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

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architecture’s ability to conceive of projects that understand
and engage those processes. Other representational
tools that can describe and analyze dynamic change
and experiential qualities must become standard to uncover
unexpected and valuable site characteristics herefore
unknown. Resulting projects will be more adaptive and
will relate to the actual experience of landscapes, offering
more possibilities for interaction, participation and the
construction of meaning and memory.
7. Landscape Architecture is risk-averse. The professional
tenets of “health, welfare and safety” are at odds with
the experimental character of design and lead to outmoded
landscapes.
Every act of landscape architectural design is an experiment.
Critically engaging this inherent uncertainty necessarily
involves taking risks, and is key to developing
projects that are adaptive, responsive and appropriate.
Landscape architecture, with its inherently conservative
value base, [14] has been avoiding both experimentation
and the systematic analysis of the outcomes of its
designs. Instead, it often relies on knowledge that is to
varying degrees reductive, syllogistic, deterministic and
self-referential. Concepts of health, welfare and safety
are based on conservative value judgments, focused
on avoiding a worsening of any given condition over
improving it. Thus the present understanding of the
‘public’s welfare’ tends toward lowest common denominator
approaches to design. A more effective way to
manage risks would be to favor incremental approaches,
with smaller, potentially reversible steps over big-gesture
master plans. This would require the reconceptualization
of landscape architectural projects as more process than
product.
8. Landscape Architecture is research-averse. Landscape
Architecture needs to continuously and critically test
its assumptions, methods and outcomes.
Da Vinci wrote, “Those who fall in love with practice
without science are like a sailor who enters a ship without
helm or compass, and who never can be certain whither
he is going (Da Vinci 2008). Landscape architecture
once was an experimental field, participating in the great
cultural projects of enlightenment and modernism, in the
18th century. Now, its concept of experiment is different
from scientific disciplines, in which a guided inquiry involves
operational definitions, testing hypotheses, control
groups and measurable results. [15] It could be speculated
that one of the reasons for this aversion to experimentation
is a misinterpretation of landscape architecture
as an applied art and applied science. Applied fields in
general have a tendency to focus on knowledge as a
marketable product and not on the continuous critical
development of further knowledge. In all fairness, most
qualities and criteria that would allow the measurement
of outcomes are qualitative in nature, notoriously difficult
to operationalize and measure, and would need the critical
integration of knowledge from different disciplines.
9. Landscape Architecture is discourse-averse.
Landscape Architecture refuses to situate itself in the
scientific, artistic, political and cultural domains and their
arguments. In particular, landscape architectural theorists
have gone to great length to develop argumentative
bases that are considered factual and hence removed
from any discourse. The embracing of scientific methods
and findings from sciences such as applied ecology in
the 1970s and the current flirtation with the ill-defined
concepts of “sustainability” are merely attempts to retreat
to irrefutable positions that provide inarguable legitimacy
yet raise a number of ethical and epistemological
questions. The idea of an objectifiable nature serves
as a base to conservationist and sustainability agendas
focused on trying to “repair and perhaps forestall
damage while cultural ways of being and acting in the
world remain relatively unchanged (Corner 1999, 2-4).
Whilst this might have worked in small projects to varying
degrees, it helped remove landscape architecture further
from the social, economic and cultural discourses du jour,
losing what little relevance it had left in the public perception,
and certainly sidelined it in the discourses affecting
contemporary landscape change and its massive scales.
A symptom of this is the intense turf war with our close
relatives – architecture and planning. Landscape
architecture’s attitudes to both seem to be more sibling
rivalry than constructive discourse, having forgotten that
all three are primarily occupied with defining, revealing
and changing the world around us - in other words,
with the idea of dwelling that lies at the core of human
existence. Dripps states, “Architecture does not construct
an image of something other than itself; architecture is
the making of the human understanding of the world”
(Dripps 1997, 15-18). Landscape architecture’s inability
to interrogate its own identity and raisons d’etre prevents
it from participating in the next big cultural project – the
reconsideration and remaking of landscape involving a
much wider variety of systems, forces and factors beyond
its present scope.
“For most of us, design is invisible. Until it fails” (Mau
2004).
Landscape is an agent of change. Landscape is
socially and culturally relevant. Currently, landscape
architecture is neither. Any attempt to gain the relevance
that landscape architecture so desperately desires
and to realize the much touted potential of landscape as
agency requires the field to develop and clearly state
the intent and value of landscape architecture in a way
that enables it to participate in the discursive practices
that “make” landscape. Landscape Architecture needs to
reconnect with the realities of landscape and expand its