Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...
Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...
Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...
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4. <strong>Landscape</strong> architecture is still relying on conventions<br />
of the picturesque, despite assertions to the contrary and<br />
to the idea of “performance over form”.<br />
One of the predominant traditions of western landscape<br />
architecture is the translation of landscape paintings<br />
into build form <strong>–</strong> or better, into landscape <strong>–</strong> resulting<br />
in the picturesque landscape garden of 18th c. England.<br />
These “pastoral” landscapes were (and still are) considered<br />
highly attractive, based on their predominantly visual<br />
characteristics. Howett states, “(W)e are still worlds<br />
away from achieving the widespread and consistent application<br />
and interpretation of ecological principles on the<br />
designed landscape... We have for the most part been<br />
guilty of turning our backs on this ethically compelling<br />
opportunity, and our addiction to the picturesque aesthetic<br />
is principally to blame” (Howett 1987). [4]<br />
Fig. 1: Honolulu International Airport, 2004 (photo: Langhorst)<br />
are not built <strong>–</strong> this is a fatal misunderstanding, rooted in<br />
the idealization of a describable, static target condition<br />
that focuses more on form than performance. Even if it<br />
is changed, the landscape immediately responds to this<br />
input [2] by further change and adaptation. Instead of<br />
focusing on the defined target condition, often against a<br />
system’s response, landscape architecture needs to stay<br />
continuously involved in a project. Building is just the<br />
first step in participating in the ongoing evolution of any<br />
landscape project, changing the discipline’s role more to<br />
a long-term consultant or manager of change, interfacing<br />
with economic, socio-cultural, and ecological processes<br />
and agents.<br />
3. <strong>Landscape</strong> is a direction, not a destination. <strong>Landscape</strong><br />
Architecture must redefine the “project” not as a product<br />
but as the ongoing guided evolution and management of<br />
the landscape.<br />
<strong>Landscape</strong> is a set of nested systems (Skyttner 2006,<br />
Wolfe 1998). The amount of variables in even one of<br />
those systems is too big to make precise predictions on<br />
how it might respond to specific inputs with even a modicum<br />
of accuracy (Waldrop 1992). The illusion of control<br />
central to the idea of landscape as building can only be<br />
sustained by focusing on landscape’s formal properties,<br />
such as spatiality and materiality. The moment the focus<br />
shifts to performative aspects of a design, any prediction<br />
becomes imprecise and fraught with uncertainty. <strong>Landscape</strong><br />
Architecture needs to engage this open-endedness<br />
and account for it in its designs and scenarios. This by<br />
no means invites a relativistic understanding. On the<br />
contrary, speculations in future landscape conditions and<br />
processes need to be based in a thorough analysis and<br />
modeling of existing and future systems processes and<br />
properties, and at best will render a range within which<br />
system properties and processes will vary, [3] favoring<br />
incremental and scenario-based approaches.<br />
Aesthetic preferences, based on the agricultural landscape<br />
practices of 1850s Europe, are often considered<br />
models for landscapes high in biodiversity, habitat connectivity,<br />
buffer capacity, etc. The inevitable consequence<br />
of this approach are landscapes that are unreflective of<br />
(and try to be uninfluenced by) contemporary ecological,<br />
economic and cultural conditions and hence inappropriate<br />
and unsustainable.<br />
5. <strong>Landscape</strong> Architecture is habitually mired in “programism”<br />
[5] and / or functionalism, leading to inflexible,<br />
limited-purpose landscapes.<br />
It is inevitable that landscapes are changed from an<br />
“existing to a preferred situation” based on functions<br />
they need to fulfill. [6] Most landscapes today are limited<br />
in purpose and are understood as passive entities; as<br />
ground upon which functional requirements are projected<br />
and imposed. This is eminently clear in large tract<br />
housing developments in the Unites States. They have<br />
a priori goals developed previous to the discovery of the<br />
location or site. [7]<br />
This programistic approach [8] requires an act of<br />
conscious erasure of the rich and diverse forces and<br />
qualities present to prepare the site to receive the program<br />
elements, a reduction of place to tabula rasa. [9]<br />
“Using the well-established forms of projection drawing<br />
the designer reduces the site, through this representation,<br />
to a condition of static receptivity, often precluding<br />
the conceptualization and realization of more complex<br />
adaptive human-environment interactions”. [10, 11]<br />
6. <strong>Landscape</strong> projects are limited by static modes of<br />
representation during their inception and presentation,<br />
resulting in a static understanding of the realities and<br />
processes that make landscapes.<br />
Problems and possibilities of representation lie at the<br />
core of the activity of landscape architecture. Traditional<br />
representations of landscapes tend to the picturesque<br />
and fail to capture temporal, dynamic and experiential<br />
qualities of landscape. [12,13] The capacity to represent<br />
even more complex and temporally challenging processes<br />
(e.g. long-term successional patterns) beyond<br />
freeze-frame diagramming is critical to landscape<br />
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