ORO Editions

protect and preserve the sacred. The kofun, the circular or keyhole-shaped burial mounds of seventh-century Japan, still dot areas of the Yamato plain between Kyoto and Osaka. Constructed in staged layers, the mounds have served to protect the imperial remains while their impressive elevation above the ground plain in itself bestowed significance on their sacred deposits. Soil was thus a medium to ensure a presence in eternity. The pyramids at Giza in Egypt, or those constructed by several cultures in Mesoamerica, represent the extreme efforts in this class and call into question at what point piles of earth faced with stone are more fairly regarded as architecture rather than earthworks.

On a smaller scale is the memorial knoll at Woodland Cemetery in Enskede, outside Stockholm, the work of architects Sigurd Lewerentz and Gunnar Asplund [1-12; see also 7-10, 7-11]. Much of the power of this moving landscape, whose design spanned 1915 through 1940, results from the subtle management of its grading. The ground of the cemetery’s central meadow is formed as a single sweep of earth and lawn, while the architecture of the three chapels at its limit appears to stiffen the edge of the pine forest, almost as if a retaining wall. These sites demonstrate that the two basic acts of adding and subtracting acts that always reform and transform govern all our interventions on and into the surfaces of the Earth.

Shaping

Piling and digging are inherently interrelated acts. Between them, though to some extent requiring both, is the reshaping of the land. Many works in this topographic category are functionally based: terracing a hillside for building construction or cultivation, or flattening hills to facilitate urban development, as was the case in making Seattle or Rio de Janeiro in the modern period. At the eighteenth-century Middleton Place plantation outside Charleston, South Carolina, the existing riverbank and slope were recontoured as a series of terraces to more smoothly link the plantation’s main house with the Ashley River, the principal point of arrival and departure [1-13]. Two earthen moles embraced plots of river land converted to rice growing, while providing the transition between water and land. It should be noted that at the time of their construction mechanical earth movement had yet to exist, and as in innumerable related stories throughout history from around

1-13

Middleton Place. Charleston, South Carolina, late eighteenth century. Terracing seen across the former rice fields.

[Marc Treib]

1-14

Terraced vineyards. Maia, São Miguel, Azores, Portugal. [Marc Treib]