The Landscape Project

Edited by Richard J. Weller and Tatum Hands

Animals

Richard Weller

The Landscape Project is a collection of essays by the landscape architecture faculty at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, long considered a leading institution in the field of landscape architecture. This collection covers topics such as food, biodiversity, water, plants, energy, public space, politics, mapping, practice, and representation and serves as essential reading for students and professionals wishing to engage with the full scope of today’s landscape. These essays radically expand the purview of landscape architecture.

Contributors

Richard J. Weller is the Meyerson Chair of Urbanism and professor and chair of Landscape Architecture and executive director of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published eight books and over 120 single-authored academic papers. He is also creative director of the interdisciplinary journal of landscape architecture LA+ Journal

Dr. Tatum L. Hands is a lecturer and editor-in-chief of LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

Other contributors

Frederick Steiner, Sean Burkholder, Christopher Marcinkoski, Sarah A. Willig, Karen M’closkey, Keith Vandersys, Sonja Dümpelmann, Rebecca Popowsky, Sarai Williams, Lucinda Sanders, Billy Fleming, James Billingsley, Robert Gerard Pietrusko, Ellen Neises, Matthijs Bouw, Valerio Morabito, Nicholas Pevzner, and David Gouveneur

ISBN 978-1-954081-42-0

Title: The Landscape Project

Size: 5” x 7” Portrait

Pages: 300pp

Binding: Flexibound, faux leather

Publication Date: Fall 2022

ISBN: 978-1-954081-42-0

Price: $35.00

World Rights: Available to create place, make space, and shape gardens and landscapes of various types has always been an indicator of our relationship with nonhuman nature at large. Plants are therefore also the subject of and the result of culture, as the terms agriculture, viticulture, arboriculture, and floriculture attest. In landscape architecture plants are both nature and culture. They sit squarely within what the early professional landscape architects described as a synthesis of agriculture, horticulture, and forestry as well as engineering and architecture.

In landscape architecture plants are more than a resource that can be harvested to provide medicine and drugs, food, and energy. They are also more than building materials and creators of space, and they provide more than what today are often called ecosystem services – the remediation of soil and water, the protection against soil erosion, the cooling of air, filtering of dust, buffering of sound, and the sequestering of carbon. Besides these functions, in landscape architecture plants are used to lift the human spirit, provide pleasure and psychological well-being, and foster identity. They are chosen and arranged for their form, sound, texture, color, smell, rhythm, and meaning. Oftentimes, landscape architecture is at its best when it employs plants to fulfill multiple of these functions and to achieve what the ancient Latin writer Horace in relation to poetry called the dulce utili – a mix of pleasure and utility.

This concept, in other contexts described as the combination of art and science, is one of the bedrocks of landscape architecture, cited in particular by 18th-century British landscape gardeners. It has also given rise to cultural technologies including Vegetationstechniken, literally “vegetation technologies,” used in the shaping of the land. An ancient example is the Etruscan and then Roman planting practice of training vines on and between trees described by Pliny the Elder and other Latin writers as “married vines,”1 and famously represented in a mural excavated in the late 19th century at Pompeii’s casa dei Vettii.2 Quite fittingly, in this ancient fresco small cupids parks and the faux naturalism of 20th- and early-21st-century zoological enclosures. The systematic animal is that which is subsumed into landscape planning based on landscape ecology. This is the landscape of corridors, patches, conservation easements, and protected areas planned according to multi-species networks and wildlife population dynamics. Finally, the social animal relates to design that seeks “cohabitation and collaboration where humans play a less than dominant role” and to unsettle “the logic of nature and culture on which many conservation ideas were privileged.”29 In other words, designing for the social animal means bringing contemporary landscape architecture and HAS together in challenging the exceptionalism of the human subject. And since the act of design is typically considered a quintessential feature of that exceptionalism, it means that the way in which we design must itself be questioned.

This was the premise of the LA+ CREATURE design competition held by the Weitzman School of Design’s flagship journal LA+ in 2020. The 258 entries received provide insights into how designers around the world are currently thinking about the status of the animal in their work.30 Instead of trying to squeeze these entries into Klosterwill’s categories (scenic, systemic, and social), I propose an aesthetically more suggestive taxonomy of Rewilds,

Sculpture Park in New York that provides safe passage for migrating salamanders. As they move through the superhighway they trigger a sensor that sends tweets to humans such as, “Hi Honey, I’m heading home.”15

In literature, perhaps best known is Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2014 book The Sixth Extinction, which outlined the loss of biodiversity in a way that caught the public’s attention and became a bestseller.16 In two more recent books—Being a Beast17 by the philosopher and veterinarian Charles Foster and Goat Man18 by Thomas Thwaites—the authors regale their respective attempts to not only live with but also live like their animal subjects. Eating worms and digging burrows, Foster temporarily “became” a badger. He has also lived as an otter, an urban fox, a red deer, and a swift. For his field work Thwaites disguised himself as a goat replete with custom-made prosthetics to walk on all fours so as to be accepted into a wild goat community.

So, what about the status of the animal in design culture? Apart from the established genre of designing zoological enclosures that can only reiterate or disguise the domination of the human gaze, that animals would even be considered a subject of design outside of zoos has been, until recently, uncommon. Consequently, MVRDV’s provocative “Pig City,” a high-rise pig farm designed in 2001 came as something of a shock.19 But here the issue was not so much one of animal rights or a concern with human identity in relation to animals, rather it was one of pragmatically reducing the sprawling footprint of Dutch pork production. From the animal’s perspective it likely matters naught whether the concrete floor plate of the slaughterhouse is single or stacked. As Temple Grandin, an animal behaviorist with an uncanny ability to empathize with ruminants, highlighted, what matters is the animal’s experience in that slaughterhouse. She designed a new, more “humane” way of guiding cattle through the horrors of the modern abattoir to their endpoint.

We prefer of course to look at picturesque landscapes with wild animals, especially from the comforts of our living rooms or from designer hideaways.

Modeling

Karen M'Closkey & Keith VanDerSys

Silt Sand Slurry

Dredging, Sediment, and the Worlds We Are Making