disused oil drilling operation and the whole northern part of the lake is completely useless. I’m interested in bringing a landscape with low profile up, rather than bringing one with high profile down. The macro aggression that goes into certain _______earthworks_______ doesn’t interest me.
GP
There’s no need to choose, then, a nice landscape.
RS
Beauty spots, they call them. Nature with class.
GP
That’s exactly what some groups of architects are doing. They are doing photo-montage (not real) proposals on conceptual architecture and they have often to choose very beautiful or very famous landscapes, postcards landscapes, in a way which will support their idea. The fundamental position of putting a light under a painting to light it.
RS
Or put a balloon tent structure on a landscape that’s already cultivated. I think that should be avoided. l’m not interested in that kind of thing... World’s Fair kind of architecture. It suggest the future that will never come... I’m more interested right now in things that are sort of sprawling and imbedded in the landscape rather than putting an object on the landscape.
GP
l’m not avoiding anything which is in the landscape, but in an urban landscape. Because for me it’s the only place, as you were saying about Sonsbeek, where you can make something more social and less esthetic.
RS
Well, New York itself is natural like the Grand Canyon. We have to develop a different sense of nature; we have to develop a dialectic of nature that includes man... A kind of “virgin”, beauty was established in the early days of this country and most people who don’t look too hard tend to see the world through postcards and calendars so that affects their idea of what they think nature should be rather than what it is. 71