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The Designed Landscape Forum at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (November
7-8,1996) and its published offspring, Designed Landscape Forum 1, examined
intentions in contemporary landscape architecture and land art, with a view
toward reporting the findings. Communication of this kind can be difficult,
especially linking actual practice to the portrayal of practice, or a conference
to a published representation of it. In this case, the book owns up to the
limitations of the conference, makes suggestions as to how to improve the next
one, and has a coherence the conference struggled to attain. Whatever the
differences, the conference organizers and the publishers deserve credit for
making it happen.
The organizers invited designers and artists to submit work for inclusion in
the Forum, with the work reviewed by three panels who selected slides for
presentation to a public audience. The book includes an image of each project. As
noted by Elizabeth Meyer, the system was flawed because few project descriptions
included statements of intent, most were blandly written, impoverished verbal
descriptions, and ideas about nature and culture, ecology and art were not to be
found. "Eventually, we found ourselves ignoring the texts and trying to find
content and invention in the slides projected in front of us."
The lack of foresight, alluded to by Meyer, influenced everything. But more
about that later. Designed Landscape Forum 1 is a big picture book, 213 pages
divided into several sections: an introduction by the chair of the event and
interlocutor of the Forum, George Hargreaves; an honor roll of panelists'
biographies and representative projects; four essays, two as front matter,
separated by a visual sampler of the book's contents, an essay in the middle, and
a coda, all four totaling twelve printed pages, about the proportion of editorial
to advertising in a current issue of any design magazine; thematic portfolios of
projects organized as gardens, land art, parks, preservation and reclamation,
urban design, institutions, and corporations; and selected projects from the
thematic order that provide a little more information. |
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The imagery has a hierarchical structure, a mix of small pictures, site bites,
most of which are just a bit larger than a 35mm slide, and quarter-page and
full-page images for the portfolios. The effect is pleasing, more evidence of the
commitment the Spacemaker series has made to graphic design. DLF 1 reads like a
yearbook, which seems intentional, celebrating a self-selected, graduating class
of international and eclectic landscape practitioners.
The essayists take different approaches to providing commentary on the
conference submissions. Elizabeth Meyer constructs a primer on design criticism
by calling attention to projects that exemplify issues, such as South Cove in New
York City; Solana, a corporate park in Texas; and Yorkville Park in Toronto as
benchmarks; the winning entry for the African American Burial Ground competition
as a "Landscape as irony;" three projects that celebrate the "constructed site;"
the craft of Portland designer Robert Murase; and a few entries offering diverse
techniques for engaging environments. James Corner attacks the profession, "the
narrow-minded, hyperprofessionalized, impoverished landscapes of the clerical
disciplines" in favor of practice that would be "culturally ambitious," meaning
it would be critical, tactile and complex, which seems to translate into a cry
for yet another avant-garde. Marc Treib develops an overview of the last four
decades, then shifts to generalized descriptions of the Forum submissions, with
attention to their shortcomings. He sees promise in contemporary design, in
"formally ordered landscape, perhaps drawing on architectural or sculptural
ideas, perhaps more accepting of environmental management practices" and design
that "looks more deeply into the ecological processes," seeing within them "the
suggestion of form that geometry or an artificial construct from the art world
would never have invented." John Beardsley ends the book with admonitions about
the need to communicate the value of the created landscape, the necessity of
criticism, the importance of conversing with people outside the profession, the
value of the vernacular, the need for the visionary, the useless schism between
the "pattern makers and the eco-warriors," and the importance of landscape
designers becoming visible in infrastructure projects. In sum, Beardsley
articulates what is missing from the Forum.
I would add only that the book documents a robust capitalism, in that the
growth ethic of the 1980s and this decade's expansionist market economy have
engendered much construction. Most of the published projects are about private
expressions of power, whether personal or corporate. There are public domains,
impacted by speculations of other kinds: how can landscapes entertain, how do
public spaces absorb themes, does geometry still have meaning, and how thick can
cultural overlays become. The picturesque aesthetic has a presence, both the 18th
century version mixing contrast, irregularity and abrupt variation, as in A.E.
Bye's "Murmuring Flow" or Ruey Chen's "Garden Perspectives without Vanishing
Points," and the 19th century reliance on visual qualities only, celebrating
contrast for its own sake, rough against smooth, light against dark, as in the
corporate projects of the SWA Group. Appealing to the picturesque is interesting,
because of its potential to serve as a corrective for modernism. |
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There is much masonry construction in the pictures, hundreds of
tons of poured, paved, coursed, polished and rock-faced stuff. There is also
wood, like the simple but elegant boardwalks built in Patagonia or Vermont.
Overall, landscape construction appears tied to program and upkeep, but perhaps
to control as well, but it is hard to understand who is being controlled and who
is controller, because of the limitations of the pictures. Related to
construction and control is the issue of weight. Obviously, projects with
significant investments in construction look heavy, but there are exceptions, as
in the Green Pia Tsunan Central Garden by Yoshita Toda or the Therapeutic Garden
for Children by Douglas Reed and Child Associates.
I close with two observations about the intent of the forum/book and the
method employed for coming to terms with current practice. Inviting lots of
different kinds of designers and artists to participate had the effect of
blending the differences between the participant's fundamental intentions. The
logic for this generosity is grounded in the kind of theoretical cross-dressing
that has occurred between design and the arts, and the strong influence land art
has had on landscape design in the past twenty years. However, by accepting all
comers and then asking panelists, book editors and readers to discriminate among
the works on the basis of veiled intentions makes assessment difficult. Moreover,
the blending of distinctions among projects had the effect of washing out the
cultural pluralism that was evident in the work. While no prizes were awarded,
the panelists, the essayists and the editors selected entries on the basis of
criteria that had not been previously announced. Perhaps this is the result of
not having a clear idea as to the role that criticism plays in a Forum, and not
having a reasonable method through which any audience can arrive at an
understanding of the state of the art. |
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The major problem with the Forum method, both live and in print, can be traced to
relying on pictures as a source for information. The pictures submitted to the
Forum and published in the book were as much cultural constructions as the
projects they depicted. The slides and photographs were not necessarily
documenting anything, but were interpreting their subjects as the photographers
saw fit. Each picture is already a critical or rhetorical act, which gives
everyone the problem of relying on a photographer's interpretation to make
critical judgments about works they cannot understand unless they witness them in
the flesh. Some readers, like the panelists/essayists, will know projects
firsthand, and their observations about them will have a veracity. Ironically,
all but a handful of the 255 images in the book are perspectives of scenic
environments, and essayists and readers will have to use pictorial evidence for
landscape designs they may assume are other than that or more than that. So the
live Forum and the book have the same problem, and the book re-presents the Forum
and the problem quite well. The design of the book does sort the submissions by
intention, type and value, suggesting differences among them, but, rather than
wondering what the pictures mean, it might be more helpful to imagine these
pictures as key images, like key words, from which a reader might pursue
additional information.
How can future events avoid this entanglement? The new rules for submission
will help, but so would looking at other models. I believe Marc Treib, in an
aside, referenced "American Bandstand" as a source for criticism. I was a
teenager when this program first aired in Philadelphia. There was a point in each
show when Dick Clark would invite a boy and a girl, one from a Catholic high
school, to rate a new song while the studio danced to it. Each gave it a
numerical value and a reason for the number - "I liked the beat" or "I didn't like
the words" - and then Clark or another person added the numbers, divided by two and
got a rating. The point here is that AnnMarie and Joe had a set of values, which
were not overly ambitious, and their conclusions were based on direct experience
with the artifact. That's not a bad base line for criticism. A second notion has
to do with regarding the submissions to the Forum as ethnographic field notes,
from a diverse group of informants, and future Forum organizers could bear in
mind the hazards of making too much of the information. Ethnographers go gently
into the dark night of interpretation and evaluation, preferring to write a field
note tale rather than an epic narrative. The 1996 Forum participants and the DLF
1 readers do not need to make sense of all of it either, but let time and more
conversation sort things out. In the meantime, we could try to get more people
dancing.
Herbert Gottfried is professor and chair of the department of landscape
architecture, Cornell University. His principal interests are cultural landscape
studies, and the history and theory of design.
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