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

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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
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