Emily's Responses

Response to “Challenging the Pictorial: Recent Landscape Practice”



In Julia Czerniak’s article, “Challenging the Pictorial,” the author criticizes pictorial representations of the landscape used by many landscape practitioners and artists since the early 18th century. She believes there are three main reasons why these pictorial or picturesque techniques limit the representation of landscapes and nature. She argues that “pictorial landscape favors appearance over function, embraces conventionalized compositional techniques, and, through particular cultural visions and venues, conditions our way of seeing nature.” Czerniak goes so far as to say that there is a need to “challenge the tyranny” of the pictorial and do away with the “cult of the pretty picture.” Towards this end, she examines the work of several landscape architects who are developing and attempting to utilize alternative techniques to represent nature and the landscape. Czerniak applauds the work of these landscape architects for utilizing techniques that show the landscape in alternative ways. One practitioner combines aerial photography with map-drawings to overcome the pictorial and provide a perspective of the landscape not visible to the average person. Another attempts to capture the landscape as a process and as a functional ecosystem that includes the cultural, economic and ecological concerns of the site using a more abstract representational style.

There is no single landscape architect with which Czerniak is entirely impressed. She finds flaws in each body of work, but celebrates the strides being made towards a less pictorial representation of the landscape. I have a new appreciation for how my perception of nature has been formed by almost entirely one system of representation and its underlying politics and culture. I agree with Czerniak that there is a need to expand our options and ways of seeing and also to take care in what informs and influences our representations of the landscape. However, I think that challenging the “cult of the pretty picture” will be a lengthy process of change, met with resistance and will run the risk of being misunderstood by fellow practitioners and the public for a long time. The solution that will meet everyone’s needs, and the least criticism, needs to involve a compromise between the pictorial and many other styles of representation that work together to capture all the dimensions of a landscape.

Response to “The Machine in the Garden”


In his essay, “The Machine in the Garden,” Leo Marx discusses the influence of the Industrial Revolution on literature written from 1830 to 1860 and specifically examines Hawthorne’s short story “Ethan Brand” to support his argument. Marx seeks to demonstrate that the literature of the period was not expressly about the Industrial Revolution because authors as yet had not come to fully understand what it was, however their writing is heavily laced with the imagery, symbols and emotions that resulted from it. Marx sites steam, the railroad, the steamship and the telegraph as examples of these industrial symbols found in literature. Inevitably, they stood for the future, man’s power over nature and “carried a sense of violent break with the past.” This last point, I believe, is the heart of the matter. Marx asserts that during this period Americans were grappling with this monumental change in their landscape. America had been thought of as an untouched, new “ Garden of the World,” but “the sudden appearance of the Machine in the Garden deeply stirred an age already sensitive to the conflict between civilization and nature.” During this period two conflicting experiences with nature were emerging in America: living with nature or dominion over it. Marx clearly points out references to this struggle in the literature of the time. The main causes of evil are often associated with science, technology and fire, all man-made creations. It is in turn the sun, symbol of the natural world, which sets things right and brings peace again.

Marx does an excellent job bringing to light the deeply emotional struggle that went on between man and nature during the Industrial Revolution in America as documented by great writers of the time. He points out that these writers were predicting the “irreconcilable conceptions of America’s destiny, as indeed of all human experience.” This struggle continues to be a recurring theme in literature, and life, with no likely end in site. Marx illustrated that people were feeling this conflict at the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution even before they had a complete sense and understanding of what was happening or what was to come. This shows intuitiveness that humans can have about nature and the innate concern they feel about what will happen if they try to alter it.

Response to “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal”


The essay, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutsky seeks to explain and educate about the quality of transparency in art and architecture. The authors take great care in defining the term with which they are going to analyze their examples. Transparency, it seems, can be defined on many different levels: material, intellectual, physical, linguistic, etc. However, the authors go into more depth about two distinct types: literal and phenomenal. The literal form being derived from cubist painting and the “machine aesthetic” and the phenomenal form only from cubist painting, the authors elaborate, “transparency may be an inherent quality of a substance…or it may be an inherent quality of organization.” Many examples of cubist paintings are then drawn upon to further illustrate this concept. However, the reproductions of the art being discussed leaves much to be desired and the language of the article is fairly technical which leaves me more confused about the distinction than when I started.

After the discussion on paintings and transparency, begins the discussion of architecture and transparency. The authors assert that because of the three-dimensional nature inherent to architecture that “literal transparency can become a physical fact…phenomenal transparency will, for this reason, be more difficult to achieve.” They embarked on the writing of this article specifically because of the challenge and because most critics limit transparency in architecture to the literal form. A comparison of several of Le Corbusier’s works is made in order to distinguish between literal and phenomenal transparency, but leaves me quite baffled. Again, without a base knowledge of these specific references it is difficult to imagine the concepts they refer to. This article is cerebral, abstract and, frankly, it makes it clear why most critics leave the subject of transparency in architecture to its more obvious nature.