Paul's Response

On Challenging the Pictorial: Recent Landscape Practice by Julie Czerniak

This article posits an interesting question in landscape architecture, should landscape be designed for the purpose of stimulating our eyes? The author’s critique refers to three books which challenge the ideal of the picturesque as a means of designing landscapes. The limited scope of such a design process invariably reduces the complexity of actual functioning landscapes which is the author’s main argument against it. Landscapes are highly complex environments which include a multitude of uses, purposes, and interrelations which must be taken into account in order to create a modern landscape. A tree should not be chosen solely based on its photogenic qualities, but for the types of beneficial wildlife it would attract, or, in the case of Adriaan Geuze’s planting of birch trees near an airport, deter.

The article is reminiscent of Ian McHarg’s book, Design with Nature, which completely changed the way I looked at designed landscapes. It was the idea that the land, with the use of countless overlays of maps of use, geology, soil, etc., would in fact define the entire design process which influenced me. In fact, looking at built landscapes, I find it difficult to detach myself from the ideas presented in that book. It seems that so much design today not only continues to focus on the picturesque, but also continues to focus on design artistically without much emphasis on the original identity or composition of the land. Czerniak argues against the picturesque, because it does not take into account all of the complexities needed to design a landscape.

In response to The Machine in the Garden by Leo Marx

The garden has been fouled by the intrusion of machines into the landscape. Both the writers of the golden age of American literature, and many of the leading scientists of today would agree with this statement. The writers were first experiencing the transformational power of industrialization and struggling to cope with it. Perhaps it is not surprising that in a time period when the effects of uncontrolled mechanization have begun to severely alter the climate of the garden, we still struggle to cope with that initial befouling. It is in much the same feelings of alienation and detachment that many of the characters of Hawthorne, Melville and Emerson, we find ourselves immersed today.

My favorite Kentucky author, Wendell Berry, has been writing about the benefits of a return to an agrarian form of life for years, both in terms of the environment and in terms of strengthening communities to reduce such feelings of detachment. We have become detached from the land, and have no idea of it. But, we still feel it emotionally. We proclaim the benefits of gardening or spending time in nature on our health, and in some way recognize the disconnect. Softening or even erasing the lines of mechanization which separate us from the garden is the main reason I became interested in landscape architecture. Designed landscapes are a means to bridge the gap, perhaps not returning us to our agrarian past, but at least providing opportunities to reconnect.

On Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal by Rowe and Slutzky

A difficulty I found over the course of studying literature and language as part of my earlier education was that words alone cannot convey a succinct message. That is to say that words are abstractions which attempt to, as closely as possible, approximate that which we wish to describe. The word dog has nothing to do with the animal, it is simply a collection on phonemes which we relate to an image and to memories embedded in our minds. I mentioned that this caused a difficulty for me because I am a visual and experiential learner. Thus, while the article postulates differences between literal and phenomenal transparency, the overabundance of vagarities and intellectualisms fails to connect these with an image in my brain.

The works of Picasso and the Cubists have clearly defined examples of phenomenal transparency. There is the complex creation of a shallow depth, the play upon the definition of space and overlapping of planes. However, the contrast between the works of Le Corbusier and Gropius is not so clear. Obviously, the Bauhaus is a perfect example to discuss literal transparency, but the explanation of Le Corbusier’s works leave me to believe that phenomenal transparency is little more that a breaking up of planes by providing differing depths and by obscuring the vision. I know that I have not completely comprehended the application of phenomenal transparency in architecture. Perhaps it is the perpetual problem of using words to describe what would very easily be described using diagrams and images. I wonder if fewer people would be turned off from the study of art if its critics and scholars could see the value in using more transparent forms of communication rather than words.