Susannah's Reflections

Reflection on Rowe and Slutzky’s Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal

 

This article begins with a disclaimer of sorts apologizing in advance for its pedantry.

It’s not their pedantry that bothers me, but their wordy style of writing which often left me confused.  Despite the difficult read I believe that I deciphered some idea of the difference between literal and phenomenal transparency.

 

In this article Rowe and Slutzky attempt to define the concept of transparency within the realm of art and architecture.  There are two aspects to transparency: literal and phenomenal.  Literal transparency is fairly obvious.  It is materially transparent.  Within traditional painting the term refers to something that is translucent, like a veil, and in architecture transparency can be found in windows and plastics.  Within Cubism though, transparency implies a “shrinkage of depth”, indicative of phenomenal transparency.  All the layers of a landscape may be present in a painting, but the space between, say, a mountain and an ocean would be removed.  It is more difficult to articulate phenomenal transparency within architecture than painting.  Le Corbusier’s “Garches”, according to the authors, successfully achieves phenomenal transparency with its “contradiction of spatial dimensions”.  It is here that I became confused.  Perhaps with good, clear photographs of some architectural examples I would be able to better understand the concept of phenomenal transparency within architecture.

Reflection on Marx’s The Machine In The Garden, chapter 1

This chapter discusses how American writers before 1860 responded to industrialism through their work, and how the symbolism they manifested continues to hold meaning today.  Because the writers to which Marx refers, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau were alive as industrialism developed, their responsive voices had to develop as well.  At first they realized their rejection of industrialism through symbolic imagery, such as the steam engine representing power, the future of the U.S., and man’s dominance of nature.  But they did not out right denounce industrialism, or speak directly about the Industrial Revolution, as it was yet undefined.  Instead they expressed their emotional response to their vast country being connected by rail and telegraph, and therefore disconnected of its valued.  The same tools that were going to make life easier like the sewing machine and the steam engine simultaneously symbolized a conqueror: of nature, and a beloved lifestyle.

 

Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau all expressed a depressed feeling of a disconnection with nature and society resulting from industrialization.  These authors’ attachment to nature represented an “indispensable source of life’s meaning” to them.  As a future landscape architect I intend to recognize this response to a lack of nature in today’s world and the emotional ramifications that follow.  Especially as our environment faces more and more crises, the desire for a connection with land and nature is ever important, and it can be partially resolved through intelligent landscaping.

 Reflection on Czerniak’s Challenging the Pictorial: Recent Landscape Practice

Czerniak rejects practicing landscape architecture based on “pictorial” guidelines.  She believes that the pictorial is an outdated custom limited to three basic concepts.  First, the pictorial landscape practice primarily views the landscape as a one dimensional, flat, picture.  Like a painting it is something to be looked at and admired.  Although aereal photography intended to reject pictorialism by revealing the grand scale of how landscape is organized from above, it was criticized as objectifying landscape as once again flat and just two dimensional.  However the process found success when juxtaposed with Corner’s map drawings, including satellite images, photos, and maps.  This technique unites different aspects and views of the landscape.  Secondly, the pictorial assigns a set of conventions found in landscape paintings, such as how the land should look according to such aesthetics found in this traditional medium.  In contrast to this ideal Czerniak cites Hargreave’s project Byxbee Park, which turns the tables by stressing concept over composition wherein the “viewer” or park goer is called on to question the field of telephone poles which symbolize the trees that can’t grow there because the park is built upon a land fill.  Lastly, the imagery found in one dimensional art from postcards to paintings not only declares what is beautiful landscape, but it determines our way of processing thought about landscape.  The project Duindoornstad reverses the order of building a city, allowing it to evolve on its own, instead of building the new city based on a final plan.

 

By exploring a series of monographs critical of the pictorial practice, Czerniak illuminates her view of the pictorial practice and the direction in which she believes landscape architecture should take in rejection of it.  It is very important that as new landscape architecture students we explore all options of “seeing”.  Although we live in a time where projects such as the above mentioned exist, we have to seek them out.  The norm is still very much the pretty garden of pictorialism.  In drought ridden Southern California you can drive around and see plenty of “pretty English gardens” which sap the natural resources of the region.  It is to our benefit environmentally as well as socially and aesthetically, to branch out and study ways of thinking and practicing landscape architecture that we have never before heard of.