Is Landscape... ?: Essays on the Identity of Landscape [1° ed.] 1138018449, 9781138018440

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Is Landscape …?

Is Landscape . . .? surveys multiple and myriad identities of landscape. Rather than seeking a singular or essential understanding of the term, the collection postulates that landscape might be better read in relation to its cognate terms across expanded disciplinary and professional fields. The publication pursues the potential of multiple provisional working definitions of landscape to both disturb and develop received understandings of landscape architecture. These definitions distinguish between landscape as representational medium, academic discipline, and professional identity. Beginning with an inquiry into the origins of the term itself, Is Landscape . . .? features essays by more than a dozen leading voices shaping the contemporary reading of landscape as architecture and beyond. Gareth Doherty is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Senior Research Associate at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. His research and teaching focus on the interactions between design and anthropology. Doherty is a founding editor of New Geographies journal and editor-in-chief of New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color. Doherty edited Ecological Urbanism with Mohsen Mostafavi. Current book projects include, Paradoxes of Green: An Ethnography of Landscape in a City-State and Landscape as Art and Ecology: Lectures by Roberto Burle Marx. Charles Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture and former Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Professor Waldheim’s research focuses on landscape architecture in relation to contemporary urbanism. He coined the term landscape urbanism to describe emerging landscape design practices in the context of North American urbanism. He has written extensively on the topic and is author of Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory as well as editor of The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Citing the city of Detroit as the most legible example of urban industrial economy in North America, Waldheim is editor of CASE: Lafayette Park Detroit and co-editor, with Jason Young and Georgia Daskalakis, of Stalking Detroit.

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Edited by Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim

Is Landscape …? Essays on the Identity of Landscape

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim The right of Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Is landscape . . .? : essays on the identity of landscape / edited by Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Landscape architecture – Philosophy. 2. Landscape assessment. I. Doherty, Gareth, editor. II. Waldheim, Charles, editor. SB472.I7 2016 712 – dc23 2015015924 ISBN: 978-1-138-01844-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-01847-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-69758-1 (ebk) Typeset in Frutiger by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

Contents

Acknowledgments Notes on contributors Foreword by Mohsen Mostafavi

vii ix xiii

Introduction: What is landscape?

1

GARETH DOHERTY AND CHARLES WALDHEIM

Is landscape architecture?

9

GARETH ECKBO

1

Is landscape literature?

13

GARETH DOHERTY

2

Is landscape painting?

44

VITTORIA DI PALMA

3

Is landscape photography?

71

ROBIN KELSEY

4

Is landscape gardening?

93

UDO WEILACHER

5

Is landscape ecology?

115

NINA-MARIE LISTER

6

Is landscape planning?

138

FREDERICK STEINER

7

Is landscape urbanism?

162

CHARLES WALDHEIM

8

Is landscape infrastructure? PIERRE BÉLANGER

190

Contents 䊏

9

Is landscape technology?

228

NIALL KIRKWOOD

10

Is landscape history?

247

JOHN DIXON HUNT

11

Is landscape theory?

261

RACHAEL Z. DELUE

12

Is landscape philosophy?

285

KATHRYN MOORE

13

Is landscape life?

302

CATHARINE WARD THOMPSON

14

Is landscape architecture?

327

DAVID LEATHERBARROW

Index

339

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Acknowledgments

This book was initially conceived and informed by a graduate-level course at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. For four years from 2009 through 2012, the Proseminar in Landscape Architecture focused on the myriad of meanings in landscape and its cognate fields. This work is indebted to the graduate students of the seminar for their rigorous discussions on many of the topics introduced in the book. Special thanks are due, of course, to the contributors to the book, nearly all of whom participated in the proseminar. Presenters in the proseminar not represented here but who added so much to the discussions included John Beardsley, Alan Berger, Anita Berrizbeitia, Susannah Drake, Sonja Dümpelmann, Ed Eigen, Richard T.T. Forman, Gary Hilderbrand, Mark Laird, Elizabeth Meyer, Chris Reed, Melanie Simo, Anne Whiston Spirn, Carl Steinitz, John R. Stilgoe, Michael Van Valkenburgh, and Christian Werthmann. Teaching assistants included Andrew TenBrink (MLA, ’09), Andrew Zientek (MLA, ’10), and Conor O’Shea (MLA, ’11, MDes, ’12). Mónica Belevan, a former student in in the proseminar, provided helpful copyediting at an early stage. Conor O’Shea later assisted with the image research for the book itself aided by Jian He, Miguel Lopez Melendez, and Felipe Vera. Sara Gothard helped with image permissions. Thanks to Ines Zalduendo, Special Collections Archivist, and Alix Reiskind, Digital Initiatives Librarian, Visual Resources and Materials Collection, at the Frances Loeb Library, Harvard University Graduate School of Design for their assistance. Permission to reproduce the Eckbo essay was facilitated by Brooke S. Hinrichs, Research and Collections Analyst, American Society of Landscape Architects, Washington DC, and Chris Marino, Reference Archivist, Environmental Design Archives at the University of California, Berkeley. Lastly, we acknowledge the professional and dedicated editorial team, including Hannah Champney, the production editor, for keeping the book on schedule; Hamish Ironside for copyediting; Louise Fox and Sadé Lee for their support and editorial advice from the beginning of this project to the end.

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Notes on contributors

Pierre Bélanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and Co-Director of the MDes Postgraduate Design Research Program at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Bélanger teaches and coordinates graduate courses on the convergence of ecology, infrastructure, media and urbanism in the interrelated fields of design, communications, planning and engineering. He recently authored the latest edition of Pamphlet Architecture #35, “Going Live: From States to Systems”, and guest edited Harvard Design Magazine #39 “Wet Matter”. Current book projects include Landscape Infrastructure, and Landscape of Defense. Rachael Z. DeLue is Associate Professor of Art History at Princeton University. She specializes in the history of American art and visual culture, with particular focus on intersections between art and science. She is currently at work on a study of Charles Darwin’s diagram of evolution in On the Origin of Species as well as a book about impossible images. Publications include George Inness and the Science of Landscape (2004), Landscape Theory (2008), co-edited with James Elkins, and Arthur Dove: Always Connect (2016). Vittoria Di Palma is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture of the University of Southern California. She is a co-editor of Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City (2009), and the author of Wasteland, A History (2014), which received the 2015 Louis Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, a 2015 J. B. Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape Studies, and a 2015 PROSE Award. John Dixon Hunt is Professor Emeritus of the History and Theory of Landscape at the University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Professor at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Current interests focus upon landscape architectural theory, modern(ist) garden design, and ekphrasis. He is the author of numerous articles and books on garden history and theory, including Garden and Grove, Gardens and the Picturesque, The Picturesque Garden in Europe, The Afterlife of Gardens, Historical Ground: The Role of History in Contemporary Landscape Architecture and, forthcoming in the University of Pennsylvania Press series on Landscape Architecture, of which he is the series editor, SITE, SIGHT, INSIGHT: Essays on landscape architecture.

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Notes on contributors 䊏

Robin Kelsey is the Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard University. Professor Kelsey has published on such topics as the role of chance in photography, geographical survey photography, landscape theory, ecology and historical interpretation, and the nexus of art and law. His books include Archive Style: Photographs and Illustrations for US Surveys, 1850–1890, The Meaning of Photography (co-edited with Blake Stimson) and Photography and the Art of Chance. Niall Kirkwood is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Kirkwood’s teaching, research and publishing broadly concerns technology and its relationship to design in the built landscape environment. Kirkwood’s books include The Art of Landscape Detail: Fundamentals, Practices, and Case Studies, Manufactured Sites: Rethinking the Post-Industrial Landscape, Weathering and Durability in Landscape Architecture, and, with Justin Hollander and Julia Gold, Principles of Brownfield Regeneration: Cleanup, Design, and Reuse of Derelict Land. Kirkwood’s most recent book, with Kate Kennen is, Phyto: Principles and Resources for Site Remediation and Landscape Design. David Leatherbarrow is Professor and Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture, at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Leatherbarrow has published widely including Architecture Oriented Otherwise, Topographical Stories, Surface Architecture (with M. Mostafavi), Uncommon Ground, The Roots of Architectural Invention, and On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (with M. Mostafavi). Leatherbarrow’s research focuses on the history and theory of architecture and the city. Nina-Marie Lister is Graduate Programme Director and Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Lister is the founding principal of plandform, a creative studio practice exploring the relationship between landscape, ecology, and urbanism. Lister’s research, teaching and practice focus on the confluence of landscape infrastructure and ecological processes within contemporary metropolitan regions. She is co-editor of Projective Ecologies (2014) and The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability (2008) and author of numerous professional practice and scholarly publications. Kathryn Moore is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, Birmingham City University, United Kingdom. Moore is President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) and a Past President of the Landscape Institute. Moore has published extensively on design quality, theory, education and practice. Moore’s publications include Overlooking the Visual: Demystifying the Art of Design (2010), and “The Regeneration Game,” Railway Terminal World (2014). Mohsen Mostafavi is the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design. His work focuses on modes and processes of urbanization and on the interface between technology and

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aesthetics. His books include On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (coauthored, 1993), Delayed Space, Architecture, Logique Visuelle, Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape, Structure as Space, Ecological Urbanism (edited with Gareth Doherty), Implicate & Explicate, Louis Vuitton: Architecture and Interiors, In the Life of Cities, Instigations: Engaging Architecture, Landscape and the City, and Architecture is Life. Current book projects include Ethics of the Urban: The City and Spaces of the Political. Frederick R. Steiner is the Dean of the School of Architecture and Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent books include Urban Ecological Design (with Danilo Palazzo), Design for a Vulnerable Planet, Planning and Urban Design Standards (student edition, with Kent Butler), The Essential Ian McHarg: Writings on Design and Nature, and Human Ecology: Following Nature’s Lead. Catharine Ward Thompson is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on inclusive access to outdoor environments, environment-behaviour interactions, landscape design for older people, children and teenagers, and salutogenic environments. Catharine is founder and Director of OPENspace research centre, where current research projects include studies on the effectiveness of environmental interventions to enhance psychological wellbeing in deprived communities and among different sub-groups in the older population. Udo Weilacher is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Industrial Landscapes at the Technical University of Munich. Weilacher’s research is on connections between landscape architecture, fine arts and history of garden art in relation to contemporary urban and cultural landscape developments. He is author of many books including Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art (1995), Syntax of Landscape (2007) and Feldstudien: Zur neuen Ästhetik urbaner Landwirtschaft/Field Studies: The New Aesthetics of Urban Agriculture (2010).

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Foreword Mohsen Mostafavi

It seems to me that Garrett Eckbo’s thought-provoking text, “Is Landscape Architecture?,” to which this volume is a critical, multivalent response, is chiefly arguing for a relationship – a relationship between landscape and architecture – rather than simply defining what landscape architecture is. By asking “Is landscape architecture?,” Eckbo foregrounds the importance of relationality, or the productive zone in which disciplinary knowledge meets transdisciplinary practice. Landscape is intrinsically caught between varied associations. The array of contributors to this volume represent a broad range of disciplines and positions, allowing landscape to be discussed in relation to fields in addition to architecture. When we ask “Is landscape planning?,” for example, we are inherently discussing landscape’s relationship to planning. Similarly, “Is landscape photography?” questions landscape’s representation through photographic methods. Through the various chapters of this volume, you will find many glimpses of particularities of identity that emerge from these associations. Writing elsewhere, Kenneth Frampton suggests that when you look at the Parthenon, you see a building that seems to grow out of the mountain. Even though the building is distinct from the mountain, there is a clear relationship; the visual appreciation of the building is ineluctably tied to its locality. This relationality becomes a kind of method in the work of certain architects. One particularly exciting example of the tension between architecture and landscape is the Villa Malaparte on Capri, which epitomizes the idea of an architecture that incorporates landscape but is also distinct from it. Frampton highlights an architecture that continues the argument of Eckbo, in physical terms, where architecture is architecture, and the constructed landscape is seen as a sort of integrated, holistic project. He thus opposes the notion of the architectural object and promotes examples of continuity between landscape and architecture. Asking “Is landscape architecture?” is therefore to seek an equivalence of architecture within landscape – not only to define landscape through its relationality with architecture but to speak of that equivalence. The Centre Pompidou is one of the most powerfully charged projects in this respect in its complex relationship with the landscape of Paris. An escalator moves vertically along the outside of the structure, offering a fresh perspective on the city

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Mohsen Mostafavi 䊏

in terms of one’s relationship to the ground, as opposed to the more quotidian experience gained by walking or traveling by car, bus, or bike. The escalator is a very deliberate way of experiencing the city, for viewing the urban landscape. The building functions almost as a kind of camera – as a mechanism for constructing spatial relationships with the city. Yet if you define something – a building, a landscape – in terms of something else, what is its position with regard to its own core practices and conventions? In considering the notion of relationality, it is also important to talk about distinctness, to talk about difference. Aldo Rossi was a vocal proponent of the notion of disciplinary autonomy, or the autonomy of architecture. Architecture is architecture. Poetry is poetry. Literature is literature. Painting is painting. Photography is photography. What issues are specific, distinct, to the core of landscape as a discipline, and to landscape as a certain set of practices? Such specificities are a necessary precondition for relationality with other things: you need to know the particular qualities of something before invoking a relationship. I would argue that landscape has had a harder time defining its disciplinary condition than have most other fields. A recognized part of the problem with landscape is that it still frequently gets conflated with conceptualizations of nature, including discussions around nature and agriculture, and traditions of gardening. Inadequate attention is devoted to the artifice of landscape – the highly artificial, highly deliberate, highly constructed. In this sense, there’s very little that’s natural about landscape. It is vital to argue to some degree for the autonomy of the discipline of landscape by defining landscape relative to landscape, in the same way that architecture has had a long gestation period of being able to articulate itself. In short, in examining the relationships arising from the multiple identities of landscape, it is necessary to look within landscape too. So the question that I would most like to pose is: “Is landscape landscape?”

xiv 䊐

Introduction

What is landscape?

Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim

Why is it, I wonder, that we have trouble agreeing on the meaning of landscape? The word is simple enough, and it refers to something which we think we understand; and yet to each of us it seems to mean something different.1 (J. B. Jackson, 1984)

This volume traverses multiple identities of landscape. Rather than seeking a singular or essential understanding of the term, we postulate that landscape might be better read in relation to its cognate terms across expanded disciplinary and professional fields. The publication pursues the potential of multiple provisional identities of landscape to both disturb and develop received understandings of landscape architecture. The book is organized as a series of rhetorical questions built upon Garrett Eckbo’s 1983 essay “Is Landscape Architecture?,” which is reproduced in this volume.2 We ask similarly charged rhetorical questions across a range of landscape’s cognate fields in an effort to unpack landscape’s luggage. This line of questioning builds upon similar questions framed by David Leatherbarrow’s reading of Eckbo’s formulation. In his 2004 Topographical Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture, Leatherbarrow probes the relative relatedness of landscape with its cognate architecture.3 Following Eckbo’s formulation “Is Landscape Architecture?,” Leatherbarrow claims topography as a medium shared by the two practices. Fatigued by theories that argue for the absolute incompatibility on the one hand, as well as by those that argue for their complete categorical collapse, Leatherbarrow proposes a relation between landscape and architecture based principally on the concept of similarity. In viewing landscape and architecture as essentially analogous, yet not the same, nor utterly different, Leatherbarrow offers a reading of the topographic arts as a field of action in which landscape and architecture might be read relative to one another.4 So what is landscape? Before landscape was a liberal profession, academic discipline, or design medium, it was first a genre of painting, a motif for the theatrical arts, and a mode of human subjectivity. This history has been well documented in the work of art historian Ernst Gombrich and cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove, among others.5 Among those describing the origins and emergence

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of landscape, J. B. Jackson is perhaps notable. Jackson began his seminal 1984 “The Word Itself” by rehearsing the dictionary definition of the term, “a portion of the earth’s surface that can be comprehended as a glance.”6 While the emergence of landscape as a cultural concept has been well documented in the postmodern era, less attention has been paid to landscape’s multiform and various cognate fields. As increasing attention has been paid to landscape as architecture, this volume invites reflection on the broader expanded field of landscape’s other terms. In so doing, this publication aspires to problematize landscape’s promiscuity, while prolonging reflection upon its flexible fecundity. Following this introduction we reprint Garrett Eckbo’s “Is Landscape Architecture?,” which inspired this book. Eckbo tells us that landscape architecture must integrate landscape and architecture. He tells us that landscape and architecture get judged separately but rarely are their interactions measured. The real potential, according to Eckbo, rests in the relationship between landscape and architecture. In Chapter 1, Gareth Doherty asks “Is Landscape Literature?” The question is addressed around two sets of paired suppositions. The first is the notion that landscape informs literature, that it has an agency over literature and shapes it. The second and perhaps more interesting take for designers is the notion that literature informs landscape, that what we write affects what we build. How is the design of the built environment influenced by literature, whether the written word is about the built environment or not? Third, there is the model proposed by Anne Whiston Spirn and several others of landscape as literature, in the sense that landscape is a text that can be read. This is followed by a notion of literature as landscape where the chapter focuses on imaginary landscapes such as the Makedo Garden, a garden that exists only through text. Last, but not least, the chapter touches on what landscape architects have to say about their professional design work. Vittoria Di Palma (Chapter 2) asks “Is Landscape Painting?” and shows that landscape and painting have been intertwined since the word “landscape” was first imported into English from Dutch to refer to small panel paintings of rural scenery. Di Palma points out that most theoretical discussions of landscape look toward painting as a point of reference for vocabulary, theoretical concepts, evaluative criteria and, visual conventions. DiPalma investigates how theories of painting informed theories of landscape and in so doing addresses the theoretical and practical links between landscape and painting. The chapter concludes with a discussion on “effect.” DiPalma explains that art elicits an emotional reaction in the viewer. She explains that great work of art of distinguished by producing “sensations that are so closely affiliated that when they unite they culminate in a burst of intense emotion. This burst of emotion is so powerful that it carries the viewer out of him or herself, generating an experience that can only be compared to an encounter with the divine.” We see that not alone has painting influenced understandings of landscape but landscape influences understandings of painting.

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Robin Kelsey (Chapter 3) asks “Is Landscape Photography?,” and, as with the previous chapter on painting, shows that landscape and photography are more interrelated than we might expect. Kelsey demonstrates that from the time of its invention in 1839 photography was a clearly a product of landscape. Writing in 1864 the photographic portraitist, Julia Margaret Cameron, for example associated the expectations for exact representation in photography with the failure of the landscape imagination. Despite an early and understandable fascination with portraiture, landscape proceeded to become a focus of photography as photography began to explore its aesthetic potential over and above the primarily representational. Appropriated by environmentalism to illustrate seemingly pristine landscapes demanding preservation, photographic reproduction has become central to landscape as a social practice. “The problem of landscape,” Kelsey tells us, “is not a matter of getting the right image of belonging; it is a matter of trying to make belonging happen through the desire of images.” Asking “Is Landscape Gardening?” Udo Weilacher in Chapter 4 discusses Olmsted’s preference for the formulation landscape architecture over landscape gardening as a turning point in landscape practice. Olmsted, challenged with the need to respond to large-scale urban planning and industrial development, distanced himself repeatedly from gardening. Gardening did not seem so relevant for larger urban-scale practice. Discussing the work of Leberecht Migge and others, Weilacher tells us that as we face an increasingly urban future: debates about the sustainability of cities and landscapes, the garden, and “gardening,” are again coming back into the focus of interest of landscape architecture. In discussing six basic principles of garden thinking, Weilacher advocates for a return to garden thinking in landscape architecture. In Chapter 5, Nina-Marie Lister asks “Is Landscape Ecology?” by exploring the “material palette” of landscape with reference to ideas in ecology, traditional, contemporary, and emerging. Initially understood as the study of the relationship between living organisms and their physical environment, ecology offered “empirical, tractable, and observable evidence that helps at once to define and constrain the territories of landscape as both entity and construct.” Now understood more broadly “through emphasis on the social, cultural, and political dimensions of species-environment relationships,” Lister advocates for the relevance of ecology to the design of landscapes of various types and scales. Lister tells us that landscape and ecology are “connected through and defined by the concept of relationship – the quality of which is mutable and dynamic.” “From material and medium, to model and metaphor, to motif and motive” this chapter considers the evolving definitions and changing roles of ecology relative to landscape and their implications for design, research, and practice. In “Is Landscape Planning?” (Chapter 6), Frederick Steiner defines landscape planning as the process of transformation of landscape, and the “application of knowledge about natural and cultural processes for decision-making.” Steiner tells us that planning can help address four contemporary landscape challenges: identifying where to locate human settlements to minimize the consequences of

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natural disasters; maximizing ecosystem services by expanding green infrastructure; restoring neglected and polluted urban areas; and, importantly, how to protect and manage large landscapes. Steiner reminds us of the fragility of the planet as evidenced through numerous natural disasters including tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods, which changes in climate suggest will increase over time. The planning of landscape can minimize the effects of such natural disasters. Meanwhile, an ecosystem services approach—considering air, natural light, water, food, energy, and minerals, as well as cultural benefits—can both help mitigate the consequences of natural disasters and restore urban environments. In discussing these challenges relative to contemporary practice, and landscape restoration, and management, Steiner argues for planning as a central tool for human adaptation to changing landscapes. Charles Waldheim asks “Is Landscape Urbanism?” in Chapter 7. Over the past decade the subject of landscape has enjoyed a relative renaissance within design culture. This well documented resurgence of what had been described by some as a relatively moribund field of intellectual inquiry has been variously described as a recovery or renewal, and has been particularly fruitful for discussions of contemporary urbanism. Among the questions implied is the relative importance of landscape’s newfound ascendancy for the disciplines of urban design and planning. In addition to its relevance for describing the contemporary urban field, might landscape have the potential to resonate with the larger territorial subjects of urban planning? Ironically, the most compelling argument in this regard suggests that the potential for landscape to inform planning comes from its newfound ascendancy within design culture and the deployment of ecology as model or metaphor rather than through the longstanding historical project of ecologically informed regional planning. As this point is a potential source of some confusion, and has become a topic of some debate; this chapter offers a provisional reading of how landscape might profitably inform the present and future commitments of urban design and planning. The term “landscape urbanism” refers to practices at the intersection of landscape and contemporary urbanism, and this chapter addresses the emerging thought that places landscape as the dominant building block for our cities, reflecting a shift from the historical model in which architecture and buildings ruled. Pierre Bélanger (Chapter 8) asks “Is Landscape Infrastructure?” Including physical structures such as roads, highways, bridges, airports and military bases, the word “infrastructure” literally refers to the underlying structure of a system, organization, or landscape, “the interface by which we interact with the biological and technological world.” In revisiting a series of milestone events in the history of North America, Bélanger tracks how the necessity for infrastructure accidentally emerged from urban and technological crisis and failure. A series of patterns and shifts are identified to expose the paradoxical, and sometimes toxic, relationship between pre-industrial landscape conditions and modern industrial systems. The chapter describes the complex physical and non-physical ecologies that create

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and facilitate interactions between the various parts of the urban infrastructural landscape. The primary aim of this chapter is to redefine conventional meanings of infrastructure relative to the biophysical landscape that it has historically suppressed. Landscape is reformulated as a sophisticated, instrumental system of essential resources, services, and agents that generate and support urban economies and infrastructure. Asking “Is Landscape Technology?,” Niall Kirkwood (Chapter 9) poses the question within the context of landscape design and construction and based on the concerns of the tension between technology and its related term techne. Kirkwood suggests that the Greek techne, which refers to the craft or artistic side of construction has been neglected, with more focus on the mechanical side of technology which in turn has established “a duality between things and ideas, the ordinary and the ideal, between making and thinking that continues to haunt landscape architecture as set of practices and as a knowledge base today.” Kirkwood specifically addresses landscape projects in order to demonstrate the broader scope of applied research work and its relationship to technology and techne. First, an investigation titled “The Sponge Project” developed by Harvard graduate students for the Second International Architecture Biennale of Rotterdam. Secondly, The Kibera Project, located just outside Nairobi, Kenya where Harvard landscape architecture students researched the needs and physical conditions of villages. And, third, Park Sharon, in Tel Aviv, a large disturbed and abandoned site regenerated using a range of landscape approaches. Examining the continued duality in landscape and technology between physical and mental, practical and imaginative, Kirkwood contends in this chapter that technology and techne go hand in hand with the design and construction of landscape. In “Is Landscape History?” (Chapter 10), John Dixon Hunt tells us that history is not past events by themselves, but that history is actually the narration of past events. Hunt outlines a history of landscape architecture; describes how landscape itself has a history often grounded in geology, climate, topography and cultural activities over a long duration, often centuries; and describes the forward momentum of history. Hunt tells us that history by implication suggests a future, or afterlife. Hunt describes three landscapes in supporting his argument: the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris, Michael Van Valkenburg’s Teardrop Park in Manhattan, and Bernard Lassus’ Jardin Damia in the 11th Parisian arrondissement. For Hunt landscape both has a history and is a history, which are contingent upon the narrator and their audience. Rachael DeLue asks “Is Landscape Theory?” in Chapter 11, and explores the proposition that landscape itself might be understood to have a point of view. In making the point, DeLue analyses several drawings and paintings including William Bartram’s “The Great-Alachua Savana,” part-map and part-topographical view, to make the point that landscape may exist without, before or after, human beings. Considering the theoretical basis for landscape as one that requires a perceiver the text opens up the possibility for landscape itself being the theorizer, which raises

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a set of questions such as: “What does a landscape see? What does a landscape think? How would a landscape, or a plant or animal inhabitant of a landscape, theorize us?” DeLue’s chapter raises and opens up a whole set of questions and concepts that can help in “imagining, describing, constructing, and questioning landscape today.” In asking “Is Landscape Philosophy?” Kathryn Moore (Chapter 12) tells us that a rationalist paradigm has come to dominate landscape thinking and practice to such a degree we no longer give it much thought. As a consequence, landscape has been reduced from “a highly complex, symbolic and powerful economic and cultural resource into a pale imitation of itself.” Material, sensual, including visual, knowledge has been cast aside in favour of a rationalist approach. Moore argues that a redefinition of the relationship between the senses and intelligence, and people and landscape, offers the possibility for such a redefinition of landscape to come about, where landscape is not just physical but embodies our values, memories, experience and identity. Each of our own world views, the values we hold, our own personal “philosophy,” influences how we see and behave in the world. Moore suggests that contemporary landscape practice needs to engage more broadly than has recently been the case: not only with space, but with people, words, shadow, light, and form. Catharine Ward Thompson’s central concern in asking “Is Landscape Life?” (Chapter 13) is the relationship between environment, health and quality of life, all of which converge in landscape. Thompson recognizes landscape as, “a cultural as much as an ecological and geographical construct.” Building upon the sociologist Aaron Antonovsky’s conception of salutogenesis – which focused on the sense of coherence in people’s perceptions of their lives and its relationship to healthy human functioning – Thompson outlines a conception of the physical environment as salutogenic; where landscape plays a positive role in the promotion of personal and public health. Thompson discusses salutogenic landscapes to describe landscapes that support and promote positive public health. Thompson tackles questions such as; What can the natural landscape do for our health? What are the mechanisms behind links between green space and mental health? What are physiological responses to natural or green spaces? It is only comparatively recently that researchers have begun to focus on the physiological and psychological processes behind access to landscapes and health. Citing recent theories and empirical studies, Thompson asks what an understanding of salutogenic landscapes might mean for the future of landscape planning and design, and concludes stressing the importance of landscape architecture in contributing to the planning, design and management of health-enhancing landscapes. In the final chapter, David Leatherbarrow responds to Eckbo’s original provocation, on which this book is based, by introducing “topography” as a term of comparison for landscape and architecture. Through the topographic lens, Leatherbarrow helps us to see what landscape and architecture have in common. Discussing the historical and cultural content of land and building form,

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Leatherbarrow – who asks “Is Architecture Landscape?” as much as “Is Landscape Architecture?” – shows that a separation of land and materials from one another is an unhelpful abstraction. The topographic is the common ground. In an essay, “A Table for Eight,” Geoffrey Jellicoe, Founding President of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, describes a dinner party he was hosting. He had space for eight guests, and he as a landscape architect was thinking of whom to invite. He goes through a complex reasoning before deciding on the invitations: he would have an architect, what he called “our closed colleague”, and then the “opposites” of an engineer and a horticulturist. The town and country planner, is joined by a painter and a sculptor. A philosopher completes the eight guests, and “can explain the why and wherefore of it all and who helps to put our endeavours into proper perspective in relation to life as a whole.” Having decided on who was coming Jellicoe then needs to decide on the shape of the table, should it be round? Or should it be rectangular? Or square? Having decided on a square table, he then needs to decide who sits next to who, and looks for relationships between the professions. He sits the planner beside the philosopher, for instance, as the planner who organizes our way of life was in Jellicoe’s eyes a professional philosopher.7 This volume is conceived in a similar way as a dinner party in terms of relationships between the various participants. The chapters are arranged in an order and grouping of themes and associations that helps expose some of the interrelationships, Sometimes as with painting and photography there is a clear progression and linkage between the chapters. Others, such as ecology and planning might at first seem very different but there are unexpected associations. The book was limited in length by the academic term, with the idea that the book can represent a theme per week. Collectively, the essays assembled here represent an initial attempt to question the depth and breadth of landscape’s affinities. As landscape has been stretched to the limits of its utility as a critical cultural concept through overuse as a generalpurpose metaphor, this volume rereads the adjectival affinities of the term. In so doing it, aspires to construct a thick description of landscape that is at once specific and focused, as well as opened to the range of disciplinary dalliances that the contemporary concept portends.

NOTES 1 J. B. Jackson, “The Word Itself,” Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984), 3. 2 G. Eckbo, “Is Landscape Architecture?” Landscape Architecture, vol. 73, no. 3 (May 1983): 64–65. 3 D. Leatherbarrow, “Cultivation, Construction, and Creativity: or How Topography Changes (in Time),” Topographical Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 59–85. 4 D. Leatherbarrow, “Introduction: The Topographical Premises of Landscape and Architecture,” Topographical Stories, 1.

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5 See E. Gombrich, “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,” Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 107–121; and D. Cosgrove, “The Idea of Landscape,” Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1998), 13–38. 6 J. B. Jackson, “The Word Itself,” 3. 7 G. Jellicoe, “A Table for Eight,” Space for Living: Landscape Architecture and the Allied Arts and Professions, Sylvia Crowe (ed.) (Amsterdam: Djambatan, 1961), 13–21.

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Is landscape architecture? Garrett Eckbo

This may appear to be a foolish question or a meaningless phrase, but it gets us to the nature of relations between landscape and architecture in the creation of environmental experience. While there has been a great deal of discussion, argument, and publication from both sides about building/landscape relationships, the lack of interprofessional communication has failed to give the subject form. It appears that architects are only interested in construction, and landscape architects only in the landscape which may have construction as a backdrop. And these professional, academic, and legal boundaries have created intellectual separations which do not exist on the ground. We see buildings and landscapes in one sweep of vision. For our purposes, let’s say that landscape, like environment (for which it may be a synonym), is everything we see of sense around us. It has three dimensions at any single instant in time, and time does not stand still. So there is a fourth dimension as well. We may move through the landscape in various ways, or we may remain stationary while the landscape moves and changes around us. Now, what is architecture? Not being an architect, I offer my own, somewhat naïve and subject-to-correction definition. Architecture is the design of buildings, three-dimensional constructions in which climate is more or less controlled and modified. Buildings may be single structures, but they are not self-sufficient; all functions associated with building do not necessarily occur indoors. Most buildings make demands upon their sites, and these demands are conditioned by locale. As the world becomes more crowded, buildings are less likely to begin or remain alone. They tend to cluster for technical, functional, or social reasons, and to grow into multiple-function communities. This we call urbanization. The term “built environment” covers these, and perhaps smaller developments, in which buildings dominate sites. However, the built environment incorporates substantial “open spaces” which are indispensable to the buildings. These include corridors for pedestrians, vehicles, and utilities; outdoor storage areas; fields and gardens; and recreational/community spaces such as parks, playgrounds, parkways, plazas, squares, malls, and so on. These spaces may be predominantly green and naturalseeming, primarily structural, or various combinations thereof. In other words, the built environment incorporates substantial, more-or-less-natural open spaces which contrast with or provide a foil for the actual construction.

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The desirable or appropriate extent and quality of open space systems within the built environment has been and continues to be controversial. There are rules of thumb for the extent and content of park/recreation systems and vehicular circulation systems, but there are almost none for less definable open space elements—aspects of urban design which the cognoscenti consider essential to urban quality, and which developers consider wasteful and frustrating to “the highest and best use” of the land. The built environment is, of course, a landscape by definition. However, if that landscape incorporates non-built or mini-built open spaces, does it then become un- or non-architectural? If architecture is the art of construction, does it terminate where structures terminate, or does it extend its control and vocabulary over the open spaces? With these questions we arrive at our obvious destination: landscape architecture and its relations with architecture. In spite of the moderating impact of the modern movement, we are still conditioned by formal versus informal, architecture versus nature—conflicts which make true landscape architecture impossible. To be true, landscape architecture must do what its name implies—it must integrate landscape and architecture. True landscape architecture produces systems or relations in which neither “landscape” nor “architecture” loses its integrity, disappears, or becomes mere decoration for the other. All of this, of course, is subject to definition, and these vary with the source. Ironically, none will be final or definitive, nor should they be. Built environment “experts” say they produce the best integrations of landscape and architecture that are possible within their client’s programming. That may well be true, but we have too few standards for judgment. We judge architecture and we judge landscape, but we seldom judge their interaction. What to do? Rather than proposing answers, I think it’s wiser, at this time, to ask questions. 1

2

3

How do building and landscapes interact? Functional and technical reciprocities are fairly obvious. But what about visual, sensory, and aesthetic interaction? What about the extrusion of geometric forces from buildings? Is the building positive and the landscape negative, solid and void, or vice versa? A medieval castle is a solid, but a conservatory or all-glass building is more void until you change the glass to mirror. And then what is it? Positive and negative are not visual qualities, unless you use them as labels. They are conceptual, literary, or descriptive. However, there is a sense in which the building is “positive,” and that is the extent in which it is set. The more sharp the contrast, the more positive the building—or negative if you don’t like it. Is integrated landscape architecture, such as that demonstrated in Italian villas, French chateaux, English states, Oriental temples, shrines, palaces,

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4 5 6 7

and castles, and some modern projects, relevant only to the elite minority, or to everyone, as enlightened urban design? Should every indoor space have a comparable or balancing outdoor space? How far can these spaces be separated horizontally and vertically? Should the outdoor space be larger than the indoor and, if so, by how much? Should the outdoor space be on the ground? Or can it be a balcony, terrace, or roof deck? Can it be a “borrowed landscape”? If so, how do we guarantee its preservation? What qualitative standards should apply to the design and development of these open spaces?

A discussion like this must soon become specific or it will get lost. The eclectic approach, which seems to be making a comeback, has no problems because it follows precedents in which the problems are already solved. A renaissance building extends itself into the landscape geometrically; a romantic building huddles or cavorts in naturalistic scenery. The one lesson we learned from modern architecture was that preconceived styles, being essentially literary, soon become irrelevant as design guides. Postmodern architecture is proving this for us again. Design, both architectural and landscape, seems most successful when it focuses on reality: (1) the nature and character of the site; (2) the needs, demands, aspirations, attitudes, and resources of the client; and (3) the talent, competence, and inspiration of the designer. Aspirations, attitudes, and inspirations may, of course, lead us back to preconceptions of one sort or another. Nothing is quite as simple as I am making it out to be. So what are we saying? Buildings result from one design process, landscapes around and between them from another. Yet both are seen at once, in one sequence of visual and functional experience. It is not so much a question of who should what, or of how many designers there should be on any one job, but rather of working toward the maximum potential of any continuous, built, or unbuilt environment. The multi-professional design team is obviously an answer, but what are its guidelines? Coming from design schools where there is little or no interaction between the professions, and no attempt to develop a theory of how their products and processes should work together on the same site or in the same area, we are left to specific improvisations and personal relationships. Relations between buildings and landscape are symptomatic of relations between people and nature. Buildings are central in our private and social living, because they provide controlled environments for our most important and intimate activities. Cities become expanded buildings as the latter multiply. Societies which are aggressive and proud of human activities—the Renaissance, our own— rate buildings and cities over landscapes and nature. Societies more modest or sensitive—England, the Orient—tend to equalize them.

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Obviously, the decision-making clientele sets the constraints on land use and design resources. But they also respond to intelligent and sensitive proposals from design professionals. That’s the way design grows and improves, by dialogue between these forces. If we don’t have the groundbreaking ideas, who will? The questions may seem impractical, but they are very important at this particular time. After thousands or years of expanding exploitation of nature— rationalized and justified by religion and power—the Industrial Revolution finally accelerated to the current level of pollution, destruction, and poisoning. But nature is not a passive storehouse of resources from which we may take as we please; it is, rather, a seamless web from which man is inseparable. Our challenge is to search for answers that will generate new forms and relations between people and nature, and to express those new relationships in architecture and landscape.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This text was originally published as “Is Landscape Architecture?” in Landscape Architecture Magazine, vol. 73, no. 3 (May 1983): 64–65. It is reproduced courtesy of the Garrett Eckbo Collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.

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Chapter 1: Is landscape literature? Gareth Doherty

Indeed, Lieutenant. A rich language. A rich literature. You’ll find, sir, that certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives. I suppose you could call us a spiritual people. (Hugh, in Translations, Friel 1981)

The Irish are often considered a literary nation—note playwrights and poets such as Brian Friel, James Joyce, Seamus Heaney, and William Butler Yeats. Their rich vocabularies and syntax are often attributed to a dramatic landscape combined with a lack of material resources: the implication being that artistic energies in the absence of wealth can more easily be turned to literature than painting, sculpture, architecture, or indeed landscape architecture. Carrying on a long tradition of storytelling, the Irish have become among the most prolific users of new social networking technologies in the world. However, Facebook posts, text messages, and tweets are not usually considered literature: literature is most often understood as an exceptionally high standard of writing with prose that is not just exquisite, but deep in insight into our being. Scholars require of literature a “pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language” to borrow Samuel Johnson’s words.1 The relationship of text to literature is not dissimilar to the notion that landscape architecture is a particularly imaginative and elegant level of designed landscape, building upon what Cicero considered a second nature—a functional or vernacular landscape as opposed to the first nature—a primal wilderness untouched by humans—leading towards what Renaissance Humanists such as Jacobo Bonafido highlighted as the third nature of more refined, designed, spaces, gardens where “nature incorporated with art” (Hunt 1992: 3). A conversation with Geoffrey Jellicoe hints at a fourth nature, which is the representation and further refinement of landscape through painting and architecture (Jellicoe 1994).2 Literature might be said to be a form of designed writing in the same way that landscape architecture is designed environment or designed space, where design is the act of imagining.3 While being very different in their aesthetic manifestations, landscape architecture and literature are more refined and imaginative forms of a common landscape or text. In this sense, landscape architecture and literature are united by their pregnancy of imagination.

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The difference between landscape in the broader sense and certain landscapes that are designed by landscape architects can be likened to the relationship between text and literature. Literature is to landscape architecture as text is to landscape.

Literature

Landscape Architecture

Text

Landscape

Works of literature exist as text, whereas not all texts are literature. The same can be said for landscape and landscape architecture. Landscape architecture and literature are both disciplines, whereas landscape and text (or writings), can be considered forms of communication.4 Where possible in this chapter, I identify “designed” landscapes as landscape architecture, or as designed by landscape architects, otherwise I am referring to landscape as in a text in the broader sense, as a text that is not yet intentionally designed.5 The answer to “Is landscape literature?”—the question we have been set— is structured around two sets of paired suppositions: 1 2

3

4

Landscape informs literature: landscape (whether primal, vernacular, or designed) has an agency over literature, and shapes literature. Literature informs landscape: what we write affects what we design and build. How is landscape architecture influenced by literature, whether the written word is about the built environment or not? We will look at dramatic texts; and examples of literature shaping landscape architecture.6 Landscape as literature: a model proposed by Anne Whiston Spirn, and others, that landscape, designed and not yet designed, is a text that can be read, often with many layers of meaning. Landscape in this framing is a syntactical construction. Literature as landscape: here we will look at landscapes shaped by and existing in literature such as the Make-do Garden, a garden that exists only through text. Ultimately this notion rests on what designers say about and use to describe their work, and what critics say afterward.

These four categorizations help to separate and understand the many complicated layers of the relationship between landscape, landscape architecture, and literature but are not in themselves an entirely sufficient framework to answer the question, “Is landscape literature?” Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I would like to share some reflections over the four notions above and propose a less literal way of tackling the question. Along the way we will be guided by what is most applicable for landscape architects.

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LANDSCAPE INFORMS LITERATURE Let me start with an anecdote about James Joyce and Le Corbusier, both of whom were leading modernists in their respective fields.7 The art historian Carola GiedionWelcker, who with her architect husband Sigfried was a friend of both Joyce and Le Corbusier, had the idea that her until-then unacquainted friends should meet. An encounter was set up in Zurich, in Joyce’s apartment.8 Le Corbusier had spoken of Joyce’s novel Ulysses as “une grande découverte de la vie,” one of life’s great discoveries. Yet when they met, the conversation concentrated on Joyce’s new pet parakeets, Pierre and Pipi. Later when Frau Giedion expressed her disappointment at what she felt was the ordinariness of the conversation that took place between them, Le Corbusier replied, “C’est admirable comme il parle d’oiseaux”, expressing his delight that Joyce “speaks of birds” (Ellmann 1982: 700). The two great modernists of their day were unable—or perhaps unwilling—to find a common framework and a direct engagement with each other’s work. Literature and architecture appeared irreconcilable. Parakeets were their common language. Perhaps Le Corbusier and Joyce should have talked about landscape, as they both clearly had a strong affinity with landscape. In Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes, a book and an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the author and curator Jean Louis-Cohen posed the central argument that Le Corbusier, “observed and imagined landscapes throughout his career,” such as evidenced by his drawings of urban landscapes such as Montevideo, and Rio de Janeiro (Figure 1.1). Le Corbusier’s work is clearly influenced by and a response to landscape.9

Figure 1.1 Le Corbusier, urban plan for Rio de Janeiro, 1929. Copyright © Fondation Le Corbusier/ADAGP, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2015.

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Joyce’s work is also very much about landscape, but in a very different way to Le Corbusier. Joyce describes the mundane urban landscapes that we identify with. Joyce’s literature, specifically doing more than simply describing the urban landscape of Dublin of 1904, to ultimately create an alternate reality, a construct of it. This accounts for Dublin’s city center being overrun by Joycean scholars, enthusiasts and tourists, every June 16 for “Bloomsday” celebrations who trace the routes of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom through the city on the same day that Ulysses was set. In case you get lost, or wish to follow the route on another date, the trail is etched in the city center streets through fourteen bronze plaques placed in the pavement running from the former Evening Telegraph offices to the National Museum (and sponsored by a soft drinks manufacturer). There is clearly a performative aspect here where the literary text takes on its own life beyond the pages of the book. Indeed Ulysses was written to be read aloud. Try reading the following line: Stephen closed his eyes to hear his boots crush crackling wrack and shells. (James Joyce, “Proteus,” Ulysses)

As Declan Kiberd writes, the muscular effort required to utter these series of consonants deliberately slow us down, not unlike the experience of walking on a wrack- and shell-covered beach (2009). There is both a temporality and spatiality to the words. Joyce has become synonymous with Dublin, even though he could not live there. The descriptions of the city are so masterfully precise that Joyce feels like a friend or neighbor to anyone who knows the city. In fact many of the details in Ulysses were gleaned from a single copy of a Dublin evening newspaper, the Evening Telegraph of June 16, 1904, reinforcing the link between the written word and performed space. The everyday happenings of Dublin, as described through journalistic text and the rich array of graphics that set the Telegraph apart, become the framework of the work of literature. Ulysses is based on the performed space of the city, as much as it leads to new performances in the city. A comment often attributed to Joyce states that if Dublin “suddenly disappeared from the earth, it could be reconstructed from my book.”10 Whether Joyce actually said this or not, he certainly could have, for the quotidian urban landscape is described in such incredible detail in Joyce’s writing. That Vladimir Nabokov could draw maps of Dublin directly from his reading of Ulysses illustrates the richness of images and descriptions imbued in the text. Nabokov constructed his map of the city (Figure 1.2) with no reference other than the text of Ulysses itself.11 There are any number of works of literature that are influenced by particular landscapes and associated with them, whether the landscapes are urban or rural, designed or un-designed, real or imaginary. Not just Joyce and Dublin; but Dickens and Victorian London; Wordsworth and the Lake District; Thoreau and rural Massachusetts; Twain and the channels and ports of the Mississippi. Contemporary

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Figure 1.2 Map of Bloom and Stephen’s travels in Ulysses from Lectures on Literature, by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright © 1980, the Estate of Vladimir Nabokov, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.

writers include Teju Cole, whose Open City describes seemingly aimless walks through Manhattan, what Cole terms as “urbanating” (Cole 2012). Indeed, more often than not, authors are inspired by the tactility of walking, almost as if the senses get aroused in a distinct way by the walk. Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital, a literary exploration of the M25 motorway surrounding the UK’s capital city—what Sinclair calls a “road to nowhere”—is surprisingly informed by walking, rather than driving (Sinclair 2002).12 A more interesting question might be what writer is not influenced by landscape? Literary friends assure me there are some writers not influenced to any great extent by landscape, but not many. Indeed the setting is often one of the protagonists of any literary or cinematic venture, establishing both the cultural frame and the possibilities of a narrative. Literature helps us see the world and learn about the landscapes in which we live and work, and which we visit, or indeed landscapes we will never visit. Literature reveals aspects of landscape and informs us about them. We come full circle where the literature influenced by a particular landscape becomes an agent in a landscape’s preservation or promulgation. Take, for example, Wordsworth and environmentalism, where the literary landscape of England’s Lake District has become a place of pilgrimage, its power imbued from the literature written about it.13 Frail creature as he is, helpless as frail, An inmate of this active universe: For, feeling has to him imparted power

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That through the growing faculties of sense Doth like an agent of the one great Mind Create, creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds. (William Wordsworth, “The Prelude,” Second Book)

Raymond Williams suggests that there are two principles of nature inherent in this poem. One is that there is an ordering principle, and the other is the idea that nature is a principle of creation (Williams 1973: 127). Nevertheless, the idea that a literary text is both a product of a landscape and an event in its future, is a critical one. Literary texts are not passive. Karen Thornber, professor of comparative literature, writing about East Asian literature specifically relative to ecological urbanism, suggests that literature has a poetic agency and the capability of changing collective consciousness as well as changing attitudes toward the built environment. Thornber writes: the drafting of policies promoting ecological urbanism, not to mention their implementation, requires changes in consciousness (i.e. changes in perceptions, understandings, and expectations). East Asian literatures have the potential to play vital roles in this endeavour. (Thornber 2010: 530–533)

In this sense, Thornber is claiming that literature has a larger social power and responsibility, one that can change public consciousness as much as, indeed if not more than, official policy. In engaging in a discussion about more ecologically sustainable cities and futures, Thornber translates an extract from the short story of Tsutsui Yasutaka, “Tatazumu hito” (“Standing Woman”), in which the author writes satirically about the superficiality of attempts to “green” the city. I went out into the main thoroughfare, where there were too many passing cars and few pedestrians. A cat-tree about 30–40 centimeters high had been planted by the sidewalk. Sometimes I catch sight of a cat-pillar that has just been planted and hasn’t yet become a cat-tree . . . Perhaps, I thought, it’s better to turn dogs into dog-pillars. They become vicious and harm people when there’s no food. But why did they have to turn cats into cat-pillars? Had the number of strays grown too large? Were they trying to improve the food situation just a bit? Or where they doing this to green the city? (Yasutaka 1984: 184–93; trans. Karen Thornber, 2010)

“Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise,” a phrase often attributed to Mark Twain, makes an important assumption. Here, reading—through the act of imagination—can transport the reader to Paradise. Paradise is a place. Whether Paradise is landscape or landscape architecture is in a way irrelevant, what

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is important is that literature takes you there, and as we have seen though the examples of Joyce, Wordsworth, and Yasutaka, it brings you back again to reality, and shapes it.

LITERATURE INFORMS LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE Shakespeare proclaimed: “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players.” (Jaques in As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII). Dramatic texts (play texts), like landscapes, are designed for performance. Plays are a performed text, not dissimilar to Michel de Certeau’s notion that “space is a practiced place.” Certeau explains that a place such as a street is transformed into a space by walkers, in the same way as “an act of reading is the same as the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e. a place constituted by a system of signs”14 (de Certeau 1984: 117). Terry Eagleton, perhaps Britain’s foremost literary critic, tells us that a play text is something more than the text itself: “A dramatic production does not ‘express’, ‘reflect’, or ‘reproduce’ the dramatic text on which it is based; it ‘produces’ the text, transforming it into a unique and irreducible entity” (Eagleton 1988: 247). This parallels with the cultural geographer Denis Cosgrove’s description of landscape as being the product of a mediation: “landscape denotes the external world mediated through subjective human experience in a way that neither region nor area immediately suggest. Landscape is not merely the world we see, it is a construction, a composition of that world” (Cosgrove 1984: 13). The playwright Ann Jellicoe asserts that plays are more than literature, “a play read as literature is one thing, the theatrical experience is quite another” (Jellicoe 1967: 11). Jellicoe, niece of Sir Geoffrey the great landscape architect, goes on to say that plays are designed for, “capturing the audience’s imagination and then taking it somewhere” (ibid.). Both plays and landscape need human activity in order to be “produced” or “mediated” otherwise they remain unactivated as text and space. The production activates the designed text or space, and produces the play or landscape architecture by “capturing the imagination and taking it somewhere.” In his 1981 work Translations, a play primarily about language and landscape, Brian Friel, one of the most accomplished Irish playwrights, centers the narrative on the issue of the naming, and re-naming, of the rural Irish landscape. The play is set in the dramatic and melancholic mountainous landscape of Donegal in the north of the island in the 1850s. This was a decade after the Great Famine, during which the population of Ireland was halved due to starvation and emigration. Donegal was also one of the last areas of Ireland to succumb to British rule: the surrounding topography and sea aided in the defense of the area from invasions. In the play, the British Army under the auspices of the British Ordnance Survey are mapping the rural landscape. This documentation and construction on paper of the landscape was ostensibly for information purposes, but in actuality was a way of securing control over it. In the process of mapping, the poetic place names—of which there were many—were Anglicized. The names, which until then had been in the Gaelic language and were richly evocative and descriptive of the

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landscape, were either translated or transliterated—indeed in some cases mistranslated or mistransliterated—and in the process lost much of their meaning. In one scene, Owen, the son of a traditionalist schoolmaster, Hugh, is encouraging his father to accept the new ways as outlined in a Name Book: OWEN: Do you know where the priest lives? HUGH: At Lis na Muc, over near . . . OWEN: No, he doesn’t. Lis na Muc, the Fort of the Pigs, has become Swinefort. (Now turning the pages of the Name Book — a page per name.) And to get to Swinefort you pass through Greencastle and Fair Head and Strandhill and Gort and Whiteplains. And the new school isn’t at Poll na gCaorach — it’s at Sheepsrock. Will you be able to find your way? (Friel 1981)

The new reading of the landscape prescribed by the British sappers, and accepted by Owen, perhaps hastened the change in language. 150 years after the play was set, English had replaced Gaelic as the everyday language in that area. Meanwhile to this day a few place names still resist, and exist only in the Gaelic language: these include Sliabh Snaght (Snow Mountain) and Cnoc na Coille Dara (Hill of the Oak Wood). For people without a knowledge of the Gaelic language, the Gaelic placenames are generally unpronounceable, and not used. While evoking the historic and metaphorical landscape in which it is set, this play text raises an important issue over how literature informs how we see and use the landscape. Hugh tells us: HUGH: Yes, it is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception — a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to . . . inevitabilities. (Friel 1981)

How might “a syntax opulent with tomorrows” be produced or imagined? How might landscape and literature work together? And indeed how might the shaping, or “architecting,” of landscape be informed by writing? A public art project sponsored by a community group in the same north of Ireland landscape was designed to ask the very question of how? Since landscape informs literature, can literature inform landscape? The proposed project, based on Translations, set out to place the entire text of Friel’s play in the rural Donegal landscape in which it is set. To this end, instead of scenes there are signs—127 of them in total—to be placed in the landscape that inspired the play. This insertion of the play into the landscape was to be at a moment 150 years after the play is set, a sort of Bloomsday for Donegal and this juxtaposition of literature with landscape would also be a juxtaposition of landscape with time. The characters would, crucially, be color coded in the signs, so a group might intuitively begin to perform the play as they pass from sign to sign.

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Figures 1.3–4 Signs in the landscape. Gareth Doherty in cooperation with Raoul Bunschoten, 2003.

The project, which was initiated by the author in discussion with Friel, was never built due to a clause in the then Donegal County Council’s development plan which prohibited the placing of advertising signs in the open landscape. “The onus is on you to prove they are not advertising,” insisted the area’s chief planning officer to me. In discussing this response with Friel, the reply was that signs (like words) signify something, and these signs did not signify anything. In other words that signs normally have informational value, but these boards had emotional value. Unfortunately, this argument was not enough to convince the planners that they were not advertising signs, and the project remains unbuilt. Figures 1.3–4 show images from the proposal for Translations: A play in 3 scenes and 127 signs. “There’s a name for every stone about here, sir, and a story too” Manus tells us in another of Friel’s plays, The Gentle Island (Friel 1973). In this one line, Friel highlights the fact that the landscape has a plethora of meanings over and above its physical features.15 Names affect how we see and read the land. As does literature. Landscape and literature are not mutually exclusive. Friel reminds us: But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen— to use an image you’ll understand— it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of . . . fact. (Hugh in Translations, Friel 1981)

Text may also shape landscape in other ways. Geoffrey Jellicoe, the British landscape architect and founding member of the Landscape Institute in London as well as the International Federation of Landscape Architects, was an advocate for allegory. Jellicoe saw himself as not a great artist: he said he needed to borrow from art and imbue his designs with art at the level of the subconscious. Deeply influenced by the writings of Carl Jung, he believed that as long as he did not tell anyone of this conceit, the subconscious mind would realize there was something powerful there, although they might not necessarily be able to specify exactly what it was (Jellicoe 1991: 126). In 1963, Geoffrey Jellicoe was commissioned to design the John F. Kennedy Memorial in Runnymede outside London, not far from and on the flight path to

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Heathrow Airport. This memorial was a gift from the British people to the people of the United States following the assassination of President Kennedy. The slightly elevated site for the memorial overlooks the historic meadow along the bank of the River Thames where the Magna Carta was signed by King John in 1215. This document established the framework for constitutional law, and this association was felt appropriate for the Kennedy Memorial. Jellicoe conceived of the design for the memorial—a garden set within a typical “English” landscape—as based on the text of Bunyan’s seventeenth century text, The Pilgrim’s Progress. The Pilgrim’s Progress is itself an allegorical text on “life, death, and the spirit,” where according to Jellicoe (1970: 22), Bunyan “rationalized and exposes an allegory during the progress of the story itself, skillfully evading the pitfall of sentimentality.” Jellicoe as a modernist was extremely cautious over sentimentality and triteness; conditions he tried to avoid in his work. Jellicoe’s intention was that the landscape would be the memorial rather than any one object or element within the park. The memorial is intended to be experienced through progression. The visitor arrives at the entrance to the garden from the water meadows below, which have no formal path leading to the memorial. Entering the memorial through a “wicket gate”, which recalls the wicket gate in The Pilgrim’s Progress, a narrow gate through which one finds salvation— as opposed to a wide gate leading to destruction—one ascends the hillside on an informal pathway made up of granite cobbles. Hand carved, each of the setts has its own “personality,” according to Jellicoe, and they are arranged like a crowd attending a football match. The pathway, with no clear edge, is intended to symbolize the masses of pilgrims on “life’s journey.” The cobbles bring one upward on a winding path through the woods to a clearing on which the commemorative stone is set. The white stone bears an inscription to President John F. Kennedy, and stands in sharp contrast to its surroundings, like a massive Ben Nicholson sculpture. It is accompanied by a scarlet American oak, chosen for its autumnal color and association with New England. The stone represents the second of the three parts to the memorial. The third is the “Jacob’s ladder” leading off to the right of the stone and taking the visitor towards two chairs one slightly bigger than the other, modeled on Henry Moore’s King and Queen bronze sculpture, representing President and Mrs Kennedy. From the chairs, one can look out over the water meadows below where the Magna Carta was signed (and above to the planes to and from Heathrow Airport). Figures 1.5–11 show the progression of the ‘pilgrim’ from the Wicket Gate, through the woodland on top of a cobbled path, to the catafalque and from there to the view over Runnymede and eternity. Although Jellicoe outlines his rationale for the design of this memorial as being deeply allegorical, it is important to recognize that there is a formal composition to the design also. Formally, the memorial employs highly precise geometries which stand in sharp contrast to the relatively untouched landscape in which it is set. Jellicoe wrote that the composition of the intervention was based on two paintings: The Allegory of the Progress of the Soul by Giovanni Bellini (1430–1516), and the Tempest by Giorgione Castelfranco (1478–1510). He said he was interested

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Figures 1.5–10 (facing page) The Kennedy Memorial, Runnymede, UK. Geoffrey Jellicoe, 1964; photographs by Susan Jellicoe; © The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading.

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Figure 1.11 Model of the Kennedy Memorial, Runnymede, UK. Geoffrey Jellicoe, 1964; photographs by Susan Jellicoe; © The Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading.

in Bellini’s relationship between natural landscape and precise geometries, and in the “duality of composition” in Giorgione, which directs attention to the landscape (Jellicoe 1970: 33). Jellicoe later writes, “this peaceful scene is itself the memorial, and what has been fitted into it is no more than a statement of purpose – an intangible idea that is emphasised by the duality of the design, as in the Tempest” (Jellicoe 1983: 88). When delivering a lecture on the Kennedy Memorial at the Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly in 1967, Jellicoe used two sets of slides. One in color showed the experience of the visitor; and one in black and white reflected what he called the grey world underneath the visible world (Jellicoe 1970: 28). Although Jellicoe let the design community into his secret grey world—the world of the subconscious—through several publications and lectures, he tried (in pre-internet days) to keep it a secret from the public believing that it is much better that the conceit remain at the level of the subconscious. Jellicoe’s Kennedy Memorial was the catalyst that prompted him to study the writings of Carl Jung and to consciously incorporate subconscious ideas into his work. He quotes Jung as saying the conscious and subconscious operate separate

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lives and when they come together that they can create great works of civilization (Jellicoe 1991: 126). Interestingly, the first sketches for the Kennedy Memorial were made while Jellicoe was in Japan (Jellicoe 1970: 27). He likened his allegory to the allegory of Zen Buddhist gardens where the garden represents a step along the process towards eternity (Jellicoe 1970: 17). Jellicoe’s allegorical style was not without precedent and no doubt influenced by his tour of Italian Renaissance Gardens which he studied in 1924–25 while he was a student at the Architectural Association. Jellicoe spent a year in Italy with J. C. Shepherd visiting renaissance gardens and while Shepherd drew the delicate measured drawings of the gardens Jellicoe paced the gardens and wrote about them. This tactile interplay between body, mind, and gardens transformed Jellicoe’s life and career by imbuing him with a sensibility for the inherent grace of landscape. He realized he wanted to base his career on the design of new landscapes as opposed to buildings. His short pithy texts are among the best examples of landscape architects writing about landscape architecture.

LANDSCAPE AS LITERATURE Walking through Rome past the Piazza Navona, the Forum, and towards Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano, I had a conversation with a friend who was at the time a student of theology. Having listened to him talk about his studies, I was trying to explain what landscape architects do. My friend had the not uncommon idea that landscape architects’ main purpose is to place plants in gardens and I was politely trying to help him understand that landscape architects also design gardens, and larger landscapes, and regions too, and that we also shape urban space. I was in Italy on a tour of Renaissance gardens—including the Villa d’Este, Villa Lante, Villa Farnese, Villa Pia—and the experience was also helping me come to the realization that landscape architects do much more than design gardens. My own focus was beginning to rest on urban landscape, or more specifically the urbanism of landscape, and landscape’s wider social and cultural contexts. As I tried to explain that landscape architecture was also related to the city, to which Renaissance gardens were often related, my friend quipped: “Ah! So if in order to have words we need silence, then in order to have buildings we need the spaces between them?” The implication being that landscape architects design voids between structures, the silence between the words of the city. Without space, buildings, like words without pauses, would have no meaning. Cities, as urban landscapes, consist of more than space. Urban landscapes are lived space. Practiced place. Even in Pompeii, silent for almost two thousand years, one can feel the practice of the place amidst the eerie ruins. Italo Calvino puts is very well when, in Invisible Cities, a book about imagination and cities, Calvino asserts that cities consists “of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past” (Calvino 1972: 10). A multitude of relationships exist in dialog with one another and in a language of landscape they also point to

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the present as well as to the future. As Mohsen Mostafavi asks, the challenge for urbanists (a term that presumably includes landscape architects) is, “how to combine rationality with imagination, the prosaic with the dream world, the planned with the unexpected—the city as the site of multiple representations and multiple desires” (Mostafavi 2012: 15). The measurement of space and past is represented through Dimitris Pikionis’s path to the Acropolis in Athens (Figure 1.12). The path, designed in the 1950s, and constructed from a collaborative process, uses waste materials from the city of Athens as a construction material, forming a palimpsest of materials and stone that together articulate the various histories of Athens and the site. Anne Whiston Spirn’s aptly named book The Language of Landscape (1998) is very much centered on the idea of reading the landscape as one might read a work of literature. In a chapter entitled “Artful Telling, Deep Reading: The Literature of Landscape,” Spirn describes Mont Saint Michel in Normandy, France, so artfully that we can picture the landscape without the need for photographs to illustrate the text. Mont Saint Michel is clearly a distinctive and inspirational landscape, shaped by a long history of, man-made interventions and acts of God.16 Through several poetic subheadings Spirn explores the main concept of her book, that of landscape being a work of literature. Spirn writes: In landscape, each rock, each river, each tree has its individual history. A river’s history, a tree’s, is the sum of all its dialogues, nothing less but nothing more; they contain no emotion, no moral. Human cultures embellish these stories in gardens, buildings, and towns. Stories humans tell have a plot, often with beginning, middle, and end, a deliberate narrative: stories of survival, identity, power, success, and failure. Like myths and laws, landscape narratives organize reality, justify actions, instruct, persuade, even compel people to perform in certain ways. Landscapes are literature in the broadest sense, texts that can be read on many levels. (Spirn 1998: 48–49)

The distinction of “many levels” is important. Spirn, who had initially studied Art History before changing to Landscape Architecture under Ian McHarg, describes Mont Saint Michel’s landscape as having a range of references, “mythic and poetic, part classic . . . part folk” (ibid: 49). In contrast, Spirn tells us that vernacular landscapes are expressed in “everyday language” or local dialects, and refers to the example of contemporary roadside memorials for people killed on highway accidents as examples. Other designed landscapes such as the setting of the Pantheon and the Lincoln Memorials are labeled by Spirn as elegies to suggest the seriousness of their conceptualization. Meanwhile, Saarinen’s St Louis Arch, in its heroic leap, is labeled as an epic, as it was designed to tell the story of the westward expansion of the United States (ibid: 49). Different landscapes have different languages, presumably to be read by different publics.

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Figure 1.12 Detail of paving at the Acropolis by Dimitris Pikionis. Photograph by Hélène Binet.

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The languages of landscape have their own distinctive grammar. Spirn likens a leaf to a noun: “A leaf on a tree is similar to a noun in a sentence (ibid: 168). Spirn is not alone in this metaphorical likening of language and landscape. Spirn references Gregory Bateson’s correlation of text with landscape: “Both grammar and biological structure are products of communicational and organizational process” (Bateson in ibid: 168). Meanwhile, a plaque at Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, a Scottish garden that relies heavily on text to provide layers of meaning to the designed landscape, reminds us that, “On the path of language there are wild flowers, consonants and vowels” (Sheeler 2003: 40). Wai-Yee Li tells us that the Chinese scholar Qian Yong reiterates the analogy between the structure of gardens and literature: “Creating a garden is like composing poetry and prose” (Li 2012: 296). While leaves and wild flowers can represent components of the languages of landscape, one important point to keep in mind is that landscape is not a universal language. Just as the world is filled with various languages and dialects landscape is no different. It might be assumed that landscape is universal but, as I have written elsewhere, because landscape is dependent on different publics and different cultures and different geographies, landscape can never be a universal language (Doherty 2014). Not everyone agrees with the grammar of landscape’s language. Laurie Olin disagrees with the likening of landscape and language, when he writes that “despite the frequent use of the analogy of language and linguistic structures and operations (my own use of the concept ‘vocabulary of forms’ above, for example) landscapes are not verbal constructions” (Olin 2011: 44). John Dixon Hunt elaborates that “Neither landscape, whether in gardens or on the painted canvas, nor architecture has ever been discursive or didactic as are poetry, rhetoric, and other verbal forms” (Hunt 1992: 16). The analogy of landscape and literature works in so far as it is a parallel but not the thing itself. Just as objects need voids, sentences also need verbs as well as nouns. Language needs syntax. Rather than getting bogged down in the components of the language perhaps we should look at the bigger picture in terms of plot, agency, sequence, and narrative. In their book Landscape Narratives Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton identify various types of landscape narrative, including experiences, associations and references, memory, and storytelling (Potteiger and Purinton 1998: 11). While keeping in mind the crucial distinction between narrative and literature, where literature is the more “imagined” story, it is important to note a reference to Duncan and Duncan who point out that while meaning attributed to landscape is unstable and plural that the range of meanings is also limited by social contexts (ibid: 120). In this sense, “the individuation of things is value-bound in that objects of thought are constituted in relation to our interests” (Jormakka 2013: 32). Reading does not come automatically. Just as with language, it is necessary to learn how to read the landscape. “Reading was somewhere between breathing and judging” (Bernterrak et al. 1984: 12). Learning to speak this visual language of landscape takes time. Spirn describes the West Philadelphia Landscape Project,

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where she has been working for many years on an investigation into simultaneously improving environmental equality and social equity in a disadvantaged urban neighborhood. It was a district that had undergone the multiple processes of industrialization; conduitization as creeks were enclosed in brick tunnels and then forgotten, residential development, and then de-industrialization and deterioration. As a part of her teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Spirn developed her program, aided by a reading of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian community organizer, who developed literacy programs in disadvantaged urban settlements in Brazil. Influenced by Freire, Spirn found that the most effective way to teach landscape literacy was to collect oral histories of older people in the community and to make those oral histories available to teach people to read from those text of oral histories (Spirn 2015). The landscape itself became the primary document from which the children learned about their landscape and brought this back to their parents and families. Palimpsest A palimpsest is generally understood as a manuscript whereby two or more successive texts have been written, one being erased to make way for the other, yet leaving traces that can be read. This is obviously an idea from a time when paper was precious and texts were overwritten which is hard to imagine in an era of cheap paper today. Contemporary examples might be a later author intervening in an earlier text, or a screenwriter adapting a text to a movie and then the director adding events to capture the meaning even when they are not in the original manuscript. The same term is often applied to landscape, where multiple layers often co-exist. John Dixon Hunt, writing in this volume, reminds us that the idea of landscape as a palimpsest has been invoked by Gérard Genette, the French literary theorist who, according to Hunt, “argues that any ‘text’ . . . has what he terms a ‘paratext.’” This paratext sets the text—or site—in relationship with other texts or sites.17 Obviously, every landscape is overwritten on a former site— whether primal, secondary, or tertiary—and is informed by the various physicalities of the place. Even when scraped away by a bulldozer, there would be traces and experiences. The notion of landscape as a palimpsest is clearly articulated through the design of the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, a collaboration among John Ronan Architects and Reed Hilderbrand, Landscape Architects (Figures 1.13–14). Conceived as a sequence of spaces between the busy city street and the interior of the structure, the building and garden are united through a surface with multiple layers showing traces of the others. The intention was to offer an “open door” whereby the conceit of “spatial ambiguity” brings clarity to the larger concept of integration of poetry with the urban landscape, and vice versa (Reed and Hilderbrand 2012: 264). This literary landscape has multiple meanings which can be read on many levels. It is important to note that the landscape is written not just in one language.

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Figure 1.13 Reed Hilderbrand, Poetry Foundation, Chicago. Photograph courtesy of Steve Hall.

Figure 1.14 Reed Hilderbrand, Poetry Foundation, Chicago. Plan courtesy of Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architecture.

Sisters

SistersSisters

SistersSisters

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LITERATURE AS LANDSCAPE I think that I shall never see, A poem lovely as a tree. (Joyce Kilmer, Trees and Other Poems, 1914)

Most people will probably imagine a tree when reading these lines by Joyce Kilmer, perhaps a favorite tree from childhood, home, or a familiar place. And that tree usually has a context. Whether the tree is sited in the midst of a green oasis in an Arabian desert, or a misty dew-soaked English October landscape, or a tree in a field in Kilmer’s native New Jersey, the tree and its setting are conjured up by the construction of the words. The fourth theme I turn to is the idea of literature as a substitution for landscape. Can a landscape exist as a literary text, and only as literature? Can a landscape exist within literature? Can literature actually be a landscape? There are several compelling examples of landscapes that have been constructed in literature, and of landscapes whose form is derived from literature. As Umberto Eco suggests so poetically in The Book of Legendary Lands, literature is full of illusory landscapes, whether at the scale of continents such as Atlantis, towns or castles, or even apartments as in the case of Sherlock Holmes and Baker Street. He tells us that no matter what the origins of these legendary places that what is important is that they have created flows of belief (Eco 2013: 9). This section will address a couple of practical examples of such literary landscapes. The literary regularity of Mughal Gardens The Mughal Empire which extended over much of the Indian subcontinent and lasted from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, left a reverse legacy of Persianstyle gardens brought from the western extent of the Mongol expansion. The crossaxial four-part garden, the chaha¯ r ba¯ gh, is the distinctive feature of Mughal gardens, whose style starts with Babur, the first Mughal Emperor (Figure 1.15). Garden literature, influenced by Quranic symbolism, had a great influence over the form of the Mughal garden. Indeed some would say that the regularity of the geometries of the four sections of the chaha¯r ba¯gh is attributable to its origins in literature since the geometries are much more regular in Mughal gardens than in other South Asian gardens.18 D. Fairchild Ruggles suggests that the idea of the garden with four streams actually pre-dates the Muslim conception of paradise and “reflects a pre-existing vocabulary of garden forms” (Ruggles 2008: 89). This geometric form of the Mughal gardens is derived from literature more than from built precedents. Actually, the idea of using literary texts in the reconstruction or conservation of landscapes is not uncommon.19 The mythical Make-do Garden A text from 1674, “Notes on the Make-do Garden,” written by Huang Zhouxing (1611–1680), a scholar from Nanjing (Nanking) in eastern China, is one of a few essays on fictive gardens that date from the seventeenth century in that region (Fung 1998: 142). This was an especially abundant period in Chinese garden

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Figure 1.15 (facing page) ‘Babur supervising the laying out of the Garden of Fidelity’, illustration from a Mughal book of manuscripts, watercolour and gold on paper, India or Pakistan, c.1590. Museum no. IM.276–1913, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

literature, a literature so rich that as the eminent Chinese garden historian Chen Congzhou advised, “The study of Chinese gardens should begin with the study of Chinese literature” (Fung 1999: 217). Huang’s Make-do Garden is a landscape that only exists in literature and a few drawings, below, based on Huang’s description, yet it is wonderfully tangible. Huang’s reasons for constructing this make-believe Make-do Garden are at once incredulous, and also very human. Let us take a moment to enter first Huang’s mind, and then the landscape in which the garden is set: Since antiquity, gardens have been remembered on account of people, and people have also been remembered on account of gardens. Nowadays there are many owners of gardens in the world. How could Huang Jiuyan not have a garden? Indeed, Jiuyan has never had a garden. If Jiuyan says, “I do not have a garden,” everyone in the world would also say, “Jiuyan does not have a garden.” Jiuyan would surely be ashamed of it. One day, Jiuyan proudly told a guest, “My garden has no fixed location. I merely select the place where the landscape is finest under the Four Heavens and construct it there. What is called ‘the finest place’ is in the world, yet out of this world, is not in the world, yet not out of this world. Since I have searched for it from the day I was born, and have only found it after several tens of years, I have not been inclined to speak of it to men of the world.” The guest said, “Please describe its general features.” Jiuyan replied, “Certainly.” All around the area are lofty mountains and steep ranges which encircle and embrace it like a lotus city. Among the mountains that surround the city, the number of those that are piled one on top of another, or fitted into each other, or small and encircled by large mountains, or small but higher than the larger mountains, cannot be known. Their names are also not known. Only the names of the mountains on the right and the left are known. The one on the right is called Mount Jiang, and the one on the left Mount Jiu . . .The residents are pure and honest, friendly and humble, without a bit of clamour or deceit. The old and young, both men and women, are happy as one; this is because there has been no arguments and disputes for many generations. The climate is also mild and genial . . . (Huang, 437, as translated in Fung 1998: 143–144).

The garden is situated under Mount Jiang and Mount Jiu and encircled with streams fed from the waterfalls. The description of the garden is in four sections. The first describes the general topographical setting of the garden, the second and third describe the garden itself, which is split by a creek that separates the yin from the yang. (The Make Garden is mostly water, whereas the Do Garden is mostly mountainous, with some creeks and streams.) The fourth section is, as Fung describes it, an account of the relationships between the two gardens (Fung 1998: 146). Figures 1.16–18 show views of the Make-do Garden as constructed from the text.

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Figure 1.16 Pages showing the Make-Do Garden, Huang Jiuyan, and extract from his literary text, from Qing Dai Shi Wen Ji Hui Bian. Copyright © Shanghai Gu Ji Chu Ban She (Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House).

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What is especially interesting about the text is how mild-mannered and content people are, “not having had arguments for many generations.” Although the people sound like they are in a utopia, rather than the garden being an example of a perfect “out of this world” garden, it is “of the world.” Significantly, the Makedo Garden is not considered an ideal future but a reflection on a wider cultural and temporal context, that is at the same time past, present, and future, or as Fung states, “a complex to-and-fro in historical thinking.” Fung contextualizes the garden with what the Chinese philosophers call “concrete thinking,” or “spatiotemporal interpenetration” (Fung 1998: 145).20 Landscapes that exist only in literature have significant advantages over those that have a material presence. Such landscapes of literature are much less expensive to construct, require no maintenance, and are very long-lasting. “‘I have a garden,’ and for ten thousand generations people in the world would say, without exception, ‘Huang Jiuyan has a garden!’” (ibid.: 147). Wai-Yee Li, philosophically, tells us that “Words last longer than structures. Furthermore, imaginary gardens defy the limits of poverty and other practical constraints” (Li 2012: 300).

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Figure 1.17 The overall Make-do Garden from Qing Dai Shi Wen Ji Hui Bian. Copyright © Shanghai Gu Ji Chu Ban She (Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House).

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Figure 1.18 The Make Garden (right) and Do Garden (left), from Qing Dai Shi Wen Ji Hui Bian. Copyright © Shanghai Gu Ji Chu Ban She (Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House).

Alternate postulations Stanislaus Fung discusses the Make-do Garden as a “complex to-and-fro in historical thinking.” it is also a complex to-and-fro between landscape and literature. Primarily a literary text, the garden nevertheless exists in our imaginations and this leads to the question as to whether the pregnancy of imagination of this literary description is in itself sufficient to satisfy the human experience of landscape? To what extent are landscapes constructed thorough the collective imaginary? To what extent does what we read about a landscape influence not just how we see it, but ultimately how we use, inhabit, and see it? Before closing this chapter, let us take a moment to read what landscape architects themselves write about their own work. Geoffrey Jellicoe, having authored over seventeen books in his nearly eighty years of practice, was one of the most proficient writers among landscape architects in the English language. “I speak English rather badly, but I agree I do write well,” he said. Contemporary examples include James Corner, who makes the point that, “Writing was, and still is for me, a powerful tool for recording, generating, and evolving ideas, as well as communicating those ideas to others” (Corner 2014: 7). Writing of the Queen Elizabeth Park in London in a short text entitled, “Park as Catalyst,” Corner tells us: it is really the ecological function of the Park that resonates the most. This is not simply a scenic park, not a feel-good or deceptive cover-up, but more a working organism, programmed and shaped to renew a place that has been so deeply damaged by both industrialization and post-industrial decline. . . The Park is an active agent in renewal, reinvention and remaking. (Corner 2012: 262–263)

Corner’s text is more than descriptive. It sets the stage for an ongoing performance. Another text by Corner offers deeper insights into the relationship between literature and design. Writing about the influence of John Dixon Hunt on the

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profession of landscape architecture and specifically about the design of the High Line in New York, Corner tells us that his design for the High Line arose after a very close reading of the site’s history and urban context. He tells us that the two most salient readings were the post-industrial infrastructure, and the self-sown vegetation that had colonized the space. Corner acknowledges the importance of Joel Sternfeld’s photography, and that of other photographers, whose powerful images became important agents in the preservation of the park (Corner 2014: 342). In “Hunt’s Haunts: History, Reception, and Criticism on the Design of the High Line,” Corner goes on to say that Hunt’s reading of the site became an important agent in the design of the site for the new linear park: The new design of the site, from its material systems (the lineal paving, the reinstallation of the rail tracks, the plantings, the lighting, the furnishing, the railings, etc.) to the choreography of movement; the meandering of paths, the siting of overlooks and vistas, and the coordination of seating and social spaces, is intended to reinterpret, amplify, dramatize, and concentrate these readings of the site. (Corner 2014)

COMPLEX TO-AND-FRO In summary, I have outlined four main positions in terms of whether landscape is literature: 1 2 3 4

landscape informs literature; literature informs landscape; landscape as literature; and literature as landscape.

I suggest that each of these positions are in a way part of the answer. However, they are all part of a complex to and fro, in some cases you can’t have one without the other. What I hope to have shown in this text is that landscape and literature are in some ways one and the same thing insofar as both are human constructs created for parallel purposes of informing and creating types of meaning and experiences. The problem with literature is that literature privileges the word and not the visual or sensual. Rather than explosions of experience we get literary distance. Nevertheless it is a necessary part of design. A project by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture highlights the link between design and the word. In an exhibition at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, entitled “OMA Book Machine,” all books produced by OMA were compiled into one single document, “Books of OMA,” forming one giant book of over 40,000 pages (Figure 1.19). OMA are prolific producers of books: producing them for office projects, sometimes a book or more every week.

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Figure 1.19 A topography of books, Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, 2010. Photograph by Valerie Bennett.

This topography of books reminds us that the design, or the architecture, of landscape is shaped by literature at all stages, from interrogating our view of landscape on a conceptual level, to contract documents, to project abstracts, to competition boards, to final reports. The writer and landscape architect use similar tools of allegory—as described in this essay—as well as satire, and metaphor. The design of landscape is inherently tied up with the design of literature, and vice versa. Landscape is of course not literature, but landscape and literature are intertwined in ways that become very hard to separate.

Figure 1.20 Kyle Kirkpatrick, layered book landscape. Copyright © Kyle Kirkpatrick.

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NOTES 1 Raymond Williams (1985) tells us that “Colet, in C 16, distinguished between literature and what he called blotterature.” He also reminds us of Samuel Johnson’s Life of Cowley, where Thomas Sprat is described as “An author whose pregnancy of imagination and elegance of language have deservedly set him high in the ranks of literature.” 2 In an interview with the author on January 20, 1994, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe explained the significance of Kenwood in London and advised the author to visit. Set within Hampstead Heath (an indigenous landscape where the layout has not changed much since the twelfth century), Kenwood was designed by Humphry Repton, within that there is a house by Robert Adam, and within the house a picture gallery with several significant British landscape paintings, including Gainsborough and Landseer. The implication was that you get all the arts within one space. It was so powerful, Jellicoe would walk there often from his home in Highgate, though the Edwardian landscape of north London. Jellicoe recommended seeing that landscape over and above seeing his own work. 3 A universally accepted definition of design does not exist, especially one that transcends scale and discipline. James Corner associates design with imagination (e.g. see The Landscape Imagination: Collected Essays of James Corner 1990–2010, Corner 2014). In The Language of Things, Deyan Sudjic tells us that, “Design is used to shape perceptions of how objects are to be understood.” (Sudjic 2008: 51). 4 See The Getty Research Institute’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus Online for definitions of each of the four terms: www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat.

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Figure 1.21 Exhibition of Ecological Urbanism book (Lars Müller Publishers, 2010) on the roof of Centro Cultural São Paulo, 2015. Photograph by Gareth Doherty.

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5 Of course this is an oversimplification and for example is problematic in terms of the sublime and picturesque theory of the eighteenth century in which landscapes were selected for certain characteristics and may or may not have been designed but still convey feelings and emotions. 6 The word “culture” can be problematic. See Bruno Latour’s introduction to Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory (Latour 2007), and also Roy Wagner’s The Invention of Culture (1981). 7 I would like to thank Desmond Fitzgerald, my professor at University College Dublin, who first told me this story, and for his help in identifying the source. 8 Joyce and his wife spent their last Christmas together in December 1940 with the Giedions. Carola Giedion-Welcker recalled Joyce’s parting words: “You have no idea how wonderful dirt is.” http://jamesjoyce.ie/on-this-day-25-december (accessed August 1, 2014). 9 Indeed Geoffrey Jellicoe would (rightly or wrongly) credit Le Corbusier’s five points of architecture and the lifting of buildings on pilotis above the ground as the moment landscape was liberated from architecture, and the new profession of landscape architecture born (Jellicoe 1994, pers. comm.). 10 See, for example, Garfield (2013). 11 Scholars are working to recreate the Evening Telegraph for June 16, 1904; see www.harenet.co.uk/splitpea/pubs/etel.html 12 See also, Iain Sinclair’s Blake’s London: The Topographic Sublime. Also Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street, and Edgar Allen Poe’s concept of the flâneur. 13 See Hess (2012). 14 I always thought it was the other way around, that a place was a practiced space, but that is another story. 15 For more on meaning see Treib (2011). 16 Spirn’s descriptions echo Jane Jacobs’s descriptions of Greenwich Village which are so intense and vivid that it is surprising to see that no photographs are used in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961). 17 See Genette (1997). 18 I acknowledge Nicolas Roth and our many discussions over gardens in India and Oman. 19 An interesting parallel is the garden of the Harmonists at Old Economy in Pennsylvania that was also divided into four quadrants, one kitchen garden, one orchard, another vineyard leading to a hill with rough stone hut and enframed by a garden wall with a vision of paradise beyond. The restoration of the gardens was aided by careful study of letters and documents. See Rebecca Yamin and Karen Bescherer Metheny’s Landscape Archaeology: Reading and Interpreting the American Historical Landscape (1996).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernterrak, K., Muecke, S., Row, P. (1984). Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology. Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle. Calvino, I. (1972). Invisible Cities (trans. William Weaver). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York. Chen Congzhou (1956). Suzhou yuanlin. Shanghai (Japanese trans.: Tokyo, 1982). Cohen, J. L. (2013). Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Cole, T. (2012) Open City. Random House, New York. Corner, J. (2012). “Afterword.” In J. C. Hopkins and P. Neal (eds), The Making of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, 260–263. John Wiley, Chichester.

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Corner, J. (2014). The Landscape Imagination: Collected Essays of James Corner 1990–2010 (ed. J. Corner and A. B. Hirsch). Princeton Architectural Press, New York. Cosgrove, D. (1984). Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI. (Originally published by Croom Helm, London, 1984). de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life (trans. S. Rendall). University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Doherty, G. (2014). “In the West You Have Landscape, Here We Have . . .” History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 34(3): 201–206. Eagleton, T. (1988). “Towards a Science of the Text.” In Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader. Macmillan Press, London. Reprinted from Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory (London, 1976), 64–69. Eco, U. (2013). The Book of Legendary Lands. Rizzoli, New York. Ellmann, R. (1982). James Joyce (revised edition). Oxford University Press, New York. Friel, B. (1973). The Gentle Island. Davis-Poynter, London. Friel, B. (1981). Translations. Faber & Faber, London. Fung, S. (1998). “Notes on the Make-do Garden.” Utopian Studies 9(1): 142–148. Fung, S. (1999). “Longing and Belonging in Chinese Garden History.” In M. Conan (ed.), Perspectives on Garden Histories. Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture XXI, Washington DC. Garfield, S. (2013). On the Map: A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the Way the World Looks. Gotham Books, New York. Genette, G. (1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (trans. C. Newman and C. Doubinsky). University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE. Hess, S. (2012). William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Under the Sign of Nature). University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, VA. Huang Zhouxing (1983). “Jiangjiu yuan ji.” In Chen Zhi and Zhang Gongshi (eds.), Zhongguo lidai mingyuanji xuan zhu, 436–443. Anhui kexue chubanshe, Hefei (translated in Fung 1998). Hunt, J. D. (1992). Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture. MIT Press, Cambridge. Jacobs, J. (1961). Death and Life of Great American Cities. Random House, New York. Jellicoe, A. (1967). Some Unconscious Influences in the Theatre. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Jellicoe, G. (1970). Studies in Landscape Design, vol. 3. Oxford University Press, London. Jellicoe, G. (1983). The Guelph Lectures on Landscape Design. University of Guelph, Guelph. Jellicoe, G. (1991) “Jung and the Art of Landscape: A Personal Experience.” In Denatured Visions: Landscape and Culture in the Twentieth Century, Stuart Rede and William Howard Adams, eds. Museum of Modern Art, New York. Jormakka, K. (2013). “Theoretical Landscapes: On the Interface between Architectural Theory and Landscape Architecture.” In S. Bell, I. S. Herlin, and R. Stiles (eds.), Exploring the Boundaries of Landscape Architecture, 32. Routledge, New York. Kiberd, D. (2009). Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece. W. W. Norton & Company, New York. Latour, B. (2007). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor–Network Theory. Oxford University Press. Li, W. (2012). “Gardens and Illusions from Late Ming to Early Qing.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 72(2): 295–336. Mostafavi, M. (2012). “Introduction.” In his The Life of Cities. Lars Müller Publishers, Zurich.

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Olin, L. (2011). “Form, Meaning, and Expression in Landscape Architecture.” In M. Treib (ed.), Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens, 44. Routledge, Abingdon. Potteiger, M. and Purinton, J. (1998). Landscape Narratives: Design Practices for Telling Stories. John Wiley & Sons, New York. Reed, D. and Hilderbrand, G. (2012). Visible/Invisible: Landscape Works of Reed Hilderbrand. Metropolis, New York. Ruggles, D. F. (2008). Islamic Gardens and Landscapes. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, PA. Sheeler, J. (2003). Little Sparta: The Garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Frances Lincoln, London. Sinclair, I. (2002). London Orbital. Granta Books, London. Spirn, A. W. (1998). The Language of Landscape. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT. Spirn, A. W. (2015). “Q&A: Landscape Architect Anne Whiston Spirn on Nature and Cities.” Metropolis Magazine, www.metropolismag.com/Point-of-View/January-2015/QA-Landscape-Architect-Anne-Whiston-Spirn-on-Nature-and-Cities (accessed June 11, 2015). Sudjic, D. (2008). The Language of Things. Penguin, London. Thornber, K. (2010). “Ecological Urbanism and East Asian Literatures.” In M. Mostafavi and G. Doherty (eds.), Ecological Urbanism, 530–533. Lars Müller Publishers, Baden. Treib, M. (ed.) (2011). Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens. Routledge, Abingdon. Wagner, R. (1981). The Invention of Culture. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. Williams, R. (1973). The Country and the City. Oxford University Press, New York. Williams, R. (1985). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Yamin, R. and Bescherer Metheny, K. (eds.) (1996) Landscape Archaeology: Reading and Interpreting the American Historical Landscape. University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, TN. Yasutaka, T. (1984) Tsutsui Yasutaka zenshu¯, vol. 16. Shincho¯ sha, Tokyo.

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Chapter 2: Is landscape painting? Vittoria Di Palma

On Saturday, September 30, 1967, Robert Smithson went to Manhattan’s Port Authority Building and bought a copy of The New York Times and a one-way bus ticket. Boarding the number 30 bus to New Jersey, he sat down, and opened the newspaper. In the art section, John Canaday’s column, “Themes and the Usual Variations,” contained brief descriptions of various exhibitions to be seen around town, including “The New York Painter” at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, and featured a reproduction of one of the paintings in that show, Samuel F. B. Morse’s Landscape Composition: Helicon and Aganippe (Allegorical Landscape of New York University) of 1836.1 Smithson’s bus trip and subsequent exploration of the New Jersey suburbs was to become the basis of his seminal essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,” which was published in Artforum the same year and illustrated by his own photographs of the “monuments” he encountered on the banks of the Passaic River—the Bridge Monument, the Monument with Pontoons or Pumping Derrick, the Great Pipes Monument, the Fountain Monument, and the Sand-Box Monument—and by a copy of his clipping from The New York Times, which included the title of Canaday’s column and a blurry black-and-white reproduction of Morse’s painting (Figures 2.1 and 2.2). Although perhaps best known as the inventor of the electric telegraph, Samuel Finley Breese Morse was also Professor of the Literature of the Arts of Design at New York University, a position he held from 1832, the year of the University’s founding, until just before his death in 1872.2 His painting depicts New York University’s new University Building (in whose northwest tower Morse had his studio and teaching chambers), transported from its actual site on Washington Square to a valley presided over by Mount Helicon, home of the Muses—a work, that according to Canaday, depicted “N.Y.U.’s proud new Gothic hall standing confidently along with other allegorical representatives of the arts, sciences, and high ideals that universities foster.”3 Morse’s painting is highly traditional in terms of its composition, its conventions (as well as its title) unmistakably derived from seventeenth-century landscape paintings by Claude Lorrain. It is divided into foreground, middle ground, and background; the darker tones of the foreground offset the lighter colors of the background; the scene is framed to the right by a tree whose outstretched branches parallel the outline of the Muse’s mountain, and

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Art: Themes and the Usual Variations

T he New York Historical Society

"Allegorical Landscape" by Samuel F. B. Morse, displayed at Marlborough-Gerson Gallery Figure 2.1 Robert Smithson, Themes and the Usual Variations. Photographer: Frode Larsen, the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo.

to the left by a trio of forms including a stone marker, a clump of bushes and trees, and the university building itself. A serpentine water feature whose utmost extent is hidden from view recedes from foreground to background, reflecting the colors of the sky and establishing depth as it draws the eye back, while the sun, placed low on the horizon, casts a golden glow over the valley, the mountain, and the monumental neo-Gothic building on the shores of the placid inlet. On that day, however, Smithson encountered not the original painting, but its “blurry reproduction” in the pages of his newspaper. This transformation from vibrantly colored oil on canvas to black-and-white newsprint effected a critical change. In Smithson’s own memorable words, the sky in the image he saw “was a subtle newsprint grey, and the clouds resembled sensitive stains of sweat reminiscent of a famous Yugoslav watercolorist whose name I have forgotten. A little statue with right arm held high faced a pond (or was it the sea?). “Gothic” buildings in the allegory had a faded look, while an unnecessary tree (or was it

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a cloud of smoke?) seemed to puff up on the left side of the landscape.”4 Smithson’s encounter with the painting in its low-resolution, monochrome incarnation allowed him to interpret Morse’s idealized landscape as a grimy scene of industrial decline. A documentary spirit may have contributed to Smithson’s inclusion of the clipping in his piece: the newspaper snippet establishes the date of his excursion while simultaneously functioning as a found object, analogous in many ways to the “monuments” he was to describe and record during the course of his “tour”. But it also did something more. Just as the five industrial objects Smithson came across in the Saturday stillness of that Passaic afternoon allowed him to redefine the notion of the monument, the blurry monochrome newsprint reproduction of Morse’s original painting enabled him to transform a traditional painterly formulation of landscape into something more resonant with a postindustrial age. Smithson was acutely aware of the role representation played in turning his prosaic Passaic surroundings into landscape. His own intentionally low-resolution photographic documentation of his tour was in itself a commentary on and critique of traditional ideas about landscape and its representation, while his description of the experience of walking over the Bridge Monument is characterized by a densely photographic vocabulary: Noon-day sunshine cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. Photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that

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Figure 2.2 Samuel Finley Breese Morse, Allegorical Landscape Showing New York University, Washington Square, New York City, 1836. Oil on canvas, 221⁄2 x 361⁄4 inches; accession no. 1917.3. Collection of the NewYork Historical Society.

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projected a detached series of “stills” through my Instamatic into my eye. When I walked on the bridge, it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel, and underneath the river existed as an enormous movie film that showed nothing but a continuous blank.5

Smithson’s impression that he was walking in or on a photograph or film, his sense that he was photographing a photograph, provide telling evidence of his recognition that landscape never exists independent of representation. It betrays an awareness that is in keeping with James Corner’s observation that “Landscape and image are inseparable. Without image there is no such thing as landscape, only unmediated environment.”6 With Smithson’s acute self-consciousness in mind, we can thus identify his use of Morse’s painting as a critical tactic. By introducing it, at the very beginning of his essay, to establish the terms of landscape’s painterly formulation, it allowed him to subvert this formulation while keeping landscape’s inextricable association with questions of representation at play.7

THE WORD ITSELF To ask “Is landscape painting?” is to pose a question that transports us back to the very beginning, to the birth of the concept of landscape itself. Painting is in fact so central to the formulation and development of the idea of landscape that if we investigate the origin and history of the term, we find numerous instances when “landscape” refers simultaneously to a view or delimited area of ground, and its painted representation. The ambivalence, oscillation, or overlap between landscape understood as an actual view, on the one hand, and its painted representation, on the other, is, I would stress, fundamental to the theoretical richness of the term itself. Furthermore, it is present from very early on. The word “landscape” was imported to England around the turn of the sixteenth century to describe small Dutch panel paintings of rural scenery. As J. B. Jackson established, the Dutch word landskip (or landskap or landschape), derives from the joining together of two terms, the prefix “land-,” which denotes the matter making up the surface of the earth, and the suffix “-scape,” a Germanic term that denotes a bounded entity. Thus “landscape,” etymologically speaking, signifies a defined or delimited area of territory.8 (Despite a common misconception, “-scape” is not a variant of “-scope.” The latter derives from the Greek skopos, and signifies a watcher, a mark, or a goal aimed at, but “-scape” is the product of a completely different linguistic tradition and has no etymological connotations of vision.) However, as a direct result of the circumstances surrounding its introduction into English and its association with panel paintings, the term “landscape” has always harbored an internal duality. It is understood to be both a bounded area of ground as well as a section of the earth’s surface that (precisely because it can be comprehended in a single view) is susceptible to representation. Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the concept of landscape develops within the English (and later British) context, the term very soon expands

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beyond its initial sense and comes to be applied both to paintings, and, increasingly, to views of the surrounding environment. Yet it never leaves its initial, painterly roots behind. Thus, the 1756 edition of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language defines landscape as “1. a region; the prospect of a country,” and “2. a picture, representing an extent of space, with the various objects in it.”9 In this definition we can see the ways in which the definition of landscape slips between materiality and representation. Landscape is a bounded area, but also a view. It is a view, as well as its painted representation. Not only is there slippage in this definition between the real and the represented, but there also is a parallel drawn between a view seen directly by the eye, and one mediated by painting. This coincidence of “the prospect of a country” in definition number one, and “a picture” in definition number two—of “prospect” and “picture”—creates an instability at the heart of the concept of landscape, an instability that centers around the focal point of the viewing subject. As an interest in landscape in this expanded sense becomes a widespread cultural phenomenon in Britain, we find that activities involving the appreciation of landscape understood “as a region; the prospect of a country” are deeply imbued with assumptions rooted in an understanding of landscape as “a picture, representing an extent of space, with the various objects in it.” To put it another way, pictures, and the conventions emanating from pictures, are always already there. Thus, it is important to assert, before we go any further, that once we make the seemingly innocent choice to use the term “landscape” (rather than land, earth, ground, countryside, field, plot, environment, ecosystem, terrain, region, or territory, to name only a few of the alternatives), we are inevitably and inextricably talking about paintings, or, at the very least, about conventions that are derived from, and rooted in, painterly practice.10

THE ORIGIN OF LANDSCAPE If “landscape” first enters the English language in order to refer to paintings of a particular genre, arriving from a particular culture at a particular historical moment, it also comes equipped with an origin myth. As Edward Norgate recounts in his manuscript of 1627–1628, Miniatura Or the Art of Limning, the first true landscape painting was born when “A Gentleman of Antwerpe being a great Liefhebber [Virtuoso or Lover of Art] returning from a long Journey, he had made about the Countrey of Liege and Forrest of Ardenna, comes to visit his old freind, an ingenious painter of that Citie, whose House and Company he useually frequented.”11 Finding the painter at his easel, the Virtuoso begins to recount his adventures, “what Cities he saw, what Beautifill prospects he beheld in a Countrey of a strange Scituation, full of Alpine Rocks, old Castles, and extraordinary buildings &c..” The Painter, inspired by this long account, puts his work aside and “on a new Table begins to paint, what the other spake, describing his description in a more legible and lasting Character, then the others words.” By the time the Virtuoso had finished his tale, “the Painter had brought his worke to that perfection, as the Gentleman

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at parting by chance casting his eye that way, was astonisht with wonder, to see those places and that Countrey soe lively exprest by the Painter as if hee had seene with his owne eyes, or bene his Companion in the Journey.”12 Norgate’s account was an origin myth, but it was a myth with a difference. Unlike the art of painting in general, which identified its beginnings with the moment the Corinthian potter’s daughter Dibutades traced the outline of her lover’s shadowy profile (a myth found in Pliny the Elder, Quintilian, and other classical sources), Norgate’s origin myth positioned landscape painting not as an ancient, but as an emphatically modern practice. In fact, he took pains to stress that landscape painting was not practiced by the Greeks or Romans as a genre unto itself, noting that “it doth not appeare that the antients made any other Accompt or use of it, but as servant to their other peeces, to illustrate or sett off their Historicall painting, by filling up the empty Corners, or void places of Figures, and story, with some fragment of Landscape in referrence to their Histories.”13 Instead, as Norgate explains: “to reduce this part of painting to an absolute and intire Art, and to confine a man’s industry for the tearme of Life to this onely, is as I conceave an Invention of these later times, and though a Noveltie, yet a good one, that to the Inventors and Professors hath brought both honour and profitt.”14 The emergence of landscape painting as a distinct genre was thus a contemporary phenomenon, associated in particular with the Dutch and their development of an art market. Even more striking than the modern pedigree this myth establishes for landscape painting, however, is the way it constructs the dialectic between novelty and convention. The sights the Virtuoso encounters on his trip, “what Cities he saw, what Beautifill prospects he beheld in a Countrey of a strange Scituation, full of Alpine Rocks, old Castles, and extraordinary buildings &c.” are notable, and worthy of particular description, because they are beautiful, extraordinary, strange. They are remarkable because they are unusual. Yet not only does the Painter succeed in depicting them, but, even more strikingly, the Virtuoso is able to recognize the sights he saw in the painter’s representations: “the Gentleman at parting by chance casting his eye that way, was astonisht with wonder, to see those places and that Countrey soe lively exprest by the Painter as if hee had seene with his owne eyes, or bene his Companion in the Journey.”15 The fact that this double translation occurs, first from the Virtuoso’s words to the Painter’s images, and then from the Painter’s images back to the Virtuoso’s recollections, indicates that underlying this exchange between Virtuoso and Painter, word and image, was a corpus of conventionalized forms. Only given the existence of a set of shared conventions could this communication have been successful. Yet this raises interesting questions. Is not an object usually experienced as striking when it is new, unusual, or different in some way, in other words, when it challenges expectations and norms? Here, instead, it is the conventional that seems to be the precondition of the novel: it allows the new to appear. Furthermore, notwithstanding this reliance on a conventional vocabulary, the resulting representation is so true to life that it seems that the Painter must have seen these places “with his owne eyes.” In this account, convention also allows for an experience of authenticity to occur.

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Equally significant is the relationship Norgate’s tale establishes between word and image. The Virtuoso describes the monuments and sights he encountered on his journey: cities, castles, buildings, mountains, and prospects. The Painter, in response, paints “what the other spake, describing his description in a more legible and lasting Character, then the others words.” Norgate’s choice of terms here is telling. The Painter, in translating word into image, performs a descriptive operation that retraces the Virtuoso’s verbal account of the sights he saw. However, the Painter’s image ends up trumping the Virtuoso’s words due to its greater legibility and more lasting character. In the final reckoning between word and image, painting is accorded a greater power, but it achieves this superiority by taking on literary characteristics: legibility and character are key to painting’s force. Finally, the communicative power of landscape painting results in an emotion: the Virtuoso is “astonisht with wonder,” dazed and immobilized by the power of the representation, by the effect of landscape. Thus, in Norgate’s account, we find landscape defined and characterized in ways that continue to remain central to our understanding of the term today: landscape is identified with modernity, with tourism, with convention and representation, with novelty and authenticity, and with character and effect.

LANDSCAPE AND PAINTING In the twentieth-century historiography of landscape studies, the link between landscape and painting was definitively established by Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring’s Italian Landscape in Eighteenth Century England of 1925.16 Manwaring’s book was a re-writing of her Ph.D. dissertation for Yale University; its subtitle, A Study Chiefly of the Influence of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa on English Taste 1700–1800, gives a tidy synopsis of its thesis and main argument. Manwaring chronicled the rise of interest in painting, and in particular the landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, among the English aristocracy during the course of the eighteenth century, and showed how this developing interest affected the arts of the time, painting, poetry, and landscape gardening among them. The longevity of her thesis is amply demonstrated by the fact that it is still being presented as the stock explanation of the creation of the English landscape garden. As the character Hannah Jarvis quips in Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play, Arcadia: English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the Grand Tour. Here, look—Capability Brown doing Claude, who was doing Virgil. Arcadia! And here, . . . untamed nature in the style of Salvator Rosa. It’s the Gothic novel expressed in landscape. Everything but vampires.17

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The importance of the Grand Tour for these developments can hardly be overstated. The Grand Tour introduced British aristocrats to Italian landscape, providing a vehicle for the first-hand experience of scenes and sights sanctified by the study of classical literature. The market for tourist art that developed as a result of the swelling tide of Northern European scions who flooded across the Alps was intended to satisfy a new thirst for souvenirs of time spent “on classic ground.”18 Paintings produced for this market by seventeenth-century masters like Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa and their lesser imitators performed two functions: they identified the kinds of monuments and scenes that were worthy of depiction while establishing formal conventions for their representation, and they existed as portable objects that could be brought back home. This portability disseminated the conventions of idealized landscape even further geographically, and planted the seeds for subsequent efforts to translate the lessons gleaned from Italian landscape onto British soil. The smaller, cheaper, and even more portable objects spawned by these paintings (engravings, mosaics, plaques, boxes, charm bracelets, and gilded fans among them—objects that were, once again, produced specifically for touristic consumption), further codified particular sights and scenes, reinforcing not only a canon of monuments, but also determining the way in which these monuments and sights should be viewed.19 They created a culture of expectation according to which it was not enough to have seen the Colosseum—one must have seen it from a particular spot, perhaps even at a particular time of day, in order truly to have experienced it. By these means, the first encounter with a monument was constructed as producing a particular frisson of pleasure composed equally of novelty and familiarity: the object is new, yet also familiar due to prior exposure to its various representations. It is thus within the set of institutions and practices that grow up along with the development of tourism of Italian landscapes (and consequently within an emerging understanding of landscape itself) that we find the coincidence —one might even say interdependence—of novelty and authenticity with convention and representation. But these images of Italian and Italianate landscapes had further, and even more lasting consequences. The circulation of paintings and copies of paintings that came about as a result of the Grand Tour led to the codification of an ideal vision of landscape in which painterly conventions held sway. Works by such masters as Claude, Poussin, and Salvator Rosa determined what a scene should look like—what elements it should contain, and how they should be disposed—in order to be classified as landscape. The central role these paintings played in the shaping of taste meant that when scenes of real terrain were encountered, they were viewed and evaluated through a perspective deeply informed by a familiarity with paintings. The exceedingly powerful role this perspective played in the representation of British landscapes is vividly illustrated by a comparison of Claude Lorrain’s Landscape with Apollo and the Muses of 1652 with a painting of the River Wye made in England approximately a century later, in which the view of the popular Welsh tourist destination is punctuated with a peak that strikingly recalls Claude’s imaginary landscape scene (Figures 2.3 and 2.4). This visual quotation

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(whether intentional or unconscious matters little, for either is equally revealing) is testimony to the degree to which painterly conventions of landscape representation had permeated British culture by this time. Paintings had allowed British land to become landscape.

PAINTINGS AND GARDENS The impact of a painterly definition of landscape was not limited to two-dimensional art. Ideas and conventions that had first been formulated in painting had also a profound effect on the creation of that new landscape of leisure that came to be known as the English landscape garden.20 The two classic examples of this interaction between paintings and gardens are Stourhead, Wiltshire, built by the banker Henry Hoare between 1741 and about 1780, and Painshill Park, Surrey, created by Hoare’s friend and contemporary Charles Hamilton from around 1738 to 1773. Not only are these two gardens designed in the form of a circuit—like a Grand Tour in miniature—composed of a sequence of encounters with framed views, but both also include more extensive panoramas that are unmistakably designed according to painterly principles (see Figures 2.5 and 2.7), with that at Stourhead, as Kenneth Woodbridge has argued, evidence of an effort to translate Claude’s Landscape with Aeneas at Delos of 1672 into three dimensions.21 Stourhead and Painshill are simultaneously real gardens and representations of landscape, offering experiences that focus attention on questions of representation,

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Figure 2.3 Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Apollo and the Muses, 1652. Oil on canvas, 186 x 290 cm. Scottish National Gallery.

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Figure 2.4 Studio of Richard Wilson (1713–1782), On the Wye. Oil on canvas, 254 x 311 mm. Copyright © Tate, London 2014.

and that bring the role of the viewer in the transformation of land into landscape to center stage. Painshill and Stourhead were both popular tourist destinations, explored, described, and sketched by numerous visitors from the time they were first opened to the public. Among the visitors to Painshill in the 1760s were two men who would go on to become central voices in the development of eighteenthcentury landscape aesthetics: William Gilpin and Thomas Whately.22 Gilpin, who visited Painshill twice (once in 1765 and again in 1772), produced a brief description and a sequence of pen-and-wash sketches (Figures 2.7 and 2.8). Whately instead penned an extensive verbal description that was used to illustrate the chapter on parks in his treatise of 1770, Observations on Modern Gardening. Gilpin’s prospect of Painshill “From ye Gothic temple” (Figure 2.7) is clearly an image formed according to Claudian formal precepts: it is divided into foreground, middle ground and background; the darker tones of the foreground offset the lighter colors of the middle ground and background; the scene is framed to the right by the trunk and bushy foliage of a tree. A prominent water feature whose utmost extent is hidden from view recedes from foreground to background, reflecting the sky as

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Figure 2.5 A view of the Pantheon across the lake, Stourhead, Wiltshire. Photograph: Vittoria Di Palma.

Figure 2.6 The Pantheon framed by trees, Stourhead, Wiltshire. Photograph: Vittoria Di Palma.

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Figure 2.7 William Gilpin, View of Painshill, Surrey, 1772. Courtesy Surrey History Centre.

it draws the eye back, while two white structures (a five-arched bridge, and a pedimented classical building labeled as the Temple of Bacchus) lead the eye up, stepwise, from the surface of the lake to the dark form of a tall tower whose angular silhouette punctuates the horizon. Whately’s account of Painshill begins with a verbal description of the very same scene: the “landskip . . . commanded from an open Gothic building, on the edge of a high steep, which rises immediately above a fine artificial lake in the bottom.” Surveying the garden below, Whately first focuses on the lake in the center of the composition, noting that “the whole of this lake is never seen at once; but by its form, by the disposition of some islands, it always seems to be larger than it is.” Looking then to either side, he draws a frame around the boundaries of the view: “on the left are continued plantations, to exclude the country; on the right, all the park opens; and in front, beyond the water, is the hanging wood, the point of which appeared before, but here it stretches quite across the view, and displays all its extent, and all its varieties.” Having framed his scene, Whately then proceeds to take note of the particular objects—the bridge, the hermitage, and the high tower—which punctuate the composition: “A broad river, issuing from the lake, passes under a bridge of five arches near the outlet, then directs its course towards

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the wood, and flows underneath it. On the side of the hill is couched a low hermitage, encompassed with thicket, and over hung with shade; and far to the right, on the utmost summit, rises a lofty tower, eminent above all the trees.” 23 Whately represents Painshill in words, Gilpin in pictures. Both experience the garden as a sequence of encounters with a set of composed scenes or pictures. Both begin with the comprehensive view visible from the Gothic Temple, both then descend into the garden in order to chronicle its particular monuments and scenes: the grotto; the Roman arch; the hermitage; the Gothic tower; the Temple of Bacchus; the Turkish tent. Each of these monuments is represented by Gilpin individually on a separate spread of his notebook, set off and surrounded by a foliage frame—a vivid illustration of Whately’s observation that the various structures “are never visible all together; they appear in succession as the walk proceeds; and their number does not croud the scene which is enriched by their frequency” (Figure 2.8). Furthermore, Whately’s description makes frequent use of terms such as view, prospect, object, scene, landskip, and offskip, and his account highlights Painshill’s formal properties: the contours of the site; the disposition and grouping of the groves, bridges, and buildings within it; the reflectivity and extent of the water feature; the various distinctions of light and shadow; the contrasting

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Figure 2.8 William Gilpin, View of the Gothic Tower, Painshill, Surrey, 1772. Courtesy Surrey History Centre.

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hues of the pale green deciduous trees, the dark evergreens, and the lively colors of flowering shrubs; the elegant forms of the lawns and woods; and the varied, sinuous outline of the banks of the lake. These formal properties merge to constitute scenes that Whately describes as “splendid,” “polished,” “rude,” “solemn,” “grand,” “beautiful,” and “picturesque.” Painshill is a striking example of one way in which the relationship between landscape and painting could be formulated. Gardens like Painshill that were designed with paintings in mind focus the attention on qualities such as composition and massing, chiaroscuro and color, line and outline, perspective and framing. The conceit of designing a three-dimensional garden so that it adopts the formal conventions of a two-dimensional image, and the pleasure produced by this oscillation between “real” and “represented,” between two and three dimensions, between viewing the “picture” and then being allowed to enter into it and to experience it with all of one’s senses, are direct results of that productive duality that lies at the heart of the concept of landscape. These were also the qualities that led Whately to characterize Painshill as “picturesque”.

THE PICTURESQUE The term “picturesque” derives from the Italian pittoresco, which literally means “painterly,” or “after the manner of a painter.” Gilpin had defined it succinctly (if vaguely) in his An Essay upon Prints of 1768, as “a term expressive of that peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture.”24 Whately, however, was particularly interested in its applicability to gardens, devoting an entire chapter of his Observations on Modern Gardening to the subject of “picturesque beauty.” In Whately’s view, a familiarity with a painting of an object or scene adds greatly to our enjoyment of the original: “we are delighted to see those objects in the reality, which we are used to admire in the representation; and we improve upon their intrinsic merit, by recollecting their effects in the picture.” However, although the paintings “of a great master, are fine exhibitions of nature, and an excellent school wherein to form a taste for beauty,” they must be consulted with caution for “their authority is not absolute; they must be used only as studies, not as models; for a picture and a scene in nature, though they agree in many, yet differ in some particulars, which must always be taken into consideration.” In particular, he stresses, “the subjects for a painter and a gardiner are not always the same; some of which are agreeable in the reality, lose their effect in the imitation; and others, at the best, have less merit in a scene than in a picture.” Thus, Whately concludes that the term “picturesque” should only be applied to “such objects in nature, as . . . are fit to be formed into groupes, or to enter into a composition, where the several parts have a relation to each other; and in opposition to those which may be spread abroad in detail, and have no merit but as individuals.”25 By the time Whately published his Observations on Modern Gardening, the term “picturesque” had come into common use—so much so that he cautioned that of late it had even been somewhat “too indiscriminately applied.”26 But it was

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in the years immediately following Whately’s publication that the picturesque achieved a truly central place in the aesthetic discourse of the time. This occurred largely through the circulation of Gilpin’s accounts of tours that he had undertaken in various parts of England during the 1760s and 1770s, which contained detailed descriptions of scenery and aesthetic evaluations of scenes “relative chiefly to picturesque beauty”. Gilpin’s copiously illustrated notebooks first circulated in manuscript, but his work came to the attention of an even wider public beginning in 1782, when he published Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales &c., Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770, using the new technique of aquatint to reproduce his atmospheric pen-and-wash sketches (Figure 2.9). Observations on the River Wye opens with a statement that underscores the novelty of the enterprise Gilpin was intent on popularizing: We travel for various purposes; to explore the culture of soils; to view the curiosities of art; to survey the beauties of nature; to search for her productions; and to learn the manners of men; their different polities, and modes of life. The following little work proposes a new object of pursuit; that of not barely examining the face of a country; but of examining it by the rules of picturesque beauty.27

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Figure 2.9 William Gilpin, illustration from Observations on the River Wye, 1782. Collection Robin Middleton.

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For Gilpin, this meant not merely describing natural scenes, “but of adapting the description of natural scenery to the principles of artificial landscape; and of opening the sources of those pleasures, which are derived from the comparison.”28 In other words, a tourist in search of the picturesque was not merely a passive observer of scenery, but an active force in its constitution as landscape. This agency was critical because although Nature had created the land, her taste was not impeccable. In Gilpin’s view, although “Nature is always great [i.e. grand] in design . . . she is seldom so correct in composition, as to produce an harmonious whole. Either the foreground or background is disproportioned; or some awkward line runs across the piece; or a tree is ill-placed; or a bank is formal; or something or other is not exactly as it should be.”29 At these times, Gilpin contends, “the imagination is apt to whisper, ‘what glorious scene might be made, if these stubborn materials could yield to the judicious hands of art!’”30 Gilpin encouraged his readers to give free reign to those “judicious hands,” suggesting that “by the force of this creative power an intervening hill may be turned aside, and a distance introduced” until the scene looked as it should: like a landscape rather than mere land.31 Gilpin’s works developed a vocabulary and a set of criteria for analyzing natural scenery according to artistic principles. Landscapes, and the objects they are composed of, were described in strictly formal terms, evaluated according to their suitability for representation. For Gilpin, a landscape was picturesque if it was divided into foreground, middle ground, and background; if it was animated by strong contrasts of light and shade; if it contained a variety of objects; and if these objects grouped in a pleasing way. A device that aided immeasurably in this operation was the Claude glass, a small convex mirror made of tinted glass, usually bound up in a pocket-book or carrying case (Figure 2.10). A view reflected in a Claude glass was not only contained within a frame, but also, due to the curvature and tint of the mirror, its details were minimized and obscured, its forms were joined together into broader masses of light and shade, and its colors were muted. All of these distortions combined to transform the view into a scene that resembled a painting by Claude Lorrain. The Claude glass helped both with training the eye to appreciate a prospect according to painterly conventions, and (if the observer were so inclined) with the act of representation: the operations of simplification and abstraction it effected greatly aided the amateur artist who wished to emulate the oeuvre of the seventeenth-century master. With Gilpin as a guide, and a Claude glass in hand, the seeker of picturesque beauty was handily equipped for the enterprise of transforming British scenery into landscape.32 Gilpin’s writings cemented the understanding that representation was the instrument that turned land into landscape. This notion is illustrated strikingly by a letter written by Gilpin’s son William to his father during the course of a trip to the Lake District in 1788, the region in the north-west of England which was established as a prime tourist destination by Gilpin’s Observations on Several Parts of England, Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland of 1786. On the first day, the younger Gilpin recounts, he was very dissatisfied by his attempts to sketch the rugged scenery of Borrodale: “It was all very magnificent;

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Figure 2.10 Thomas Gainsborough, Study of the artist sketching with the help of a Claude glass, 1750–1755. Graphite on paper, 184 x 138 mm. Copyright © Trustees of the British Museum.

but the sky was clear—and the distinctness with which we saw so many rocks and mountains, broken into so many parts . . . rendered every attempt I could make to express the same in blacklead altogether vain.”33 The experience was so disappointing that not only was he unhappy with his own sketches, but he came even to doubt his father’s entire approach: How inadequate, said I, is my father’s pencil to express all this! He may substitute what he calls effect in the [place] of it—but where is this effect? . . . it must be a thing of his own invention—a kind of mantle that he pretends nature is sometimes covered with, which tho’ it may conceal some particular beauties,

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yet amply compensates for that by its great harmonizing power . . . . A fine artifice, this, thought I, truely! and so returned home to the inn at Keswick with a sovereign contempt both for your doctrines and drawing.34

On the second day, however, he awoke to a rainstorm, and suddenly, after having traveled only about half a mile on horseback, the clouds began to break away; and as if they had assembled on purpose to convince me of the errors of yesterday . . . immediately marshalled themselves all around so as to aid the landskip in the most powerful manner. Then what effects of gloom and effulgence—dark mountain forms in all their chaste and corrected colouring—for the most part bosomed in cloud—except over one ragged knoll, where a passage is opened for the light that catches the opposite summits, and melting away the gloom in the richest fringed work broadens at it descends,—but I cant describe—nor need I—for you have only to look in your own store house [of sketches] to take a view of them—It gave me however a very singular pleasure to see your system of effects so compleately confirmed as it was by the observations of that day—wherever I turned my eyes, I beheld a drawing of yours.35

Gilpin’s son looks at natural scenery, but sees art: he understands nature as though it were already a representation of itself. His words give precise expression to Whately’s definition of picturesque beauty, of the delight we feel when we “see those objects in the reality, which we are used to admire in the representation; and we improve upon their intrinsic merit, by recollecting their effects in the picture.”36 With Gilpin and Whately’s understanding of the picturesque, the traditional configuration of the relationship between original and copy, nature and its representation is reversed: here art comes before nature, conditioning and shaping how nature is viewed. The essence of the picturesque is thus an acknowledgement that there is no “innocent eye,” no apprehension of nature free from an artificial frame: for the seeker of landscape, culture is always already there. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, the blossoming of the picturesque—as an aesthetic term, as a guide for tourism, as a way of seeing, and as a set of rules for representing landscapes—sparked an impassioned literary debate about the relationship between landscape and painting between two landowners, Sir Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight, and the landscape gardener Humphry Repton. Price and Payne Knight were united in criticizing the style of garden design associated with the name of Capability Brown, and advocated instead a new taste whose principles were to be derived from the study of paintings. Price put this argument forth in An Essay on the Picturesque, published in 1794, Payne Knight in a long didactic poem entitled The Landscape, which appeared in the same year. Their publications provoked an outcry from Repton, a follower of Brown best known today for his “Red Books,” who wrote impassioned letters and subsequently a longer essay in response to the picturesque challenge, the latter

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included in his Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening of 1795. Payne Knight subsequently penned a more comprehensive treatise in response to both Price and Repton: An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste appeared in 1805, while in 1810 Price issued a new edition of An Essay on the Picturesque that included Repton’s letters and Price’s pointed defense of his own position. Price’s full title, An Essay on the Picturesque, As Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and, On the Use of Studying Pictures, For the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, indicates the two aims of his treatise. The first was to establish the picturesque as a distinct aesthetic category comparable to the beautiful and the sublime, and to abolish the confused term “picturesque beauty” used by both Whately and Gilpin. As a strict adherent to the sensationalist theory of Edmund Burke, Price believed that the picturesque objects affected their beholders in a direct and unmediated way by virtue of their physical characteristics. Whereas sublime objects were immense, dark, and obscure, and beautiful objects were small, smooth, and delicately colored, picturesque objects were instead characterized by their variety, intricacy, and roughness. Price’s formulation of the picturesque is thus an early example of an aesthetic theory that intertwines haptic and optic modes of perception. Price reconfigured the relationship between landscape and paintings in such a way as to bring it under the rubric of sensationalist aesthetics. Burke himself had been skeptical about the efficacy of paintings to produce a sublime response: notwithstanding the scene they might represent, as small, contained, brightlycolored objects, their ability to affect their viewers on a physiological level was limited. Price, in his attempt to establish the picturesque as an aesthetic category structurally equivalent to those of the sublime and the beautiful, pushed the evolving relationship between landscape and painting one step further. In his view, objects in nature that were irregular, rough, shaggy, intricate, variegated, and mottled—objects like moss-covered rocks, overgrown ruins, decaying logs, brittle autumnal foliage, rutted country lanes, or worn-out cart horses that painting taught us to seek out and value—had as direct and unmediated an effect on our sensibilities and imaginations as Burke’s towering precipices, thundering cataracts, and exploding volcanoes. The second aim of An Essay on the Picturesque was to determine the ways in which the study of paintings could contribute to the design of landscape gardens. Paintings educated the eye by showing how the various objects that make up a landscape could be separated, combined, and juxtaposed. In surveying a natural scene, Price argued, we might scarcely notice the objects within it “as they lie scattered over the face of nature.” However, when these same objects are “brought together in the compass of a small space of canvas [they] are forcibly impressed upon the eye.”37 Price considered landscape paintings, in particular those by Claude and Salvator Rosa, to be akin to “a set of experiments of the different ways in which trees, buildings, water &c. may be disposed, grouped, and accompanied in the most beautiful and striking manner, and in every style, from the most simple and rural to the grandest and most ornamental.”38 Caution is to be exercized,

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however, for just “as he who studies art only will have a confined taste, so he who looks at nature only, will have a vague and unsettled one,” Price admonishes: the key is to examine both. Thus, the use of paintings “is not merely to make us acquainted with the combinations and effects that are contained in them, but to guide us, by means of those general heads (as they may be called) of composition, in our search for the numberless and untouched varieties and beauties of nature.”39 By looking at both art and nature with an eye educated by paintings, the aspiring improver could compile a set of examples, and then (deploying a procedure analogous to the use of a commonplace book in literary composition), judiciously select and combine particular elements in order to generate new landscape designs. For Price, the modern canon of landscape paintings is analogous to the ancient canon of literary texts, providing not only a set of aesthetic principles, but a common cultural foundation that unites the individuals of a particular culture and class: “the more I reflect on the whole of the subject, the more I am convinced, that the study of the principles of painting in the works of eminent painters, is the best method of acquiring an accurate and comprehensive taste and judgment, in all that regards the effects and combinations of visible objects,” he declares.40 Paintings thus enabled Price to mitigate the potentially revolutionary implications of Burke’s radical sensationalism, tempering the knowledge of sense with a judgment gained through breeding and education. Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price had similar tastes—they were united in their disdain for the insipidity of the traditional Capability Brown landscape, as well as in their appreciation of the varied tints and textures of the decaying and overgrown in nature. Payne Knight differed from Price, however, in his understanding of aesthetic effect. Whereas Price was a dogmatic acolyte of Burke’s sensationalist aesthetics, Payne Knight was more of a skeptic. In a famous passage from his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, Payne Knight poked fun at Burke’s definition of the sublime as a combination of astonishment and terror by noting that if the author of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful “had walked up St. James’s street without his breeches, it would have occasioned great and universal astonishment; and if he had, at the same time, carried a loaded blunderbuss in his hands, the astonishment would have been mixed with no small portion of terror: but I do not believe that the united effects of these two powerful passions would have produced any sentiment or sensation approaching to sublime.”41 For Payne Knight, aesthetic response was neither so universal nor so mechanical in its operations: the key to understanding the complexity and individuality of aesthetic response was instead the association of ideas. Repton, who wrote from the perspective of a practicing landscape gardener, took issue with Price’s and Payne Knight’s criticism of Brown and with their general aesthetic sensibility, in particular their disdain for utility and their appreciation of nature’s wilder qualities. In Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening he argued (rather flatfootedly misrepresenting Price’s argument) that painting and landscape gardening were two fundamentally different enterprises, and that using paintings

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as a guide for design meant ignoring the changeable qualities of real landscapes: their inherent motion, their panoramic scope, their differing balances of light and shade. Furthermore, he found Price’s and Payne Knight’s preference for overgrown and decayed scenes evidence of a vitiated taste, of palates whose need for a high degree of irritation was at least unseemly, if not also politically and morally suspect. Although “picturesque effect” was admittedly a source of pleasure in designed landscapes, it was only one element in a list that also included such tamer qualities as congruity, simplicity, symmetry, order, continuity, and utility.42 Quoting a letter from a supporter, he forcefully concluded: “places are not to be laid out with a view to their appearance in a picture, but to their uses, and the enjoyment of them in real life, and their conformity to those purposes is that which constitutes their true beauty.”43 By the end of the eighteenth century, largely as a result of this flurry of dueling publications, the connotations of the term “picturesque” had substantially broadened. George Mason’s 1801 Supplement to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary lists no fewer than six: “what pleases the eye; remarkable for singularity; striking the imagination with the force of painting; to be expressed in painting; affording a good subject for a landscape; proper to take a landscape from.”44 The first three definitions, “what pleases the eye,” “remarkable for singularity,” and “striking the imagination with the force of painting,” all have to do with the reception of landscape—specifically, with reception understood according to sensationalist aesthetics. The picturesque scene gives pleasure by striking the imagination forcefully. It does this by virtue of its singular qualities, qualities that make the scene a good subject for a painting. Definitions four through six, on the other hand, have to do with representation: “to be expressed in painting,” “affording a good subject for a landscape [painting],” and “proper to take a landscape [painting] from,” are about the production of landscape by means of the activity of sketching or painting natural scenery. These oscillations—between actual landscapes and painted ones, between production (of real or represented landscapes) and reception (again, of real or represented landscapes)—are fundamental to the picturesque. They contribute to a recursive complexity that lies at its heart and that is key to its productivity as a theoretical approach. It is definition three, “striking the imagination with the force of painting,” however, which indicates yet another consequence of the intertwined history of landscape and painting we have been tracing, for it is within the nexus of this evolving relationship that our modern understanding of the work of art is forged.

EFFECT Whately had cautioned that the term “picturesque” should be applied only to “such objects in nature as . . . are fit to be formed in to groups,” and that it should never be used with respect to those “which may be spread abroad in detail, and have no merit but as individuals.”45 The source of his distinction between picturesque objects that group, on the one hand, and unpicturesque objects that lie scattered

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about, on the other, can be traced back the treatise published in 1708 by the French academician Roger De Piles entitled Cours de peinture par principes.46 De Piles’s treatise was the equivalent of a course of lectures; it was intended to establish principles that would instruct aspiring artists in the art of painting, to show them the road to greatness. Among extended discussions of painterly techniques like line, color, shading, perspective, and composition, De Piles also included a long section on landscape. Works by the greatest masters, such as Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Salvator Rosa, were divisible into different genres. Poussin, whose cerebral landscapes and noble themes evoked the geometrical perfection of a vanished classical world, was the exemplar of the heroic style. Claude, on the other hand, whose classical landscapes were characterized by limpid skies, clear light, harmonious forms, and soft colors, excelled at the pastoral style. Finally, Salvator Rosa, known for his precipitous rocks, gnarled trees, dangerous banditti, and stormy skies, was instead the master of the savage style. Each of these three genres was associated with a particular effect. Poussin elevated the mind through the contemplation of noble and heroic thoughts and actions; Claude soothed the spectator with limpid visions of classical Arcadia; and Rosa stimulated the viewer with his tempestuous and frightening scenes that provoked deeply troubling thoughts and emotions.47 The principal means of communicating these effects was through what De Piles termed the tout-ensemble. The tout-ensemble (translated in 1743 as the “whole together”) was an aspect of composition according to which all the parts of a painting were so mutually interdependent that none would dominate over any other (Figure 2.11).48 A successful tout-ensemble (De Piles recommended the use of a convex mirror for its production) ensured that a painting, rather than being perceived by the eye as a collection of disparate objects (as with the scattered spheres), was instead seen all at once (as with the bunch of grapes). In other words, the tout-ensemble was the facet of a painting’s composition that guaranteed a unified impact. But the tout-ensemble was much more than a successful engagement with the laws of human vision, for it was also this quality that raised painting from an artisanal craft to a high art. The tout-ensemble was analogous to “the spiritual part” of painting; it was what differentiated “true painting”— la vrai peinture—from more mundane productions. In De Piles’s memorable formulation, a “true painting” stops the spectator in his tracks, engages him in conversation, and “invites him to please himself with contemplating the particular beauties of the picture.” For painters to succeed in producing this kind of intense communication with their viewers, De Piles contends, they must “rise higher than the ordinary, and, as it were, be transported out of themselves,” seized by the enthusiastic raptures of the sublime. Then, and only then, will they be able to kindle a similar rapturous state in their beholders, making the viewing of their work akin to a divine revelation.49 The true work of art transcends its objecthood to address its viewers, transfixing them, calling out to them, and overcoming their reason in order to infuse them with a kind of sublime ecstasy. Thus, it is in De Piles’s treatise that we find the articulation of an aesthetics

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