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CounterPunch
November
2, 2002
Parting Shots
A Refracted History
(Summary) Of The Twentieth Century The Always-Already Deferred
Fusion Of Landscape + Architecture
by GAVIN KEENEY
"The page contains a single sentence:
'Underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because
there isn't any.' The sentence is repeated over and over for
the whole length of the page, giving the impression of a wall,
of an impediment. There are no periods or commas or margins,
a wall, in fact, of words that illustrate the meaning of the
sentence, the collision with a wall behind which there is nothing.
But towards the bottom and on the right, in one of the sentences
the word any is missing. A sensitive eye can discover the hole
among the bricks, the light that shows through."
--Julio Cortazar (1966)
HISTORIOGRAPHY, FORMALISM(S),
AND CRITICAL HISTORY
In early structuralism (Jakobson) there
exists the theory of the dominant -- e.g., the visual arts in
the Renaissance, music in Romanticism -- to which other forms
conform / strive to merge. In Modernism the dominant is / was
science -- and linguistics, architecture, sociology, psychology,
and etcetera attempted to produce a synthetical system outside
of / in contradistinction to the humanities. This is the either
/ or of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which of course he abandoned
after the Russellian project collapsed.
In Russian formalism we see the first
moves toward a system of signs freed from semantic content. This
is also why Russian formalism appealed to the neo-rationalist
architects of the 1960s and 1970s. The endgame however (Tafuri's
idea of hegemony returning) of formalism was futurism, suprematism,
constructivism and functionalism -- all more or less new forms
of architectural nihilism (see Cacciari) at first and, then,
new forms of architectural dogma. Berdyaev's suggestion that
communism failed because it was not spiritual contains a suggestion
that the humanities and science are essentially irrreconcilable
until systems are truly "open" -- hence Umberto Eco's
anti-ideological concept of the "open work". The mechanistic
worldview and the organic worldview are two mutually antagonistic
and insufficient themes that plague philosophy and architecture.
(See Ortega y Gasset.)
Russian landscape -- the silent and primordial
figures and gestures lurking in the literature and art of the
Silver Age (1890-1920) -- gave way to the slashing, machinic
universe of agit-prop avant-gardism. Socialist Realism killed
even that latter, mechanistic worldview in favor of heroic images
of an always-deferred material and technological utopia. Tafuri's
utopic realm of the sphere -- versus the fallen world of the
labyrinth -- was idealism pictorialized. In the rarified realm
of "structure", politics (and ideology) were momentarily
bracketed (or pre-prepared) before re-deployment. Hence, Tafuri
favored -- even against his own better judgment -- the meta-logical
games of formalism as acts of resistance and criticality (and
oftimes aesthetic cruelty).
Lyricism returned in the 1950s thaw in
Russian literature, and it is that spirit plus an intense inner
working of the subject / object dialectic that animates the cinema
of Andrei Tarkovsky. Landscape, in Tarkovsky world, is mise en
scene, and reflects always an inner condition as does the supporting
apparatus of architecture (often ruined architecture) and the
things of everyday life. Tarkovsky connects the latter-day Russian
aesthetic of the tragic to the pre-Revolution mysticism of Russian
lyric poetry and literature.
It might be said that landscape 'returns'
in waves (in movements through things) versus as an object or
set of objects. An ecology of signifying forms is the meta-ecological
model underlying signifying chains. New topographies and the
renovation of the architectonic aspect of design almost always
prefigures a re-deployment (re-surfacing) of repressed content
(other possible futures, or always-already deferred alternative
models). The ideological aspect of the aesthetic (Eagleton) consists
of the mask that Tafuri considered the chief characteristic of
Gramscian hegemony. In theory, this mask must be removed and
the underlying content exposed and transformed to liberate consciousness
(Porphyrios). Thus, radical formalism comes and goes -- it's
here and then not here -- as the diachronic history of architecture
reveals the diachronic nature of signifying systems. Synchronic
applications, on the other hand, are typically applied to the
critical historical operations of philosophy, history (art and
architectural), and aesthetics.
Curiously, avant-garde modernist and
late-modernist art and architecture share an innate anima towards
the return of the out-moded (Foster). Paradoxically, late-modern
(or neo-modern) art and architectures also permit a selective
return of certain forms of avant-garde formalism -- the primary
example in neo-modernist architecture is the persistence of varieties
of purism and architectures of liminalism (the Whites, or the
New York Five) and minimalism. Blame Frampton for the New York
Five, if you will, but their collective position was an act of
recovery and renovation of principles buried in the avalanche
of generic modernism after Le Corbusier. The so-called corporate
modernism of the post-WW2 period led directly to the crisis of
the 1960s. Tafuri may have denounced historiography as mythography,
but critical history also contains its own mythicizing subject
(the architecture of deferred utopias reaching back to the Renaissance).
(See Tafuri on Alberti.)
The problem well may be that architecture
is implicitly hegemonic in itself -- as it almost always denies
ground. Its own version of hegemony is built into its reliance
on materialization and the technological spirit. It is this latter
thing that emanates from within hegemony as a form of positivism
that takes no prisoners. This primary urge within architecture
is the place where architecture is overwhelmed and appropriated
by conventional / instrumentalized forms of everyday hegemony.
The age-old architectonic of metaphysics underwrites this doubling
of hegemony.
Machine-age romanticism pervades modern
architecture. This is the 'Machine Ate the Garden' syndrome.
It is prefigured in Blake and Thoreau and problematized by Leo
Marx and proponents of the industrial sublime. The hegemonic
aspects of architecture crush landscape whenever its own precious
autonomy is threatened. This is most evident in urban environments.
This aggressive autonomy issues forth from architecture in defense
of its hegemonic status -- utopian or otherwise. The avant-garde
is complicit in this handing over of architecture to everyday
hegemony insofar as it abdicates its responsibility to prevent
the collapse of free consciousness into new empty forms (new
masks). Clement Greenberg's "Towards a New Laocoon"
preceded the hegemony of abstract expressionism and set the stage
for the 1960s revolt of conceptualism and minimalism. Lessing's
Laokoon (1766) simply countered the late-baroque concentration
of the arts in de-materialized spiritual form by placing limits
on literary and plastic art forms. Wölfflin produced an
art history without names that essentially took the synchronic
approach to reading form to a new level of systemization by way
of psychological precepts. His gift was absorbed into Russian
formalism by way of symbolism and then futurism. This abstract
approach to mining history came to an apotheosis in Structuralism
(by way of Saussure), and was undone in turn by Post-Structuralism,
in which case the diachronic political critique of post-Marxism
extracted maximum revenge on the tyranny of the signifier.
Today, we see the advent of a deterministic
virtuality (an almost-new vitalism) that impregnates everything
with the shimmering sign of nothingness. This nothingness --
the ultra-depleted surface of things -- is, paradoxically, valorized
as the most prescient of conditions, as the late-modern subject
is primary presented as a void (a virtual and virtuous nothingness).
This renascent nihilism suggests that architecture has grown
weary of its complicity in hegemonic orders and has elected,
instead, to play versus resist. Such a strategy also suggests
that the flotsam or debris field of architectural de-construction
has opened up to purely instrumental and ad hoc games played
from 'inside' architectural production -- i.e., within the folds
of information and data that produce / impress the architectural
image as well as the architectural object. As the shimmering
architectures of the de-materialized subject are increasingly
realized as actual cultural fabric, the anti-ideological ideology
of 'total flow' might be expected to reveal itself. That this
pluralistic, negative ideology has arrived out of a de-construction
of previous ideologies is fully consistent with the nature of
the production of architectures. What is curious is the maelstrom
of incorporations that occur in the inter-textual apparatus of
architectural virtuality and de-materialization. As the architectural
object moves closer to a field condition in and of itself, a
wide array of previously repressed material is folded into the
matrix. This new 'ecology' is, in fact, a form of psycho-social
re-conditioning -- and the incorporation of the idea of 'landscape',
as figure or fold, suggests a possible way out of the deterministic
circle inscribed in the generation of purely synthetical environments.
This 'way out' is through the proverbial hole in the wall of
the architectural image -- the 'cracked' and 'broken' surface.
A possible re-inscription of depth is in and of itself predisposed
to return landscape + architecture to its place in the creative
construction of consciousness. This concept of depth approaches
Heidegger's 'running ahead to meet the past', and, as a cipher
for the production of timeliness, such an approach precludes
complete immersion in the detritus of over-determined, collapsing
systems and / or the seductive, de-materialized field of flows
and vectors. Despite the scintillating presence of surface, at
some point the issue of architecture's ontological ground must
be formally re-addressed.
"The possibility of access to history
is grounded in the possibility according to which any specific
present understands how to be futural. This is the first principle
of all hermeneutics." --Martin Heidegger (1924)
Thus the wheel rolls on and on, turning
over and over, crushing incomplete school after incomplete school.
The provisionary nature of form-making is revealed in the process
-- and the essentialist worldview within such processes escapes
unscathed to return another day as another attempt to reach the
ontological ground beneath our feet and some form of synthesis,
or, as Walter Benjamin proclaimed, "The Coming Philosophy".
ARCHITECTURAL
HORIZONS / TIME NOT ITSELF
Upon disposing of (setting aside) the
achingly beautiful photographs of so-called natural landscapes
(the Sierra Club idiom) and the glossy, romanticized vernacular
images of working landscapes (the National Geographic idiom)
-- or first and second nature -- and circling this same window
on the world (photography) in search of something more timely
(third or 'fourth' nature), the image of the subject / object
dialectic reappears through the agency of the putative autonomy
of the photographic work of art. (See Rodchenko, Steichen / Stieglitz,
Cartier-Bresson, Becher, Koudelka.)
The sense of time not itself provided
in Heidegger's lecture "The Concept of Time" (1924)
works to the foreground in the various worldviews contained in
photography -- whether the socio-politically charged works of
Magnum or the extreme, aesthetic ambient 'landscapes' of Blossfeldt,
Kenna, James, Korab, plus architectural and fashion photography
in general. Closer to the origins of modern photography, the
work of Steichen, Evans, Rodchenko, Man Ray, Sudek, et alia picture
the elan vital -- the inner history -- of photographic subjectivity
through an apparent objective apparatus, an apparatus that proves
in the end to be mythic versus empirical. These early progenitors
of the photographic aesthetic meld the expressionist, constructivist,
and cubist affects of an inquiry into form and the interplay
of object and field, the latter most often portrayed as shadow
or tenebrious void out of which emerge the forms of life (often
as vestige, phantom, and / or fragment) imbued with momentary
auratic, if not symbolic verisimilitude, only to fade into the
fixity of the frozen image.
In architectural photography (Sudek,
Stoller, Shulman, Llimargas, or Binet) and fashion photography
(Newton, Avelon, Meisel, Teller, Knight), the concept of trace
and vestige moves to a new level of significance, productivity,
and seductivity in the suggestive yet aborted narrative content,
landscape (urban and otherwise) often providing a telltale (palpable)
intonation or adumbrative depth suggesting a deferred grounding
of abstract (de-materialized) desire in consumption, appropriation,
expropriation, and photogenic simulation. That such aesthetic
precepts have further burrowed their way into the present-day
image of architecture through computer-generated simulations
is, therefore, no surprise.
In the photographic expropriation of
landscape, in and of itself, the image of constructed ground
(space) -- whether gardens, cities, parks, cemeteries, airports,
etc. -- supports the subtle but persistent themes consistent
with the production of an elective versus enforced hegemony.
This surplus hegemony is 'elective' insofar as such circumstances
are either avoidable or generally out of reach. The nature of
time, as relative to environments and variable milieux, and as
depicted in an imagery that selectively edits / represents cultural
values (currents) and implicit historicity (timeliness), or that
which asks "How?", frames and enhances the authorized
and unauthorized perceptions of cultural conditioning; that is
to say, the emptiness of the typical modern architectural image
is an elective minimalism as are the polished products of the
sensuous and seductive editorial pages of glossy fashion magazines
which often appropriate and 're-style' classic, baroque, and
modern landscape gardens as mise en scene supporting the dream-state
of haute-couture fashion and design. Indeed, such fashion statements
operate within the world of photography as an excess (a type
of hallucination) glorifying the scenographic and privileged
places and attitudes (modus vivendi) identified as 'de luxe'
and or 'elite' in the rarified upper reaches of 'society', a
class-conscious production of cultural identity. In turn, a titilating
noirish under- / over-world is suggested in the extreme and phantasmatic
imagery that is folded into such normative fashion pages (e.g.,
Helmut Newton and Jurgen Teller) as an image of extravagance,
decadence, and an excess of 'success' (freedom through mock bondage).
This latter imagery substantiates the ineluctable charisma of
the urban chic and is present in diverse forms, including the
presentation graphics of present-day architects and landscape
architects.
The ageless, immortal landscape that
stands just outside this frame (process) of forceful or frivolous
'acculturation', as a 'timelessness' within timeliness, in turn
supports the indeterminate nature of the authorized / unauthorized
activities of the elite, the voyeur, the flaneur, the aesthete,
the connoisseur, and the so-called cognoscenti (fashionisti)
-- an explicit confrontation / clash of the microcosmic, iconoclastic
architectures of the heterogeneous with those of the everyday
world of the hoi polloi. The macrocosmic image -- the wide world
-- often is deployed as a spectral other and supports a synoptic,
panoptic return to preternatural and natural vectors of consciousness
ostensibly outside historical time and its proscribed, constructed
ground. Landscapes of the primordial ground condition and re-insinuate
the elemental dialectic of self and ground through a social and
aesthetic reductionism to primitive or unalloyed terms consistent
with the concept of wilderness and primitivity. The structural
and operational terms of such a grounding are built upon the
innate aesthetic allure of things archaic and / or of a radically
contingent 'nature'. Landscape + architecture appears, then,
as ever, suspended in the void between Pascal's two infinities.
The production of time (timeliness) --
as time has no abstract reality, 'as such', other than the neutral
concept of timelessness -- is as often a surplus as an intentional
affect of design. The promenade (architecturale and cinematique),
the cemetery or park as heterotopia, the cacophonous urban bazaar
and street, the implied orthodoxy of certain styles and modes
of structural landscape -- historical (diachronic) and trans-historical
(synchronic), or 'isms' -- all effectively produce fictionalized
forms of time bound up with a system of inferences and discursive
structures that are both concealed and masked (see Tafuri, Jameson,
and Davis), as all hegemonic systems construct a surface to which
things are projected. In the latter case -- e.g., in the synchronic
plenitude of avant-garde formalisms -- much 'modernist' landscape
is complicit in the spurious conflating of the timeless and the
timely, primarily through an extension of seriality and cinematic
aesthetic strategies inconsistent with unmasking conventions
and undermining the everyday (default) mode of the production
of time and space. It is the putative production of authenticity
that motivates the avant-garde ("every new age requires
new forms"), while almost always the operative forms are
re-absorbed into a new conformity. The bricolage of post-modern
landscape and architecture, or the pop and minimalist landscapes
of the 1980s avant-garde, is, thereby, directly implicated in
the demotion of landscape architecture to a type of brinksmanship
versus an authentic re-writing of the codes of everydayness.
This denial takes both the form of a-historical games and faux
avant-garde agitation. It is the polar opposite of the utilitarian
and pragmatic (often conservative and reactionary) modes utilized
by the status quo. In most cases the faux avant-garde and the
pragmatic are both facile and instrumentalized representations
of landscape as surface, intentionally glossing or bracketing
cultural and intellectual depth, troublesome and pernicious forms
of ideology, and introducing a type of determinism by way of
formalizing contingent systems. In other words, "How?"
is endlessly supplanted by "What?".
The fixity of images is a relatively
ancient problem in aesthetics, while the structural and contingent
gestures of design and representation betray or conceal this
concept insofar as they produce a product or condition versus
a continuum. In the case of the production of a continuum, time
is portrayed through a dynamic synthesis (syrrhesis) of structural
and ambient forces -- an avant-ecology of signifying factors
(images, signs, forms, functions) that imply as well as access
a vast otherness within, beyond, above, or below the constructed
ground of image / place / time. Rote fixity collapses under such
immense pressures and time opens up to 'other times', to other
horizons, the nature of time itself (implied historicity) forced
to the foreground or gesturing wildly in the background. In-between,
almost always, remains the subject (the proverbial, metaphysical,
irreducible middle-ground) situated at the crossroads of vertical
and horizontal axes, x, y, z (the conventional coordinates of
constructed space) replaced by 'fourth' nature -- 'fourth' nature
being the very image of being, a sublime portent for the cipher
of time not itself, or time as the provisional field for the
non-ideological unity of things.
THE FUSION
THING / TOTAL FLOW OR NOTHINGNESS?
The historical, diachronic interplay
of landscape + architecture in modern architectural production
is / was at times a visionary pas de deux, while at other times
an anti-visionary danse macabre (danse mecanique). In the latter
case, landscape (milieu, ambiance, ground) is eclipsed and/or
flattened in the strenuous and sometimes idealistic (utopian)
seige represented by high-borne modernist formalism (technocratic,
positivist, pragmatic, and programmatic). In such scenarios,
landscape became an almost nothing, not by design, but by proscription,
elimination, and / or abstraction. In this essentialist project,
landscape became de-natured space.
In the somewhat delicate, often lyrical
case of the pas de deux, landscape is situated at the elective
nexus of interpenetrating systems (architectonic and environmental
fields), as intermediate condition, or simply noted, in passing,
as a surplus value incorporated into the development of the architectural
object by juxtaposition. The extension of architectural eIements
into the near landscape in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, Alvar
Aalto or Carlo Scarpa, and the penetration of the building by
so-called free-flowing or layered space suggests the classical
disposition of positive and negative, solid and void, and the
articulation if not transformation of architectural forms to
fully synthetic forms in the rare instances when landscape and
site impregnate architecture with a prescient auratic 'interiority'
and / or formal radiance that plays out in an explicit synthesis
of verticality and horizontality -- as in early modernist villas
-- thereby picturing the contingent, material conditions for
architecture's emergence. The most immaterial aspects of ambient
environmental factors -- the play of light and shadow -- often
provide architecture with an archaic uncanniness (an elemental
timeliness) that is purely ephemeral and, most usually, unintended
(purely incidental). Ando and Holl are masters of this poetic
/ phenomenological genre, while others (Gehry) simply accept
the inevitable 'patina' of building marked by time. The mutable
materiality of architecture supported this embrace of the ambient,
as glass curtain walls and metal cladding became ever more common
and de-materializations occurred in the genre, noted explicitly
by MoMA's 1995-6 exhibition "Light Construction". Dan
Graham's mirrored pavilions play wonderfully with this omniscient
quality of glass, doubling the field of vision such that the
very field of representation breaks down into a prismatic and
often kaleidoscopic universe of shards, filters, and superimpositions
-- the effect entirely dependent on the setting of the object
in the landscape. This latter de-materialization invokes the
concept of 'total flow' and the tendency towards objectifying
surface at the expense of depth.
Outside of this cyclic, accidental, and
discontinuous emergence of sublimated aspects of architecture's
implicit ground, a third order of symbolization and abstraction
is to be found that represents a preliminary and provisional
synthesis of subject / object relations -- i.e., most often a
figurative symbiosis built into form and described as the gestural
or sublime fusion of 'form' and 'content' in sculpture and the
hybridized field of land art, most especially, where discursive
orders are stripped away and an elemental, generative, and formal
essence presses forward. In the case of art, and its near-automatic
assumption of conceptual autonomy, the works of Noguchi and Smithson,
plus the avalanche of land art-inspired landscape architecture
after the 1960s, re-present the archaic and liminal nature of
almost-first nature (perhaps 'fourth' nature) through hyper-sensual
manipulations of form and a presentiment, if not an acclamation,
of pre-linguistic forms and seminal structural operations versus
aspects of full-blown discourse (full-fledged signifiers). Here,
timeliness is reduced to an iconic presence tipping inexorably
toward absence (timelessness). These liminal measures most often
take the form of excavations or insertions (interventions) that
at the least pretend to re-write the codes of occupying or mapping
presence. This type of 'deep-sea diving' comes in many forms
and is not limited to the delineation of art-in-the-landscape,
or art-as-landscape. The concise, inward-driven nature of such
expression is primarily poetic and is found in all of the arts.
This archaistic jouissance deliberately invokes the ontological
ground as a place 'before' -- pre-existent to -- the emergence
of the Imaginary (the phantasmatic world of doubled and / or
tripled un-realities) and the Symbolic (the so-called fallen
world of the signifier). These figures play in the dust of the
Self, seemingly before the emergence of the Ego (and Super Ego).
Such fictive gestures also act as analogs for the extreme interiority
of works of art and architecture prior to their deployment as
cultural signs and tropes (figures of speech and thought). In
the process of stripping away the detritus of signifying chains
(ossified and / or fossilized modes of expression and discourse),
such maneuvers circle the same ground repeatedly. The eventual
collapse of the operative figures of near-speech simply occurs
as the work vanishes into the annals of art or architectural
history. The dissolution of many of Heizer's and Smithson's remote
works matters hardly at all given that they were intentionally
situated in a mythicized 'wilderness' as a strategic critique
of the production of modern art and the machinations of the art
world.
From 1930 to 1960, the time of the emergence
of high-modern architecture (and the International Style), landscape
was effectively subjugated by the ordeal / onslaught of hyper-structural
and technocratic instrumentalities -- cultural, political, economic,
and otherwise. The image of techno-utopian architecture and the
architect as glossy man accompanied the last hurrah for messianic
modernism. The high-architectonic was at best complemented by
neutral ground / landscape, though most often ground / landscape
was 'locked away' in the spatial assault of low-formalist and
high-functionalist orthogonal systems -- super-functionalisms.
The amalgam that came to be known as corporate modernism, and
which was typified by Mies van der Rohe's transcendent glass
office buildings (set upon pristine podiums), is / was, according
to Cacciari and Quetglas, the pure reification and secularization
of the certain abstracted aspects of sacral architectures past.
This 'classicism' masked the origins of the modernist experiment
in socially-self-conscious experiments in form-making -- e.g.,
Mies' problematical Berlin period -- and became hypostatized
in the omniscent and omnivorous over-production of sterile corporate
architectures. Most mid-century modern landscape architecture,
following suit, adopted the dominant visual code of geometricism
and the architectonic logic of plan libre as the spirit of the
age, overthrowing the last vestiges of romanticism, post-romanticism,
and the late-Olmstedian picturesque. The latter continued well
into the mid-1900s transposed into the form of national parks
and interstate transportation systems. In the case of the exemplars
of modern landscape architecture (Kiley, Eckbo, Tunnard, Sasaki,
and Walker), an attendant minimalism, expressed in seriality
and typological reductionism, secured the accommodation of landscape
to architecture, albeit through subjugation and abstraction.
Gaudi, Burle Marx, and Luis Barragan, on the other hand, appear
to represent unique expressions of critical regionalism before
it was characterized as such by Kenneth Frampton.
[Bracketed, herein, is the entire section
of faux-populist, pop, and vernacular architectures from theorists
such as Banham, Venturi, Rudofsky, Jackson, and Alexander, to
the late-modern syncretism of 'everyday' and new urbanist fantasies.
In the case of Banham, machine-age romanticism had its Second
Coming. In the case of New Urbanism, typologically driven post-modernism
returned in the form of an elective code. The classicizing aspects
of New Urbanism, however reductive, remained open enough to absorb
the experimental alienated architecture of Rossi as well as certain
aspects of the critique of urbanism associated with the Tendenza
and European neo-rationalism.]
After the 1960s, as the hegemony of abstract
planning and object-oriented modern architecture increasingly
fell into disarray (and disrespect), various alternative visions
emerged alongside post-modernism (after 1968) both reviving and
re-negotiating the language of generic historical form and the
geometric and material expressions of late-modernity -- modernity
being measured, to paraphrase Lacan, "from the Renaissance
to the so-called zenith of the twentieth century". In the
1980s, as the last signs of the ecological and vernacular movements
of the 1970s faded or were absorbed into a new artistic vision
of landscape architecture (including expropriated affects of
land art), a new wave of design speculation, which premiated
or gave equal merit to ground, submerged the last vestiges of
high (mid-century) modernism and the ubiquity of the neo-baroque
landscapes of corporate campuses and urban entourage (Walker's
"everything 3 meters apart'). Rote geometricism continued
as a default methodology in landscape urbanism, especially in
the case of 1980s urban projects that sought to revitalize the
devastated economic prospects of the city center. The waterfront
'festival marketplace' became the new re-urban model, ending
-- thankfully -- with Battery Park City in the late 1980s.
In landscape architecture, various neo-modernist
schools attempted a revival of geometricism, but without the
astringent and therapeutic measures of pure (and grave) formalism
-- as was occuring in architecture -- while post-modern schools
evolved toward a neo-minimalist, sur-rationalist, or neo-mannerist
mode of representation. Deconstructivist-inspired landscape urbanism
appeared as figurative 'anti-storyboards' in the 1980s and 1990s,
primarily in the guise of international design competitions (see
Berlin after 1989). Narratology and linguistics permeated the
'extended field' (Krauss) inherited from the 1960s, but failed
to secure the poetic task of re-writing the foundational language
common to landscape + architecture. Rather than search for primordial
pre-linguistic analogs in design languages, linguistics was applied
in a very literal, superficial, and artificial manner as 'reading
and writing' the landscape. As landscape + architecture attempted
to re-align the dysfunctional and infrastructural contingencies
of the modern city through landscape urbanism, late-modernism
also clashed with New Urbanism. Landscape + architecture fell
into vogue, however, only insofar as the type and scale of projects
and commissions required the collaboration of multiple disciplines
and aesthetic considerations and / or the agency of computer-generated
modeling softwares promoted convergence (see Parc Downsview Park).
This nascent order only tangentially embraced the artistic jouissance
of renascent forms of formalism -- that always-estranged and
strange dialectical / synthetic hybridization of milieu and anti-milieu
that returns at times of cultural crisis. The deterministic and
materialistic (anti-humanistic) systems of planning which evolved
from McHarg's system of mapping produced a new wave characterized
by an obsession with terrain vague and junk space while new ecological
imperatives were advanced in the necessary re-appropriation of
post-industrial wastelands, urban and ex-urban. This latter movement,
post-McHarg, returned to landscape the dynamic instrumentalities
of process-driven design, while adding whole new representational
systems and blurring / obscuring relative scales and normative
graphic conventions. Montage and mapping were combined to produce
a new avant-garde sensibility, even though much of the intellectual
rigor of the Dadaist-inspired idiom was off-loaded or simply
repressed after intitial gestures towards a new anti-aesthetic.
Today, following this historical melange
of schools and movements, the always-already deferred synthesis
/ syrrhesis of landscape + architecture -- that which resides
uneasily in the interstices of all instrumentalized and discriminatory
systems and / or fields, and that which has been problematized
as "in-betweenness" -- may be seen exacting revenge
in the form of an irruptive other-worldliness in the operations
of various latter-day conceptual artists (the truly irrepressible
avant-gardists). This other-worldliness (which is radically contingent
versus transcendental) comes to expression in the form of the
attempt to bring / harness the figures and forces (gestures)
of things and milieux -- an ambient intellectual and environmental
syrrhesis (flowing together) -- that counters cyclical reification,
outright expropriation, and rote appropriation. As K. Michael
Hayes has recently pointed out in Perspecta 32 ("Resurfacing
Modernism"), the late-1990s emphasis on flows (datascapes,
vectors, etc) in mostly virtual architectures might, in itself,
end in a return to a mere emphasis on imagology and surface without
the induction of the intellectual coordinates that support critical-historical
consciousness. Virtuality is, afterall, the present-day reified
realm of the Imaginary. To prevent this collapse, the poetic,
inter-textual, and the extreme formalistic gestures harvested
from structuralism and post-structuralism must be re-visited.
This quest to bring ambient cultural and natural forces to play
within the axes of three-dimensional space -- to produce the
near-total work of art -- stands astride the conflicting claims
of architecture to be both an art and a science. It is in the
latter instance, in architecture as a hyper-conscious (self-conscious
and critical) art, that the more profound exemplifications of
landscape + architecture will be found. Everything else will
proceed per usual.
Gavin Keeney
is a landscape architect in New York and writes on the subject
of landscape + architecture + other things, a cultural amalgam
always-already forthcoming. He is author of On
the Nature of Things (Birkhauser, 2000). He can be reached
at: ateliermp@netscape.net
POSTSCRIPT
An 'elective' synthesis of landscape
+ architecture will be accomplished in the future, as it has
always been accomplished in the past, in the singular work of
art. The forms and types of this 'near-total work of art' are
variegated and not reducible to landscape nor architecture, but,
instead, open onto a vast, heterogeneous field that is symptomatic
of the human condition; that field of subjective topographies
comprised of the fundamental unanswerable questions and paradoxes
of worldliness and timeliness.
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Neve Gordon
Yigal
Bronner's Rights Violated by IDF
Kurt Nimmo
The Delusions of David Horowitz
Desiree Hellegers and
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Red Squads
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Portland Activists Mobilize Against the FBI's Joint Terrorism
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All's
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October 26
/ 27, 2002
Michael Wolff
A Place
of Tears
Ilija Trojanow
Bali Mon Amour
Ben Tripp
Crocodile Tears
Hope Shand and Silvia Ribeiro
The Great Containment:
GM Fallout from Mexico to Zambia
M. Junaid
Alam
The Wolf Who Cried Wolf:
Charging Anti-Semitism & Extending the Iron Wall
Gavin Keeney
The Fusion Thing:
Landscape + Architecture
Adam Engel
A Good Man is Hard to Misfit
Anis Shivani
Is America Becoming Fascist?
Jason Leopold
Is Thomas White Fit to Lead the Army?
Philip Farruggio
Let Them Eat (Crumb) Cake
Josh Frank
The Grassroots of Hope
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen: episode 5
Night School
M. Shahid
Alam
The Civilizing Mission
October 25, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Pappy
Bush on Wellstone:
"Who Is This Chickenshit?"
Stuart Timmons
Harry
Hay Dead at 90:
He Paved the Way for Modern Gay Activism
Vanessa Jones
Australia
Votes Green:
Historic No Vote to US War Plans
Ben Terrall
Rep.
Tom Lantos' Big Lie
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Behind
the Drive for War:
The Escalating Bush Military Budget
Will Youmans
Israel's and Divestment
Norman Madarasz
Lula
on the Verge
October 24,
2002
Jo Freeman
How the
Christian Coalition Boosts Israel
Ben Tripp
George
W.: Caught Between Iraq and a Hard Place
Harry Browne
Ireland's Dreary Yes to Nice
Anis Shivani
A Guide
for the Perplexed:
the Major Countries of the World as Defined by the Office of
Strategic Influence
T.W. Croft
America's
New Improved War
William Hughes
A Free
Press, But for Whom?
Alan Farago
Jeb Bush and the Environment
October 23,
2002
Daniel Wolff
Pataki,
Witt and the Indian Point Nuke
Wayne Madsen
A Saudiless
Arabia
Sam Bahour
and Paul de Rooij
Abritrary
Imprisonment
Chris White
Why I Oppose
the US War on Terror:
an ex-Marine Sergeant Speaks Out
Anthony Gancarski
Back to Bali
Adam Engel
Twilight
(of the Idols) Zone
Robert Fisk
How to Shut Up Your Critics
October 22,
2002
Jack McCarthy
A Letter
to C. Hitchens
Carol Norris
This Message
Brought to You by Breast Cancer, Inc.
Joanne Mariner
Just
Say "Not Until We're Married":
Legislating Morality and Understanding HIV/AIDS Prevention
Kathleen Christison
Excuse Me?
How Israel Justifies Killing Palestinians
Linda Heard
Iraq War
Mongering:
A Game of Chess with Lives at Stake
Roger Peacock
Marketing the War on Iraq
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