Looking Back At Landscape Urbanism

Julia Czerniak

The author Julia Czerniak imagines landscape as a particular culture of and consciousness about the land that refrains from the superficial reference to sustainability,ecology,and the complex processes of our environments in favor of projects that actually engage them.

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According to architect James Corner the nineteenth century notions of public spaces where nature is seen as separate from the city, is imaged as undulating and pastoral and acts as a moral antidote to urbanization.

The following projects challenge this notion and attempt to make landscape visible and legible through the everyday life thereby to build new relationships

Projects for discussion;

• Guadalupe River (1988)
• Byxbee Parks (1991)
• Rebstockpark (1992)
• Plaza Park (1989)

The intention of examination by Hargreaves Associates and Eisenman Architects

• The first is to observe how site particularities, both physical and discursive, "make their appearance".
• The second is to speculate on the implications site generated work poses for landscape and the contemporary city.
• The generative capacity of a site variously construed as a spatial location, a physical and cultural context. and a discursive position which is value-driven.

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• Guadalupe River (1988) a three-mile linear park and flood control system that passes through downtown San Jose, California

• Byxbee Parks (1991) another example of force/form evolution

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Rebstockpark, Frankfurt

Central park, Manhattan

Folded Grid Pattern for houses

Two principle devices

Tree rows of various combinations of canopy

Drainage swales and canals

Unconventional Juxtapositions

Park/ Parking

Planting Strategies - public and private spaces

HARGREAVES ASSOCIATES

PLAZA PARK in SAN JOSE (1989)

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• The area affecting the design-how the specifics of a site construct the work-is supplanted by the area affected by it-how the work constructs the site." To elaborate on this point through Hargreaves Associates' Plaza Park in San Jose (1989).
• Shifting economies of the region, from one based on agriculture and food production to high-tech software industry.
• Successful technology companies were juxtaposed with low income neighborhoods.
• Miwon Kwon makes two points relevant to the discussion of landscape publicness.
• Lucy Lippard’s suggestion.
• TO THINK SITE IS TO THINK LANDSCAPE
• Hargreaves Associates and Eisenman’s strategies of site specifics.
• Landschaft and Landskip.

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IDEAS OF NATURE

RAYMOND WILLIAMS

ABOUT AUTHOR

RAYMOND WILLIAMS

He was an welsh social writer, novelist, cultural theorist, author and socialist. He mostly wrote on cultural, politics and literature contributed to marxist critique of culture and arts.he insisted upon viewing culture as ‘ordinary’ as everyday and democratic, being constantly made and remade.

INTRODUCTION

• When we say about nature do we include ourselves?
• Well known passage in Burke
• Christian interpretation to call pagan.
• Moment of monotheism, moment of a singular nature.

SINGULAR, ABSTRACTED AND PERSONIFIED NATURE

• When Nature herself, as people learnt to say, became a goddess, a divine Mother, we had something very different from the spirits of wind and sea and forest and moon.
• A competitor - the monotheistic god.
• God is the first absolute, but nature is his minister and deputy.
• Henry Medwall’s play Nature or in Rastell’s The Four Element.

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THE NEW IDEA OF EVOLUTION: THE PRACTICAL WORLD

Selective breeder: process, specific forces

World: The physical

The organic

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Fixed and constitutional ideas

The critical question: did the nature included man? Was the process of man and animal was the same?

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The medieval concept of nature: God's creation

The age of discovering the relations of man with god

THE ABSTRACTION OF MAN: NATURE INCLUDED MAN OR NOT?

State of Nature and social man:

Digger and mark

Property

Common ownership

Private ownerships

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Experiments: agriculture and industrial

THE NATURAL AND THE CONVENTIONAL

FOR AND AGAINST IMPROVEMENT

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When nature is separated out from the activities of men, it even ceases to be nature, in any full or effective sense.

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We have mixed our labour with earth, our forces with earth’s forces too deeply to be able to draw back and separate either out.

Conventional idea of nature - untouched, unspoilt, separated from man

What is natural?

18th century idea of nature - order and right reason

Early 19th century - Idea of nature as countryside retreats

2nd half of 19th century - idea of nature as cruel and savage