ORO Editions

[Marc Treib]

In Genesis it is written, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered into one place, so that the dry land may appear. . . . And it was so” [1-1].1 Although water is said to still occupy two-thirds of our planet’s surface, we live primarily on the land, on terra firma. In making landscape architecture, this land—topography—is primary in all but the most unusual of commissions. Earth is the surface upon which we work, and earth is the material with which we begin our designs. As soil, it provides the nutrients necessary for vegetal life. As a medium for landscape design, it is shaped, excavated, piled, and graded into varied levels and specific forms. Cutting and filling are primary acts in making almost every landscape. Although perhaps instigated by pragmatic concerns, grading inherently constitutes a sculptural act enfolding both need and expression. Today’s landscape architect emulates what in the Beginning represented only divine intervention. As proclaimed in George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, modeling the land was part of the Creation: “Every valley shall be exalted: Every mountain and hill made low, the crooked straight, the rough places plain.” If not quite to the same extent, the landscape architect also intervenes by reshaping the land, according to a plan.2 At times humans do play God and make their own land, however; Venice and much of the Netherlands provide excellent examples of this form of creation. When asked what plans had been made for the architecture and landscape of the recently constructed Ijmeer housing development in Amsterdam, Dirk Sijmons responded: “We don’t have any specific plans as yet; we have to finish designing the land first.”3 A related story involves Máxima, or Leidsche Rijn Park designed by West 8, also in the Netherlands, whose construction began in 1997. On a bicycle tour on the park’s loop path when construction was still underway, West 8 principal Adriaan Geuze pointed to the sand and earth piled where the then-dammed river would eventually flow and told me: “The Rhine will be over there, but we haven’t finished making it yet” [1-2].4 Or consider the seemingly natural landscape of New York’s Central Park that in actuality demanded the complex conversion of diverse terrains to shape a landscape to accommodate social use, traffic, address environmental demands, and provide water storage. The Olmsted-Vaux design for the park bundled all those needs within a landscape that appears to have survived from some primordial era, long before Manhattan was settled by Europeans. Not so, not at all. From these historical references and contemporary anecdotes we understand that land can be made as well as remade, and that the form of that land is consequential.

While we often consider land a static entity, it is in fact an active material continually reshaped by environmental forces and human efforts. Sand dunes, whether those of the great African deserts or the anomalous Grand Dune du Pilat in southwestern France, are always on the move [1-3]. Mountains erode; their sediment and debris fill estuaries and rivers or are carried to the sea. Displaced by glaciers, uncounted tons of rock, soil, and rubble may travel hundreds, even thousands of miles. Ultimately, then, we recognize that land is created through explosion, erosion, and sedimentation, by building up and wearing down, by inorganic and organic processes and through human intervention. The Grand Canyon in Arizona may be America’s most dramatic exemplar of erosion, but it has resulted from forces and processes that act upon all land, although their resulting forms are rarely so spectacular [1-4].

Animate yet nonhuman activities also remake the land. Animals dig holes to bury food, others make burrows for habitat, or some, such as ants and termites, build structures that can rise meters above the ground. A beaver dam can instigate the inundation of vast areas of territory, modifying local ecosystems to a significant degree. The human transformation of the land, then, is but the culmination and perhaps most rapid and consequential of the geologic and animal processes. Humans possess the means to effect major transformations in a short period of time; occasionally, we determine the need and exert our will. We do not always make these decisions wisely, however, as the 1930s attempt to build the Cross-Florida Barge Canal clearly revealed: an unfortunate example of bad digging.5

Humans reshape the land for environmental management by blocking the wind; trapping the sun; and storing, stifling, and redirecting the flow of water. By modifying the land we address functional needs such as transportation and defense, and spiritual needs such as worship, burial, and remembrance. While the scales of these applications may vary to an exponential degree, the acts remain basic: digging, piling, and shaping singly or in combination.