Robert's Reflections:

The Machine in the Garden

I drew a little from this article. The author shed light on the feelings of early American Romantic authors towards nature and mechanization.  These opinions are widely discussed.  The latter half of the article seemed to be a summary of a short story pointing out key allusions Hawthorne makes in regards to the main character and society, nature, mankind, etc.  These noted romantic American writers often described man’s folly against nature usually delivered via technological innovation or or use of technology especially mechanization and industrialization.  I have never read the short story Ethan Brand.  The only work from Hawthorne that I am familiar with is the Scarlet Letter.  The Scarlet Letter was much less a commentary on industrialization and its effect on the cumulative “human soul” than this article makes Ethan Brand out to be.  I would probably have gotten more out of this article if I had read the short story, or if I had read Machine in the Garden by Marx.  The only conclusions which I can draw are te ones laid out by the article’s author  (and they are logical conclusions).  Once the unpardonable sin (mechanization) is expelled the relatively happy little puritan valley is pretty and peaceful again.  It is obvious to the reader that the author of this article believes that Hawthorne is making a direct statement against the unregulated and rampant industrialization of his day, in a cryptic and un-literal fashion which romantic authors love to beguile 21st century high-school students with. 

Transparency:  Literal and Phenomenal

I tried to enjoy this article.  I feel it is a little over my head (or intentionally pedantic).  I muddled through the first section that verbally illustrated 2 types of transperency and their artistic resumes.  Honestly, I was going to try and skip to the end when things got a little spicy.  I did enjoy the direct comparisons to modern architecture (design, layout, and texture).   I did appreciate the the visual aides placed and and clearly labeled.  This article would have been a nightmare for me had I not been able to compare the buildings with their Cubism roots described in the section above.  Being a tired Landscape Architecture student; I did not appreciate the importance of the first section (why the Rowe was so concerned with labeling the and illustrating different artists’ styles of transparency) until the author took things home with the second and last section.  The connections Rowe made were well supported and described.  

I went back and reread the first section once I was sure which way this article was going to gain a better concept of the middle and last sections.  While the title is pretty straight forward, an abstract would have been extremely helpful.

I had never really thought about it, but in our field transparency is often displayed as a function of organization.  If something is transparent on a drafted set of plans it is because a landscape architect drew it that way (unless the material being drafted is 

inherently transparent).  A sense of transparency can also be achieve in modern Landscape architecture by arrangement just as was being discussed in the Bauhaus structural design, to provide the feeling of transparency(the idea of transparency) not just the actual physical attribute of clear glazing.

Challenging the Pictorial:  Recent Landscape Practice.

In her article Czerniak describes 3 contemporary landscape architects/firms that are bucking the convention of pictorialism.  She partially defines pictorialism as having its roots in the English Garden/Pastoral form of landscape architecture.  I agree with her.  The fundamentally aesthetic values that pictorial landscapes contain are subject to that lineage.  

I was not excited to by the prospect of reading 3 book reviews, however I did like the way she put 3 very different practitioners of a similar visual experience together.  All authors were adept at expressing views visually and through juxtaposition.  Their arrangement of designs and images to express the shared themes of the “gestalt” project or landscape was stimulating.  

I found it interesting that all architects viewed their various projects as open ended.  Never finished, always evolving after initial completion.  Even the arial photos/renderings added a “greater whole” or “no clear boundaries” aspect to their models.  I do not know if “open-endedness” is a fundamental aspect of this anti-pictorial movement; but I feel like it is worth mentioning.  

Of the 3, I found the first book description the most intriguing .  I liked the idea of an arial photograph to give a holistic view of a landscape and using hand renderings to reduce (diagram) information the architect (artist) wanted to convey to the reader about certain landscapes.  Ancient peoples have been making landscapes that can only be taken in as a whole from a birds eye view, without such a vantage point.  I find it fitting that we are now using that same vantage point to rediscover architecture that was made to taken in from the ground level perspective and re-explore the idea of the entire landscape.