often precluding the conceptualization and realization of more complex adaptive human-environment interactions”. [10, 11] 6. Landscape projects are limited by static modes of representation during their inception and presentation, resulting in a static understanding of the realities and processes that make landscapes. Problems and possibilities of representation lie at the core of the activity of landscape architecture. Traditional representations of landscapes tend to the picturesque and fail to capture temporal, dynamic and experiential qualities of landscape. [12,13] The capacity to represent even more complex and temporally challenging processes (e.g. long-term successional patterns) beyond freeze-frame diagramming is critical to landscape Papers
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