interior design vs third landscape

land scape architecture

interior design product vs “the third landscape�

Prof. Antonio di Campli

USAC, Turin, 26 june 2012

Two opposing ideas of conceiving garden design Interior design is a multi-faceted practice in which creative and technical solutions are applied within a structure to achieve a built interior environment. Designs are created in response to and coordinated with the building shell and acknowledge the physical location and social context of the project.

The “Third Landscape” designates the sum of the space left over by man to nature alone. Included in this category are left behind (délaissé) urban or rural sites, transitional spaces, neglected land (friches).It is the reversal of the idea of enclosed space.

James Corner (1961) Garden Design as Interior Design

What will grow here?

The Field Operations with Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, Olafur Eliasson, Piet Oudolf and Buro Happold, High Line, New York

Design principle keep it: simple / wild / quiet / slow Preserve: sight lines the structure wild / existing plant species typical railings slow experience unusual and found conditions industrial presence at the street level

Gilles Clément (1943) The “Third Landscape”

The Third Landscape The Third Landscape - an undetermined fragment of the Plantary Garden -designates the sum of the space left over by man to landscape evolution - to nature alone. Included in this category are left behind (délaissé) urban or rural sites, transitional spaces, neglected land (friches), swamps, moors, peat bogs, but also roadsides, shores, railroad embankments, etc. To these unattended areas can be added space set aside , reserves in themselves: inaccessible places, mountain summits, non-cultivatable areas, deserts; institutional reserves: national parks, regional parks, nature reserves.

Compared to the territories submitted to the control and exploitation by man, the Third Landscape forms a privileged area of receptivity to biological diversity. Cities, farms and forestry holdings, sites devoted to industry, tourism, human activity, areas of control and decision permit diversity and, at times, totally exclude it. The variety of species in a field, cultivated land, or managed forest is low in comparison to that of a neighbouring « unattended » space..

From this point of view, the Third Landscape can be considered as the genetic reservoir of the planet, the space of the future…..

Viewing the Third Landscape as a biological necessity, conditioning the future of living things, modifies the interpretation of territory and enhances areas usually looked upon as negligible. It is up to the political body to organize ground division in such a manner as to assume responsibility for these undetermined areas, tantamount to concern for the future.

The Third Landscape is of interest to the planning professionals, the designer, led to include in his project an unorganized space or to designate as public amenity unattended areas created, voluntarily or not, by all land use.

The term Third Landscape derives its name from a landscape analysis of the site of Vassivière in the Limousin ordered by the “Centre d’Art et du Paysage of Vassivière” in 2003. The study indicated the binary character of the area: one side in the shade with forestry holdings, essentially Douglas Firs, a landscape under control of the forestry expert; on the other side, light, with cattle and pasture land, principally devoted to cattle fodder, a landscape under the surveillance of an agricultural engineer. Although the shade/light mass apparently covers the entire area, there is a hidden element. An analysis of existing species indicates that their limited number does not correspond to the average to be expected in the space analyzed. A third territory in Vassivière , composed of moors, peat bogs, riparian forest, steep embankments, road ditches and shoulders, serves as a receptacle for the varieties chased from the cultivated areas, capable of subsisting in the climate and on the land.

The term Third Landscape does not allude to the Third World, but to the Third Estate. It is a referral to Abbé Siéyès’ question: « What is the Third Estate? Everything-What role has it played to date? -None-What does it aspire to?

-Something ».

Mandala Garden, Turin, 2010 (via Giordano Bruno, 31, PAV) On May 27 2010, PAV inaugurated Jardin Mandala a garden on the building’s walkable rooftop designed by the French gardener, landscape designer, botanist and writer, Gilles Clément (Paris, 1943). Jardin Mandala is a sitespecific garden designed on the principles of symbiosis that consists of 1600 plants covering 500mq to form a Mandala, traditionally made from sand and pigments to emphasize the delicacy and impermanence of existence.

There are nine varieties of sedums and graminaceous plants distributed in lots of little beds of Pozzolana (crushed bricks and volcanic rock) in repeated sequences and divided by gravel and wood walkways, in two points there are drawings by Clément’s engraved into cement which represent the natural cycle of energy flows in trees grass. The aesthetic harmony of Clément’s project however is not the focal point, the choice of plants and peat were intentional due to their particular characteristics: adaptability to arid weather conditions; low water intake and low maintenance.

Jardin Mandala auto-regulates itself.

Jardin Mandala as Clément explains represents: ‘both the container and the content’ and is part of a deeper discourse that seeks to engage people in the biosphere as a systemic whole, this philosophical approach to gardening lies in his belief that cultivating the garden (earth) ensures the survival of the gardener (man), and as we have run out of planet to exploit in this context the garden becomes the best medicine for the current global crisis. According to Clément there is significant potential in the abandoned industrial sites of cities, which he refers to as the ‘third landscape’, as they provide refuge for natural diversity and represent unique eco-systems of which humans are a co-dependant part.

Jardin Mandala in the middle of PAV’s wild parkland and surrounded by industrial buildings, high rise condos and busy roads, is a green oasis, an autonomous garden, a space for reflection, an invitation to regain ecological consciousness and an excellent start in the process of giving cities back to nature.

Indecision, instability, biologic nomadism, “permitted practices of non-organization”, contiguity, uneven evolution, non-productivity: new positive values ​​within a biological concept, not economical, of the territory. some antinomies:

Open / Closed.

In the Manifesto of the Third Landscape ClĂŠment explores the themes and questions yet expressed in The planetary garden, in which he proposed the representation of the planet as a garden.

With this expression, Clement created a juxtaposition between opposite dimensions, translating the word garden from the original meaning of enclosed space (from garten, fence), to that of system.

It is the reversal of the idea of hortus conclusus: If this expressed the nature ordered by man as opposed to the external vacuum, to the wild and hostile nature outside the walls, now is the vacuum, the little space left between walls and walls, to attract our care; now it is the spreading of the walls, boundaries, fences, (the global city, the organized world) to scare. The garden is in this way the response to the redefinitions of the urban question. If the urban park was invented for the city of the nineteenth century, the planetary garden is the garden of the global city.

Liquid / Solid state.

The set of residues that form the Third Landscape acts as a connecting and vivification element between the voids of the human activities. These residual places tend to a liquid state, it never long retain a shape, they change, overflow, and the more they assume the character of a liquid material, the more they are resistant to being recycled, that is governed.

Traditional tools of heritage management (monitoring, protection, definition od limits) can not be used without setting aside their qualities: it is a vision far non-patrimonial, non-institutional (“not patrimonial good but the space of the future�), which contrast to many current thoughts on the landscape as a space for, local heritage societies, place of performance of memory strategies.

Brooms / Green.

The considerations of Gilles ClĂŠment about residues and the invention of the Third Landscape somehow resemble the discovery of the mountain landscape place in the modern era, the horrid place, the wilderness area, in contrast to the pleasant place: in this case, the discovery of waste places, with no purpose, as opposed to places that have a defined value in use.

The residues are “broom spaces�, using a metaphor from Leopardi, a frontier land, a place of hybridization of different species, and the mixture is the planetary engine of biological evolution. Clement takes the side of polytheism against plant monoculture of english lawn.

Brassage / Parklife.

In the confrontation between biological evolution and economic evolution is the political value of the vision of Gilles Clément. The concept of landscape was created as a tool to control the movement of spatial patterns, and therefore is not neutral: corresponds to a selection of elements and values of the territory (social groups and / or economic, natural and man-made forms, local identities) according to a dominant model.

John Barrell talks about the dark side of the landscape, referring to the imposition of a vision, a way of reading and perception of space, belonging to a particular social class, which tends to exclude those of other social groups; for Gilles Clément we can talk about the luminous side of the landscape, since the third landscape is a non-exclusive, but inclusive model, it is a “fragment of a shared collective consciousness” based on planetary mixing (brassage) that is the origin of ecological functioning and ecosystemis wealth. .

The Third Landscape has no scale, or rather it has it all, from the microscopic to the satellite one.

ClĂŠment writes of the necessity to get used to the recognition of the Third Landscape, and, consequently, to handle it. Because the institutional forms of spatial control tend to be divided into sectors and areas, and to oppose to free transformations. to recognize the Third Landscape means to leave spaces indecision, introducing entropy as a variable, and considering the absence of moral, social or political regulation, not necessarily in a negative way.