A recent project by Estudi d’arquitectura Toni Gironés restoring a Roman site at Can Tacó is instructive. Built in the mid-second century BCE in a strategic location in the district of El Vallès,13 the Turó d’en Roina was a fortified Roman administrative and regional control center. The restoration project was undertaken to recover both the natural and archeological heritage of this important site in the Els Turons de le Tres Creuses complex. Wandering through a small forest with oak and pine trees towering above us, we discover the site at the end of a quiet, winding path: there, the Roman remains appear, their spaces envisaged through their reconstructed geometry. The main intervention consists of reimagining the outer profiles of the Roman structures, revealing the walls and rebuilding the original shapes.
1 Extract from Around the World with Orson Welles (1955), written and directed by Orson Welles for Associated-Rediffusion.
If we consider Schama’s thesis, the Can Tacó project is a reconstruction of memory beyond any material form. It uses a contemporary format to perform a mostly geometrical operation that gives this complex its longlost volume back. But it does so by shaping the emptiness: it evokes the volumes but does not make them explicit. Thus, stone and steel, mountain and industry, live together in an interpretation of what pre-existed here, revaluing and activating, incorporating and not erasing, and simultaneously co-evolving with the environment.14 So, in experiencing the landscape our consciousness shifts from the past to the present, taking the opposite direction to the physical matter, which moves from the present to the past.15
6 José M. Roldán, “El Camino de la Plata: Iter o Negotium,” Revista Gerión, Extraordinario 1 (2007): 323–40.
Timing Memory But the truth is that our present should not be defined as that which is more intense: it is that which acts on us and which makes us act, it is the sensory and it is motor; our present is, above all, the state of our body. Our past, on the contrary, is that which acts no longer but which might act, and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation of which it borrows the vitality.16
Deleuze’s well-known paradox, implicit in this quote from Henri Bergson, says that time resides within the confines of the present while it is the present that never stops moving, so it is the present that constitutes time, but it happens
2 Council of Europe, European Landscape Convention (Florence, 2000). 3 Spanish Historical Heritage Institute (IPCE), National Plan for Cultural Landscape (Madrid: Spanish Historical Heritage Council, 2011), 21. 4 Lionella Scazzosi, “Reading and Assessing the Landscape as Cultural and Historical Heritage,” Landscape Research 29, no. 4 (2004) 344. 5 Juan Miguel Hernández León, Autenticidad y Monumento: del mito de Lázaro al de Pigmalión (Madrid: Abada, 2013), 174.
7 Darío Álvarez & Miguel Ángel de la Iglesia, “Iter Plata: Proyectar el paisaje patrimonial,” Her&Mus: Heritage & Museography, no. 12 (2013). 8 Ibid., 64. 9 Ibid. 10 See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 56–63. 11 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 173. 12 Ibid. 13 Marta Flórez & Isabel Rodà, “Las Vías Romanas en Cataluña: el Caso del Vallès Oriental (Barcelona)” in Boube Emmanuelle, Bouet Alain & Colleoni Fabien, De Rome à Lugdunum des Convènes (Bourdeaux: Ausonius, 2014), 247–62.
in this constituted time.17 Bergson suggests that perception is nothing more than the emergence of a small part of that submerged mass of totality in which everything past is condensed, where we find the threshold between potential and actual, or what constitutes the present. Ultimately, memory is the fundamental synthesis of time, and memory emerges with perception.
14 Toni Gironés, “Can Tacó” in Josep Lluís Mateo & Florian Sauter, Earth, Water, Air, Fire: The Four Elements and Architecture (New York: Actar Publishers, 2014), 54–61.
Is it not precisely this that occurs in the projects we have reviewed? In the challenge of intervening in these cultural landscapes, the problems of authenticity appear to have been resolved, be it intuitively or coincidentally, using Bergsonian thinking. The interventions show how the body in motion, the sound of water, visual horizons and, fundamentally, perception, activate the memory. They present an alternative way of working with history, distancing themselves from interventions in historical landscapes that are guided by the criteria of material heritage restoration and that have attempted to recreate the past and flee the present.18
17 Hernández León, Autenticidad y Monumento, 140. The author discusses the validity, for restoration theory, of the Bergsonian concept of memory developed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition.
15 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 63. 16 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [1896] (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 240.
18 See Fidel A. Meraz, “On the experience of temporality: existential issues in the conservation of architectural places,” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 3, no. 2, (2016): 167–82. See also David Harvey, “Landscape and Heritage: Trajectories and Consequences,” Landscape Research 40, no. 8 (2015): 911–24.
In the examples presented the act of shifting time, of bringing memory into the present, is vital. The present moment is as crucial as the past: it is only now, after centuries or even millennia, that we take action to preserve their cultural meaning. The intervention criteria that have been followed are based on the assumption that the landscape is dynamic, and they enable it to evolve, ensuring that its essence and nature survive, without confusing protection with fossilization. They are consistent in providing a contemporary experience of the cultural landscape that results, in turn, in public appreciation of it. In other words, restoration, formal, functional, and material recuperation, sets out to protect the vitality of the intangible, of that which is able to suggest the cultural meaning of the inherited tradition, bringing the present to the past and awaiting the future. Previous: Preserved terracing in LandaOchadiano Arquitectos’ design for the Añana Salt Valley. Above: Ancient waterways revealed by Miàs Architects’ design for Banyoles, Spain.
A recent project by Estudi d’arquitectura Toni Gironés restoring a Roman site at Can Tacó is instructive. Built in the mid-second century BCE in a strategic location in the district of El Vallès,13 the Turó d’en Roina was a fortified Roman administrative and regional control center. The restoration project was undertaken to recover both the natural and archeological heritage of this important site in the Els Turons de le Tres Creuses complex. Wandering through a small forest with oak and pine trees towering above us, we discover the site at the end of a quiet, winding path: there, the Roman remains appear, their spaces envisaged through their reconstructed geometry. The main intervention consists of reimagining the outer profiles of the Roman structures, revealing the walls and rebuilding the original shapes.
1 Extract from Around the World with Orson Welles (1955), written and directed by Orson Welles for Associated-Rediffusion.
If we consider Schama’s thesis, the Can Tacó project is a reconstruction of memory beyond any material form. It uses a contemporary format to perform a mostly geometrical operation that gives this complex its longlost volume back. But it does so by shaping the emptiness: it evokes the volumes but does not make them explicit. Thus, stone and steel, mountain and industry, live together in an interpretation of what pre-existed here, revaluing and activating, incorporating and not erasing, and simultaneously co-evolving with the environment.14 So, in experiencing the landscape our consciousness shifts from the past to the present, taking the opposite direction to the physical matter, which moves from the present to the past.15
6 José M. Roldán, “El Camino de la Plata: Iter o Negotium,” Revista Gerión, Extraordinario 1 (2007): 323–40.
Timing Memory But the truth is that our present should not be defined as that which is more intense: it is that which acts on us and which makes us act, it is the sensory and it is motor; our present is, above all, the state of our body. Our past, on the contrary, is that which acts no longer but which might act, and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation of which it borrows the vitality.16
Deleuze’s well-known paradox, implicit in this quote from Henri Bergson, says that time resides within the confines of the present while it is the present that never stops moving, so it is the present that constitutes time, but it happens
2 Council of Europe, European Landscape Convention (Florence, 2000). 3 Spanish Historical Heritage Institute (IPCE), National Plan for Cultural Landscape (Madrid: Spanish Historical Heritage Council, 2011), 21. 4 Lionella Scazzosi, “Reading and Assessing the Landscape as Cultural and Historical Heritage,” Landscape Research 29, no. 4 (2004) 344. 5 Juan Miguel Hernández León, Autenticidad y Monumento: del mito de Lázaro al de Pigmalión (Madrid: Abada, 2013), 174.
7 Darío Álvarez & Miguel Ángel de la Iglesia, “Iter Plata: Proyectar el paisaje patrimonial,” Her&Mus: Heritage & Museography, no. 12 (2013). 8 Ibid., 64. 9 Ibid. 10 See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 56–63. 11 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: HarperCollins, 1995), 173. 12 Ibid. 13 Marta Flórez & Isabel Rodà, “Las Vías Romanas en Cataluña: el Caso del Vallès Oriental (Barcelona)” in Boube Emmanuelle, Bouet Alain & Colleoni Fabien, De Rome à Lugdunum des Convènes (Bourdeaux: Ausonius, 2014), 247–62.
in this constituted time.17 Bergson suggests that perception is nothing more than the emergence of a small part of that submerged mass of totality in which everything past is condensed, where we find the threshold between potential and actual, or what constitutes the present. Ultimately, memory is the fundamental synthesis of time, and memory emerges with perception.
14 Toni Gironés, “Can Tacó” in Josep Lluís Mateo & Florian Sauter, Earth, Water, Air, Fire: The Four Elements and Architecture (New York: Actar Publishers, 2014), 54–61.
Is it not precisely this that occurs in the projects we have reviewed? In the challenge of intervening in these cultural landscapes, the problems of authenticity appear to have been resolved, be it intuitively or coincidentally, using Bergsonian thinking. The interventions show how the body in motion, the sound of water, visual horizons and, fundamentally, perception, activate the memory. They present an alternative way of working with history, distancing themselves from interventions in historical landscapes that are guided by the criteria of material heritage restoration and that have attempted to recreate the past and flee the present.18
17 Hernández León, Autenticidad y Monumento, 140. The author discusses the validity, for restoration theory, of the Bergsonian concept of memory developed by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition.
15 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 63. 16 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory [1896] (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 240.
18 See Fidel A. Meraz, “On the experience of temporality: existential issues in the conservation of architectural places,” Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 3, no. 2, (2016): 167–82. See also David Harvey, “Landscape and Heritage: Trajectories and Consequences,” Landscape Research 40, no. 8 (2015): 911–24.
In the examples presented the act of shifting time, of bringing memory into the present, is vital. The present moment is as crucial as the past: it is only now, after centuries or even millennia, that we take action to preserve their cultural meaning. The intervention criteria that have been followed are based on the assumption that the landscape is dynamic, and they enable it to evolve, ensuring that its essence and nature survive, without confusing protection with fossilization. They are consistent in providing a contemporary experience of the cultural landscape that results, in turn, in public appreciation of it. In other words, restoration, formal, functional, and material recuperation, sets out to protect the vitality of the intangible, of that which is able to suggest the cultural meaning of the inherited tradition, bringing the present to the past and awaiting the future. Previous: Preserved terracing in LandaOchadiano Arquitectos’ design for the Añana Salt Valley. Above: Ancient waterways revealed by Miàs Architects’ design for Banyoles, Spain.
LA+ time/fall 2018 107
Erle C. Ellis
Erle C. Ellis is Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he teaches environmental science and landscape ecology. His research investigates the dynamic ecology of human landscapes from local to global scales toward informing sustainable stewardship of the biosphere. Ellis develops tools for global synthesis (GLOBE) and 3D mapping (Ecosynth) and is author of the recently released volume Anthropocene (2018) from the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series.
Time In Our Hands co-designing a better anthropocene
Geography, Environmental Science
A
new “great force of nature” is shifting Earth into a new interval of geological time, an “age of humans,” the Anthropocene.1 Global climate change, widespread pollution, mass extinction, and the loss and reshaping of natural habitats are just a few of the many indicators that human societies have gained the capacity to transform the functioning of an entire planet. For some, this time of unprecedented anthropogenic environmental change must be seen as a “rupture” in Earth history – a clean break from earlier times when human societies lived only within the limits of a natural Earth system which shaped them, and not ever the other way around.2 Others, including the stratigraphers of the Anthropocene Working Group, recognize the continuous nature of anthropogenic environmental change, yet still focus on defining a discrete boundary in time and rock to define the start of an Anthropocene epoch in the middle of the 20th century.3 Others look deeper in time, observing anthropogenic transformations of Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, and climate caused by megafaunal extinctions, land clearing using fire, soil tillage and irrigation, domestications and species introductions facilitated by expanding trade networks, and other increasingly globalized social-ecological transformations that have produced the Earth and world systems of the current time.4
Recent anthropogenic changes in Earth’s environments are unprecedented in scale, rate, and intensity. Their impacts are harmful already and all but certain to increase over time, at least in coming decades. But there is nothing unprecedented about the coupling of human social change with human transformation of environments. There is no break in this human-environmental continuum. Human societies have always engineered their ecosystems. And across tens of millennia, human transformation of ecology has always been inherently social: socially learned and socially enacted. We have always lived within, reshaped, and adapted to environments already shaped by our ancestors. Unlike any other species, the human ecological niche, our way of living on Earth, is a sociocultural niche, constructed from the coevolving cultural, material, and ecological inheritances of countless generations across myriad societies interwoven into the fabric of human sociocultural diversity.5 The emergence of ever-larger scales of interconnected human societies and their unprecedented capacities to transform Earth are dual consequences of these longterm evolutionary processes. In the Anthropocene, environmental change is social change, and social change is cultural change. Though social change follows no simple directional timeline through the many regime shifts in societal functioning and environmental transformation (from intensive hunting of megafauna, to agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization), there is no rupture in this relation. Human societies have never been more capable of transforming Earth than they are right now. Yet these unprecedented sociocultural capacities cannot be understood or redirected without connecting them with their deep roots in millennia of sociocultural evolution in societies around the world.6 To break the timeline of Earth history into two parts around 1950 or even 5,000 years ago acts only to obscure the underlying processual and political realities of social-ecological change, which are inevitably continuous, heterogeneous, historically contingent, and evolving.7 Whether and when an “Anthropocene divide” in Earth history might eventually be negotiated among stratigraphers, the question that matters now is not when human societies changed Earth, but why, and whether human societies might yet shape a better Anthropocene than the one we are creating now. The Anthropocene paradigm puts time in our hands. Can this time be reshaped from a narrow crisis of despair and shrinking possibilities into an expansive future of hope and opportunity for both humanity and nonhuman natures?
Fall 2018 $5
Engineering Time Left: “Earthrise” by NASA, with a nod to Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog (1969).
The Anthropocene was not designed. Nor was it built in a day. In clearing land, farming, and developing Earth to sustain our generations, no one set out to create a hotter,
LA+ time/fall 2018 107
Erle C. Ellis
Erle C. Ellis is Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County where he teaches environmental science and landscape ecology. His research investigates the dynamic ecology of human landscapes from local to global scales toward informing sustainable stewardship of the biosphere. Ellis develops tools for global synthesis (GLOBE) and 3D mapping (Ecosynth) and is author of the recently released volume Anthropocene (2018) from the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series.
Time In Our Hands co-designing a better anthropocene
Geography, Environmental Science
A
new “great force of nature” is shifting Earth into a new interval of geological time, an “age of humans,” the Anthropocene.1 Global climate change, widespread pollution, mass extinction, and the loss and reshaping of natural habitats are just a few of the many indicators that human societies have gained the capacity to transform the functioning of an entire planet. For some, this time of unprecedented anthropogenic environmental change must be seen as a “rupture” in Earth history – a clean break from earlier times when human societies lived only within the limits of a natural Earth system which shaped them, and not ever the other way around.2 Others, including the stratigraphers of the Anthropocene Working Group, recognize the continuous nature of anthropogenic environmental change, yet still focus on defining a discrete boundary in time and rock to define the start of an Anthropocene epoch in the middle of the 20th century.3 Others look deeper in time, observing anthropogenic transformations of Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, and climate caused by megafaunal extinctions, land clearing using fire, soil tillage and irrigation, domestications and species introductions facilitated by expanding trade networks, and other increasingly globalized social-ecological transformations that have produced the Earth and world systems of the current time.4
Recent anthropogenic changes in Earth’s environments are unprecedented in scale, rate, and intensity. Their impacts are harmful already and all but certain to increase over time, at least in coming decades. But there is nothing unprecedented about the coupling of human social change with human transformation of environments. There is no break in this human-environmental continuum. Human societies have always engineered their ecosystems. And across tens of millennia, human transformation of ecology has always been inherently social: socially learned and socially enacted. We have always lived within, reshaped, and adapted to environments already shaped by our ancestors. Unlike any other species, the human ecological niche, our way of living on Earth, is a sociocultural niche, constructed from the coevolving cultural, material, and ecological inheritances of countless generations across myriad societies interwoven into the fabric of human sociocultural diversity.5 The emergence of ever-larger scales of interconnected human societies and their unprecedented capacities to transform Earth are dual consequences of these longterm evolutionary processes. In the Anthropocene, environmental change is social change, and social change is cultural change. Though social change follows no simple directional timeline through the many regime shifts in societal functioning and environmental transformation (from intensive hunting of megafauna, to agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization), there is no rupture in this relation. Human societies have never been more capable of transforming Earth than they are right now. Yet these unprecedented sociocultural capacities cannot be understood or redirected without connecting them with their deep roots in millennia of sociocultural evolution in societies around the world.6 To break the timeline of Earth history into two parts around 1950 or even 5,000 years ago acts only to obscure the underlying processual and political realities of social-ecological change, which are inevitably continuous, heterogeneous, historically contingent, and evolving.7 Whether and when an “Anthropocene divide” in Earth history might eventually be negotiated among stratigraphers, the question that matters now is not when human societies changed Earth, but why, and whether human societies might yet shape a better Anthropocene than the one we are creating now. The Anthropocene paradigm puts time in our hands. Can this time be reshaped from a narrow crisis of despair and shrinking possibilities into an expansive future of hope and opportunity for both humanity and nonhuman natures?
Fall 2018 $5
Engineering Time Left: “Earthrise” by NASA, with a nod to Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog (1969).
The Anthropocene was not designed. Nor was it built in a day. In clearing land, farming, and developing Earth to sustain our generations, no one set out to create a hotter,
in conversation with
kathryn gleason sonja dÜmpelmann christophe girot
+ The justification of the study of history is that you can’t adequately interpret the present and anticipate the future without understanding the past. Do you think this is true in the case of contemporary landscape architecture?
the timekeepers
Landscape architecture has an ambiguous relationship to time. On the one hand, by virtue of its connections to the urban development industry, it is inherently futuristic and utopian in its outlook. On the other, landscape architecture’s veneration of place, and its deep memory of the paradisiacal, makes it simultaneously nostalgic. Suspended, as it were, between myths of the past and myths of the future, any landscape architectural work is also expected to absorb the contingency of the here and now. This stretched professional situation is reflected in long-standing pedagogical questions of the relevance and role of history in the field’s educational curricula. To broach this, LA+ posed three questions to landscape historians Kathryn Gleason (Professor of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University), Sonja Dümpelmann (Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design), and Christophe Girot (Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the Architecture Department of ETH Zürich).
Kathryn Gleason: In my teaching and research, I see the temporality of landscape architectural design being less about past/present/future, or modern/traditional, and more about trajectories of different kinds of knowledge. For example, Roman hippodrome gardens might inspire more interesting ways to walk laps, but they have rarely been emulated since Pliny the Younger’s day. Roof gardens, on the other hand, have an exciting past, from detailed technical descriptions of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to Tiberius’ use of them on the Palatine in Rome. After a lapse of two millennia, they have become important again, a trajectory akin to a stone skipping erratically across the water of time. More broadly, we see a more constant trajectory over three millennia of designed landscapes as expressions of economic or religious power, the control of natural processes, and as places for the curated collections for education of the citizenry. In seeing landscape architecture as a ‘new’ discipline, we see landscape design innovation on a short trajectory, rather than in longue durée as our sister disciplines do. Landscape is, as Anne Whiston Spirn has asserted, an ancient language. It is also a set of both intellectual and material practices we may interrogate towards innovation. Sonja Dümpelmann: If we lose our histories we lose ourselves. Analysis, interpretation, and criticism of contemporary landscape architecture would lack depth without historical understanding. The study of history offers explanations and insights that can help us better understand ourselves and others, our and others’ actions and inactions. It offers explanations for why a landscape looks the way it does, functions the way it does, is used the way it is used, is represented the way it is represented. The analysis and interpretation of historic evidence is fundamental in this endeavor, regardless of the age of the landscape and its design. Those who design and shape the land have a lot of power and therefore an ethical responsibility. By understanding how landscapes have been used in the past to subject or exclude people, we can inform the design and construction of more just and sustainable landscapes today and in the future. Without recognition of its history, landscape architecture would quite literally lose its grounding. Although beginning in the late 18th century, literati, philosophers,
in conversation with
kathryn gleason sonja dÜmpelmann christophe girot
+ The justification of the study of history is that you can’t adequately interpret the present and anticipate the future without understanding the past. Do you think this is true in the case of contemporary landscape architecture?
the timekeepers
Landscape architecture has an ambiguous relationship to time. On the one hand, by virtue of its connections to the urban development industry, it is inherently futuristic and utopian in its outlook. On the other, landscape architecture’s veneration of place, and its deep memory of the paradisiacal, makes it simultaneously nostalgic. Suspended, as it were, between myths of the past and myths of the future, any landscape architectural work is also expected to absorb the contingency of the here and now. This stretched professional situation is reflected in long-standing pedagogical questions of the relevance and role of history in the field’s educational curricula. To broach this, LA+ posed three questions to landscape historians Kathryn Gleason (Professor of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University), Sonja Dümpelmann (Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design), and Christophe Girot (Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the Architecture Department of ETH Zürich).
Kathryn Gleason: In my teaching and research, I see the temporality of landscape architectural design being less about past/present/future, or modern/traditional, and more about trajectories of different kinds of knowledge. For example, Roman hippodrome gardens might inspire more interesting ways to walk laps, but they have rarely been emulated since Pliny the Younger’s day. Roof gardens, on the other hand, have an exciting past, from detailed technical descriptions of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon to Tiberius’ use of them on the Palatine in Rome. After a lapse of two millennia, they have become important again, a trajectory akin to a stone skipping erratically across the water of time. More broadly, we see a more constant trajectory over three millennia of designed landscapes as expressions of economic or religious power, the control of natural processes, and as places for the curated collections for education of the citizenry. In seeing landscape architecture as a ‘new’ discipline, we see landscape design innovation on a short trajectory, rather than in longue durée as our sister disciplines do. Landscape is, as Anne Whiston Spirn has asserted, an ancient language. It is also a set of both intellectual and material practices we may interrogate towards innovation. Sonja Dümpelmann: If we lose our histories we lose ourselves. Analysis, interpretation, and criticism of contemporary landscape architecture would lack depth without historical understanding. The study of history offers explanations and insights that can help us better understand ourselves and others, our and others’ actions and inactions. It offers explanations for why a landscape looks the way it does, functions the way it does, is used the way it is used, is represented the way it is represented. The analysis and interpretation of historic evidence is fundamental in this endeavor, regardless of the age of the landscape and its design. Those who design and shape the land have a lot of power and therefore an ethical responsibility. By understanding how landscapes have been used in the past to subject or exclude people, we can inform the design and construction of more just and sustainable landscapes today and in the future. Without recognition of its history, landscape architecture would quite literally lose its grounding. Although beginning in the late 18th century, literati, philosophers,
on site-specific art in a changing environment
on site-specific art in a changing environment
DATE, PAINTING
DANIEL ROSENBERG
M
y favorite picture these days was taken on the streets of Hong Kong by the German photographer Michael Wolf. The photo depicts two vendors—a man, perhaps in his 30s, and a girl, about 12—posing with their wares including 13 paintings convincingly imitating work by the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara hung outdoors on a red and white tiled wall. The man stands between two blue plastic stools, smiling directly into the camera. He is wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, black slacks, and black shoes. The girl sits in a wooden folding chair pointed toward him, while she is turned toward the photographer, engaged but impassive. Inside their stall, behind a raised garage door, are other paintings and miscellaneous items for sale, maybe snacks.
DATE, PAINTING
DANIEL ROSENBERG
M
y favorite picture these days was taken on the streets of Hong Kong by the German photographer Michael Wolf. The photo depicts two vendors—a man, perhaps in his 30s, and a girl, about 12—posing with their wares including 13 paintings convincingly imitating work by the Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara hung outdoors on a red and white tiled wall. The man stands between two blue plastic stools, smiling directly into the camera. He is wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, black slacks, and black shoes. The girl sits in a wooden folding chair pointed toward him, while she is turned toward the photographer, engaged but impassive. Inside their stall, behind a raised garage door, are other paintings and miscellaneous items for sale, maybe snacks.
Constellation Park represents a major departure from conventional cemetery burial. From the relative safety of its speculative state, this project evokes a spectacular vision of the future to encourage community debate about our long-held expectations that the cemetery should be physically separated from the life of the city. The technological and design features of Constellation Park have recently been applied within the landscape of an existing Victorian cemetery as part of a collaborative residency between the Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol and researchers at DeathLAB. The awardwinning project “Sylvan Constellation,” represents the next step in a process of expanding the burial capacity of overcrowded garden cemeteries, via technological and design innovation. In contrast to brand new technological and architectural cemetery landscapes, the existing, overcrowded garden cemetery landscape provides a more difficult prospect for designers. It resists spatial change as it contains cultural meaning that is literally cemented in place by the burial infrastructure. Renewable tenure, or the recycling of graves, has increasingly been discussed as a means to provide additional burial space and to contribute to the long-term sustainability of the cemetery landscape.15 While renewable tenure appears to be a return to the model of grave reuse that was practiced in European churchyards, its management and practice in the contemporary, secular context is quite different. This is due to the greater size of cemetery landscapes, higher density of burials, and the continued cultural importance placed on individual memorialization in today’s society. This means that there needs to be careful consideration given to the processes around
1 Sean Carroll, “The Arrow of Time,” Engineering and Science, Winter (2010): 20–25. 2 ‘The real’ is understood here in the Lacanian sense, not as reality, but as that meaning which escapes the symbolic and which characterizes the chaos of human existence. 3 Richard A. Etlin, “Landscapes of Eternity,” Oppositions 8 (1977): 14–31. 4 Peter Johnson, “The Modern Cemetery: A Design for Life,” Social and Cultural Geography 9, no. 7 (2008): 777–90. 5 Emma Sheppard-Simms & Katrina Simon, “The Institution of Perpetual Memory: The Typology of the Cemetery and the Generative Potential of Renewable Tenure,” in P. Hogben and J. O’Callaghan (eds), Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 32, Architecture, Institutions and Change (Sydney: SAHANZ,2015), 603–15. 6 Julie Rugg, “Defining the Place of Burial: What Makes a Cemetery a Cemetery?” Mortality 5, no. 3 (2000): 259–75. 7 Julie Rugg & Stephen Michael Hollan, “Respecting Corpses: The Ethics of Grave ReUse,” Mortality 22, no. 1 (2017): 1–14.
exhumation and what happens to human remains and monuments once the grave tenure expires.16 From an ontological perspective, renewable tenure instigates an important shift in the conceptualization of what happens to the body after death – from the certainty offered by the perpetual gravesite, to a foregrounding of the fragility and impermanence of the human body. The practice of renewable tenure moves toward a cyclical notion of time in the cemetery where bodily decay is necessarily followed by forgetting, disappearance, and, finally, renewal. However, renewable tenure remains a politically fraught option that continues to face community resistance when it is proposed in existing garden cemeteries.17 Despite continued resistance in the United Kingdom and its former colonies, renewable tenure is currently practiced in many countries throughout the world, including Europe, South America, and Asia, where graves can be recycled in as little as five years following burial.18 Perhaps less visibly, renewable tenure has also been practiced in instances of state burial, for example in collective paupers’ graves or “potters’ fields,” where there tends to be less political resistance to the reuse of graves.19 A notable example of this is Hart Island, located at the western end of Long Island Sound in New York City. Hart Island has a complex history and has been the site of many institutional land uses over time, including a prison camp, quarantine station, hospital, a missile base, and a boy’s reformatory.20 However, since 1868 the island has been used as a mass burial ground for over one million people – primarily
8 There have been multiple studies that discuss shortages in burial space in the American, UK, Australian, South African, Asian, and South American context. See, e.g., Carlton Basmajian & Christopher Coutts, “Planning for the Disposal of the Dead,” Journal of the American Planning Association 76, no. 3 (2010): 305-7; G. Bennett & P.J. Davies, “Urban Cemetery Planning and the Conflicting Role of Local and Regional Interests,” Land-use Policy 42 (2015): 450–59; Lily Kong, “No Places, New Places: Death and its Rituals in Urban Asia,” Urban Studies 49, no. 2 (2012): 415–33. 9 See, e.g., Moksha Tower in India, Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica III in Santos, Brazil, and Martin McSherry’s proposal for the Vertical Cemetery in Oslo. 10 Matthew Au, “Housing the Dead: A Lense through Local Densification Patterns,” Room One Thousand 4 (2016). 11 For work on immortality projects and the connection to questions of mortality, see Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973). 12 Urban Death Project “Home” http://www. urbandeathproject.org/ (accessed July 26, 2017).
Above: Rendering of DeathLAB’s “Constellation Park.”
Constellation Park represents a major departure from conventional cemetery burial. From the relative safety of its speculative state, this project evokes a spectacular vision of the future to encourage community debate about our long-held expectations that the cemetery should be physically separated from the life of the city. The technological and design features of Constellation Park have recently been applied within the landscape of an existing Victorian cemetery as part of a collaborative residency between the Arnos Vale Cemetery in Bristol and researchers at DeathLAB. The awardwinning project “Sylvan Constellation,” represents the next step in a process of expanding the burial capacity of overcrowded garden cemeteries, via technological and design innovation. In contrast to brand new technological and architectural cemetery landscapes, the existing, overcrowded garden cemetery landscape provides a more difficult prospect for designers. It resists spatial change as it contains cultural meaning that is literally cemented in place by the burial infrastructure. Renewable tenure, or the recycling of graves, has increasingly been discussed as a means to provide additional burial space and to contribute to the long-term sustainability of the cemetery landscape.15 While renewable tenure appears to be a return to the model of grave reuse that was practiced in European churchyards, its management and practice in the contemporary, secular context is quite different. This is due to the greater size of cemetery landscapes, higher density of burials, and the continued cultural importance placed on individual memorialization in today’s society. This means that there needs to be careful consideration given to the processes around
1 Sean Carroll, “The Arrow of Time,” Engineering and Science, Winter (2010): 20–25. 2 ‘The real’ is understood here in the Lacanian sense, not as reality, but as that meaning which escapes the symbolic and which characterizes the chaos of human existence. 3 Richard A. Etlin, “Landscapes of Eternity,” Oppositions 8 (1977): 14–31. 4 Peter Johnson, “The Modern Cemetery: A Design for Life,” Social and Cultural Geography 9, no. 7 (2008): 777–90. 5 Emma Sheppard-Simms & Katrina Simon, “The Institution of Perpetual Memory: The Typology of the Cemetery and the Generative Potential of Renewable Tenure,” in P. Hogben and J. O’Callaghan (eds), Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand: 32, Architecture, Institutions and Change (Sydney: SAHANZ,2015), 603–15. 6 Julie Rugg, “Defining the Place of Burial: What Makes a Cemetery a Cemetery?” Mortality 5, no. 3 (2000): 259–75. 7 Julie Rugg & Stephen Michael Hollan, “Respecting Corpses: The Ethics of Grave ReUse,” Mortality 22, no. 1 (2017): 1–14.
exhumation and what happens to human remains and monuments once the grave tenure expires.16 From an ontological perspective, renewable tenure instigates an important shift in the conceptualization of what happens to the body after death – from the certainty offered by the perpetual gravesite, to a foregrounding of the fragility and impermanence of the human body. The practice of renewable tenure moves toward a cyclical notion of time in the cemetery where bodily decay is necessarily followed by forgetting, disappearance, and, finally, renewal. However, renewable tenure remains a politically fraught option that continues to face community resistance when it is proposed in existing garden cemeteries.17 Despite continued resistance in the United Kingdom and its former colonies, renewable tenure is currently practiced in many countries throughout the world, including Europe, South America, and Asia, where graves can be recycled in as little as five years following burial.18 Perhaps less visibly, renewable tenure has also been practiced in instances of state burial, for example in collective paupers’ graves or “potters’ fields,” where there tends to be less political resistance to the reuse of graves.19 A notable example of this is Hart Island, located at the western end of Long Island Sound in New York City. Hart Island has a complex history and has been the site of many institutional land uses over time, including a prison camp, quarantine station, hospital, a missile base, and a boy’s reformatory.20 However, since 1868 the island has been used as a mass burial ground for over one million people – primarily
8 There have been multiple studies that discuss shortages in burial space in the American, UK, Australian, South African, Asian, and South American context. See, e.g., Carlton Basmajian & Christopher Coutts, “Planning for the Disposal of the Dead,” Journal of the American Planning Association 76, no. 3 (2010): 305-7; G. Bennett & P.J. Davies, “Urban Cemetery Planning and the Conflicting Role of Local and Regional Interests,” Land-use Policy 42 (2015): 450–59; Lily Kong, “No Places, New Places: Death and its Rituals in Urban Asia,” Urban Studies 49, no. 2 (2012): 415–33. 9 See, e.g., Moksha Tower in India, Memorial Necrópole Ecumênica III in Santos, Brazil, and Martin McSherry’s proposal for the Vertical Cemetery in Oslo. 10 Matthew Au, “Housing the Dead: A Lense through Local Densification Patterns,” Room One Thousand 4 (2016). 11 For work on immortality projects and the connection to questions of mortality, see Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973). 12 Urban Death Project “Home” http://www. urbandeathproject.org/ (accessed July 26, 2017).
Above: Rendering of DeathLAB’s “Constellation Park.”