Environmental Readings 2016

Environmental Readings

2016

Editors Editors Plumeria Plumeria J. J. Alexander, Alexander, Anna Anna Nau Nau and and Doug Doug Norman Norman

csd

Center for Sustainable Development Center for Sustainable Development

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Environmental Readings 2016

Table of Contents

Editors Plumeria J. Alexander Anna Nau Doug Norman

Foreword

Frederick Steiner 4

© 2016 Center for Sustainable Development Published by: Center for Sustainable Development The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture 310 Inner Campus Drive B7500 Austin, TX 78712-1009 Designed by Plumeria J. Alexander All rights reserved. Neither the whole nor any part of this paper may be reprinted or reproduced or quoted in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or here-after invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without accompanying full bibliographic listing and reference to its title, authors, publishers, and date, place and medium of publication or access.

Cover Photo: The Villa Medici del Belcanto, part of the Medici Villas and Gardens of Tuscany World Heritage Site in Italy (Wikimedia Commons).

Part I: Environmental Theorists Charles Eliot and Origins of Cultural Landscape Preservation

Anna Nau 7 Kongjian Yu: Scientist, Designer, Educator in Landscape Architecture

Haoyang Li 15 Lady Bird Johnson: The “Instinct for Beauty” in Landscape Conservation

Plumeria J. Alexander 21 Luis Barragan: Imagined Landscapes for Modern Urban Life

David Sharratt 28 Poetry, Painting, and the Humanized Landscape: Charles Eliot’s Vision of Landscape Architecture.

Doug Norman 38 Part II: Examination of Landscape Theory Advancing Cultural Landscape Preservation: Charles A. Birnbaum and Modernist Urban Landscapes

Anna Nau 52 Landscape Urbanism: Study in the Theory

Haoyang Li 61 Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP Cycles: Performance-based Landscape Design and the Portland Park Sequence

Doug Norman 68 The Spirit in the Science, The Ancient in the Modern: Visions of Spiritual Ecology

Plumeria J. Alexander 78

How Art Has Informed Landscape

Maria P. Navarrete Garcia 90 Part III: Emerging Landscape Theories Is Landscape Film?: An Essay on Memory and Representations

Jason Melling 98 Is Landscape Heritage?

Anna Nau 104 Is Landscape Performance?

Doug Norman 116 Design Landscape as Place

Haoyang Li 123 Camillo Sitte: Space, Enclosure, Tradition and the Healthy Modern City

David Sharratt 129 Divine Love, A Manifestation in Nature

Plumeria J. Alexander 140

Foreword Frederick Steiner

Dean and Paley Professor, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia A long, deep green thread exists in American literature from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman through Herman Melville and William Carlos Williams and on to Terry Tempest Williams, Wendell Berry, and Colson Whitehead. This literature has influenced how we perceive our environments and, in the process, many planners, designers, and conservationists, including Frederick Law Olmsted, Jane Addams, Aldo Leopold, Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg, and Anne Whiston Spirn.

My University of Texas at Austin Environmental Readings courses traced this thread and its effects on how we shape our landscapes through design and planning.

The readings in the course focus on green literature as well as design theorists and theories. Three of the most important theorists in environmental planning and landscape architecture are Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., Charles Eliot, and Ian McHarg. The senior Olmsted pretty much created the field of landscape architecture, adapting the English pastoral aesthetic for the rapidly urbanizing North American continent to address pressing urban issues. Arguably, the planning profession in the United States also began with the senior Olmsted. Charles Eliot was a protégé of Olmsted’s. Eliot pioneered the use of comprehensive, scientific landscape inventories; originated the concept of land trusts; and designed the first metropolitan regional open-space plan. Educated in both landscape architecture and city planning, Ian McHarg influenced both fields in the late twentieth century.

He urged us to better understand natural processes and how people use space.

Current theories in environmental planning and landscape architecture addressed by the Environmental Readings list include: frameworks for cultural landscape studies, the future of the vernacular, ecological design and planning, sustainable and regenerative design, the languages of landscapes, and evolving views of landscape aesthetics and ethics.

I taught Environmental Readings each spring at the University of Texas at Austin and will continue to do so at Penn. I inherited the Environmental Readings seminar from my Arizona State colleague Laurel McSherry (now at Virginia Tech) when she went on sabbatical with a Rome Prize. At Texas, I reworked the course on Laurel’s inspirational foundation to make it my own. Mostly, landscape architecture and planning students have enrolled. However, I have also had architecture, history, public administration, geography, sustainable design, and urban design students

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take the course. Every year or two, I choose a different, recently published book, usually a novel, to conclude the semester. For instance, this semester I assigned Timothy Egan’s The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America as well as a less typical selection, Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the environment and human ecology Laudato Si’. I plan on using Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad next spring when I will offer the course for the first time here at Penn.

The essays that follow are by students who were in the class in the spring of 2016 and emerged out of spirited and collegial exchange in the seminar meetings.

The collection of essays Is Landscape… ? provided an open question framework for exploring how we might understand “nature” and the built environment in a rich variety of ways. By examining topics such as cultural preservation, spiritual ecology, space/place, performance, dance, film, urbanism, heritage, tradition, and innovation, several related threads emerged over the course of the semester and are represented in the essays collected in this volume. The insight shared across the conversation presented in these pages is that landscapes are fundamentally inseparable from the people who observe, experience, study, shape, and inhabit them.

August 22, 2016

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Charles Eliot and Origins of Cultural Landscape Preservation Anna Nau Charles Eliot (1859-1897) was one of America’s pioneering landscape architects and is credited as the founder of regional planning (Figure 1). He studied under Frederick Law Olmsted, the country’s first self-proclaimed landscape architect, later becoming his business partner. For the field of historic preservation, Eliot should also be considered a central figure. As a vocal advocate for the protection of significant historic and natural landscapes in and around New England, Eliot was instrumental in the 1891 creation of the Massachusetts Trustees of Public Reservations, the first statewide preservation organization in the United States. Greatly influenced

by English promoters of landscape and architectural preservation, he played a central role in the growing awareness of the cultural and historical significance of American landscapes. In doing so, Eliot laid the foundations for cultural landscape preservation in the United States.

Opposite: Portrait of Lady Bird Johnson, 1978, in front of Lyndon Baines Johnson Ranch (Wikimedia Commons).

Since the 1990s, theorists and practitioners of historic preservation have increasingly recognized the significance of cultural landscapes as part of our historic built environment. The National Park Service defines a cultural landscape as “a geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources and the wildlife or domestic animals therein, associated with a historic event, activity, or persons or exhibit other cultural or aesthetic values.”1 The concept of cultural landscapes – which includes historic sites, designed landscapes, vernacular landscapes, and ethnographic landscapes – expands the understanding of what we consider historic or Figure 1. Portrait of Charles Eliot culturally significant and therefore worthy of from the frontispiece of (Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect preservation. While early preservation theorists published in 1902). of the late nineteenth century did not use the term “cultural landscape,” many embraced such a concept in their writing and advocacy for historic buildings, sites, and landscapes deemed worthy of protection or commemoration. Historic (or architectural) and natural (or landscape) preservation

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efforts were generally not distinguished as separate causes. As Michael Holleran suggests, they were, in fact, “kindred campaigns and often attracted the same individuals.”2 Charles Eliot’s efforts to protect historic landscapes and natural areas in Massachusetts should be seen within this ideological atmosphere of the nascent preservation movement at the end of the nineteenth century.

Charles Eliot was born into an educated, artistic, and elite Massachusetts family.

His father, Charles W. Eliot, was a professor of mathematics and chemistry at Harvard College when his son was born, later taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and eventually became President of Harvard University. Eliot’s mother, Ellen Peabody Eliot, was a “lover of nature” as well as an amateur artist.

Although she died when Eliot was only ten years old, she likely influenced her young son’s interest in nature, particularly during their trips through Europe in the 1860s.3 Together with his father and younger brother Samuel, Eliot spent ample time outdoors, camping around New England and sailing along its coastline.

Eliot suffered from “melancholic withdrawals,” so much of the family’s outdoor pursuits were aimed at strengthening Eliot’s physical and psychological wellbeing.

The historian Keith Morgan has credited Eliot’s early interactions with the New England countryside as shaping him into a “landscape wanderer” and “connoisseur of landscape forms.”4

Figure 2. Eliot’s sketches of English barn types (Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, 1902).

It was during a tour of Europe in 1885-1886 that Eliot first encountered contemporary ideas of cultural landscape preservation. This tour was devised as a part of his professional training. Since no formal education in landscape architecture existed at the time, Eliot’s preparation for professional practice included taking a number of courses in agriculture and horticulture at Harvard and completing a formal apprenticeship with Frederick Law Olmsted. At the end of his apprenticeship, Eliot set off for England.5 Journals from his travels through Europe reveal a fascination with everyday places, buildings, and landscapes, not simply the large parks and estates that were of interest to a young landscape architect. Describing his time in London, Eliot notes,

The streets are always interesting; there are so many more marked types of men and women, houses, vehicles, and buildings, than in our towns. But the suburbs and the country I like so much better, – the great Elms, the Lebanon Cedars, the half-timbered houses, the parish churches, the quaint village streets, the lanes and hedges, the footpaths, the occasional 8

parks, the soft greenswards, the soft atmosphere, and the long shadows.6 It was the way these individual aspects of the landscape produced a unified effect that was of interest. As he moved from England to France and throughout the Continent, Eliot carefully recorded his broad impression of a place, from the major public buildings, to small gardens, to the layout of streets, to the local dress (Figure 2). Significantly, he also often compared the places he visited to his native New England, noting its unique characteristics (Figure 3). In reading his accounts, one gets a sense of his growing awareness that the individual character of a place is intimately tied to its specific combination of people, culture, and landscape.

Eliot’s writing a few years later makes clear his broad understanding of architecture as the “whole of the external world,” a concept borrowed from William Morris, the leader of the English Arts and Crafts movement and the

Figure 3. Eliot’s comparison of the open spaces of Paris, London, and Boston (Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, 1902).

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founder of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.7 In England, Eliot met James Bryce and Hardwicke Rawnsley, both active in efforts to protect places of historic or scenic interest in that country.8 Bryce, an influential Liberal politician, was an active outdoorsman, a member of several preservationminded organizations, and a supporter of public legislation aimed at protecting architectural and natural heritage, including the Scottish Mountains Bill. He was also a long-time friend of the Eliot family, having stayed with them on visits to Boston in the early 1880s. Bryce is credited with introducing Eliot to the idea of a private organization that could purchase and protect places of natural and historic significance. A year before Eliot’s sojourn in England, one of Bryce’s associates in the Commons Preservation Society, Sir Robert Hunter, put forth the idea of a voluntary land trust for the protection of noteworthy “open spaces” against incursion from railroad and urban expansion. Hunter’s idea would, a decade later, result in the founding of the English National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty. However, Eliot put the idea into action in the United States first, with the founding of the Trustees of Public Reservations in 1891. Eliot’s journal from July of 1886 mentions his learning of the Commons Preservation Society and Hunter’s initiative.9 A few weeks later, Eliot met with the secretary of the Lakeland Defense Association, Hardwicke Rawnsley. They talked of Rawnsley’s efforts to protect historic scenery in the Lake District from “railway schemes” and Eliot told him about landscape preservation in America at Yellowstone and Niagara Falls.10 When he returned to the United States, Eliot opened his own landscape architecture practice in Boston. Like his mentor Olmsted, he also struggled to define the precise role of his profession to the public. Professional writing quickly became an outlet for Eliot to advocate for the need of landscape architects as mediators between the demands of rapid urban growth and the desire for parks and the need to protect natural beauty.11 In a number of articles for the Garden and Forest publication, Eliot set out his doctrine of landscape architecture and the necessity for more appropriately designed landscapes in urban areas. Tied to this idea was his argument for the importance of preserving the existing places of scenic and natural beauty from the encroachment of private development. Eliot believed that designed landscapes should respond to their specific climate and regional context. In an 1887 essay “Anglomania in Park Making,” he warned against adherence to strict fashions in garden design, accusing Americans of destroying “natural beauty, with the intention of attaining to a foreign beauty” that was inappropriate to local context. Citing his recent travel experiences, Eliot argued that “really beautiful parks of Europe are those which have a character of their own, derived from their own conditions of climate and scene” (Figure 4).12 Eliot’s theory on the regional appropriateness of landscape design was tied to his appreciation of the unique character of certain landscapes. As Eliot’s practice grew, he became more vocal in his calls to protect landscapes of historic or aesthetic 10

Eliot’s plan of the Park at Muskau near the German-Polish border (Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, 1902)

importance around Boston from suburbanization. He believed these places, such as a grouping of ancient trees outside the city known as the Waverly Oaks, should be set aside “just as the Public Library holds books and the Art Museum pictures – for the use and enjoyment of the public” (Figure 5).13 In a public speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1890, Eliot called on Bostonians to safeguard places of natural interest, just as they had rallied several years before to save the Old South Church as a monument to the city’s colonial heritage. He found many like-minded individuals for his cause, notably Olmsted, but also the members of the Appalachian Mountain Club, as well as Dr. Charles S. Sargent, the director of the Arnold Arboretum and publisher of Garden and Forest.14 The following year, their efforts resulted in the state legislature chartering the Trustees of Public Reservations. The Trustees were tasked with securing places of “natural beauty or historical interest” from the threat of urban development.15 For Eliot, the point of preserving these places was for the “active enjoyment of nature.”

He saw scenic landscapes as a critical part of urban culture, not only as places of respite from the city, but also as places of recreation and delight. Keith Morgan emphasizes Eliot’s unique understanding of the cultural importance of parks and rural landscapes, illustrated by his use of the term “scenery” instead of “park” to 11

Figure 5. The Waverly Oaks, c.1924 (Digital Commonwealth, Massachusetts Collections Online)

indicate the cultural and communal character of the places he wanted to preserve.

In his suggestion of the term “trustees” for the organization, he also stressed the public stewardship of the enterprise, articulating his belief that common citizens had the ability and responsibility to both appreciate and protect these places for future generations.16 In landscape and planning history, Eliot’s subsequent involvement with the early development of the Boston Metropolitan Park System is perhaps his most lauded accomplishment. However, his contribution to the shaping of concepts regarding the protection and preservation of cultural landscapes is equally significant. After his tragically early death at age thirty-seven in 1897, Eliot’s father, Charles W. Eliot, became a champion of his son’s causes, including landscape preservation. The senior Eliot published many of son’s writings that included significant discourse on the issue of “scenic preservation,” including the 1898 Vegetation and Scenery in the Metropolitan Reservations of Boston and the 1902 edited autobiography, Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect. During the height of Eliot’s career, when in partnership with Olmsted, he was an influential mentor to other young landscape architects, such as Arthur Shurcliff and Warren Manning. Shurcliff is remembered, along with Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., as a founder of the landscape architecture program at

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Harvard University that the senior Eliot helped to establish in 1900. In the 1930s, Shurcliff also left his stamp on American preservation history as the landscape architect in charge of the colonial revival style restoration of the gardens at Colonial Williamsburg.17 Eliot’s landscape theories helped shape professional and popular ideas about the American landscape. In his short professional life, Eliot left a lasting legacy.

While the Trustees remained a modest organization with only a few land holdings by the time of Eliot’s death, it nonetheless served as a model for several subsequent statewide preservation groups, such as the New York Trustees of Scenic and Historic Places and Objects, founded in 1895. It also served as the model for national-level organization on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably the English National Trust, and eventually, the American National Trust for Historic Preservation.18 It is important to note that is was his English contemporaries, especially Bryce and Rawnsley, who introduced Eliot to the idea of a preservation public land trust. Yet they looked to the Massachusetts group for guidance when founding their National Trust in 1894, nominating a representative from the Trustees for their committee, Eliot’s friend and colleague Dr. Charles S. Sargent. This trans-Atlantic institutional connection, as detailed by Melanie Hall, evidences a specific Anglo-American cultural affinity through the language of landscape heritage. Individuals involved in early preservation initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic looked to each other for advice and support, as Eliot’s efforts show. The British group in particular sought support for their preservation organization from “English-speaking people” abroad by appealing to a broad sense of national identity based on common cultural values.19 While Eliot’s ideas and the terminology he used for indicating the cultural significance of landscapes may have been directly influenced by his English connections, his efforts were aimed at an American public for the benefit of uniquely American scenic landscapes. Eliot’s early concepts of landscape preservation as an integral component of historic preservation had been largely forgotten by the mid-twentieth century, when the National Park Service and other preservation groups began to more systematically recognize historic landscapes, both designed and natural, as historic sites.20 Today, the growing recognition of cultural landscapes and their preservation means that Eliot’s legacy as a cultural landscape preservation pioneer deserves recognition. Eliot’s career “embodied the connection between parks and preservation” that is a central component of historic preservation in the United States.21 Notes Charles A. Birnbaum, ASLA, Preservation Brief 36: Protecting Cultural Landscapes: Planning, Treatment and Management of Historic Landscapes (Washington, DC: Preservation 1

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Assistance Division, National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, 1994), 1 2 Michael Holleran, “America’s Early Historic Preservation Movement (18501930) in a Transatlantic Context,” in Towards World Heritage: International Origins of the Preservation Movement, 1870-1930, ed. Melanie Hall (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2011), 196.

3 Keith N. Morgan, “Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect: An Introduction to His Life and Work,” in Arnoldia 59, no. 2 (Summer 1999), 4.

4 Ibid., 7-8.

5 Ibid., 8; Witold Rybczynski, A Clearing in the Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Century (New York: Scribner, 2003), 354, 370.

6 Charles W. Eliot, Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect; A lover of nature and of his kind. who trained himself for a new profession, practiced it happily, and through it wrought much good (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1902), 59.

7 Morgan, 8, 15.

8 Ibid., 9-10; Eliot, 68; Melanie Hall, “The Politics of Collecting: The Early Aspirations of the National Trust, 1893-1913,” in Transactions of the Royal Historical Society. Sixth Series, Vol. 13 (2003): 353.

9 Hall, 350-53; Eliot, 154.

10 Eliot, 161; Morgan, 10.

11 Eliot, 207, 262.

12 Ibid., 215-16.

13 Ibid., 318.

14 Michael Holleran, Boston’s “Changeful Times”: Origins of Preservation and Planning in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 132.

15 Trustees of Public Reservations, First Annual Report of the Trustees of Public Reservations, 1891 (Boston, 1892), 7.

16 Morgan, 13-15.

17 Elizabeth Hope Chushing, “’The Fading Landscape:’ Arthur A. Shurcliff’s Evolving Perceptions of Landscape Preservation,” in Design with Culture: Claiming America’s Landscape Heritage, ed. Charles A. Birnbaum and Mary V. Hughes (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 83.

18 Holleran, Boston’s “Changeful Times,” 133.

19 Hall, 348-51. James Bryce served as British Ambassador to the United States from 1907-1913 and played major role in building up Anglo-American political relations before the outbreak of the First World War. 20 Holleran, “America’s Early Historic Preservation Movement (1850-1930) in a Transatlantic Context,” 197.

21 Holleran, Boston’s “Changeful Times,” 133.

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Kongjian Yu: Scientist, Designer, Educator in Landscape Architecture Haoyang Li Kongjian is seductive. He is warm, connects well with people, smiles and jokes charmingly. Before you know it, he has roped you into some kind of service to his cause. Or is it to his ego? The two are one, and that seems to make it all okay. Or more than okay.

--William S. Saunders It is only when you have learned enough about ordinary people’s lives that you can design public spaces in harmony with the local culture and people, and the local environment. Come back, poetic site; come back, people’s space; come back, narrative place.

In our new world, survival is at stake.

--Kongjian Yu The Son of “Reactionaries” Today, people know Kongjian Yu as Dr. Yu, Professor Yu, President of Turenscape, Founder and Dean of the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Peking University, one of the most popular contemporary landscape architects in the world. Surprisingly, unlike some of the modern elites in the field of design who grew up in a rich or well-educated family, Yu was raised in a disadvantaged family in a very rural area of South China. Born in 1963 to illiterate farmer parents, Yu experienced an extremely difficult childhood and witnessed the hardship of his family. Yu’s hometown, Dongyu, was a small village of less than 500 hundred people located in Zhejiang Province, China, where his family settled for over two hundred years and he was the 20th generation.1 When Yu was three years old, his family was deprived of their private property in the Cultural Revolution by the ruling classes in the name of supporting socialism and against capitalism. From then on, for ten years, Yu and his family suffered from ridicule, humiliation and hunger on the charge of being “reactionaries.” His parents were frequently forced to sweep the streets and locked up in a cowshed. Yu’s brother wrote a petition letter to the central government of China complaining about what they were suffering, which caused him to be carted off to jail.2 He managed to run away and was forced to confess himself as an “anti- revolutionary” after he returned in a year.3 Yu himself was always punished at school for trifles such as breaking a bottle and was once forbidden to attend the class. All of these challenges he had during his childhood stimulated his strong character as a part of his personality, which explains his later

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ambition.

The Body on A Water Buffalo Yu seemed to be quite optimistic about what happened to his family. He describes his childhood as “normal life” shared by other “reactionaries.”4 The natural environment in his village and the farmland became a refuge where he could gain spiritual consolation and escape from bias and unfairness. By his teenage years he mastered farming techniques learnt from his father. He worked at the rice paddies, patches of sugar cane, corn, and sunflowers and loved the feeling of being surrounded by the vegetables.5 This farming experience provided the earliest education of landscape that later inspired his design of agricultural plants in some of his projects. During that period, he frequently rode a water buffalo to the farm near a creek and a forest while reading some books, which later helped him go to high school and then college. Except for reading, he liked to go deep into the forest for adventure. He would always catch fish in the creek and weasels, and bring back some mushrooms for family dinner.6 However, after he went to high school, the water in the creek was heavily polluted by the large amount of DDT and other chemicals released from the new factories. Trees were cut down for constructing the new town. This phenomenon soon spread across the whole country. Since his early age, Yu understood that the domestic landscape provides not only food for human living but also for recreation and aesthetics. These changes destroyed everything that used to provide the pleasure of getting access to nature for Yu and set the scene for his later environmental concerns and his efforts in ecological study.

From Beijing Forestry to Harvard In 1980, Yu started his new life in Beijing as an undergraduate student leaning Landscape Gardening at Beijing Forestry University, a major separated into specialties in design and horticulture. Not able to pass the drawing test, Yu had to study horticultural science and became a scientist instead of a designer.

However, Yu was deeply interested in designing landscape. Yu’s colleague Dihua Li, a professor in Peking University, said: “Kongjian was highly attracted to traditional Chinese paintings, design drafts on the wall, and English books on the bookshelf he saw in Professor Xiaoxiang Sun’s room. He then started to teach himself painting.”7 Professor Sun, as a respected designer in China who thought of landscape architecture as “a profession for solving social and environmental problems from local to global scales,” inspired Yu using his word “Earth-scape” (later being developed by Yu to ‘’Turenscape’’ as his firm’s name).8 After Yu’s graduation from Beijing Forestry, he studied landscape ecology and geomorphology at Peking University where he broadened his horizon across different disciplines.

From 1987, Yu went back to Beijing Forestry and started pursuing his master’s degree in landscape under the instruction of Professor Youming Chen. Traveling with Chen to different places around the country, Yu started to understand the

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importance of the relationship between landscape and culture. During that period, he was asked to be the translator for a speech by Carl Steinitz from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University (GSD). Steinitz recognized Yu’s talent and encouraged him to study at Harvard. Another of Steinitz’s former students Dr. Allan Shearer (currently an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin) recalls: “Although Yu’s English isn’t so good, he could always express his idea clearly using only a few words.” This could be one of the reasons that Steinitz realized his intelligence.

In 1992, Yu left Beijing Forestry and entered the Doctor of Design Program at the GSD. Here, he was trained by Steinitz’s landscape planning theory which focused on how to approach the design of large landscapes, dealing with questions related to the environmental crisis of our time.9 Steinitz also taught Yu his framework of design including 6 levels: Representation Model, Process Model, Evaluation Model, Change Model, Impact Model, and Decision Model.10 His “heuristic” application of the science of landscape ecology underlies the spatial strategies that Yu would later promote in his own designs.11 In this same year, Yu met Ian McHarg when he came to Harvard as a visiting Professor. McHarg’s ecological thinking in the book Design with Nature (1969) provided great inspiration for Yu’s later work.12 During this period at Harvard, Yu also studied landscape ecology, field study skills with Professor Richard Forman and practiced using Geographic Information System (GIS) under the instruction of Steven Ervin. Before that he didn’t even know how to use a computer. In addition to ecology, Yu mastered the method of combining science with references to inherited cultural wisdom.13 Along with several other Chinese students, Yu helped Steinitz study feng shui and transform it from a superstition in traditional Chinese culture to a scientific method for studying cultural meanings in contemporary landscapes.

The Scientist, Designer, Educator After receiving his degree of Doctor of Design at GSD in 1995, Yu went to the landscape architecture firm SWA Group in Laguna Beach, California. He felt a lack of experience in terms of designing projects. He had never taken any studio courses before and had limited training in drawing design documents using computer techniques. In 1996, Yu met Professor Changdu Chen at Peking University, the “father” of landscape ecology in China, when Chen visited SWA. Chen encouraged Yu to come back to China to realize his dream of solving big ecological problems in a macro scope.14 It was during this time that he recovered his confidence and emerged his responsibility of solving the problems caused by urban sprawl in China.

In 1997, Yu finally decided to return to China. At that time, everybody saw him as a scientist instead of a designer. Surprisingly, he started his own business: he founded his firm Turenscape in 1998, and only one year later, won the design competition for Dujiangyan Square in Sichuan Province. From then on, Yu transformed himself

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from a scientist to a successful designer.

Almost at the same period, his intelligence in organizing, researching and teaching started to unfold. In 1997, he founded the Center of Landscape Planning and Architecture under Peking University’s Geography Department, and developed it to an independent school in 2003 (now the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture).15 Unlike other university-based firms in China, whose works tend to lack innovation due to the restriction of the system, Yu made a smart decision in making his Turenscape independent from the college. In doing so, his firm could be more productive and creative, and at the same time, he could use the fame and income of Turenscape to engage outstanding international faculty and facilities to support the education of the college. Some of his successful students later became faculty members at Peking University or his colleagues at Turenscape.

Different from the traditional landscape education in Beijing forestry that focused on Horticulture, Yu formed his own method of landscape planning in a much larger scale, focusing on ecology and agriculture. This was largely due to the influence of McHarg, Steinitz and Forman. While McHarg had proposed an approach as long as Steinitz’s framework to form a comprehensive inventory of national environmental, ecological information, Steinitz advanced the realization of such inventory based on the application of GIS.16 Similarly, Yu led a team of Peking University researchers who proposed the Negative Approach and National Ecological Security Patterns towards urban development planning, in which landscape is first planned as an ecological infrastructure as well as an urban form maker.17 His theory was a Chinese version of Charles Waldheim’s landscape urbanism thinking --“a disciplinary realignment where landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of urbanism.”18 A lot of his projects have successfully illustrated his idea of planning landscape at the national or regional scale. In 2010, Yu’s original research and landscape planning for Houtan Park, Shanghai, which covered the entire Expo site, extended the consideration far beyond the scope of his final design.19 In addition to his design works, Yu is also a prolific writer. Since 1998, Yu has written hundreds of articles or books to develop the discipline of landscape architecture in China. His own Journal LA China established in 2008 addresses popular topics such as landscape urbanism.20 The Revolutionist of ‘’Big-Foot’’ Aesthetics Most of Yu’s work has been restorative and, more importantly, “productive,” as he says. He describes his philosophy using the metaphor of foot. “For almost 1,000 years, young Chinese girls were forced to bind their feet to shape little feet so they could marry citified elites, since their natural ‘big’ feet were associated with provincial people and rustic life.”21 Today’s urban landscapes, cites and buildings are described by Yu as Chinese girls’ “Little-Foot”, since they reflect the desire and aesthetic of the urban class to become sumptuous, sophisticated and meaninglessly

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bizarre, driven by the current “City Beautiful Movement.”22 Yu himself was once treated as a “Xiangba Lao”, literarily means “Bumpkin”, when he first came to Beijing Forestry without a decent shirt, while other students in his class were much more fashionable. Due largely to his love of farming during his childhood, he never felt inferior but rather insists on his own aesthetics. His students describe him as “an affable person who likes wearing white or red casual shirts and a pair of slippers.”

Just like his daily outfit, Yu describes his philosophy as “big-foot” aesthetics and designing landscape to him is “the art of survival” which is “the art of leveling the earth and irrigating and growing crops; the pleasure of the harvest; and the celebration that follows–useful and beautiful.”23 Yu urges landscape professionals and mayors to create productive landscapes, recycle construction materials, preserve natural patterns and biophysical processes, design landscapes as living systems for survival, as useful infrastructure to capture and filter storm water. His theory breaks from the traditional education of gardening which he describes as designing ornamental gardens, and tries to free landscape architecture into a much broader scope. Due to his activist opinions, he was sometimes criticized by the academics in other universities. However, as Peter Walker describes: “In China, Yu has been able to lead the profession away from planning primarily determined by economic and engineering considerations to built landscapes of the highest conceptual and built beauty--a dream we in the west have rarely achieved.” 24 Notes 1. Saunders, William S., ed., Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2012), 61.

2. Ibid, 61.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid, 62.

6. Ibid, 61.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. Steinitz, Carl. “Landscape Planning: A Brief History of Influential Ideas.” Journal of Landscape Architecture: JoLA (04, 2008): 68-74 10. Steinitz, Carl. “A Framework for Theory Applicable to the Education of Landscape Architects (and Other Environmental Design Professionals).” Landscape Journal 9, no. 2 (10, 1990): 136-143 11. Saunders,145.

12. McHarg, Ian L, Design with Nature (New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1969).

13. Saunders,145.

14. Ibid.

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15. Steiner, Frederick R., “The Activist Educator,” in Designed Ecologies: The Landscape Architecture of Kongjian Yu. ed. William S. Saunders ( Basel: Birkhaüser, 2012), 10616. Ibid.

17. Yu, Kong-jian., Li, Hai-long., and Li, Di-hua, “The Negative Approach and Ecological Infrastructure: The Smart Preservation of Natural Systems in the Process of Urbanization,” Journal of Natural Resources 6 (2008): 937-958.

18. Waldheim, Charles, Landscape as Urbanism, (New York: Princeton University Press, 2016), 16.

19. Saunders,187.

20. Steiner, “The Activist Educator”, 106-115.

21. Yu, Kongjian, “The Beautiful Big-Foot: Toward a New Landscape Aesthetic.”

Arcade 30, no. 2 (04, 2012): 35-37 22. Ibid.

23. Yu, Kongjian, “The Big Feet Aesthetic and the Art of Survival.” Architectural Design 82, no. 6 (11, 2012): 72-77.

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Lady Bird Johnson: An “Instinct for Beauty” in Landscape Conservation Plumeria J. Alexander “The instinct for beauty is an instinct deep in the heart of everyone.”

--Lady Bird Johnson, 19661 Born Claudia Alta Taylor, “Lady Bird Johnson,” by historical accounts, was a lady of moral fortitude, humble, yet strong, thorough, and underneath it all, moved by her heart and soul to make her mark in the field of environmental health and beautification. She helped pass the “Highway Beautification Act of 1965-66, the Clean Rivers Act and the National Preservation Act of 1966, and the Air Quality Act of 1967, The National Trail Systems Act and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, both in 1968.”2 She served as a figurehead for an immense army of emissaries whom she mobilized for the cause of environmental beautification, conservation, and preservation, including school children, homeowners, “woman doers,” wealthy philanthropists, business owners, national committee members, the U.S. Congress, and the President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ).

From Second Lady to First Lady Similar to many figures in landscape architecture, Lady Bird Johnson’s interest in the field developed over the course of time and depth of her life experience. As Second Lady in 1963, Lady Bird accompanied LBJ on his trips representing the Kennedys.

They travelled to over 33 foreign countries, and wherever she went, Lady Bird made note of the landscapes, plants, and trees and even spoke with gardeners, if possible.

At the time, she had not yet determined what her area of focus would be, however, was aware of the enjoyment that these sights afforded her.3 After John F. Kennedy’s assassination and her subsequent change in role from Second to First lady, Lady Bird constrained herself to promoting her husband’s agenda during the interim years before LBJ’s subsequent election. She travelled more, promoting LBJ’s Head Start program, his “unconditional war on poverty,” and visited the poverty-stricken areas of Appalachia and Pennsylvania coal mining towns.4 She kept an audio diary of her time at the White House, in which she recorded her personal thoughts and experiences about her role as First Lady. As she travelled across the country by plane, she remarked that “when you saw the vast scars across the landscape from surface mining, you couldn’t keep from thinking that God had done his best by this country, but Man had certainly done his worst, and now it is up to Man to repair the 21

damage.”5 Her travels, hence, introduced her to landscapes of deep beauty, as well as areas that had been disfigured by scarring development and the effects of poverty.

During the election year of 1964, Lady Bird’s concerns slowly began to coalesce into a recognizable form. This development was in large part due, not only to her travels, but to the people whom she met and socialized with during that year. Lady Bird began holding “Woman Doer Luncheons,” to which she invited prominent women to discuss issues of the day. Jane Jacobs, a grassroots activist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, attended one such luncheon. The First Lady asked her questions about ways to counteract overcrowding in cities, how to make a city beautiful, and listened to Jacobs’ concerns about lack of funding to maintain local parks.6 In addition, during the summer of 1964, Lady Bird went on a trip to see the Indian reservations and the national parks in the region, as well as campaign for the reelections of the Senators of Wyoming and Utah. During this trip, she got to share thoughts with Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior Department and author of The Quiet Crisis, a book chronicling the shrinking of open space, environmental pollution, and visual and auditory blight that was slowly eating up the country’s heritage of natural beauty.7 Those conversations set the foundation for a great working relationship over their similar interests in conservation.8 LBJ’s role in environmental legislation also influenced Lady Bird. John F. Kennedy had expanded the role of the government in conservation leadership by “reassertion of the concept that the federal government has a primary responsibility to exercise its authority on issues involving natural resources and environment” and by supporting higher levels of funding for environmental initiatives.9 Lyndon Johnson’s goal was to create a line of continuity between his policies and John F. Kennedy’s, and therefore considered it his responsibility to carry on Kennedy’s (and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s) legacy by more forcefully creating and supporting environmental initiatives. For Johnson, this was a happy task, as his experience as a youth in the Texas Hill Country was close to his heart: “‘I have a lot of land…and I only wish that all the people could have the chance to experience the same joys I can. I am concerned with the erosion of natural beauty in this country. I know that this is a problem which cuts across many lines.’”10 He was therefore receptive when Secretary Udall urged him to openly support the Wilderness Bill and Water Bill that were currently in Congress.11 The Soul of Lady Bird Being surrounded by people who were a little farther down her future trail clearly had an effect on the Lady Bird. However, the greater significance lies not just in Lady Bird being around interesting thoughts and people, but in her ability to recognize the clues of happenstance that pointed the way to the future. Though

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presented with many meaningful missions, Head Start, reducing poverty, missions related to LBJ’s “Great Society,” Lady Bird made a decision...“During the final weeks of 1964, when she was debating what to emphasize, she decided that ‘the whole field of conservation and beautification’ had ‘the greatest appeal.’”12 Lady Bird was able to listen to the trillings of her soul, and communicate that to others, even before she had decided on a cohesive focus. She spoke of landscape in all of her talks, for instance, commenting on aspects of the landscape, or the hues of the autumn leaves in each city she visited when stumping for her husband.13 Toward the latter end of her career, when asked why she was so interested in the preservation of wildflowers in her work in Austin, Texas, she answered “Joy.”14 These remarks lead me to believe that her strength laid in trusting the feelings of immense joy that being in beautiful landscapes brought to her, sentiments harkening back to the deep appreciation of the beauty and soul of nature, expressed in the writings of both Frederick Olmsted and Ian McHarg. All three figures were influenced by their meanderings in the landscape or wilderness, and allowed the strong feelings embedded in those experiences to guide their future actions.

Lady Bird’s ability to act and speak from the heart was recognized by many, and was indispensible not only for her own career but for LBJ’s as well. She became well known for her ability to deftly answer tough questions, with grace, wit, and heart. In response to hecklers on her four-day whistle-stop train campaign, she responded, “I respect your right to think as you do. Now I’m asking you to be quiet while I finish what I have to say.”15 In fact, she was frequently able to ameliorate fumbled political relationships that stemmed from her husband’s intensely driven, overbearing ways through her well-chosen words.16 To comprehend her personal power, as well as the power she weld within the presidency, the following should be understood: “The Johnsons were a political team from the beginning, often working better together than apart. Lady Bird attended meetings of the Senate and Congress and kept notes on how congressmen and senators stood on the current issues... It has been said that the President took criticism from his wife better than from any of his advisors.”17 Moreover, “It was not easy to ‘discuss’ a difference of opinion with Lyndon Johnson or critique a speech, unless you were Lady Bird, with her quiet unassuming manner and diplomacy.”18 For LBJ to be able to hold in high regard the criticism of the person who knew his deepest flaws is indeed a mark both of the power of Lady Bird’s honest, yet always compassionate communication, LBJ’s deep respect for her intelligence, as well as the strength of their relationship.

First Lady of the Environment In an era when women’s rights and roles were experiencing great change, Lady Bird was clearly working in unchartered territory, both politically and domestically.

Marie Gomes Straight quotes that while some compared Lady Bird to the pioneering former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, she thought of herself as very different. “‘Roosevelt was an instigator, an innovator, willing to air a cause without

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her husband’s endorsement. Mrs. Johnson was an implementer and a translator of her husband and his purposes. She is a WIFE in capital letters.’”19 While this can seem like a diminutive role at first glance, Lady Bird’s was indeed effective principally because she took a back seat to President Johnson, while simultaneously deftly managing strategic relationships from within. She never challenged or threatened the President’s premier role, yet worked within the confines of that space to achieve great things. For instance, she encouraged her husband to support several “farsighted,” landmark environmental bills, through never took legislative credit for herself.20 Lady Bird was able to embody a truly unique role in her tenure as First Lady; a role of which there were no express expectations…privy to all that went on politically, yet professionally responsible for none of it. The freedom to self-define her position allowed her to be the perfect figurehead for an environmental movement that was ambiguous, untested, unchartered, seemingly innocuous at times and at other times highly political. With one foot in politics, another allied with the domestic realm of family and social issues, and another in the realm of affluent philanthropists and businesspeople, Lady Bird could gather national support from a range of varied groups in a way that few others could.

Indeed, Lady Bird strung together many social opposites to achieve her goals. The very notion of “beautification” was ambiguous, yet carried heavy social and political meaning. As a woman in the 1960s, she was the appropriate gender to represent a movement of “beautification,” which rang of things feminine. Yet, the concerns of “beautification” were essentially so much more than cosmetic concerns. It involved not only the planting of flowers and trees, but also, what we today call “‘biodiversity,’ ‘restoration ecology,’ ‘habitat conservation’” and urban-heat mitigation.21 Her role as First Lady also carried the advantage of a press that was perennially interested in what she did, and--having a degree in journalism from University of Texas at Austin herself--she used this power well, inviting the press to every event she created or attended. Through this adroit relationship, she was able to shine the light on the environmental causes of her choice, therefore giving the cause greater visual and literary presence.22 Confluent with the array and complexity of her range of influence was the choice of environmental concerns she took on. Lady Bird arranged the planting of flowers in Washington’s monumental district to increase the effect and beauty of those parts, echoing the City Beautiful movement of the earlier part of the century. But unlike the limitations of City Beautiful, which was criticized for its lack of concern for the working class population, she also, with the help of Senator Udall and Walter Washington (executive director of the National Capital Housing Authority), identified several neighborhoods and schools in the “gray and dismal” parts of Washington D.C. that needed cleanup and beautification, and created a plan to execute this work with neighborhood residents.23 Lady Bird worked on 24

broad legislation, such as the Highway Beautification Act, but also concerned herself with planting shade trees, as well as adding benches and trash cans to local neighborhoods. Not being held to any job description, Lady Bird was able to engage the environmental cause on multiple levels, both minute and sweeping. Therein laid the power of her solutions; recognizing that one particular path will not solve the problem, but rather a network of interwoven individual and across-the-board solutions.

Figure 1. Lady Bird Johnson and Muriel Humphrey, wife of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, plant trees along 1-95 in Virginia, during her LandscapeLandmak tour, 1965. (Wikimedia Commons)

Empowering the Nation Lady Bird was brilliant in that she attempted to involve as many segments of communities as possible. In the summer of 1966, she convened the National Youth Conference on Natural Beauty and Conservation. This conference involved over “500 teenagers from 10 youth organizations, including the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts 4-H Clubs, and the Campfire Girls.” The youth discussed the importance of “air pollution, roadside control, city beautification, litter control” and more, and received a $75,000 grant from the Ford Foundation for the members to continue beautification initiatives in the hometowns. They also went on to request that 1967 be declared a “Youth National Beauty and Conservation Year” by the President.24 The proposal was not was not immediately adopted, but was eventually presented to the president as an opportunity to court better publicity with the nation’s youth, which had soured on college campuses with respect to the his policies on the war in Vietnam. The event would cost him nothing, “reach 20 million youth in 11 national youth organizations,” and would generate beneficial media photographs of himself with youth.23 Lady Bird’s work in this instance clearly dovetailed nicely with LBJ’s own political interests, and underscores their hand-in-hand political relationship.

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In addition to encouraging voices of all ages, the act helped mobilize the cause in states throughout the nation, as the young emissaries took their knowledge and applied it to their home communities. This action helped contribute to Lady Bird’s desire to grow a nation of citizens that cared about the beauty and health of their environments and took personal responsibility to solve the problems in their own respective “backyards.” As she stated, “‘The really gratifying thing about the whole business of improving the environment is that it encompasses tasks for everyone, from children in an anti-litter campaign to adults working on zoning legislation or building community centers in the ghetto.’”26 LBJ complemented her remarks with his own perspective of this gathering of public effort “‘flower power, architectural power, urban planning power—all these powers are shaping a better country.’”27 Again, the lesson appears to be that each person is individually responsible for the arduous task of civic beautification, and hence, social betterment. But we are also responsible to each other, by means of creating laws and legislation that are just and preserve the heritage of beauty and Nature for our children.

I think what Lady Bird was intending was actually best stated by LBJ: “Beauty belongs to all the people.”26 I think that it would be hard to find someone who, speaking from her heart, did not agree with this statement. It has simple, profound, and radical meaning. It intrinsically suggests that we all equally have the right to experience beauty in our lives. And therefore, if our current economic, urban planning, and environmental policies do not support that, then those policies are wrong and violate our fundamental rights as human beings, and by extension, the rights of nature as an independent entity. Lady Bird Johnson’s legacy, through the power of heart, caring, and action, reminds us of an alternative way to process our relationship to nature, as well as each other.

Notes 1. Lewis L. Gould, Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1988), 87.

2. Marie Gomes Straight, Lady Bird Johnson: A Life of Dedication and Beautification (Dominguez Hills: California State University, 1999), 42.

3. Ibid, 23.

4. Ibid, 29.

5. Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment, 36.

6. Ibid, 38.

7. Ibid, 43.

8. Marie Gomes Straight.

9. Ibid, 41.

10. Ibid, 42 11. Ibid, 41.

12. Ibid, 46.

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13. Ibid, 45.

14. “Lady Bird Johnson, Portrait of a First Lady.” KLRU. http://www.pbs.org/ ladybird/windingdown/windingdown_report.html (accessed 18 February 2016).

15. Straight, 32.

16. Lyndon Baines Johnson Exhibit. LBJ Presidential Library. Austin, Texas. Visited March 2016.

17. Marie Gomes Straight, 49.

18. Ibid.

19. Marie Gomes Straight, 48 20. Lewis L. Gould, Lady Bird Johnson: Our Environmental First Lady (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1988, 1999).

21. “Lady Bird Johnson, Portrait of a First Lady,” KLRU. 22. Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment.

23. Ibid, 107.

24. Ibid, 212 25. Ibid, 212 26. Ibid 216 27. Ibid, 216.

28. Lyndon Baines Johnson. “President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Remarks at the Signing of the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, Oct 22, 1965.” Public Papers of the President of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965. V2, Entry 576, pp10721075. Washington D.C. Government Printing Office. 1966.

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Luis Barragan: Imagined Landscapes for Modern Urban Life David Sharratt Upon receiving the Pritzker Prize in 1980, Mexican architect Jorge Luis Barragan, without significant explanation, referred to himself as ‘Landscape Architect.’

Members of the audience must have scratched their heads, thinking, ‘why is this architect of colorful walls calling himself a landscape architect?’ Part of the reason was that, despite building many buildings, he was also a practicing landscape architect: he dedicated enormous energy to large scale landscape and planning projects. More significantly though, this identification underlies a theoretical approach Barragan developed for all of his work. Regardless of scale, when Barragan built in his late career it was designed as a contribution to a carefully developed imagination of larger systems and place.

Today, millennials increasingly choose urban habitation over the suburban patterns often preferred by their parents. As density grows so does the necessity for the built environment to evolve in ways that create culturally relevant, sustaining, and healthy landscapes. Cities benefit when architects, landscape architects, urbanists and planners design cohesively. By engaging a specific context, architects create work that mediates a more complex field of culture and environment than that of a single building, critically developed through either the lens of history or style.

Barragan, working during the exploding density of Mexico City, confronted these sets of issues. Barragan was not a theorist, nor did he philosophize at length about his work. However, the work, and the few remarks he made about his intentions, leave a bold alternative vision for modern life. Examining Barragan’s intentions and theory as a landscape architect, and how the theory manifested in his work, unpacks prescient values for enacting localized, enriching, and enduring urban landscapes.

In 1924, one year after finishing his architectural degree from Escuela Libre de Ingenieros de Guadalajara, Barragan left his home in rural Guadalajara for Europe. It was a trip, ostensibly not to visit architectural sites, but, to better inform his understanding of the world. “It was a trip where I learned French, I visited exhibits and I did not concern myself in any particular way with architecture.

Visiting those places in Europe called the ‘cities of art’ was an occasion to have an overall look at the national art that, for the most part, had contributed to the writing of history; but I did not study anything in particular.”1 Barragan’s attitude towards his first trip out of Mexico revealed a perspective which he would later

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cultivate into a mature understanding of his environment: he unfailingly sought to understand the immediate in reference to the horizon. Upon graduating, Barragan was less concerned with his short term professional development and the making of buildings than he was with the aspiration for the understanding of a national identity placed within the context of the great cities and art traditions of the world.

The development of Barragan’s attitude of a simultaneous disenchantment with his immediate condition and idealistic ambition can largely be understood by the context from which he eagerly departed. Born to a wealthy Catholic family from the Guadalajara countryside, he had the luxury of distance from the nation’s tumultuous period during his childhood and early adult life. Mexico, at the turn of the century, was led by the crumbling Porfirio Diaz dictatorship, which failed in 1911. In the void of hard leadership the country fell into a period of revolt, lootings, and attacks on basic infrastructure. By 1922 the country found itself in a position of political and social crisis, fraught with violence caused by the increasing polarity between the rich and the poor--tenants and landlords. The Catholic Church attempted cultural mediation by protecting the old and clear separation of wealth, and became identified as the party of the Whites. In 1919 the Confederacion Obrera Catolica [Catholic Workers Confederation] in their weekly publication of moral instruction for workers wrote: “It is impossible to destroy the providential order established by God. And it is necessary that both the rich and poor remain as they are, not all men can be equal…. The order depends on the worker, and therefore it is the worker that must defend it.”2 In opposition to the moralizing entrenchment of wealth and power rose the Reds, a socialist and anarchist group, many of whom were willing to use violence.

It was in the midst of such crisis that Barragan graduated in 1923 from a traditional architectural education which he later described as “primitive.”3 His thesis chronicled the classic canon of traditional architectural education and offered nothing new on the subject. He then worked briefly for a Beaux Arts architect in Guadalajara, where he inevitably developed some professional and technical skill, but was dissatisfied with historicist repetitions.4 Barragan’s 1924 departure to Europe offered a break from personal and national circumstances. Among the most influential parts of his trip were his travels through Northern Africa, his visit to the Alhambra, and his attendance at the 1928 Exposition des Arts Decoratifs. The exposition, now understood as the mainstream birth of Art Deco, also exposed the varied way the conflict between modernist and classicist theory manifested, as well as the varying ways modernism could express national identities in transition. At the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs Barragan noted interest in the modern innovators. He saw Melnikov’s Soviet Pavilion, Le Corbusier’s Esprit Nouveau, and recognized the clarity of Hoffman’s Austrian Pavilion. However, these history book exhibits were not what caught Barragan’s

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attention. The obvious line of inquiry for the young architect hailing from a country in transition would be to consider: What application could Corbusier’s Plan Voisin have to Mexican cities? Or, what could be learned from the Soviets, who used Melnikov’s constructivism as an entirely new architectural language for a new social political ideology? Instead Barragan stumbled upon and became enthralled with the writings of Ferdinand Bac on garden design. “It was Bac who awakened in me a passion for the architecture of Gardens…. More than the gardens themselves, it is his writing that explains what creates the magic of the places.”5 Ferdinand Bac was a Frenchman who led a solitary studious life, punctuated by frequent travels throughout Europe. Like many of his French contemporaries at the turn of the century, Bac romanticized a painful sense of moral solitude and isolation, lamenting a lack of cultural and national cohesion. After a trip to Spain and North Africa in 1890, Bac dedicated his time to designing and writing on gardens. Barragan was also enamored with and felt a sense of cultural connection with the Alhambra and Generalife gardens, and therefore must have related to the source of inspiration for Bac. Bac’s writings aimed to reunite a new French identity by focusing on and exalting the power of the French soil, which he described with pride as a garden itself--something like a fertile primed canvas. He called for a return to common sense--a content society based on common threads of Latin history, a recreated and imagined Mediterraneanism developed and nourished in designed gardens. For Bac, the garden was a potent source of potential for individuals throughout France to reimagine their collective identity in relationship with their environment--a means for establishing a new but rooted national identity that could retain its connection to the past while becoming relevant to the present.

These ideas profoundly resonated with Barragan’s discontent with and commitment to his home country, as well as the profound beauty and connection he felt visiting Spanish and Moorish gardens. The simultaneity of his travels and exposure to Bac awakened a sensitivity in perception of environment in Barragan and planted seeds of aspiration for the redemptive capacity of gardens. He said, ‘‘‘The soul of gardens,’ according to Ferdinand Bac, ‘contains the highest level of serenity which is available to man,’ and it was Bac who aroused in me the desire for landscape architecture.’”6 The luxury of old established wealth afforded Barragan distance and the cultivation of worldly theory, but his deeply spiritual universal and unitarian beliefs never allowed him to permanently leave or disengage with the complexity and turmoil of his home country. Barragan returned to an unfolding conflict that had begun during his departure. Barragan and his friends, among other intellectuals and artists, developed an increasingly regionalist philosophy, based on a romantic celebration of the earth--in their case the Jaliscan soil. They lauded “alma Jaliscana” or Jaliscan soil and, much like Bac did, described convincingly that their particular piece of earth was the binding element for an integrated contemporary and traditional conscience able to “give form and cohesion to its sons and soul to its population, that the 30

physical earth with its mineralogy possessed prodigious and unique virtues.”7 Their developing ideology and struggle for regional political independence was captured by the writings and paintings of Juan Rulfo and Jose Clemente Orozco, and the bi-weekly publication Barragan co-founded with Alfonzo Gutierrez Hermosillo: “Bandera de Provincias.” Barragan’s involvement with this group of regionalist thinkers would inform his later work, and no doubt was partially inspired by his admiration of Bac’s nationalistic romanticism of the French soil.

During this time in Guadalajara, Barragan also built seventeen single-family homes in which he was working out ideas of regional identity within the framework of Bac’s Mediterranean ideology. The houses centered themselves on enclosed garden courtyards (walled-in outdoor space), mixed old models of organization with new solutions, and experimented mixing Mediterranean formal language with objects and materiality of Jaliscan regionalism. Barragan reflected on the synthetic relationship of his memories and experiences from home with his experiences and thinking abroad: “The popular Mexican architecture of the provinces has also left its impression on me--the walls painted with whitewash, the tranquility of the patios, the color of the streets--because there exist profound similarities between these teachings and those to be learned from the villages of North Africa and Morocco.”8 As important as the Guadalajara works are in understanding Barragan’s development as a thinker and designer, had he stopped here he would not have won a Pritzker or ascended to international recognition. It was not until 1935 when he moved to the wildly sprawling and simultaneously densifying Mexico City, and then in 1940 when he “retired” as an architect that he expanded the scale and scope of his thinking while clarifying his work.

In 1920 the population of Mexico City doubled from the numbers of the 1900s.

Then, over the fifteen year period of Barragan’s most important works, the city’s population doubled again.9 Along with the population explosion, the modern city’s infrastructure was in the process of being born. While satellite cities -- large scale suburban development--were constructed at the edge of the city, industrial development was incentivized, driving the labor force from the country into the heart of the city. By 1940 the bus transport fleet had increased 64.5%, an extensive rail system was initiated, and existing roads were increasingly congested with automobiles. By the 1950s large scale functionalist residential complexes were being built to house the exploding urban population, along with plans to build city parks (and expand Chapultepec--now one of the largest parks in the Western Hemisphere). The construction of the University City was also underway.10 Moving to Mexico City, Barragan embraced and appreciated the urban condition, its difference from his country upbringing, and recognized the city as akin to the major European and American cities. But in the midst of its turbulent growth Barragan grew increasingly critical of its development. He held hope in modernity 31

and the city as a source of spiritual development, but believed that architectonic development could not be part of a collective, global ideal of modernity. In a narrow sense, by 1940, he was disenchanted with the international architectural style-which he had participated in, designing homes and apartment buildings in Mexico City from 1935-39. In a larger sense, Barragan was critical of the development of an urban culture which he saw as increasingly commodified, chaotic, and lacking spiritual nourishment.11 Prior to his move to Mexico City, Barragan returned to Europe in 1931 to meet with Le Corbusier and Ferdinand Bac. Bac had warned of the acceleration of modernity. Bac expressed that the most important function of architecture is “to provide a dwelling place in which to house the human spirit, especially with respect to the concept of intimacy.”12 Bac was critical of mechanization and the new rhythms humans were developing through increased dependence on machines--a rhythm which disconnected people from their surrounding environments. Barragan subsequently developed a similar critique, but focused less on mechanization and more on the troubles of a modern life which depended on publicity, exteriority, and commodification. In 1951 Barragan remarked: “I wonder at what hour of his day does Modern Man meditate and is allowed his imagination to follow creative and spiritual ideas. I ask myself, how can this type of life permit the individual to find the peace and serenity that man should enjoy every day, especially in these times.”13 Idleness, for Barragan, was the ultimate dream for a common society, a refuge, a condition that allowed transcendence from the beautiful--a spiritually regenerative space.

In 1940, he ostensibly turned to landscape, particularly the garden, as his means of deriving -- perhaps imagining -- an alternative means of development. With plazas, fountains, gates, gardens, and developments in Las Arboledas, Los Clubes and El Pedregal, Barragan begins “place construction” with a deep understanding of the locale, and a synthesis of architecture, landscape design, topography, climate, culture and dwelling (in the Heideggerian sense), --a synthesis that anticipated today’s theory and practice.14 Ignacio Diaz Morales interprets Barragan’s works of this period as demonstrating a sophisticated theory of place making that relies on nested, hierarchical values centered on a conception of healthy human dwelling within three ecosystems: “the natural ecosystem, within which it should be produced; the ecosystem of the city inhabited by the human community; and the building located within the city’s ecosystem. In other words buildings should necessarily be subordinated to the requirements of urban space, and urban spaces, in turn, must necessarily be subordinated to the requirements of the natural environment that surrounds them.”15 In this manner, even when Barragan was designing a single family townhouse he was designing landscape.

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This nested set of ecosystem values explains Barragan’s identification as a “landscape architect” and points to an inversion of common architectural values present in his later works--where architectural form becomes subservient to space. Here, space is largely defined by the gardens and landscape he designed. This inversion is most clearly seen in his work at the Cuadrada San Cristobal in the Los Clubes residential development. Los Clubes, and the adjacent park Las Arboledas, were planned by Barragan, punctuated with varying greenspace, fountains, gates, and public space, to create an environment to enrich the human condition with tactile, sensory art that gave datum and focused attention to natural processes.

The Cuadrada San Cristobal is a stable complex with a single family home. The traditional hierarchy of stable and house is clear: the stable is servant space to the house, given lower priority, and pulled away from the figure of the house. But with San Cristobal, Barragan inverted the traditional hierarchy: the stable was conceived as the border of a larger garden to which the house serves as a muted and framing backdrop. The house is inwardly focused and appears as a minimalist white volumetric object from which walls radiate, then gain color to magnificently define and claim the grounds where stable, tree, and water communicate as equally important figures. Despite a lone stand of trees, and the vibrantly blue reflecting water, the ground is left bare and its own orange tint becomes a complimentary plane of color among the bold pink and white planes of color used to accentuate space.

The resulting grounds are breathtakingly beautiful; wall, ground and sky coalesce to create a poetic space which define the house. When entering, the house’s stark white simplicity obscures view of the grounds and establishes prospect. Beside the house is a carefully chosen tree that is formally and spatially dominant to the house.

Barragan was known to people who worked with him as being obsessive in his selection of trees, often preferring species with twisted and tortured forms. Hidden behind the house is a secret garden entered through drapes of vines growing on a grove of trees planted and trained under Barragan’s direction. Within this room of trees are three seats, hewn roughly from thick logs. It is a simple hidden garden room designed as counterpoint to the open and spatially strong character of the stable grounds. The varying outdoor spaces provide potent refuge from the chaotic city, define the site, are laden with Mexican cultural references, yet are also boldly abstract and modern.

A decade before his work on the Los Clubes development, the Cuadrada San Cristobal, and the Las Arboledas park, Barragan’s largest project and obsession was the development of El Pedregal, a large housing development that he undertook in reaction to the lack of spiritual unity of his time.16 Located southwest of the city center on unique volcanic ground, Barragan designed and developed the first roads, gates, and houses, as well as outlined guidelines for future development. The roads, paths, and houses were all designed to be subservient to, and to accentuate, the natural contours of the sculptural and surreal lava formations. He aimed to 33

establish a cohesive style for the houses that would respect Mexican architectural tradition while deferring to the depth of the natural landscape. It should be clarified that respecting tradition came with no historic affect. “Philosophically, we are of the more classic or more traditional spirit..., we are in the process of creating an architecture of our time, so the most anti-traditional thing to do is to do old architecture.”17 Homes were to be placed below positions of prominent rock formations, and to be surrounded by walls, in order to appear as if arising from the earth as stereotomic mass. The homes he built established a formal vocabulary of planes and straight lines in which simplicity was preferred to accentuate the visual drama of the topography. Lava formations often interrupted or penetrated walls to draw attention to, as Barragan described, the “Extraordinarily dramatic qualities and poetry hidden in the landscape, in few words as much as requires intuition.”18 Alejandro Margain Flores, who worked in Barragan’s office on El Pedregal detailed the extended efforts Barragan devoted to enhancing the experience of the natural ecosystem. Together they spent long days at the site starting at 6:00 AM and ending at 10:00 PM in order to study the changing shadows and qualities of light.

Accordingly, the work on El Pedregal typified a process which always began from detailed investigation of the site with the aim of developing strong connections to topography, native vegetation, soil type, and orientation. The aim was never an idealized wild nature, for, Barragan--like Bac--was a gardener in service of the human condition. Pathways in Pedregal were constructed using a careful layering of local materials--outlined in coarse sand, filled with a clay and sand mixture, then covered with soil tenzonite (sometimes mixed with color) in order to feel comfortable for walking. According to Flores, while working on the public park in Los Venados, Barragan had the site cleared, then left it open to watch where people would naturally make paths -- they then built paths there.19 Flores also described Barragan as an ardent student and observer of botany. Barragan would spend many days travelling to nurseries and taking methodical notes. At one point the office held an in-house compiled catalogue of 3,000 species, each with personal notes and sketches.20 Plants, trees, and ground always played a central role in Barragan’s designs, but their design was never faithful to one style. In El Pedregal plantings aspired to learn from nature: Barragan tossed a handful of seeds, and trees were planted where they landed in order to appear wildly spaced.21 Trees in Las Arboledas were planted on a strict grid in order to accentuate the ordered linearity of the attenuated park as well as the passing people and ribbon of water within.

Barragan’s final house, Casa Giraldi, was conceived around one existing jacaranda tree. The tree determined the location of the inner courtyard. The courtyard consists of two elements to which the exterior of the house defers: the tree, and the vibrantly colored ground surface of local sandstone tiles. The tiles, each striped in fantastic patterns of mineral deposition, form an entrancing texture of color and line. The 34

central interior social space is bracketed by this courtyard space, on one side, and a synthetic landscape of water, color, and light, on the other. Programmatically this space is a swimming pool, but a masterful combination of color, daylight, sunlight, and reflection create a space akin to a James Turrell: it celebrates the intersection of human perception, natural elements and built artifact--demonstrating a mature synthesis of art, landscape and architecture.

In Barragan’s later work, he used minimal means to create potent space laden with spiritual and cultural values--as if each is considered to be a contribution to, what David Leatherbarrow describes as the topographic arts. Leatherbarrow writes: “The task of architecture, urban design and landscape architecture as topographic arts is to provide the prosaic patterns of our lives with durable dimension and beautiful expression.”22 Barragan’s approach to landscape provides valuable principles for designers working at a range of scales. His works leave traces of critical cultural thinking about the act of building as the development of relationships within regional contexts -- sets of relationships which intensify the aesthetic experience, providing space for lasting and healthy development. The work, while bold, is not formal. Geometry, space and material were carefully crafted to nurture a set of nested relationships intended to give grounded meaning to a modern life that Barragan became increasingly critical of.

With his long advocacy of development and regulation of land in Pedregal, Barragan demonstrated that he understood political-economic forces as fundamental parts of preserving and creating healthy landscapes. But, unfortunately the present reality demonstrates the failure of Los Clubes and El Pedregal in this regard. His built artifacts -- paths, gates, roads, buildings--stand as lasting and rich testament to his values, but unfortunately the precedent was not continued in his planning work.

Evidence of well intentioned planning and landscape projects that fail to leverage and develop sustaining regulatory and economic systems, unfortunately, are not uncommon in Mexico City.

Mario Schjetnan’s firm Grupo de Diseño Urbano (GDU), one of the most recognized landscape architecture firms in Mexico, has designed many urban landscape projects with similar regionalist and humanist values as Barragan. Their work on the restoration of the Xochimilco Ecological Park in 1993 created a place that integrated the remediative and practical services of ecological services with recreation and spaces of sensory refuge. However, without a functional system to maintain the park it now stands as a modern ruins--wooden bridges are rotting, concrete benches are crumbling into the soil, the cultivated wetlands stand dry and overgrown, and perhaps most disarming, invasive species have begun to dominate the groundcover, leaving the area quiet--eerily devoid of animals and birds.

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Among the lasting positive lessons that Barragan’s work leaves, the failure of the Pedregal and Xochimilco Ecological Park underlines the absolute importance of long term economic design and planning for any large scale landscape project. As fundamental as ecological, cultural, and spiritual values are in the development of healthy places for modern life, so too is a forward thinking understanding of economic and political systems, and creative solutions for their long term health.

Notes 1. Antonio Riggen Martinez, Luis Barragan, Mexico’s Modern Master, 1902-1988 (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1996), 22.

2. Ibid, 21.

3. Ibid, 17.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid, 25.

6. Jose Maria Buendia, “An Architecture of Memories,” in Luis Barragan: The Phoenix Papers, ed. Ignacio San Martin (Temple, AZ: ASU Center for Latin American Studies, 1997), 75.

7. Martinez, 33.

8. Ignacio Diaz Morales, “The Essence of Architectural Space,” in Luis Barragan: The Phoenix Papers, ed. Ignacio San Martin (Temple, AZ: ASU Center for Latin American Studies, 1997), 79.

9. Felipe Correa and Carlos Garciavelez Alfaro, Mexico City: Between Geometry and Geography (Hong Kong: Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2014), 100-110.

10. Ibid.

11. Martinez, 53.

12. Ibid, 49.

13. Ibid, 98.

14. Clive Dilnot, “The Question of Dwelling and Ethics of Beauty,” in Luis Barragan: The Phoenix Papers, ed. Ignacio San Martin (Temple, AZ: ASU Center for Latin American Studies, 1997), 107.

15. Morales, 52.

16. Martinez, 63.

17. Ibid, 73.

18. Ibid, 77.

19. Alejandro Margain Flores, “At Work with Barragan,” in Luis Barragan: The Phoenix Papers, ed. Ignacio San Martin (Temple, AZ: ASU Center for Latin American Studies, 1997), 94.

20. Ibid, 96.

21. Ibid, 97.

22. David Leatherbarrow, “Is Landscape Architecture?”, in Is Landscape?, ed. Garteh Doherty and Charles Waldheim (Abdingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), 328.

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Poetry, Painting, and the Humanized Landscape: Charles Eliot’s Vision of Landscape Architecture Doug Norman Well might Wordsworth write (1805) to Sir George Beaumont: “Painters and poets have had the credit of being reckoned the fathers of English gardening;” and he adds, “they will also have, hereafter, the better praise of being fathers of a better taste.”

–Charles Eliot, Charles Eliot Landscape Architect At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist till Art had invented them.

–Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying” It may seem odd at first glance to pair the words of Charles Eliot with those of Oscar Wilde as the two thinkers, although contemporaries, seem to have very little occupationally or aesthetically in common: Wilde the urbane dandy, theatrical celebrity, and prophet of decadence and Eliot the wholesome Boston elite, earnest parkway advocate, and pathbreaker for conservation. In Wilde’s dialogue, Vivian presents his Aestheticist argument that is Nature that imitates Art and the other way around as conventional theories of representation would have it. Yet, Vivian’s playfully paradoxical thesis in the “Decay of Lying” may provide a useful opening for examining the relationship between and Art and Nature that pervades Eliot’s thinking on the art of landscape architecture. In Wilde’s dialogue, Vivian insists that it is Nature that imitates Art, not the other way around. Landscape painting figures prominently into the conversation. Both quotations assert that the arts teach people how to see by elevating their audience’s sensibilities so that they may apprehend the beautiful in the natural. Both thinkers take this idea in different directions. For Wilde, it seems, the point is perception, which is also important to Eliot. But Eliot goes further in suggesting that what poetry and painting teaches us to see through the media of paint and words can be then applied in the media of rocks, trees, paths, and waterways. In this essay, I examine how Eliot’s formative experiences and education allowed him to cultivate a rich understanding of the interconnections between literature, art, and landscape architecture, one that he would put into practice in his landscape designs.

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Born into a distinguished Boston Brahmin family, Charles Eliot (1859-1897) remains today one of the key figures in American landscape architecture, conservation, and park design. Given that his career as a landscape architect spanned just over a decade, the legacy he left behind is an impressive and enduring one. One might characterize him as the John Keats of his nascent field, cut short in his prime, provoking wonder at what he might have accomplished across a longer lifespan. Eliot’s grandmother and aunt introduced him to drawing and sketching and his mother modeled a rapturous enjoyment of natural beauty; these activities helped him to cultivate keen powers of perception, an ability to observe minute details working in concert within larger systems. His grasp of distinct geographical locales with differing landscapes, cities, and architecture may have begun in his early childhood as the Eliot family embarked on an almost two year journey through Europe when he was just four years old and on a second one year journey when was nine. Switzerland, rural England, the parks of London, Florence, Rome, and Heidelberg bring out a “decided fondness for maps, and a great enjoyment of scenery.”1 Like his future mentor Frederick Law Olmsted, Eliot’s otherwise fortunate childhood was punctuated by the loss of his mother at an early age. He later attributes his reserved qualities to this loss. Perhaps it was this grief that gave him the first-hand experience–even if not consciously recognized–of nature’s healing power. As the family moved to different locations in the Boston metro area, “Charles roamed the country roundabout, and learnt it by heart.”2 Eliot’s biography, which consists of his own writings framed by his father’s narrative account of his life, gives one the impression that almost every aspect of his childhood seems fortuitously arranged to produce a landscape architect of the highest caliber.

In fact, very much like the picturesque landscapes he prized, studied, and designed, a synthesis of nature and culture–of natural aptitudes and disciplinary training– conspired to produce an artist fit for the task of designing landscapes both small and large. Like many of his late nineteenth century contemporaries, Eliot received a broad education in arts, belles lettres, and the emerging sciences. The combination of those skills with experience gained from his quite structured recreational activities produced a keen ability to comprehend the complex machinery of natural systems and how they interface with urban settlements. The sensitivity and sheer pleasure with which he encountered the beauty of scenic landscapes fueled his drive to preserve open spaces, which he understood would be so important to the health of a nation entering onto the world stage. That he lived a relatively short life and saw an even shorter career yet had a deep engagement with the longer view is truly remarkable.

Camping, hiking, drawing, and observing allowed him to develop his early childhood skills in his teen years and into early adulthood. Each summer the family took extended camping trips on Calf Island and Mt. Desert Island off the coast of Maine, where the children practiced drawing, writing, as well as getting to know 38

“Nature in all her various moods.”3 At the age of twelve, his playtime consisted of mapping part of the Norton estate and identifying the different types of plants in each area. His father reports that he also liked to “amuse himself by laying plans for imaginary towns,” plans that tellingly included public reservations marked on the maps as “Public Land,” “Public Reserve,” and “Public Park.”4 Already, the privileged youngster had a fundamentally democratic sense of the importance of preserving such beautiful scenery for the benefit of all. At the suggestion of his father, Eliot took frequent walks around the Boston metro area while learning to use a map and compass and getting to know the lay of the land, characteristics and landmarks of the territory. As Eliot Sr. points out, “No better preparation in youth for some of his most important work as a man could possibly have been devised.”5 This accidental professional training was already well underway by the time he began his undergraduate education.

As a college student at Harvard, Eliot immersed himself in the classics of European literature and wide variety of nineteenth century science and philosophy, generally preferring “poetry and history” to fiction.6 His summer camping and yachting adventures only served to augment his formal education. Yachting helped him further hone his surveying and drawing skills and, taking charge of the ship’s log, he practiced an extremely concise writing style that his father characterizes as “a felicity of expression… particularly his choice of simple words that fit.”7 At the age of twenty-one, he organized a yachting and camping trip for himself and a dozen fellow students to Mt. Desert, planning, directing, and managing the entire affair. Rather than a slothful romp one might expect of young college students on break, this two-month excursion required that participants conduct scientific field work investigating “geology, ornithology, marine invertebrates, meteorology, [and] entomology” of the island. Over several summers, this so-named Champlain Club contributed data to two scientific publications and revealed to Eliot his skill in managing projects and people.8 Even with his increasing erudition and scientific sophistication, Eliot’s heightened sensitivity imbued these experiences with intense epiphanic episodes worthy of Romantic poets like William Blake or Friederich Hölderlin. Just after the first Champlain Club camp broke in 1881, “His head was full of memories and dreams, of fearful hopes, dreads, and pains; the beauty and the wonder of God’s earthly paradise burst upon him like a holy vision, and the depths of hell on earth opened at his feet.”9 Eliot’s broad education, outdoor experiences, and highly developed sensibility would prove to be central to his success at articulating and practicing the discipline to which he would devote his short life. The mix of pleasure, skill, and discipline in these pursuits paralleled the combination of literature, visual arts, and science in his development as a landscape architect.

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Figure 1. Charles Eliot’s sketch of Camp Champlain (Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect, 1902).

Throughout the summer of 1882, after completing his Bachelor’s degree, Eliot pondered his next steps; eliminating the careers for which he knew he was not suited and thinking about what kind of employment he would most enjoy, he arrived at the young profession of landscape architecture by September. With his father’s blessing, he enrolled at the Bussey Institution, the Department of Agriculture and Horticulture of Harvard University where he studied agricultural chemistry, horticulture, applied botany, and topographical surveying among other subjects.

That winter at the Saturday Club, Eliot Sr. asked Frederick Law Olmsted–the nation’s leading landscape architect–for advice on preparing his son for a career in that profession. Eliot’s second cousin, Charles Eliot Norton, and his uncle, Robert S. Peabody, recommended and introduced young Eliot to Olmsted in the spring of 1883, and by the end of April Eliot was apprenticed to the legendary park designer.

Eliot admired Olmsted’s preference for “park land in its actual condition” not overly manicured, and the planting of indigenous trees in “furtherance of nature.”10 On the other hand, some of Olmsted’s designs with a higher “degree of complication and artificiality” he found displeasing.11 Throughout his two-year tenure with Olmsted he learned the ins and outs of the profession and the processes involved in projects large and small. This was a crucial period for Eliot’s professional development to be sure, but my focus here will be a particular set of ideas that begin to take form on his post-apprenticeship tour of European parks and gardens (1885-1886). Among the 40

many European influences on Eliot, one that stands out as particularly important for larger landscape design was Prince von Pückler-Muskau, whose approach to and writing on landscape gardening drew on principles of poetry and painting and was informed by a Romantic aesthetic. As an enlightened aristocrat, his work made a profound impression on the talented young Brahmin, ultimately helping him to articulate some of the central dictums of landscape architecture done right.

The first stop on his landscape study voyage was of course England. With letters of introduction in hand and a long list of parks and estates to visit, he set off enthusiastically exploring urban parks and the English countryside. His preference for the simple and subtle surfaced in his abhorrence of flower gardens and “unnatural treatment” of streams and ponds.12 Along the way, in his letters to Olmsted and to his father, he began to lay out the principles of quality landscape architecture more precisely. But it was winter in England, so invariably the weather limited his excursions. Such days he would spend in the British Museum Reading Room as well as other museums and galleries, acquainting himself with renowned landscape gardening texts and admiring paintings old and new. On a January day in 1886, Eliot spent the day at the Royal Academy admiring the Italian and Dutch masters.

Although the Renaissance looms large in the imaginary of landscape architecture, it seems always somewhat filtered through the prism of Romanticism for nineteenth century artists like Eliot. And on this day it was J. M. W. Turner who captured his attention and touched his ability to derive intense, quasi-spiritual pleasure from painting, literature, music or scenery: … water-color landscapes by Turner–for the most part scenes in England and Scotland, and in the Alps–every one of them poetic, lovely, enchanting, like the poetry of Shelley; all the landscape painting I have ever seen is as nothing in comparison to these. These pictures take right hold of my heart, and move me as real landscape sometimes does. I am transported.13 This passage illustrates the interpenetration of poetry, painting, and landscape that shaped Eliot’s thinking and practice; poetry and painting, as well as Renaissance and Romantic, comprise perhaps the most significant metaphorical, philosophical, and stylistic touchstones for the budding landscape architect. And it is his heightened sensibility combined with his rigorous training that allows him to apprehend beauty in such a deeply emotional, intellectual, and spiritual manner.

Later that year, en route to Florence where he would admire paintings by Titian and Botticelli, he invokes the Romantic landscapes of Turner to extol the beauty of approaching the city so central to Renaissance art: The effects of bursting sun light on the new leafage in distant parts of the plains, on the hill-set towns, and on the winding Arno, were startling. Near sunset the light-effects were most marvelous.

Clouds everywhere, yet much sunlight too; bright gleams of rainbows; dark rain-clouds behind 41

Figure 2. “Villa Salviati on the Arno” by J. M. W. Turner, 1796-1797 (Artstor).

gleaming snow-mountains; white, billowy cumuli over shadowed hills — altogether wondrous and Turneresque… Actually in Florence, city of my dreams! 14 Eliot’s sense of wonder and delight prompt him to capture the painterly scene in simple yet almost poetic expression. Describing the beauty of Florence in relation to the surrounding countryside awash in “soft colors” and “golden light,” he proclaims, that “The city in the midst of the valley is a perfect thing too—a comprehendible place—a composition in the painter’s sense.”15 The city is coherent and attractive because it has been laid out as a painter would arrange elements on a canvas.

Near the end of his voyage he brings up Turner again to describe the approach to Edinburgh cloaked in a dreamlike haze of smoke and fog.16 Clearly Renaissance and Romantic painting shaped the way Eliot perceives, thinks and writes about scenic landscapes.

Even if he fails to evince such enthusiasm for reading the founding texts of landscape architecture, Eliot devours the gardening essays of Walpole, Repton, Gilpin, and Kent on those rain-soaked London days. He doggedly makes his way through the “tough reading” of “The Landscape Art” by the Prince Pückler-Muskau, which upon reflection he regards as “one of the best books on the subject.”17 He would revisit the superlative in connection with Pückler the following September on the German leg of his tour, when he at last visits Pückler’s masterpiece at Muskau,

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Figure 3. Prince Pückler’s Park von Muskau (Photographer: Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Artstor).

declaring it “landscape gardening on a grand scale” and the “most remarkable and lovable park I have seen on the Continent.”18 He notes that the variety of trees is similar to those common in American woods and admires the varied streambanks, the “naturalesque” woods, “well-designed” roads, “charming” views, and nearly hidden village.19 After a stop in Weimar, Eliot makes his way to Pückler’s Wilhemsthal Park which he admires in part because it is “entirely unfenced and undefined as to boundaries.”20 He continues: “Its principal features are a good made pond, pleasant green slopes running up into the edges of the forest which comes down from surrounding high hills, some fine groups of old trees, some good water-side planting, and a quaint water tank near the house in a grove of very large Norway Spruces;” overall, he finds the simple and peaceful park “extremely American.”21 It is as if he senses a national affinity with the enlightened Prussian prince, something in the very rocks and trees as well as the open-ended, unadorned beauty that speaks to the profound love of the outdoors he explored as a child. German Romantics were fond of claiming Shakespeare as their own countryman, and perhaps Eliot echoes a similar aesthetic kinship here. Although brief, these encounters with the zenith of German landscape architecture would inform his vision of the profession; indeed, of the Muskau park he writes “This work of Fürst Pückler is of a sort to make me very proud of my profession!”22 In stark contrast, the next day he visits Wilhelmshöhe with its gargantuan artificial waterfall, one thousand steps, commanding views, and faux medieval

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castle. In reaction to this ostentation, he writes “It is a work, one would say, such as only a despot could have carried out.”23 Clearly, this offense to good taste lacked the enlightened if not entirely democratic principles of English parks. Unlike Pückler’s simplicity, he describes what seems to be “no end of other water works and ‘temples,’ and several ‘lakes’ and caves; and flower gardens… scattered about in the big woods on each side.”24 To leave no doubt about his son’s disdain for the overdone hodgepodge, Charles W. Eliot adds, “Of course Charles needed to see this largest thing in Europe of its Figure 4. View from Wilhelmshöhe Park (Photographer: Dirk Schmidt, kind; but, to his thinking, Wikipedia). it was not a good kind.”25 The Romantic idolatry of natural irregularities and of natural beauty subtly arranged dovetails with nineteenth century natural science in Eliot’s thinking, which will eventually allow him to articulate a thorough repudiation of both baroque excess and neoclassical formal rigidity. And, he does so by in part by transplanting Pücklerian insights–insights the Prince had harvested in England–back home in American soil.

The English had led the way in landscape gardening, but Pückler and Eliot both realized English designs were place-specific and could not be simply copied in different environs; rather, it was the principles that should be judiciously applied in harmony with the natural elements present at a given site. Introducing the essay “Anglomania in Park Making,” Eliot Sr. sums up his son’s firmly held opinion that “park work should conform to the climatal and soil conditions of the place where it is situated, and should never attempt to produce an exotic and unnatural beauty.”26 Eliot himself decries vain attempts to cultivate “velvet turf ” grasses on the rocky 44

coasts of Maine. He names a number of “really beautiful parks”–Muskau among them–and pointedly asserts that “none of them [are] English, except as England was the mother of the natural as distinguished from the architectural in gardening.”27 Here, he refers to the English departure from neoclassical order and ornament of the grand French parks. It is the approach, or the method, rather than the particular plants and arrangement of their parks that Eliot recognizes as the valuable English contribution to landscape design. Once again he calls attention to Muskau’s terrain, climate, and flora as especially similar to the American “Middle States”: Indeed, American trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants are very numerous in this noble park; the Tulip-tree, Magnolia, Wild Cherry, Witch Hazel, Withe-rod, Bush Honeysuckle, Goldenrods, and Asters are harmonized with native plants on every hand. It would be next to impossible to find an American park in which these things have been planted as freely.28 Once more he sees his homeland reflected in the Lusatian hills, an image of what it could become painted in trees. He ends the essay thusly: “Are we to attempt to bring all to the English smoothness? Rather let us try to perfect each type in its own place [my emphasis].”29 Smoothness works for the English countryside, but not for the geology and plant life of Northeastern Germany or New England.

Following his essay on Anglomania, Eliot provides a reading list of the “modern art of landscape gardening” for readers Garden and Forest magazine, an inaugural canon for the discipline of landscape architecture. He outlines a brief yet elegant account of the roots of landscape architecture in poetry and painting. He begins with late medieval and Renaissance poets, Dante, Tasso, Chaucer, and Spenser who kindle the love of natural scenery in their readers. The poets in turn inspire the genesis of landscape painting in the 17th century, giving rise to the 18th century blossoming of landscape gardening prose. He lists his way through the recognized greats of that genre and ends with the latest text, Pückler’s Hints on Landscape Gardening.

Poetry, painting, and landscape gardening, along with Renaissance humanism, Romantic spirit, and Victorian science, come together in the evolution of landscape architecture and the humanized landscape.

In the midst of advocating for a Metropolitan Parks commission to oversee the connected system of parkways he envisioned for Boston, Eliot pens an essay devoted to Pückler’s Muskau Park and the important principles embodied in its design. He underscores Pückler’s English method of park design that in many ways aligns with how Eliot Sr. describes Olmsted’s designs as “furtherance of nature.”30 Eliot praises Pückler for transforming the “almost ugly” river valley, not by extending architectural works throughout the valley,—not by constructing mighty terraces, mile-long avenues, or great formal water-basins, such as he had seen in Italy, at Versailles and at Wilhelmshöhe,—but by quietly inducing Nature to transform herself. He would not force upon his 45

native landscape any foreign type of beauty; on the contrary, his aim was the transfiguration, the idealization of such beauty as was indigenous [my emphasis].31 If England represented, for Eliot, the “mother of the natural as distinguished from the architectural in gardening,” then Muskau was certainly one of her children.32 Pückler’s landscape masterpiece helps Eliot articulate the most effective and aesthetically pleasing way to coax the natural systems into yielding up their best effects. Nothing here is forced or imposed, but carefully encouraged into an ideal of indigenous beauty in slow processes with lasting results of humanized nature. The natural systems work as they should but result in an idealization akin to compositional form of a poem or painting. He continues this train of thought musing that, Somewhere and somehow he had learned the landscape painter’s secret, that deepest interest and finest beauty spring from landscape character—character strongly marked and never contradicted. In England he had seen this truth illustrated by actual living landscape, for Repton’s parks were simply the idealization of characteristic English scenery.33 The secret of the landscape painter is, then, to embrace the character of the place and to bring that character to its fullest and highest expression. At once deeply natural, rooted in the land and living systems, and exquisitely artificial, an artifice so well devised as to seem the very form of the place or essence of its distinct character.

Towards the end of this essay celebrating the German country park, Eliot exhorts his compatriots to follow suit. “Our countrymen are beginning to manifest an appreciation of landscape painting,” he writes approvingly; immediately challenging them to “show the genuineness of their appreciation by preserving and enhancing the beauty of the actual landscape in which their lives are passed.”34 The landscape painter’s secret, grounded in a careful study of nature, would play an important role in Eliot’s vision of a metropolitan park system for Boston.

Understanding the character of a place required knowledge of both natural systems and cultural ones. A thorough understanding of geological processes was key to that study of nature and to landscape design that Eliot characterized as the “idealization of... scenery.” As Anita Berrizbeitia argues, “the geological structure of Boston” served as “rationale, and as a conceptual framework for the selection of sites” in the proposed park system.35 In order to create a park system that preserved the best scenery and provided lasting benefits to inhabitants, natural systems would have to trump political ones. Municipal boundaries represented obstacles to designing the type of landscape Eliot prized. His youthful ambles around the Boston metropolitan area informed his sense of these larger interconnected systems comprising “a region of marvelously commingled waters, marshes, gravel banks, and rocks.”36 Yet, he acknowledges that this scenery is already partly man-made, already a synthesis of nature and culture. In “What Would Be Fair Must First Be Fit,” whose title neatly

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encapsulates the principle that beauty emerges from functional form, he describes the cultural processes that have shaped the region: In New England, for example, the hard-worked men of the last century cleared and smoothed the intervales, left fringes of trees along the streams and hanging woods on the steep hillsides, gathered their simple houses into villages and planted Elms beside them, for ‘use, advantage, and convenience’ merely, and yet beauty is the result.37 He follows this account with a quote from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in which Perdita and Polixenes debate the limits of the natural and the artificial— the authentic and the created—in a garden: “ this is an art / Which does mend nature, change it rather; / But the art itself is nature.”38 Eliot turns to the bard to offer a definition of landscape architecture as the art of nature. By combining the two terms, their binary opposition is thrown into question not unlike Wilde’s Vivian cheekily lamenting the decay of lying. For Eliot, it seems, Art and Nature are elaborately interwoven systems. This idea of the interpenetration of Art and Nature runs through Pückler’s writing and probably contributed to Eliot’s vision of landscape architecture.

In his Hints of Landscape Gardening, Pückler introduces the topic by praising English landscapes as beauty emerging from the useful, the fair from the fit as Eliot would phrase it. The art of landscape gardening in both grounded in pleasure or a “highly developed talent for enjoying life” and ability to create “a lasting sense of wellbeing,” the latter requiring “signs of human attention and intelligent influence.”39 Nature requires culture to provide this sense of well-being: Even in a painted landscape, we want something to remind us of human activity in order, as we say, to enliven it. But an actual landscape requires far more variety than a painted one, and so it seems to us doubly charming and beneficial to the receptive human heart when we can admire, as in England, where nature almost everywhere is idealized through art…40 Here too, one finds a similar interplay between landscape painting and park design as the idealization of indigenous beauty. For Pückler, the aim of landscape gardening was to create “a concentrated image, a smaller picture of nature as a poetic ideal– the same idea the gives every true artwork its essence.”41 Both of these quotes suggest that landscapes are most congenial and beautiful when Nature imitates Art. The painting metaphor appears again in Pückler’s discussion of using trees, shrubs, waterways and paths to frame scenic views, an idea that runs throughout Eliot’s writing and designs; the landscape park, like Muskau, “is really just a picture gallery, and a picture needs a frame.”42 These represent a handful of the many ideas and strategies in Hints that inspired Charles Eliot as he worked on assembling and designing the parks of Boston’s “Emerald Necklace.” Others include the

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Figure 5. Small portion of Boston’s Emerald Necklace park system (Photographer: Sarah Cedar Miller, Artstor).

charm of irregularity or informal arrangement of waterways and plantings, paths and approaches that guide visitors to various, sometimes surprising, views, the importance of building structures in harmony with the landscape and of planting close around buildings to avoid the bare geometry of an exposed building.

This partial genealogy of Eliot’s influences reveals how landscape architecture is deeply rooted in a rich tradition of European literature, art, and science. The strains of Renaissance humanism, Romantic sensibility, and Victorian science culminate in sophisticated comprehension of what to the untrained eye might appear to be a relatively untouched piece of pretty scenery. Eliot’s rigorous training in science and intimate knowledge of the natural systems around Boston helped innovate the young profession and point the way forward to the ecological planning, later advanced by Ian McHarg, so central to the threats we face today. More than ever, the necessity of understanding and preserving large landscapes is paramount to achieving greater resilience and mitigating the destruction wreaked by increasingly severe natural disasters. Looking at these aspects of Eliot’s development can help us think more creatively in part by unsettling the still pervasive opposition between the natural and the artificial and by capturing the public imagination with poetic, painterly visions of our shared futures.

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Notes 1. Charles W. Eliot, Charles Eliot; landscape architect, a lover of nature and of his kind, who trained himself for a new profession, practiced it happily and through it wrought much good.

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1902), 3.

2. Ibid, 4.

3. Ibid, 8-10.

4. Ibid, 10-11.

5. Ibid, 15.

6. Ibid, 24.

7. Ibid, 19.

8. Ibid, 26.

9. Ibid, 27.

10. Ibid, 40.

11. Ibid, 40.

12. Ibid, 54.

13. Ibid, 61.

14. Ibid, 108.

15. Ibid, 109.

16. Ibid, 163.

17. Ibid, 68.

18. Ibid, 191.

19. Ibid, 191.

20. Ibid, 196.

21. Ibid, 196.

22. Ibid, 191.

23. Ibid, 196.

24. Ibid, 197.

25. Ibid, 197.

26. Ibid, 215.

27. Ibid, 216.

28. Ibid, 218.

29. Ibid, 218.

30. Ibid, 40.

31. Ibid, 359.

32. Ibid, 216.

33. Ibid, 360.

34. Ibid, 363.

35. Anita Berrizbeitia. “Between deep and ephemeral time: representations of geology and temporality in Charles Eliot’s Metropolitan Park System, Boston (18921893),” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes: An International Quarterly 34, no. 1 (2014), 38-51, 42.

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36. Eliot, 390.

37. Ibid, 552.

38. Qtd in Eliot, 552.

39. Hermann Prince von Pückler-Muskaul, Hints on Landscape Gardening, Together with a Description of their Practical Application in Muskau. Trans. John Hargrave. (Basel: Birkenhäuser, 2014), 25.

40. Ibid, 25.

41. Ibid, 31.

42. Ibid, 38.

Opposite: Coastline at Pahoa, Hawai’i (Photograph

by Plumeria Alexander).

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Part II:

Examination of Landscape Theory

Advancing Cultural Landscape Preservation: Charles A. Birnbaum and Modernist Urban Landscapes Anna Nau In the last few decades, a focus on cultural landscapes has helped to broaden the classification of what we consider historically, culturally, and aesthetically significant portions of our built environment. Cultural landscapes are both a concept and a method of “considering, analyzing, and evaluating places.”1 As such, they present a valuable framework for how landscape architects, planners, and preservationists understand and intervene in the extant built environment. The National Park Service defines a cultural landscape as “a geographic area, including both cultural and natural resources…associated with a historic event, activity, or persons or exhibit other cultural or aesthetic values.”2 Cultural landscapes are, in the broadest sense, places where nature and culture intermingle. One of the most influential theorists and proponents of cultural landscape preservation in the United States is the landscape architect Charles A. Birnbaum. Author of the federal Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes, Birnbaum continues to educate and advocate for the protection of significant cultural landscapes, particularly those of the recent past, through his work with The Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Raised in New York City, Birnbaum credits his interest in landscape to childhood experiences in his grandparent’s garden at their home in New London, Connecticut.3 He studied landscape architecture at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, graduating in 1983. After interning with the New York-based landscape architect Paul Friedberg, Birnbaum spent several years working with Patricia O’Donnell and Anthony Walmsley, whom he credits for introducing him to the “combination of nature and culture” in landscape architecture. With them, he worked on research and interpretation of historic parks such as Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and the chain of parks in Boston’s Emerald Necklace.4 Birnbaum’s professional career began at a time when standards of landscape preservation were just beginning to formulate. Birnbaum argues that, at the time, there was a general lack of awareness of the significance of landscape architecture and landscape architects in the United States. Compared to the state and federal efforts placed on recognizing buildings of historic significance, such as those

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on the National Register of Historic Places, “landscape architecture has been overshadowed.”5 In 1989 the National Park Service (NPS) created a new program – the Historic Landscape Initiative. At the time, the NPS had begun to address preservation needs for “agrarian settings” in its holding, but quickly realized the need to apply this idea to “the parks more broadly with growing importance given to cultural resources developed to serve the parks themselves.”6 NPS brought in Birnbaum to head the program in 1992. He spent several years leading the effort to develop the first federal guidelines for landscape preservation. Importantly, it was during this initiative when the NPS began using the term “cultural landscapes”8 instead of “historic landscape.” Birnbaum credits this as a significant “shift in the way we think about landscapes.”7 The NPS Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes, published in 1994, defines four general types of cultural landscapes: “historic sites, historic designed

Figure 1. A view in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, N.Y. c.1910 (Library of Congress).

landscapes, historic vernacular landscapes, and ethnographic landscapes.” It also outlines how to apply the federal Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties to cultural landscapes. These standards include four broad categories of treatment types ranging from the least amount of intervention to the

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greatest: preservation, rehabilitation, restoration, and reconstruction. The Guidelines, together with the Preservation Brief 36: Protecting Cultural Landscapes: Planning, Treatment and Management of Historic Landscapes, represent the codification of a definition and treatment approach to cultural landscapes from a regulatory perspective. Between 1992 and 1994, Birnbaum and other NPS staff worked to refine the guidelines, revising them after regular public review and discussion. Many of the examples of both recommended and non-recommended approaches came from Birnbaum’s experience in researching historic urban parks in the United States, such as Brooklyn’s Prospect Park (Figure 1).9 By their very nature, regulatory standards and guidelines like these are meant to be broad, allowing for appropriate contextual interpretation at any given site, but in practice have the potential to be limiting or applied in a simplistic manner.

Arnold R. Alanen and Robert Z. Melnick, in Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America (2000), stress this inherent danger of codified treatment approaches to cultural landscapes. They point to a need to recognize that cultural landscape preservation is inherently complicated, because “the landscape is both artifact and system; in other words, it is a product and a process.”10 Birnbaum did attempt to account for this complexity in the Guidelines. One of the general recommendations states that “preservation planning for cultural landscapes involves a broad array of dynamic variables;” therefore “adopting comprehensive treatment and management plans… acknowledges a cultural landscape’s ever-changing nature and the interrelationship of treatment, management, and maintenance.” This idea of change and continuity is listed as a key factor to consider in selecting a treatment approach for a cultural landscape: There is a balance between change and continuity in all cultural resources. Change is inherent in cultural landscapes; it results from both natural processes and human activities. Sometimes that change is subtle, barely perceptible as with the geomorphological effects on landform. At other times, it is strikingly obvious, as with vegetation, either in the cyclical changes of growth and reproduction or the progressive changes of plant competition and succession. This dynamic quality of all cultural landscapes is balanced by the continuity of distinctive characteristics retained over time. For, in spite of a landscape’s constant change (or perhaps because of it), a property can still exhibit continuity of form, order, use, features, or materials. Preservation and rehabilitation treatments seek to secure and emphasize continuity while acknowledging change.11 Thus, according to the Guidelines, to properly preserve or rehabilitate a cultural landscape, its every-changing character must be recognized and taken into account.

Other factors for consideration listed in the Guidelines include the landscape’s relative significance in history, its larger surroundings and geographical context, its past and current use, the presence of any archaeological resources, the presence of natural resources and systems, as well as the realities of management, maintenance, and

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interpretation.

As the NPS Guidelines highlight, documentation and research form a critical basis for understanding the significance of cultural landscapes. In 1998, Birnbaum established The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF), a non-profit that “provides people with the ability to see, understand and value landscape architecture and its practitioners, in the way that many people have learned to do with buildings and their designers.”12 Through publications, lectures, exhibits, and online outreach, they advocate for the importance of cultural landscapes and the recognition of threats to those places. It is the recognition and appreciation of how landscapes matter to people in their everyday lives that TCLF works to foster. Their efforts include a web-based educational program called “Cultural Landscapes as Classrooms” and a research and oral history program called “Pioneers of Landscape Architecture” that documents the work and lives of significant landscape architects such as Lawrence Halprin and Carol R. Johnson. More recently, TCLF has launched an online, illustrated reference database of significant cultural landscapes in North America called “What’s Out There.”13 The goal is to create an effective research tool for historians, designers, preservationists, and property owners.

One of the greatest challenges facing America’s cultural landscapes, Birnbaum argues, is the lack of awareness of the significance of many of our cities’ twentieth-century urban designed landscapes.

In particular, he has been a vocal proponent of the need to better understand “our shared legacy of post-war landscape a rch i t e c t u re. ” 1 4 While progress has been made in recognizing the Figure 2. Pictured here in 2011, the former pedestrian-friendly Fulton Mall in significance of Fresno, California, designed by Garrett Eckbo in 1964, was significantly altered many nineteenth- in 2014 to make way for vehicular traffic once again (Wikimedia Commons). century landscapes, those of the twentieth century, particularly the post-war period are still largely “invisible.”15 This has resulted in mismanagement, inappropriate intervention, and sometimes demolition of many significant urban cultural landscapes such as Garrett Eckbo’s 1964 design for Fulton Mall in downtown Fresno, California (Figure 2).16

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Through their ‘Landslide’ program, TCLF raises awareness of “threatened or unique” landscapes in the hopes of “creating civic discourse where there often is none.”17 For example, in 2015 TCLF called attention to plans to demolish Pershing Park (M. Paul Friedberg, 1981) in Washington, D.C., adding the park to its list of “At Risk” landscapes and lobbying for its preservation (Figure 3).18

Figure 3. Pershing Park, Washington, D.C. designed by M. Paul Friedberg in 1981, is currently listed as “At Risk” by The Cultural Landscape Foundation due to a planned design for a new memorial that would demolish the existing park (Wikimedia Commons).

Despite significant losses, Birnbaum believes that awareness and appreciation of modernist urban landscapes are growing. The Historic American Landscape Survey (HALS), established in 2000, has become a critical tool for documenting significant designed landscapes, including those under threat. Denver’s Skyline Park, designed

by Lawrence Halprin in the 1970s, was the first to be documented to HALS standards.

This documentation, completed in 2003, has since proved an invaluable historic record following the subsequent demolition of much of the park’s historic features (Figures 4 & 5).19 It is hoped that HALS, TCLF, and other initiatives to identify and document significant cultural landscapes will have a meaningful impact on the way land and property owners, both public and private, approach the maintenance and management of landscapes. In his introduction to a special issue of the

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Figure 4. Historic American Landscape Survey drawing of Skyline Park, Denver, Colorado, designed

by Lawrence Halprin (constructed 1972-1975, Library of Congress Collection).

National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Forum Journal in 2013, Birnbaum argues that we are witnessing a critical moment of opportunity for the protection of significant modernist landscapes: Most significantly, questions about the cultural value of the designed urban landscapes have moved from intellectual arguments in scholarly journals to debates in city councils, on editorial pages, and in the blogosphere. Increasingly and incrementally, the cultural value of Modernist works, namely those from the recent past, are being thoughtfully re-evaluated as the resurrection of the country’s urban centers continues.20 One of the major lessons of a cultural landscape preservation framework is the need for a less black and white approach to the broader preservation field, including architecture. Many preservation advocates cite New York City’s High Line (James Corner Field Operations) as a key success story of both the interweaving of innovative design and the preservation of existing cultural landscape resources in an urban environment. While it is an appealing model, Birnbaum warns that “copycat” designs of the High Line in other cities miss the specific, local context basis for its success. Instead, each intervention must take into account the particularities of place. Birnbaum argues that cities in particular need to “employ

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Figure 5. Much of the three-block linear Skyline Park has been significantly altered, with many of the features pictured in this 2003 Historic American Landscape Survey photograph now lost (Library of Congress Collection).

a more flexible, constructive, and entrepreneurial mindset” when it comes to proposals for intervention in existing urban landscapes. Municipal regulations, he argues, must look “broadly at cities’ cultural assets and think more holistically about their integration.”21 When stewards of cultural landscapes are more aware of the cultural significance of these landscapes, they are more likely to see preservation or rehabilitation as an alternative to complete re-design when making decisions about future change.22 “We are in an era of urban re-renewal,” according to Birnbaum, “where ecological and cultural systems underpin our urban landscape infrastructure, in all of its rich, glorious, and at times messy manifestations.”23 A cultural landscape perspective, which considers the necessity for understanding local context and cultural meaning and that recognizes a balance between continuity and change, provides a unique framework for both designers and preservationists.

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Notes 1. Richard Longstreth, “Introduction: The Challenges of Cultural Landscape Preservation,” in Cultural Landscapes: Balancing Nature and Heritage in Preservation Practice, ed. Richard Longstreth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1.

2. Charles A. Birnbaum, ASLA, Preservation Brief 36: Protecting Cultural Landscapes: Planning, Treatment and Management of Historic Landscapes (Washington, DC: Preservation Assistance Division, National Park Service, US Department of the Interior, 1994), 1.

3. Sarah Kathleen Peck and Eliza Shaw Valk, “Leadership and Cultural Landscapes: An Interview with Charles Birnbaum,” in Landscape Urbanism Journal 02 (Fall 2012), accessed March 15, 2016, http://scenariojournal.com/luleadership-and-cultural-landscapes/ 4. Bill Marken, “Groundbreaker: Charles A. Birnbaum,” in Garden Design Magazine (Jan/Feb 2010): 73.

5. Ibid.

6. Longstreth, 9.

7. Peck and Valk.

8. National Park Service, Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes (1994), accessed March 15, 2016, http://www.nps.gov/tps/standards/four-treatments/ landscape-guidelines/index.htm 9. Charles A. Birnbaum, “Making Educated Decisions on the Treatment of Historic Landscapes,” APT Bulletin Vol. 24, No. 3/4 (1992): 42-51.

10. Arnold R. Alanen and Robert Z. Melnick, “Introduction: Why Cultural Landscape Preservation?” in Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America, eds. Arnold R. Alanen and Robert Z. Melnick (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 16-17.

11. National Park Service, Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes.

12. “About TCLF,” The Cultural Landscape Foundation, accessed March 15, 2016, http://tclf.org/about 13. See http://tclf.org/ 14. Charles A. Birnbaum, “Expanding the Field: Modern Landscape Architecture and Historic Preservation,” Forum Journal Vol. 27 No.2 (Winter 2013): 4.

15. Ibid., 10.

16. Ibid., 8; TCLF, “Fulton Mall,” accessed March 15, 2016, http://tclf.org/ landscapes/fulton-mall 17. Peck and Valk.

18. TCLF, “Threat to Pershing Park Increases,” (Jan. 26, 2016), accessed March 15, 2016, http://tclf.org/landslides/threat-pershing-park-increases.

19. Birnbaum, “Expanding the Field: Modern Landscape Architecture and

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Historic Preservation,” 4-5.

20. Ibid., 6.

21. Ibid., 7.

22. Charles A. Birnbaum, “Preserving and interpreting the landscape legacy of Thomas Dolliver Church,” Studies in the History of Garden & Designed Landscapes 20:2 (2000), 181.

23. Birnbaum, “Expanding the Field: Modern Landscape Architecture and Historic Preservation,” 10.

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Landscape Urbanism: Study in the Theory Haoyang Li Since the end of the twentieth century, landscape as an old term has been used in the relatively new theory “landscape urbanism” to describe the emerging role of landscape in urbanism. Landscape urbanism and its central notion of the “recovery of landscape” has shifted the position of landscape architecture and challenged the roles of other design professions including architecture, urban design and planning.1 Discussions among the field of design have started to move toward a shared notion, for which landscape holds the central significance.2 Moreover, the discourse of landscape urbanism has broadened its scope from the academic world to professional practices over the past two decades.

Terms and Definitions The combination of the terms “landscape” and “urbanism” was first promoted in the Landscape Urbanism conference sponsored by the Graham Foundation in Chicago in April 1997. Speakers included Mohsen Mostafavi, James Corner, Alex Wall, Adriann Geuze, and also Charles Waldheim who originally conceived and organized the formulation of landscape urbanism.3 In his book, Landscape as Urbanism (2016), Charles Waldheim provides a detailed history of the term landscape urbanism. The term urbanism in English was adopted from the French urbanisme at the end of the nineteenth century, which “refers to cultural, representational, and projective dimensions of urban work specific to the design disciplines that the social science term urbanization lacks,” and is defined “as the experience of, study of, and intervention upon processes and products of urbanization.”4 Since its arrival in England in the sixteenth century, the term landscape has been influenced from Dutch landschap, German landschaft, and Danish landskab.5 Historically, its meaning went though great changes from the genre of landscape painting to visible features of the land or a view, and more contemporarily as the land that conveys “a sense of [having been] purposefully shaped.” In landscape urbanism, the centuries old term landscape is not only used to mean a genre of cultural productions, including landscape painting, and landscape photography, but also used as “a model or analogue for human perception, subjective experience, or biological function,” as well “as a medium of design, through which gardeners, artists, architects, and engineers intervene in the city.”6

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The definition of the term landscape urbanism seems elusive since more and more professionals have been engaged in this field with different perspectives and very few of them have a detailed explanation. Stan Allen uses a simple sentence to describe his thoughts of landscape urbanism: “Increasingly, landscape is emerging as a model for urbanism.”7 Susannah C. Drake defines landscape urbanism as “a strategy of using landscape ecology and landscape architecture to create and regenerate cities.”8 Charles Waldheim provides a more concrete definition of the theory though his book within which he explains “landscape urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently under which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism.”9 The Origins--New or Old? To further understand the theory, it is important to dig deep into the heritage of landscape urbanism.7 Like its definitions, the understanding of the origins of the theory is not uniform. Some professionals believe that landscape urbanism could be traced back to Central Park which was designed within the process of “gridding the city,” and ASLA President Gary Scott suggests that “the ideas of landscape rather than architecture generating urban form began with Frederick Law Olmsted.”10 Waldheim, however, argues that Olmsted’s work is “the camouflaging of ecological systems within pastoral images of ‘nature’,” which landscape urbanism rejects.11 Instead, he believes that the idea of landscape urbanism starts from the critiques of modernist architecture and planning projected by Charles Jencks and others.12 He also thinks that several early projects could serve as precedents for landscape urbanism including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1934-35) and Ludwig Hilberseimer’s New Regional Pattern (1945-49), which both proposed “an organic urbanism” within which “landscape as the medium structuring spatial relations between extant natural environments and engineered infrastructural systems.”13 It is hard to say that whether landscape urbanism is totally new, or perhaps it is a hidden notion that has existed long before the rise of its theory. Some landscape urbanists believe landscape urbanism exists within the heritage of ancient civilizations. Bruno De Meulder and Kelly Shannon suggest that hill towns of the Mediterranean and terraced topography of Machu Picchu in Peru represent “indigenous landscape urbanism” within which landscape was the “strategic asset” for the development of the ancient cities.14 Similarly, Kongjian Yu found the root of landscape urbanism in the Chinese ancient art of geomancy, or Feng-shui which is a sacred landscape infrastructure that has, for thousands of years, shaped the ancient Chinese urban forms.15 Classic examples of cities as landscape are those with water systems as branches of the Grand Canal in China. Since the State of Wu, for thousands of years, the vernacular landscape of “Water Lanes” in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province has directed the industrial and commercial activities, and the form of the city, and has shaped the “turtle back” pattern in Qing Dynasty by the “One Bow and Nine

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Arrows” water system (see Figure 1).16 Even today, after most of the “Water Lanes” have been replaced by concrete streets, the geometry of the downtown area of Wuxi is still controlled by the form of the original water system (see Figure 2).

Figure 1. The “One Bow and Nine Arrows” (Source: Photo by Haoyang Li, 2013).

Figure 2. Model of Down Town Wuxi, (Source: Photo by Haoyang Li, 2013).

Frameworks and Practices in Landscape Urbanism No matter whether landscape urbanism is relatively new or old, it cannot be denied that the contemporary urban conditions are new and are totally different from the historic conditions in those ancient civilizations. It is reasonable for Waldheim to trace the origins of landscape urbanism back to an era when economy in North America started to decentralize.

Since the landscape urbanism conference, Waldheim has been one of the strongest advocates for landscape urbanism. As the current chair of the landscape architecture department at Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard, Waldheim has guided and supported the emergence of landscape urbanism. Edited by Waldheim, the book Landscape Urbanism Reader (2006) collects the thoughts of landscape urbanists and illustrates a broad and varied picture of the theory. Ten years later, his new book Landscape as Urbanism (2016) provides a further illustrations of the theory, including its deep origins and background from different aspects of society, culture and economy, and concludes with the frameworks and practices of different landscape urbanists.

Charles Waldheim has a deep understanding of the conditions of contemporary cities. In Landscape as Urbanism (2016), he provides an analysis of the transition

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of economic structure from twentieth-century “Fordist” economy to twenty-firstcentury “post-Fordist” economy which is expected to be mitigated by landscape, and he explains the phenomenon of decentralization, shrinkage and flux of contemporary cities. Also, he illustrates the failure of other design professions including architecture, urban design and planning to “offer meaningful frameworks for describing or intervening upon the city in the context of urban abandonment, disinvestment, and decay.”17 Based on the context he has researched, he theorizes that “landscape is a medium uniquely capable of responding to temporal change, transformation” and “articulating relations between urban infrastructure, public events, and indeterminate urban futures for large postindustrial sites.”18 For him, landscape is also a “lens” through which urbanism can be described and represented.19 Waldheim’s theory concludes and parallels other landscape urbanists’ frameworks, including James Corner, Adriann Geuze, and Stan Allen.

James Corner who is the director of James Corner Field Operations and former Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at University of Pennsylvania developed his theoretical framework for considering landscape as field of operation.

For him, landscape urbanism is to develop “a space-time ecology that treats all forces and agents working in the urban field and considers them as continuous networks of inter-relationships.”20 Corner studied landscape ecology with Ian McHarg who led environmental planning practice within which city and nature are considered opposites. Largely influenced by architects Bernard Tschumi and Rem Koolhaas’s work, Corner uses ecology in another way—as interacting with culture, society, economy and urban development. Corner’s thoughts were effectively tested in his professional practices includes the Bridesburg neighborhood project on Philadelphia’s Delaware River Waterfront in 2003. He proposed a strategy of “phytoremediation” which uses poplar trees to remediate contaminated sites in the neighborhood.21 The process of planting and replanting trees for absorbing contaminations in parallel with the phasing of urbanization of those sites would record the sites’ environmental history and direct the form of the city.22 As a graduate in landscape architecture from Wageningen University, Adriann Geuze of West 8—who was also originally trained in landscape ecology—developed similar thoughts as James Corner. In the Buckthorn City Project (1995) on the Dutch coast, Geuze creatively proposed a strategy to use the invasive European buckthorn plant to drive the market-based urbanization. Similar to Corner’s thoughts in using ecology to shape future urbanization, Geuze’s design proposes to utilize an openended natural process to direct the development of the shape of the city.23 As the former Dean of School of Architecture at Princeton University, Stan Allen’s

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theory and practices in operating the field parallels Corner’s interests. Allen studied and was inspired by the forms in the natural world that are self-regulating and open-ended, and he drew a series of diagrams through which he developed his framework of “field condition” to focus on thickened horizontal surface (see Figure 3).24 He conceives the field as an infrastructure which is self-regulated to accommodate the flux of contemporary urban forms. In 1996, Allen’s project at Barcelona Port proposes a horizontal surface using landscape as infrastructure dynamically responding to the future Figure 1. The “One Bow and Nine Arrows” (Source: Photo by Haoyang Li, 2013). condition of urbanism that is hard to predict. The emphasis on flexibility, change, and time is clear in both of these landscape urbanists’ frameworks and practices within which landscape is used as a model of process.

Critiques of the Theory After two decades, landscape urbanism theory has attracted not only advocates but also critics. Some people believe that the theory, especially its definition is ambiguous and mere rhetorical dressing. For example, Bruno De Meulder and Kelly Shannon argue that some of the contemporary practices of landscape urbanism which have promised self-regulating of landscape actually require a higher degree of control, because “the reinvention of the natural world has superseded the building of a mechanical world—which, in fact, requires not less design but more design.”25 Similarly, other critics like Frits Palmboom, reject the process-oriented approaches used by some designers (e.g. James Corner and Adriann Geuze) influenced by Ren Koolhaas who defines urbanism as fluid. He does not critique West 8’s ambiguous proposal for Schiphol Amsterdam Airport, because it intentionally avoided a detailed planting design. Instead, he suggests that “form-oriented and processoriented approaches cannot be driven apart from one another,” and insists on giving “architectonic moment” within landscape urbanism its value.26 The Changing Role of Landscape No matter how professionals from different disciplines define or practice landscape urbanism, what they believe the origins of the theory are, or how they assess the theory, collectively, their discussions represent a great change in the role of

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contemporary landscape. The common argument landscape urbanists share is that landscape, rather than urban design or architecture, could better shape and also represent urban forms. In the early nineteenth century, landscape architecture emerged as a compensation for the chaotic social order and urban forms due to heavy industrial development. At the turn of twentieth century, the creation of urban systems was led by architecture and engineering largely due to Le Corbusier‘s vision of “Machine for living” for shaping urban forms. In the decentralizing city associated with a mature Fordist industrial economy, Ian McHarg’s book Design with Nature (1969) changed the way in which landscape architecture was conceived by promoting the idea that environmental design could restore natural systems.27 In the contemporary post-Fordist industrial economy, the discourse of landscape urbanism has been trying to shift the role of landscape again. This time landscape is to generate urban form rather than simply compensate for unhealthy social systems or repair broken environmental systems. In this new era, as Waldheim says, “landscape is called on to structure the redevelopment of industrial sites for new forms of urban living, through a unique combination of ecological performance and design culture.”28 Notes 1. Dean Almy, ed. On Landscape Urbanism. (Austin, TX: Center for American Architecture and Design, University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, 2007).

2. James Corner, “Terra Fluxus” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Waldheim, C. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 21-34.

3. Ibid.

4. Charles Waldheim, Landscape as Urbanism. (New York: Princeton University Press, 2016), 2.

5. Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 17.

6. Waldheim (2016), 3.

7. Stan Allen, “Mat urbanism: the thick 2-D.”, in Case: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival, ed. Sarkis, H. (New York: Prestel 2001), 118-126.

8. Susannah C. Drake, 2010. “Term, Definition, Identity: Regenerating Landscape Architecture in the Era of Landscape Urbanism.” Topos: The International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design (71): 50-57.

9. Waldheim (2016, 18 10. Drake (2010).

11. Waldheim (2016), 15.

12. Charles Waldheim, “Landscape as Urbanism” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Waldheim, C. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 35-54.

13. Charles Waldheim, “Precedents for a North American Landscape

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Urbanism.”, in On Landscape Urbanism, ed. Almy, Dean, ( Austin, TX: Center for American Architecture and Design, University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, 2007), 292-303, 136.

14. Bruno De Meulder and Kelly Shannon, 2010. “Traditions of Landscape Urbanism.” Topos: The International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design (71): 68-73.

15. Yu, Kongjian. 2010. “Five Traditions for Landscape Urbanism Thinking.”

Topos: The International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design (71): 58-63.

16. Wang, Fang, and Li Haoyang, 2014. “The Unique Landscape of the Grand Canal --Studies of Strategies about Development and Protection of the Water Lanes in Wuxi.” Journal of Huaqiao University. 3 (2014): 31-41.

17. Waldheim (2016), 89” 18. Waldheim (2016), 15.

19. Ibid, 15.

20. Corner (2006).

21. Waldheim (2016), 42.

22. Ibid, 42.

23. Ibid, 42.

24. Waldheim (2016), 36.

25. Meulder &Shannon (2010).

26. Frits Palmboom, 2010. “Landscape Urbanism: Conflation or Coalition?”

Topos: The International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design (71): 43-49.

27. Waldheim (2016), 5.

28. Ibid, 5.

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Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP Cycles: Performance-based Landscape Design and the Portland Park Sequence Doug Norman Influenced by Bauhaus interdisciplinarity, Jungian psychology, ecological thinking and countercultural currents of the 1950s and 1960s, Lawrence Halprin created a performance-based approach to landscape design and planning in collaboration with his wife Anna Halprin and the many architects, landscape architects, planners, and artists with whom he worked. By examining several strands of influence in Halprin’s work and his approach to the Portland park sequence, this paper will explore the theoretical bases for Halprin’s RSVP Cycle and Take Part Processes and the kind of landscape design that resulted from them.

Collaborative Influences Lawrence Halprin and his wife Anna Halprin–the famous avant-garde dance pioneer–drew inspiration from the interdisciplinary approach of the Bauhaus movement, which brought together architects, painters, dramatists, sculptors, industrial technology, as well as stage and costume design. In the years just before World War II, Halprin studied at the Harvard School of Design, and it was under the tutelage of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius that he began to form the ideas that would lead to his innovative contributions to participatory planning and much lauded landscape designs.1 After serving in the war, Halprin joined his wife in San Francisco where he worked for Thomas Church, while Anna collaborated with area artists to develop her path-breaking choreographic approach. After four years with Church, he struck out on his own to build a thriving practice that produced hundreds of private gardens in the Bay Area and larger projects all across the country. By the late 1950s, Anna was working with poets, sculptors, and pioneers of electronic music as well as members of Halprin’s office.2 Her highly interdisciplinary, participatory, workshop-based performance projects–in which Halprin frequently took part–informed his emerging approach to garden design early in his career and eventually to his much larger park and landscape planning projects. The Halprins were both deeply engaged in and fascinated by the collaborative creative processes they explored and that came to define their illustrious careers. Through the writings of László Moholy-Nagy and his collaborations with Anna, Halprin understood that the movement of the human body through space and time was key to “exploring

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and explaining the challenges of expansive design problems” of the larger projects in which he was involved from the late 1950s.3 From Moholy-Nagy’s concept of “vision in motion,” he developed his “motation system… to encompass the idea of motion and action” inspired by “dynamic cities and communities,” ones that were “incredibly lively and involved constant social movement, interactive community life, dance, art, and music.”4 Pondering the ways in which speed could affect an environment and vice versa, he realized that a system of graphic representation or notation would be an indispensable tool for communicating ideas and achieving enduring solutions to complex planning problems. He turned to music to develop the centerpiece of the RSVP process, the Score, discussed in further detail below.

Through these open-ended scores and the RSVP process, Halprin intended “to free the creative process by making the process visible.”5 Ecological thinking and Jungian psychology were also key to developing a scoring method that would be flexible enough to apply in many different contexts and at different scales. For the Halprins, “art forms were influenced by and arose from natural processes” that they observed in their wide travels and nearer to home in Marin County and the High Sierras.6 Already looking to natural systems and forces for creative guidance, Halprin’s professional association/friendship with Ian McHarg reinforced this central insight, as did the stream of McHarg-trained architects who came to work with Halprin over the years.7 The stress and anxiety of running his flourishing practice precipitated not only his escapes to the High Sierra but also his turn to the ideas of Carl Jung via his therapist Dr. Joe Henderson. Here ecological and psychological thinking dovetail in the then growing awareness of modern humans’ alienation from the natural world and our primitive connections to the elements. Jungian theory introduced him to “the importance of archetypal images, which have no antecedents and emerge from the unconscious” especially with regard to natural forms and processes; he credits “this recognition of our shared needs and symbols” with bringing about “an underlying universal quality” to his designs.8 This self-exploration paired with wider ecological and social concerns were tied to the countercultural movements of the period in which he refined his collaborative process-oriented approach.

The major countercultural currents that accompanied and fostered the avant-garde art of the 1950s and 1960s helps situate the RSVP cycle process as a synthesis of Beat and New Left cultures bringing together the capacious interdisciplinarity of the Bauhaus movement, deep ecological thinking, and Jungian archetypes discussed above. As Alison Hirsch explains in her book City Choreographer, The Halprins … sought to reestablish an organic wholeness between life, art, politics, philosophy, and so on. To reconstruct this interconnected life, and to dissolve the power structure that infused a deep sense of alienation into overall society, Larry employed both [Beat and New Left] strategies of the

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counterculture by exploring the inward potential of the unconscious, demonstrated by his design interest in ‘archetypal forms’ in the 1960s… as well as the outward possibilities of public statement and participation demonstrated by his Take Part Process.9 This cultural synthesis would also inform the structural core of the graphic notation system at the center of this performance-based process: two concentric circles, “the inner circle… self-oriented” and “an outer, community-oriented circle.”10 All of these strands–of which there are undoubtedly more–set the stage for his articulation of the process in his 1969 book The RSVP Cycles, his work on Portland parks, and the further elaboration of Take Part Process.

The RSVP Cycles, a Metascore for the Halprin Process The “organic wholeness,” “interconnected life,” and search for universal principles Hirsch describes are immediately apparent in Halprin’s introduction to The RSVP Cycles, which–like the scores they are constructed around–are applicable to all human activity, not just music, dance, and planning. He came to the realization, while working on the book, that it was really the creative process writ large that he wanted to explore: “I was not interested exclusively in what the score-performance relationship was–how the particular event, the building, or piece of music, or piece of legislation, was beautiful, but how the process of arriving at it came about.”11 Indeed, Halprin and collaborators used the RSVP Cycles process to create the book itself. Understanding that process, as well as making it visible and accessible to others, held the potential to liberate creative forces for individuals and communities and to empower the disenfranchised. For Halprin, both dance and environmental design dealt with “subtleties and nuance, intuition, and fantasy, and… [went] to the root-source of human needs and desires–atavistic ones at that.”12 The RSVP Cycles were designed to uncover these needs and desires through an iterative, nonlinear process comprised of a “multidimensional and moving interconnectedness” between its four elements: Resources, Scores, Valuaction, and Performance.13 Hence the felicitous acronym gives a nod to the concept of eliciting responses– the French phrase répondez s’il vous plaît–as well as evoking the party, event, ritual, or social gathering.

Figure 1. RSVP Diagram from The RSVP Cycles (198).

The four basic elements are arranged around the concentric circles described above like the cardinal points on a compass with vertical and horizontal arrows connecting the opposing poles (see Figure 1). The clean geometrical simplicity does not imply an orderly movement through the process; rather, “The cycle operates in any direction and

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by overlapping.” The Resources (R) stage consists in an inventory of “what you have to work with… including human and physical resources and their motivation and aims.”15 Next comes the Score (S), which graphically represents the process that will guide the performance. The Valuaction (V) stage provokes analysis, evaluation, and decision-making often by comparing different alternative futures, a process strikingly similar to the concept of scenario planning. These activities may involve the previous stage in the creation of “thematic” scores to test out ideas and alternatives.16 In fact, the V part of the cycle was key to the dance and theatre scores created during Anna Halprin’s lengthy workshop sessions in which the dancers, Anna, or the group would consider alternatives and revise the original score. The final Performance (P) stage is the result of the score, but not necessarily the end of the process. In the spirit of liberating creativity and inviting participation, Halprin calls for open scores that allow for flexibility and variability of performances and responses that extend decades into the future.

Throughout the book, Halprin weaves in examples of open and closed scores with differing degrees of control. Closed scores such as the player piano scroll and Bach scores exert higher degrees of control over the performances; the player piano allows for no variation, no agency for a performer.17 John Cage’s innovative musical notation, invented to compose music made with unconventional instruments such as water containers or radios, serve as examples of more open scores in which the notations become inseparable from the sound.18 These more open scores invite more active interpretation and the kind of creative participation that Halprin wanted to cultivate in environmental planning and design. He describes advocacy planning as the attempt to encourage community involvement in Scoring (S) their own environments by using questionnaires to gauge the Resources (R) of their motivations and needs, which then feeds back into another cycle of Valuaction (V) and further Scoring (S).19 Here the role of the planner or the artist changes from the controlling “solitary hero” to a “synthesizer who brings together differences and works to evoke the art within us all.”20 Halprin criticizes the analogous top-down or “solitary hero” style of planning and design of Corbusier’s Chandigarh or Costa and Niemeyer’s Brasilia, which he says may be beautiful but “lack congruence with the lifestyles of their people because the score was closed to them.”21 The open scores so important to boundary-transgressing art of the 1950s and 1960s provided a model for democratizing planning and design and for transcending the false opposition of Art and Life. They could also help reconnect people to the natural environment through ritual and play, effectively surmounting the dualism of Humanity and Nature and moving Western society away from what he called the Biblical score. Based on Lynn White’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis,” which contends that the Judeo-Christian injunction “exploit nature for his proper ends,” the Biblical score per Halprin culminates in “the ethos of private-

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property-for-gain” at the root of ecological devastation and social injustice facing mid-twentieth Americans.22 He calls for an ecologic ethic in which we once again acknowledge human beings as part of the natural world and its systems.

To encourage the new ethic, he proposes ecoscoring so that people can begin to comprehend natural processes and ecosystems or “why it is, what it is, and how of its developing way.”23 Ecoscores make these processes visible, raising awareness about the environment and the value of ecosystem services that support life. These processes also inform design in a way that evokes the atavistic needs and desires we all share. The concept of ecoscoring was an important aspect of Halprin’s RSVP praxis as can be clearly seen in his design process for the Portland Park Sequence.

The Portland Open Space Sequence & the Take Part Process In the early 1960s Portland Development Committee (PDC) urban renewal agency spearheaded the South Auditorium Urban Renewal Area just to the south of Portland’s downtown Pearl District, and by 1963 they razed the formerly Jewish and immigrant neighborhood. These projects “that displaced thousands of powerless residents ultimately inspired him to develop the Take Part Process.”24 The project later stretched northward, and this is where Halprin would be asked to design a series of three parks connected by a pedestrian path: The Auditorium Forecourt, Pettigrove Park, and Lovejoy Plaza (see Figure 2). He did so by developing a Score for the sequence, which he applied at two scales, the self-oriented and the communityoriented.25 The Scoring (S) grew out of his understanding of the Resources (R),

Figure 2. Halprin’s sketch of the Portland Park Sequence from Sketchbooks of Lawrence Halprin (69).

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including the distinct urban setting, the local character of the city’s inhabitants, and the regional geological features. At the larger community-oriented scale, he imagined the eight-block grid of pedestrian-oriented “open spaces... promenades, nodes of plazas & parks with a mix of public space and private space interwoven.”26 Evident in his sketches, he thought carefully about movement through the sequence and how the various spaces would meet the needs of downtown community by offering different types of spaces suitable to different activities or Performances (P) (see Figure 3) The accompanying text reads, “The space is choreographed for movement with nodes for quiet & contemplation, action & inaction, hard & soft, YIN & YANG.”27

Figure 3. The rhythm of choreographed uses for the Portland parks Park Sequence from Sketchbooks of Lawrence Halprin (60).

At the self-oriented scale, or “Intimate human scale,” Halprin sought to integrate “nodes within the larger system that offer the ‘experiential equivalency’ to indigenous natural phenomena… to connect the people of Portland to their foundational ecology.”28 That ecology would speak to both interrelated scales, both individual and community needs and desires, through an application of Halprin’s ecoscoring concept.

The ecological resources of the Portland area would shape his ecoscore to encourage individual and community performances and participation in activities that reflected the region and its people. Halprin wanted to create spaces to which people would respond by bringing “into the heart of the downtown activities which related in a very real way to the environment of the Portland area – the Columbia river, the Cascade mountains, the streams, rivers, and mountain meadows… symbolic elements… very much a part of Portlander’s psyche.”29 The features and processes of the Pacific Northwest watershed provided the ecoscores that would bridge the city and the surrounding landscape and that would evoke the universal archetypes of landscape that had the power to mitigate modern alienation (see Figure 4).

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However, “the Forecourt along with the Source Fountain, Lovejoy Fountain Plaza, and Pettigrove Park were meant to evoke a metaphorical watershed.”30 The parks would be abstractions that spoke to the city dwellers’ psyches and invited them to participate. In Halprin’s words “the fountains and plazas are formed to link up with nature’s process not copy her.”31 The upper, mountain portions of the watershed and its associated processes became the ecoscore that would control how the series of fountains unfolded from mountain spring, down through rushing cascades, placid pools, regal waterfalls, and tranquil mountain meadows (see Figure 5).

Bringing these “wild” hydrological processes into the urban environment, Hirsch

Figure 4. The Watershed as resource stage inspiration for the park sequence from Sketchbooks of Lawrence Halprin (60).

contends, allowed Halprin to “[harness] water’s potential as an elemental force and ‘atavistic need’ that is fundamental to the survival of man, to incite such primal response.”32 In doing so, he would open up possibilities for healing aesthetic experiences and increased social cohesion through participation.

The fountains opened at a moment in Portland when social, racial, and political divisions were wreaking havoc across the country. The ceremony took place on the heels of the Kent State shootings and violent confrontations between anti-war

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Figure 5. Metaphorical watershed flow through the park sequence from Hirsch (129).

activists and police in Portland and could be characterized as a combination of everyday “‘living rituals’ with the chance occurrences or happenings” Halprin prized in the active cityscapes and dynamic communities he prized.33 In a presentation to the Cultural Landscape Foundation, Halprin recollects that “All the young people from miles around appeared on the scene and started jumping into the fountains, as I say they were designed to be used in that way, participated in” (“Portland Reflections”).34 The mayor and police attempted to stop the boisterous crowd from entering the fountain, so–in order to defuse the situation–Halprin himself jumped in the fountain fully clothed with microphone in hand, urging people to come together and participate. The inaugural performance of the space ended up a “jolly” day (see Figure 6), replete with the kind of participatory performance he had intended the fountains to incite.35 Not every part of the process was appropriate for open scoring however.

In The RSVP Cycles, he describes the design of the Lovejoy Fountain as a relatively closed score: “the plaza fountain was preconceived by the designers and the exact form and methods and construction were conveyed to the builder and built that way.”36 But, once the fountain was completed it became an open-ended score for Portland residents: “The Performance (P) was not an end but a beginning in the cycle again.”37 Over the years, thousands of performances, from formal theatrical and musical events, to weddings, drum circles, buskers, have taken place in both Lovejoy Plaza and at Ira Keller Fountain (formerly the Auditorium Forecourt). Moreover, the parks have exerted a significant influence on Portland’s downtown planning and pedestrian friendly, connected open spaces. Hirsch points out that the legacy of Halprin’s original sequence is that it “seems to have generated this larger network of public spaces, activated by water... demonstrative of Halprin’s success at structuring 75

Figure 6. Opening-day revelry at the Auditorium Forecourt Fountain, 1970, from Hirsch (150).

an open-ended score.”38 The RSVP Cycles processes allowed Halprin to design an urban landscape that promotes active public spaces and public participation. He “felt that citizen involvement was vitally important for public projects because in a democracy we all need to have a sense of ownership in our communities.”39 To that end, he and his team turned to RSVP process once again to create a more accessible guide to the cycles as they specifically related to public planning processes called Take Part. Laden with hip 1970s graphics and eye-catching typeface, the guide describes various ways ordinary people can get involved with public processes to help shape their communities. The team includes tips and examples for engaging in public meetings, planning charrettes, role-playing, active listening, and information sharing. Numerous photos of smiling faces and interesting activities along with its breezy upbeat prose suggest to readers that this is a party they don’t want to miss, an invitation calculated to provoke an RSVP and continue the cycling processes.

Notes

1. Elizabeth K. Meyer, “Biography of Lawrence Halprin,” The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Nd, http://tclf.org/pioneer/lawrence-halprin/biography-lawrencehalprin (accessed 15 March, 2016).

2. Lawrence Halprin, A Life Spent Changing Places. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 110.

3. Meyer.

4. Halprin, A Life, 127.

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5. Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment.

(New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1969), 3.

6. Halprin, A Life, 130.

7. Ibid, 108.

8. Ibid, 103.

9. Alison Bick Hirsch. City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America.

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 18.

10. Halprin, A Life, 133.

11. Halprin, RSVP, 2.

12. Ibid, 1.

13. Ibid, 2.

14. Ibid, 2.

15. Ibid, 2.

16. Ibid, 131-133.

17. Ibid, 13.

18. Ibid, 11.

19. Ibid, 18 20. Ibid, 31.

21. Ibid, 18.

22. Ibid, 98-99.

23. Ibid, 98.

24. Hirsch, 123.

25. Ibid, 125.

26. Lawrence Halprin. The Sketchbooks of Lawrence Halprin. (Tokyo: Process Architecture, 1981), 60.

27. Ibid, 60.

28. Hirsch, 125.

29. Halprin, Sketchbooks, 61.

30. “Ira Keller Fountain.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation, Nd, http://tclf. org/landscapes/ira-keller-fountain (accessed 15 March, 2016).

31. Halprin, Sketchbooks, 61.

32. Hirsch, 121.

33. Ibid, 117.

34. Lawrence Halprin. “Lawrence Halprin Projects: Portland Reflections,” The Cultural Landscape Foundation, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=04zfTDn4378, (accessed 15 March, 2016).

35. Ibid.

36. Halprin, RSVP, 58.

37. Ibid, 58.

38. Hirsch, 151.

39. Halprin, A Life, 134.

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The Spirit in the Science, The Ancient in the Modern: Visions of Spiritual Ecology Plumeria J. Alexander Spiritual Ecology is a relatively new field, having began to proliferate in study in the 1990s (Sponsel). Leslie E. Sponsel, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and author of Spiritual Ecology: A Quiet Revolution defines Spiritual Ecology as: the “scientific and scholarly studies of the vast, complex, diverse, dynamic, and promising arena at the interfaces of religions and spiritualities with environments, ecologies, and environmentalisms.” To this definition we can add: Practitioners of spiritual ecology fall into three categories: 1) the scientific and academic, who may or may not be religious or spiritual, but whose work points to such a theory, 2) People whose spiritual or religious beliefs inspired their environmentalism, and 3) People who experienced transcendent feelings of interconnectedness in nature that then fuels their environmentalism, such as Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. There is also most likely a lot of blur between these categories.1 Mohandas K. Gandhi once said “There are as many religions as there are individuals,” and therefore, a definition of Spiritual Ecology would necessarily encompass a wide lexicon of voices and theories about the subject. Whatever the directive, culture, or beliefs of those voices, I believe that they stem from aesthetic apprehension of and “feelings of belonging to” nature that is replete in the human experience. 2 Even in the context of the first category, in which scientific or academic theorists may not be “spiritual,” those researchers nevertheless feel some kind of alliance or feelings of kinship with the ideas they are studying, or they would likely not be pursing the study as an area of interest.

Professor Sponsel introduces the study of Spiritual Ecology by describing the ideas of the British social anthropologist, Sir Edward Burnet Tylor, that Animism (derived from the Latin term anima, which is defined as “spirit, soul, or life force”) was the “earliest stage in the evolution of religion and is the ultimate foundation of all religions.” Sponsel describes Animism as the “belief that nature is inspirited by extraordinary beings and forces.”3 Nature, in this context, includes animals, rocks, plants, mountains, waters, earth, and the like. He gives the example of the common Thai belief that the spirit of a person who has died may take up residence in a tree. This is part of what makes the tree a figure of reverence, in addition to its own existence as a living organism. In continuation of that idea, when a farm or 78

building is constructed, a Thai citizen will build a miniature house for the spirit of that land to reside in, in place of its old home in the land.4 There is also another aspect of nature that is being engaged, which is, nature not as a collection of individual material forms, but as an overarching alive and aware force. Scholar and Animist Graham Harvey describes the awareness of this force of nature as: “consciousness…embedded in the nature of all things and [which] seems intimately linked to matter at every level.”5 Having lived in Hawai’i, my experience of the Hawai’ian cultural ethic closely mirrors the ideas of both Animism, as well as a consciousness arising out of and guided by nature. It is, in fact impossible to live in Hawaii and not come to understand that a deep consciousness arose out of the Hawai’ian people’s relationship to the landscape. For example, every native art form appears to be inspired by or derived from the landscape; not just general forms of natural phenomena, such as mountains or rainbows, but also specific regions, such as a particular valley, a specific mountain range, or a flower variety that only grows on the coastline. Hawai’ian songs before and after the colonial influence, for instance, often recount the deep love inspired by particular landscapes, or liken the love of two persons to a natural phenomena.

Here, I have included a famous song: Aloha ʻia ʻo Waiʻanae

Love for Waiʻanae

He malu i ka ulu niu Ulu niu kaulana ʻo Pōkaʻī He nani ke ʻike aku

The peaceful shady Famous coconut grove of Pōkaʻī Bay I see the beauty

Kū kilakila Kaʻala Kuahiwi kau i ka hano Uluwehi i ka maile lau liʻiliʻi He ʻala huʻihuʻi ē Pā ana ka makani he Kaiāulu He aheahe mālie Puīa i ke ʻala o ka ʻawapuhi He pua ʻala onaona Haʻina mai ka puana ʻO Waiʻanae kuʻu home Home i aloha ʻia e mākou Home poina ʻole

Majestic Kaʻala The glorious mountain Where the small leaf maile grows in profusion With its penetrating fragrance The wind named Kaiāulu Blows gently Brings the fragrance of ginger The sweet smelling flower Tell the refrain Of my home at Wai`anae The home that we love The unforgettable home6, 7 79

Hawai’ian myths and legends recount how particular flowers or forms of nature came to have their name. The undulating motions of the hands in certain types of the Hula dance (which was actually a form of worship, as well as a means of recording history) echo the undulation of the waves. It is with great reverence to the land and Akua (the Great Spirit) that these dances are performed. Hawai’ian architecture is designed to experience the breeze, with large roofs covering outdoor spaces, and many public spaces being open to the air, rather than air-conditioned, including large public buildings such as the Honolulu International Airport, or the outdoor shopping mall, Ala Moana Shopping Center.

Urban landscapes are christened by names of natural phenomena, such as a street or district with names like Kap’iolani, “treasured rainbow,” or Waikiki “spouting water.” Wayfinding is also dominated by landforms, with verbal directions often involving either heading “toward the mountains,” which inhabit the inner part of the island, or “toward the ocean,” which inhabits the periphery.

The Big Island of Hawai’i gives one an experience of the intense richness of animal life in which we are amidst. I vividly remember strolling down a neighborhood street one afternoon on my way to the beach. I stop to smell a fragrant ginger plant in someone’s front yard, and a bright green gecko sneaks up on a leaf and ogles me. As I continue on my way, a butterfly floats by my head, on its own sightseeing voyage. Heading toward the sound of the waves, I approach a brushy hidden pathway that I know leads to the ocean. The underbrush shakes and rustles as a mongoose frantically scampers away from my feet. At the beach, I put my bag down and enjoy the warm sand on my feet. A blurry brown shape in the water transforms into a brown sea turtle, and it pokes its shiny head out of the waves to take a breath. Each experience is so enchanting that these encounters feel more like spiritual visitations than chance phenomena. As I relax on the sand and focus my eyes at a distance over the ocean vista, I gasp as I spy a spout and a whale’s tail just slipping back into the water! To have such deep encounters with wildlife and landscape, the daily experience of Hawai’ians of old and new, is to truly come to understand the nature of a spirited, living ecology. In traditional Hawai’ian culture, every interaction with nature, be it wildlife or plantlife, is a gift and expression of Akua, and is regarded and received with deep gratitude. This deep gratitude lays the foundation for an attitude of reciprocity, through engaging with Nature through frameworks of responsibility and stewardship.

Though the extent of the ineffable runs deep in the relationship between Hawaiian spirituality and ecology, I will now turn the page to schools of thought within other philosophies that reinforce these ideas of responsibility, stewardship, and gratitude.

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Buddhism, Nonviolence, and Voluntary Simplicity Buddhist philosophy has been recognized as a responsible model for engaging concerns of environmental degradation due to its centuries-long documented history that involves the thought of scholars and practitioners from around the world. In addition, the philosophy can be seen as more widely appealing and practicable because it is not actually a religion, but a philosophy, or “way of ‘systems thinking.”8 Buddhist philosophy is based on the premise that all sentient beings experience birth, suffering, aging, and death. The way to end suffering is by seeking and achieving spiritual enlightenment, or awakening (nirvana), which ceases the cycle of endless rebirths and more suffering.9 The way to achieve enlightenment is by following the Dharma10 , which can be described as the “way things are,” “laws of nature,” or, as I previously quoted, the way of the “consciousness [that] is embedded in the nature of all things and seems intimately linked to matter at every level” (Harvey).

Following the Dharma means honoring the inherent dignity of life by following the Middle Way, an eight-fold path of action that rejects extremes of living, and encompasses Buddhist precepts of nonviolence (ahimsa), compassion (karuna), and loving-kindness (metta).11 These precepts are significant because nonviolence, compassion, and lovingkindness apply to all sentient beings, which include plant and animal life. In Buddhism, these precepts are put into practice through a monastic code of over two hundred regulations that prevent monks from knowingly harming animals, plants, water, or any visible organisms.12 Sponsel discusses the reality that Buddhists acknowledge: it is fundamentally impossible to live without causing harm, because we inadvertently do so by stepping on insects and microscopic organisms, or even by eating plants. Nevertheless, Buddhists “strive as much as feasible to minimize harm.” “Here the basic distinction between need and greed is pivotal,” he continues, “By pursuing the Middle Way, an individual tries to satisfy as modestly as possible the four fundamental needs that the Buddha recognized: food, medicine, clothing, and shelter.” Sponsel also points out that this is similar to the modern practice of voluntary simplicity.13 Given that the ultimate reason for embarking upon a Buddhist mode of living is to achieve enlightenment, and that this path of realization involves evolving beyond the typical importance given to the material world, in favor of a focus on the sustenance generated through the metaphysical world, an attachment to excess material goods would gradually fall away as a byproduct of pursing this spiritual and philosophical path. Therefore, the pursuit of a higher spiritual realization, or constant awareness of the interconnected nature of the world, would have a significant impact on the need for material creation and ensuing waste formation, and help to conserve natural resources.

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Gandhi, Nonviolence, and Deep Ecology The tenant of nonviolence (and by extension, compassion and loving-kindness) has a well-developed history in Hinduism, as well, of which Buddhism is an outgrowth.

Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948), famous for his use of nonviolent resistance in liberating India from the colonial English during the first half of the 20th century, also applied the principle of nonviolence en masse to encompass all living beings.

Like the Buddha, Gandhi associated spiritual development with the ideals of nonviolence. Author and Peace researcher Thomas Webber writes of Gandhi’s thoughts about nonviolence: “Another way to illustrate Gandhi’s concerns with the oneness of life is to look at his writings on ahimsa. Usually translated as nonviolence, it can be seen as the fountainhead of Truth14—the ultimate goal of life. From his prison cell in 1930, Gandhi wrote to his ashramites that ‘Ahimsa and Truth are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to disentangle and separate them. They are like two sides of a coin.” Weber went on to cite the analysis of Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1912-2009): ‘Gandhi made manifest the internal relationship between self-realisation, nonviolence and what sometimes has been called ‘biospherical egalitarianism.’”15 This is significant because Gandhi lived in a time before the modern articulation of ecological and environmental philosophy.16 Arne Naess was deeply influenced by Gandhian principles of nonviolence, going as far as stating, “‘nature conservation is non-violent at its very core.’”17 Naess coined the term “deep ecology” by dividing the ecological movement in the 1970s into two approaches, “shallow” and “deep.” Shallow ecology, in Naess’ view, stopped short of values-based changes in society, by promoting technological solutions such as recycling or automotive efficiency,18 without actually altering the consumptionbased lifestyle of an industrial economy. “Deep” ecology, however, went further to question the moral and values-based roots of consumption, and therefore, implicit condoning of environmental degradation.19 Naess’ willingness to explain social behavior towards the environment as having a spiritual or moral basis can also be read as, at least in part, a Gandhian influence.

David Lanis Barnhill and Richard S. Gottlieb, authors of Deep Ecology and World Religions, further the analysis of Naess’ deep ecology by saying that it proposes that each human identifies with the interests of all other entities in the natural world, and that this identification leads to the notion of Self-realization as being the ultimate goal of deep ecology. “[T]he uppercase “S” in Self implies that there is a larger, more comprehensive, Self than the self (with a lower case “s”) of the individual ego. Because I identify with the rest of the natural world, I care for the rest of creation…I come to understand that I can only fully realize myself through the flourishing—the Self-realization—of the entire universe.”20

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This leads us to the fundamental premise of Spiritual Ecology, that, “humans, nature, and the supernatural comprise a functional, spiritual, and moral unity through their interconnectedness and interdependence,” and that “religion [or spirituality] promotes and maintains the dynamic equilibrium within and between the social and ecological systems.”21 To interpret, Sponsel is saying that due to the indivisibility of the different parts of the living world in indigenous and non-dualistic belief systems, spirituality functions as a regulating system for the community’s relationship with nature. Indeed, many indigenous cultures have eco-spiritual guidelines in place that serve beneficial enviro-stewardship functions. For instance, ancient Hawaiians maintained a system of “kapu” (meaning “regulated” and/or “sacred”), or set of practices that maintained environmental equilibrium by restriction of actions at certain times.22 Fishing of certain species, for example, was not allowed during their spawning season. This was beneficial for both the Hawaiians and the species, as replenishment of sea life population ensured their survival for later hunting.

Indigenous societies in the Amazon refrain from or prohibit killing top carnivores such as the jaguar, anaconda, river otter, or dolphin, that regulate prey populations.23 Many cultures throughout the world recognize certain trees as spiritual entities--the Buddha himself achieved enlightenment under a bodhi tree. These trees frequently are visited by locals, and the visitors leave offerings at their roots. Their spiritual status protects the trees from being cut down.24 In the case of the Buddha’s bodhi tree, clippings from the tree have been transplanted in many countries throughout the world, (including the University of Hawai’i campus), which spreads the ideas of the sacredness of trees, and humans’ relationship to them.

Given the importance of spirituality in governing ecological behavior and ethics in indigenous and non-dualistic cultures, the influence of missionaries and colonialism on these cultures was highly disruptive. Sponsel explains the influence: “Indigenous culture and spiritual ecology are usually antithetical to the generally anthropocentric and utilitarian environmental ethics of colonial and industrial societies which tend to segregate, objectify, and commodify nature as if were no more than a warehouse of material resources to exploit for consumption, commerce, and profit.”25 Solutions Wangari Maathai Wangari Maathai’s story is helpful in understanding how imported economic and ecological models can be destructive to indigenous cultures and their ecological practices. In her own lifetime, Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) witnessed the area where she was raised and supported by the land in Kenya become degraded through the introduction of commercial farming and monocrops. The income generated from exporting those crops internationally did not meet the living needs of the local

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people. Rural women could no longer provide adequate firewood, drinking water, healthy diets, nor adequate shelter or income for their families. Wangari Maathai led a movement called the Green Belt Movement of reforestation by showing the women in her community the relationship between farming practices and ecology, and by organizing these women to reforest the area. In order to do this, she relied on the cultural memory of this group of people, who remembered, within their lifetimes, being able to support themselves with the natural resources of the land. In the process, she confronted the colonial legacy of spiritual and ecological culturecide. She recounts “Initially, the work was difficult because historically our people have been persuaded to believe that they are poor, they lack not only capital, but also knowledge and skills to address the challenges. Instead they are conditioned to believe that solutions to their problems must come from ‘outside’.” So she developed a community education program, in which community members discuss their problems, causes, and possible solutions, as well as how the individuals themselves might be part of the problem. “In the process,” she continues, “participants discover that they must be part of the solutions. They realize their hidden potential and are empowered to overcome inertia and take action. They come to recognize that they are the primary custodians and beneficiaries of the environment that sustains them.”26 As the movement unfolded, Mathaai confronted entrenched patriarchal attitudes within the society that reduce opportunity and resources for women, and tackled political corruption and destructive foreign debt contracts with the International Monetary Fund.27 Maathai’s work is exceptional in her ability to motivate individuals past their personal fears in the confrontation of monolithic corporate entities. She has also helped Kenya and the world confront a deep reality, which is that we are all responsible for deplorable actions that lead to environmental degradation, not just the multinational corporations that are the engineers and profiteers of this behavior.

The Alliance of Religions and Conservation Given the myriad and complex nature of religious and spiritual groups, varying natural environments in which they live, and cultural memory of ecological practices each group holds, it seems logical to work to support each group within their local environment. The Alliance of Religions and Conservation (ARC) is a secular organization founded by the United Kingdom’s Prince Phillip that works with various religious groups throughout the world “to develop their own environmental programmes, based on their own core teachings, beliefs, and practices.”28 The organization works with eleven of the major world faiths. This is an excellent strategy, because, on the one hand, it motivates religious constituents to act as ecological stewards en masse through their religious institutions. On the other hand, the strategy allows each person to find their personal connection to the issue by encountering it through their own cultural and spiritual belief system.

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Beyond the personal level, the ARC states that, as a block, the eleven world faiths “own seven percent of the habitable surface of the planet, and if they invested together, would be the world’s third largest identifiable block of holders of stock and shares.” This block of holders is even more significant because the faiths typically do not need to see an immediate return on their investment, as is the case for regular companies. To quantify the potential for change at the hands of these faith-based organizations, the organization says that the United Methodists Pension Board in the U.S., for instance, is “spearheading a drive to convert all the denomination’s funds to ethical investments, a move affecting up to US$40 billion of church assets.”29 In various clusters, the different faiths together can also make investments in economic and environmental change that they may not be able to do alone. For instance, the ARC website details examples such as Islamic, Daoist, and Christian investors working together to micro-finance poor communities in developing sustainable products, using a non usury (no-interest) based economic model which fits their shared values. Another example given is a water investment development project in India, embarked upon by a cluster of Hindu, Jain, and Zoroastrian investors.

The ARC is illustrating that the connection between spirituality and ecological stewardship in the international-multifaith-contemporary context can be just as impactful as it has been in the local-indigenous-historical context. The potential for creating solutions to ecological survival becomes exponential when groups with differing beliefs communicate and work together for common causes.

Dr. Trish Kehaulani Watson Dr. Trish Kehaulani Watson is self-described as a “lineal descendent of both chiefs and colonizers.” She has degrees in environmental law and American studies, focusing on indigenous and traditional natural resource management. She created a consulting company, Honua Consulting, that works as a liaison between the native Hawai’ian community and other organizations. Her goal is to foster honest communications and relationships between the public, government, and native Hawai’ian culture. In a speech entitled “Nā Kapu Kai: Successfully Integrating Indigenous Epistemologies into Western Conservation Policies and Practices,” she explains how some native Hawai’ians and other indigenous cultures may view Western science, and its approaches toward ecological remediation: First, ‘environmental problems’ are defined by western science, not indigenous knowledges of realities. It is not enough that we (native Hawaiians) have been howling that our environments have been under attack for years. Until there is “science” to show it, the problem does not exist.

Therefore, western science defines the problem. They control the science. They dictate policy, and 85

thereby the money and mandates. From policy, money and mandates we return again to science, still controlled by the west. Then comes ‘management,’ still a western controlled practice. Then finally, implementation, when maybe, just maybe – indigenous people will be considered ‘stakeholders’ and be ‘consulted.’30 Indigenous peoples, from this perspective, clearly feel left out of the discussions and solutions towards natural resource management initiated by modern scientists.

Western science and indigenous conversations have not found common ground, most likely in part, because of what Sponsel et al call “Scientism,” or science’s “philosophy which reduces all reality to the physical domain and does not wish under any condition to accept the possibility of the existence of non-scientific world views.”30 This type of imperviousness to other world-views alienates other communities and their potential solutions for natural resource management. Indeed, the idea that “only science is objective, and everything else is subjective” seems rather illogical in a highly variegated world.31 Rather than agreeing on a predefined reality, we may need to be more open to the idea that “reality”, or the experience of nature and Spirit, may be highly subjective.

In fact, some epistemologies would say that everything is subjective, and all that subjectivity essentially arises from place, or experience one has in a place. The Buddha said that at one point something is the truth, and as you progress and grow, that thing is no longer the truth. Instead, something else is the truth. And, in fact, perhaps nature is all of the things different cultures perceive it to be, because particular experiences of nature would arise out of a particular place, and certain perceptions arise out of different development stages in different people. There may be some correlation between the subjectivity of perception and nature and “systems thinking,” as presented by Jotin Khisty: The emergence of systems thinking is a profound revolution in the history of scientific thought.

The accepted beliefs are: that it embraces holistic, systemic, ecological, and transcendental thinking; that complex systems can be comprehended from the dynamics of the whole/part and part/whole relationships; that our understanding and knowing can be intuitive, affective, and transcendental; that the metaphors of knowledge are in the shape of networks which are obviously interconnected and interdependent, yielding valuable insights into truth; that all concepts, theories, and findings are understood as limited and approximate, and that we acknowledge that there is no definite understanding of reality.32 If systems thinking truly takes hold in the scientific community, then perhaps a new age of greater communication can take hold between secular, and non-dualistic and indigenous communities. Watson goes on to say: “I come to speak both of how indigenous people not only defined what was ecologically sacred but to speak about the reality that all indigenous peoples took steps to regulate and manage their sacred resources. You see, conservation and natural resource management 86

are not new, nor western constructs – they are inherently indigenous.” Truly, both spirituality and science are as old as human existence.

Watson goes on to offer some advice to both western science proponents and indigenous people on how to communicate with each other and find supporters within both camps. She concludes in her speech: “I must admit that I have trouble with the theme of this conference: shared power. What power? Nature has all the power. She always has. Our transformation must be one into a shared vision for survival.” Perhaps as she suggests, we need not struggle for some illusory concept of power, over other cultures, other people, nature, or our own self. Indeed, moving beyond predatorial economic constructs and isolating world-views towards healthy stewardship of nature may be intimately linked up with much more humbling ideas of tolerance, personal responsibility, moral and spiritual growth, and fundamentally, our ability to “interbe” on this earth as a species.

Notes 1. Environment and Ecology. “Religion and Ecology: Spiritual Ecology” Nd. Na. http://environment-ecology.com/religion-and-ecology.html?start=15. Accessed April 2016.

2. Leslie Sponsel. Spiritual Ecology: A Quiet Revolution. (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2012), xii.

3. Ibid, 9.

4. Ibid, 2.

5. Ibid, 9.

6. Wai’anae is a city but also a Northwestern region on the island of Oahu. Pōkaʻī Bay and Ka’ala mountains are land formations near Wai’anae. Kaiaulu is the name of the wind that blows in Wai’anae.

7. Kanoa-Martin, Kaiulani. Huapala. Hawaiian music and Hula archives. 19972015. Accessed March 2016. http://www.huapala.org/Aloha/Aloha_Ia_O_ Waianae.html 8. Jotin C Khisty, “Meditations on Systems Thinking, Spiritual Systems, and Deep Ecology,” in Systemic Practice and Action Research 19. no. 4 (2006): 295-307.

9. Ibid.

10. “‘Dhamma/Dharma’ A Pali word (the Sanskrit equivalent being Dharma) with meanings as diverse as ‘nature’, ‘teachings’, ‘justice’, ‘normal’, ‘truth’ and ‘good manners’. As the word is commonly used in Buddhism it means the teachings and doctrines of the Buddha. But these teachings and doctrines are called Dhamma because they explain and describe the nature of things, the way things are, the way they operate.”

“Dharma Data: Dhamma/Dharma”. Glossary of Buddhist Terms. (Buddhist Dharma Education Association & Buddhanet) http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/dharmadata/fdd41.htm 87

11. “The Middle Way.” Soka Gakkai International: Buddhism in Action for Peace.

Web. Nd. Na. Accessed March 2016. http://www.sgi.org/about-us/buddhism-in-daily-life/the-middle-way.html 12. Sponsel.

13. Voluntary simplicity is a movement spearheaded by social scientist and author Duane Elgin. It is a call for individuals to live frugally by consuming less material goods, working less hours (which contributes to overall happiness,) and pursuing quality of life through non-consumer based means that bring inherent joy, such as social engagements, intellectual and artistic pursuits, and sustainable living.

“What is Voluntary Simplicity?” Simplicity Collective. Web. Nd. Na. http://simplicitycollective.com/start-here/what-is-voluntary-simplicity-2 14. “Truth” here meaning “absolute truth”, or “spiritual reality” 15. Bioegalitarianism is the “’the equal right to live and blossom’ of all creatures.”

(Allison 47) 16. Thomas Weber, “Gandhi and Deep Ecology,” in Journal of Peace Research 36. no.

3 (1999).

17. Ibid.

18. Naess may have also been influenced by Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), an environmentalist who is recognized as the founder of the modern science of wildlife management. Leopold also felt that environmental problems were caused by cultural beliefs and attitudes. In The Essential Aldo Leopold, authors Curt Meine and Richard L. Knight wrote that Leopold interpreted civilization as “‘the successive dominance of a series of ideas’ and identifies engineering as the dominant idea of the modern industrial society.” The authors argued “the driving idea of modernity has been wealth—its expansion and accumulation. Engineering has only been a told to express that idea.”

Curt Mein and Richard L. Knight, The Essential Aldo Leopold. (University of Wisconsin Press: 1999), 238.

19. Alan Drengson. “Some Thought On the Deep Ecology Movement,” Foundation for Deep Ecology. Web. Nd. Accessed March 2016.

20. David Landis Barnhill and Roger S. Gottlieb. Deep Ecology and World Religions: New Essays on Sacred Ground. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 159.

21. Sponsel, 14.

22. “Nā Kapu Kai: Successfully Integrating Indigenous Epistemologies into Western Conservation Policies and Practices.” Honua Consulting. October 2011. Accessed March 2016. http://www.honuaconsulting.com/uncategorized/na-kapu-kai-successfullyintegrating-indigenous-epistemologies-into-western-conservation-policies-andpractices/ 23. Sponsel, 15.

24. Ibid.

25. Sponsel, 17 88

26. Namulundah Florence, Wangari Maathai: Visionary, Environmental Leader, Political Activist. (Brooklyn: Lantern Books: 2014), 233-234.

27. Ibid.

28. The ARC is a sister organization to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) 29. Information drawn from ARC company website.

30. “Nā Kapu Kai: Successfully Integrating Indigenous Epistemologies into Western Conservation Policies and Practices.”

31. The quote is from Seyyed Hossein Nasr, expert on Islamic science and spirituality, Sponsel, 158.

32. Sponsel, 150.

33. Khisty, 297.

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How Art Informs Landscape Maria P. Navarrete Garcia As the first “canvas,” landscape allows us to rewind art history. Imprint hands in the Cave of Hands or painted animals, as in Lascaux or Chauvet, tell us about a time when art and landscape were not separated. For thousands of years, the dialogue between art and landscape has evolved, but the two have never been entirely separate from each other. In her essay “Is Landscape Painting?”, Vittoria di Palma tells us how the word landscape arrived in England in the 16th century as a way to describe small Dutch paintings of rural scenery.1 The term itself derives from two terms: land, the matter making up the surface of the earth, and scape, a bounded entity.

Because of the association of the word with the painting, it was related to the Greek word skopos, meaning “a watcher.” That is why the word signifies an area of ground as well as views of the surrounding environment. Di Palma states that every time we used the term landscape, we are reminded of its roots in the art of painting. Indeed, her statement follows Edward Norgate and his story about the first landscape painting. Norgate recounts the first landscape painting as a long journey made by a “great Liebfhebber” (virtuoso or lover of art) and told to a painter friend who then represented it.2 This tells us that the first landscape painting was informed by literature, not by sight. Landscape painting was practiced as a distinct genre associated with the development of the art market, not by the Greeks or Romans, but by the Dutch.

How art teaches us to learn to see, or modifies the way that we see, moreover, influences what we want to see. The Grand Tour of Europe, a tradition of the British aristocrats, focused on the Italian landscape, and the painters, Claude Lorrain and Salvatore Rosa, who established the formal convention for the representation of form in landscape. The tradition of the Grand Tour codified the ideal vision of landscape in which painterly conventions dominated. The impact of the Grand Tour was not just a memoir to tell, but became real when the aristocrats started molding their own lands after paintings of Italian landscapes. The two classic examples of painted landscapes becoming actual English landscapes are Stourhead and Painshill Park. In both cases, the role of the viewer in the transformation of land into landscape was central. These gardens were designed with painting in mind, so they focused on: composition and massing, chiaroscuro and colors, line and outline, 90

and perspective and framing. Thomas Whately wrote that our familiarity with the image adds greatly to our enjoyment of the original.3 To this day, publicity is based largely on this principle. It was William Gilpin who popularized the understanding that representation was the instrument that turned land into landscape. Gilpin’s tours through England during the 1760’s and 1770’s and the publishing of his manuscripts made the idea of “picturesque” beauty popular. For Gilpin, a tourist in search of the picturesque “was not a merely passive observer, but an active force in the constitution as landscape.”4 Gilpin encourages his readers to work with their hands, suggesting that they need to work on their drawings until the scene looks as it should: “like a landscape rather than mere land.”5 How does that work? By choosing which elements of the composition help to translate better this idea of landscape. To help in this enterprise, he used a device called the Claude glass, a small convex mirror. The device helped train the eye by minimizing details, which allowed the viewer to frame the scene to resemble a Claude Lorrain painting.

Gilpin’s writings were translated into French and German, and became so influential that even Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) remembered a tour through Connecticut countryside as a boy, with his father and stepmother, as a tour in search of the picturesque.

Long after eighteenth century British culture, art keeps serving as inspiration for modeling landscape. In turn, landscape itself molds and inspires our culture. “Burle Marx was convinced that he belonged to a long tradition of people that work in the landscape, dating back to the Neolithic period, long before the French or AngloChinese. At every period, he said, man has laid out a world on the ground and given a form to the place he occupied. The history of the garden is the history of that attempt, always begun again in whose immense chain he felt he was a link.

Each period has to relearn its relationship to the natural milieu in which it lived because the garden is the form par excellence that this intellectual and perceptible awareness takes.”6 The gardens of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brasilia, covering a surface area of 16,000 square meters, were built in 1965 after president Juscelino Kubitschek in 1950 decided to move the capital of Brazil from Rio de Janeiro “to the country’s uninhabited place Brasilia.” The master plan by Lucio Costa, buildings in contemporary architecture designed by Oscar Niemeyer and public gardens of Burle Marx all defined the unique space of the city.7 Burle Marx applied different concepts in defining his gardens. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Itamaraty Building, 1965) stands on a large rectangular lake with floating gardens. As a way to understand how art can inform landscape, I will analyze landscape through the presence of the four elements: water, fire, air and earth.

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Water: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was inspired by the gardens of an excavated Roman House in Conímbriga, one of the largest Roman settlements excavated in Portugal, and classified as a National Monument in 1910.8 Marx was also inspired by the painter Claude Monet, “His interest in water and aquatic plants was taken from Monet.”9 Burle Marx brings a square pool into a place that lacks water, to frame and receive Niemayer’s building. Like a medieval Castle, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs stands and rests in water. Water is able to reflect and expand the building and at the same time provides light, reflected off the water, onto the concrete opaque building.

Water allows the building to rest, to find place and shine.

In the lakes of his first gardens, Burle Marx set plants that multiplied very quickly in the aquatic environment. As a consequence, very quickly, shape and colors were mixed in an unpredictable way, ergo, the original composition was lost. To avoid this, he built underwater beds, with the function of growth containers, giving discipline over time to the composition.10 The water gardens of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brasilia where built over these underwater beds. Plants that float on water where carried from humid places collected around Brasilia, and were able to reappear creating the tension in between proximity and being from another place, making this other place available to the city, in this public site.11 Water as a surface of reflection, water as transparent layer, water as a source of life. Revealing the sky, with all its weather changes, at the pool outside, revealing stones through different levels in the inner garden, allowing plants to grow and fishes to live. The crown water gardens of the Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia help visitors to not forget how plants naturally colonize a place from stones to shrubs and trees, and the different ways in which water behaves.

Fire: Fire is light and temperature. How does fire appear? In minerals produced in and being spread over the earth because of fire, in the form of magma. In the type of plants, and biotype reproduced. In the inner garden, where there is humid vegetation. In the light, reflected in different ways by different textures on the vegetation. In the light filtered by pergolas, filtered by water, reflected by the concrete of the building.

In a physical way through the sculpture, placed in the terrace garden, that evokes its materiality and shape, is fire.12 Fire is also called to mind by color, especially the inner garden. The garden is surrounded by fire metaphors.

Air: When air is captured, and cut by sun, you are able to see it. How does air flow in the building? How does air move through the garden? Particularly interesting are the threshold places; the inner garden, connected to the outside, where Burle Marx placed the epiphytes, plants that are able to live in air. Places in between inside and outside, where air can be renewed and where air reveals the outside temperature.

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Air in the form of wind, allows sounds and smells to travel through the garden and encounter human beings. We receive rhythms through the air. Burle Marx sees rhythm in a physical way: “Rhythm is not repetition, is a matter of relationship with another form, another space, texture, surface, one color with another.”13 Earth: Stones: dry earth, trees, plants, and ecological associations. Rhythm in the earth: “Plants must be interrelated. They must also be interrelated botanically in a garden. The garden will be a constantly changing entity, but if it contains its own rationale, if all its parts are interrelated, then there will always be harmony.”14 Burle Marx does not take earth, geology in the physical sense, so much in account in the design of the garden, not earth as topography in the naturalistic sense. Burle Marx “has relied to a great extent on a free form whose shape rarely coincides with natural terrain.”15 But he allows earth to appear though stones, and soil, by ecological associations. He affirmed: “Plants always do better when combined with their own ecological group.”16 In the inner garden, he works the pass from stone to vegetated humid jungle vegetation, working with the proportion of elements, that become dominant in one edge and the other, going through the stone and water in one side to the plants, from the humid jungle, and the plants that live in air, epiphytes, on the other side.

The four elements can work as a map, to understand the meaning of landscape.

Elements are not able to exist one without the other; they are always in relation to one another. Elements are a very primordial way to see many relationships as one, between nature and human beings. People work landscapes through elements.

Paris, April 14 1921. Church of Saint Julien Le Pauvre: At three in the afternoon, under the rain the Dada Movement meets to start what was the first of a series of urban excursions to banal places around the city. Moving art from the museums, to an urban walk around. With the Dada visits and the subsequent perambulations of the surrealists, the action of passing through space was used as an aesthetic process capable of taking the place of representation.

Years after Robert Smithson wrote: “walking conditioned sight, and sight conditioned walking, till it seemed only the feet could see.” Richard Long echoes the idea: “I chose to make art by walking, utilizing lines and circles, or stones and days.”

The Grand Tour for Smithson was a tour of the monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967). What would Gilpin have thought of this new “Grand Tour”? What is common to both tours?

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The connection with literature: For eighteenth century English gentleman, Italy was to be in the classic ground. For modern landscape nomads, urban peripheries were the new landscape or modern ground. Robert Smithson quotes Tony Smith: “A dark pavement that is punctuated by stacks, towers, fumes and colored lights” (Artforum, December 1966), and try to explain it through syntax: “ the key word is punctuated. In a sense, the “dark pavement” could be considered a ‘vast sentence’. and the things perceived along it, ‘punctuation marks’.

Tower= the exclamation mark (!)…. stacks = the dash (-) fumes = the question mark (?) color lights = the colon (:) Of course I form this equations on the basis of a sense data and not rational - data. Punctuations refers to interruptions in ‘printed matter’. (…) Tony Smith also refers to his art as ‘interruptions’ in a ‘space grid.’17 Gilles Tiberghien reminds us of a predecessor of this type of landscape with a description of an English Park by Capability Brown. Reported by Hannah More in 1782, Capability Brown compared his art to a literary composition: “there -he said, pointing a finger- I make a comma, and there -pointing to another place- a colon, because a more decisive bend is necessary; in another place, where an interruption is needed to break up the visual continuity, there will be a parenthesis; then a full stop, and then I begin to make another sentence.”18 Conclusion In the frame drawn by Vittoria di Palma, the concept of work of art evolves over the course of the eighteenth century, from the production techniques to the circumstances of its reception.

She highlights the important role of the viewer in the transformation of land into landscape. This emphasis on the viewer was not just an eighteenth century English phenomenon, but continues into modernity through art and literature, and continues to evolve through landscape design.

In Burle Marx and in Smithson, we see two different ways of approaching the engagement of the viewer. For both of them landscape was central to their art.

Both of them experiment with nature. The Itamaraty Palace in Brasilia was around the same years as Smithson’s Tour in Passaic, New Jersey. Burle Marx explores vernacular Brazilian flora and works with human built structures, while Smithson explores vernacular suburb landscapes and built cosmological sites such as his Spiral Jetty.

What is the role of the viewer in the work of Burle Marx and in the work of

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Smithson? What is the meaning of representation to Burle Marx and to Smithson?

What is the role of imagination in representation? For Burle Marx representation of some species allows an ecosystem to be present in a certain space and because of that becomes a sign of an entire ecotype in a certain place. He explains, “Plants that float on water where carried from humid places collected around Brasilia, and were able to reappear creating the tension in between proximity and being from another place. Or, making this other place available to the city, in this public site.”19 For Smithson representation is more conceptual, so he is going to move the viewer toward experience: What can you find in Passaic that you cannot find in Paris London or Rome? Find out for yourself.

Discover (if you dare) the breathtaking Passaic River and the eternal monuments on its enchanted banks. Ride in Rent-a-car comfort to the land that time forgot. Only minutes from N.Y.C. Robert Smithson will guide you through this faceless series of sites. And don’t forget your camera. Special maps come with each tour.

There is no innocent eye, no apprehension of nature, free from an artificial frame.

In the food chain of landscape art, visual arts and literature both contribute to transform landscape, and help each other in the experience of landscape, and finally in the understanding and shaping of our environments.

Notes 1. Vittoria Di Palma, “Is Landscape Painting?” in Is Landscape… ? Essays on the Identity of Landscape, Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim eds., (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 47.

2. Ibid, 49-50.

3. Ibid, 56.

4. Ibid, 59.

5. Ibid, 59.

6. Jacques Leenhardt, “From Modernism to Ecology,” in Robert Burle Marx: The Modernity of Landscape, eds. Lauro Cavalcanti, Farés El-Dahdah, and Francis Rambert (Paris: Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine / Institute français d’architecture and Actar, 2011), p.60.

7. Tanja Trulija and Dubravko Aleksic, “Relationship in between Landscape Design and Art in the work of Roberto Burle Marx, Prostor: A Scholarly Journal of Architecture and Urban Planning 20, no. 2 (January 2013).

8. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Landscape Design. A Cultural and Architectural History (New York: Henry R. Abrams, 2001), p.447.

9. Trkulia and Aleksic.

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10. Marta Iris Montero, Burle Marx. El Paisaje Lirico (Mexico: Gustavo Gili, 2001), p. 51.

11. Roberto Burle Marx, “The Garden as Art Form” (1962), in Roberto Burle Marx The Modernity of Landscape, eds. Lauro Cavalcanti et al. “The objective should always be to have gardens reflect the surrounding landscape by planting species that grow in the region and are well-adapted to its soil and climate.”

12. Sculpture by Maria Martins.

13 “Ritmo no es repeticion, es una cuestión de relación de una forma con otra, un espacio con otro, una textura, una superficie, un color con otro.” Burle Marx. El Paisaje Lirico. Montero, p. 51.

14. Burle Marx, “The Garden as Art Form,” p. 126.

15. Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review. Edited by Marc Treib. The MIT press Cambridge Massachusetts. London, England. p. 51.

16. Burle Marx, “The Garden as Art Form,” p.121.

17. Robert Smithson, “Toward the development of an Air Terminal Site” Artforum, June 1967.

18. Gilles A. Tiberghien, Land Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995).

19. “The objective should always be to have gardens reflect the surrounding landscape by planting species that grow in the region and are well-adapted to its soil and climate.” Burle Marx, “The Garden as Art Form.”

Opposite: Utah National Park, Angels’s Landing (Wikimedia Commons).

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Part III:

Emerging Theories of Landscape

Is Landscape Film?

Jason Melling In a previous essay I discussed whether or not landscape design could be thoroughly represented through photographs. I concluded that the spatial and temporal experience was lost, and could only be retrieved through the imaginative effort of the viewer. Expanding on that argument, a photograph fails to recreate another important part of experiencing a landscape design: memory of place. When our minds recall a memory, it rarely (if ever) is a series of motionless images. Sights and sounds can all be experienced again through the process memory recall; and the way we experience memories is the foundation of this essay’s argument. A photograph can inspire recollection and trigger a memory, but a photograph itself does not fully deliver a temporal and spatial experience that recreates the experience. To declare that “landscape is film” is acknowledging that the act of watching a movie is similar to what happens in our minds when remembering a place in a landscape.

There are certainly limitations to what film can provide, but when comparing it to photographs there are some advantages.

What is Film and What Does it Provide?

According to Merriam-Webster, film is a thin sheet of cellulose acetate or nitrocellulose coated with a radiation-sensitive emulsion for taking photographs.1 This definition merely describes a method of capturing the world around us, but the word “film” going forward will be used to represent any single recorded clip of documented reality using a light capturing device. The art of filmmaking has a long history that I will not discuss in this essay, so for the sake of succinctness I’ll begin at the point in film history where films were created using a device that would capture a series of photographs at a rate of 24 frames per second, and a sound track was recorded on the same strip of cellulose acetate film. (Later, the process was simplified by using digital means for film creation). When the photographs were projected at the same 24 frames per second for others to see, the illusion of seamless motion allowed people to have a visual and auditory experience of whatever was the subject of the projection. A place and time the audience perhaps had never visited could be witnessed, and a memory of that place could be created.

What film recreates is a functional presence in a three dimensional space outside of the one currently occupied. The camera can either be moving, effectively 98

capturing the act of moving through the space, or recording the movements of the environment from a stationary position. In both instances, the film documents and projects movements and sounds through time and space.

What is Memory, and How Does it Relate to Film?

Neurologists state that there are three parts of memory: encoding, storage, and retrieval.2 Experiments with memory indicate that encoding, storage, and retrieval in working memory cannot occur at the same time, so watching a film demands complete attention as memories of watching the film are encoded and stored in the mind.3 The retrieval part of memory could be described as replaying a film in our minds of a place we have visited in the past. Our eyes act as the lens, and our minds act as the recording device. In terms of more contemporary technology, our minds act as a present day digital camera that stores images on an internal flash storage drive. The ability to recall memory allows us to experience a place over and over again. Experiencing a landscape is not done with one microsecond snap-shots; it is accomplished by being present and moving through the landscape experiencing changes in the physical world. This encoding and storage of the landscape is what is later retrieved to play the “mental movie.”

How are Photographs and Film the Same, and How are They Different?

Both photographs and film are capable of inspiring emotions. They both can transport a person to another place and time. They can both successfully capture a place in a landscape, but there are some things that photographs can do that film will never be able to accomplish simply because of the nature of the medium.

Photographs are tangible mediums that show a single moment in time. Films do the same thing, but they move and are not stagnant. Yet, is “stagnant” really the correct word to describe photographic representation of a landscape?

Photography is an art form. It takes skill to choose what is inside the frame of the shot to create an image that can grab the attention of the viewer. In a publication from the 19th century, the author states that a talented photographer “is by no means a mere machine following a certain set of fixed rules” and that “success in this art requires personal skill and artistic taste to a much greater degree than the unthinking public generally imagine.”4 A successful landscape photographer will be able to not only capture the beauty of a place, but also the “spirit” of the place: the particular quality of a place in the landscape that elicits an emotional response.

As the saying goes: “A picture is worth a thousand words.” To take that a step further, one might say that “a picture is worth a thousand images.” A well-done photograph is not simply a moment captured in time, but a portal back in time to be able to experience the past. When looking at a photograph, it may allow the

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viewer to relive a three dimensional experience, or the photograph may conjure up an imaginative experience in a place that the viewer has never been. In the chapter “Is Landscape Photography?�5 there are images of beautiful state parks with the intention of inspiring people to do something about protecting them. The longer that one gazes at them the easier it is to imagine walking a trail or climbing one of the distant mountains; an image allows the viewer to create a spatial experience in his or her mind confined within the frames of the photograph (or even transcending the boundaries and imagining a journey there).

So Why Film?

Even with the wonderful things that a photograph can do, there is a critical requirement that viewers must possess to have a successful journey and spatial experience through a landscape they have never visited: a talent for imagination. If the viewer has never been to the place in the photograph, such an experience will require imagining what visiting the place would be like. With no ability to conjure what moving through a space would be like, a picture remains only a beautiful image to gaze at and appreciate.

Public tastes have evolved since the early 18th century, and the notion of the Picturesque where prescribed views characterize the landscape are antiquated.

The goal of landscape design now is to provoke feelings and thoughts, encourage relationships with others and the environment. These goals require a three dimensional experience together with the passage of time. A picture by itself is not able to recreate this experience. A succession of photographs may perhaps begin to accomplish this, but then it is moving towards the concept of the visual montage, which is very much a film technique. Only a film has the capability to reproduce movement through space, and require no imaginative effort from the viewer.

Sounds Great, But Where are the Landscape Design Films?

Film has its limitations. The imperative question for film is: What are the parameters that define the spatial experience, who chooses the experience, and why is this filmic reproduction of the experience the right one? With a photograph, the viewer has a freedom to imagine any sort of experience he or she wants. With film, the viewer’s experience is prescribed by a person who has made a decision about what is important in the landscape and how someone else will experience it. The specific sights and sounds are chosen by the person holding the camera, and the viewer is merely along for the ride.

This leads right into another detriment to claiming that film is the best medium to represent landscapes. According to the mechanics of creating memory described

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earlier, the processes of memory recall and encoding cannot occur at the same time; thus, only the experience that the film maker wishes you to have will exist while watching a film. When gazing at a photograph, there is no new information bombarding your attention, and so your mind is free to either recall the experience you had while at the place in the photograph; or you are able to encode and store a new imaginative memory using the visual cues in the photograph.

The cost of film production must be considered as well. While the financial cost of creating a film is now lower using digital methods of capturing, editing, and reproduction (and approaches the realm of photography costs), the time commitment to complete a film is still high. Several hundred photographs of a place could be captured in less than two hours, and then another two hours could be spent on perusing the shots and selecting the best ones to complete an attractive and successful photo shoot that conveys the experience of the place. Photographic editing is an option, adding more time until completion, but it is not necessary if the Photographer is skilled.

Creating a film of the same quality requires time to be spent on Pre-Production, Documentation, and Post-Production stages. The Pre-Production consists of planning what uninterrupted segments of film (“shots”) will accomplish the desired effects during the eventual projection of the finished film. The Documentation (“filming”) is performed with multiple recordings of the same shot (“takes”) to acquire what was planned in Pre-Production. Once satisfied, the filmmaker will then enter into Post-Production and select the best takes to edit together a final cut of the film. These steps may be rushed, but they would be so at the filmmaker’s peril. If the goal is to create a seamless experience of a landscape, the three steps of film production will require skilled attention, and failure to devote the necessary time to any one part will result in a film that does not convey a successful or attractive experience.

While it is certainly possible to use film to accomplish landscape representational goals, it is clearly more affordable to use photography, as completing even a few minute long film will require much more than four hours of work.

So Why is Film a Better Way to Represent a Landscape Experience?

A well designed landscape will have experiences that are encouraged and supported by the choices of the designer. It would be errant to say that the experiences of a landscape design are “prescribed,” yet there are some intentions and frameworks set up in the design that allow for certain personal experiences (e.g. the experience of mountain climbing would not be present in a flat parking lot). So the scripted nature of a film relates to the intentions of the designer, and it may be a useful tool

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in communicating design intentions to others. The action of moving through the designed space, and hearing its sounds, is effectively captured and recreated using film. A viewer who may not have a talent for creating imaginative mental images is capable of knowing exactly what it would be like to experience the landscape design.

Further Thoughts A landscape design is nothing to us, unless we are able to interact with it. A photograph allows us to perform this interaction using only our eyes and minds, while a film allows us to use our eyes and ears to understand better the intent of the interaction. Using the limitations of film to lead to a new form of landscape representation, the experience of personal choice should be present in this new kind of interaction. If we take the visual qualities afforded by both film and photographs, and the imaginative decision making processes allowed when gazing at a photograph, we arrive at a medium that is typically reserved only for recreation: video games.

Specifically, virtual reality video games. This medium allows for a complete sensory immersion within another place. Without going too far into the description of what Virtual Reality (VR) is or how it is developed, it will suffice to mention that VR is a three dimensional world created with computers that allows for a person to put on video projecting goggles and use a controlling device to move at his or her discretion through the programmed world. Designers today already use programs like Revit, 3dsMax, and Rhino to make three dimensional models of their designs; and video game makers use similar modeling programs when developing games for VR headsets like the Oculus Rift and Google Cardboard.6 I imagine that further development and application of Virtual Reality to landscape design would give viewers the choice to explore a landscape before a project is even funded; or the VR experience could be applied during the project development phase where critical design decisions need to be made.

The technology and quality of the VR experience would need to have a high frame rate, high pixel density, and the processing power necessary to support them to simulate a proposed landscape in a manner that closely mimics reality. Also of note, video game companies take months (even years) to create the highest quality games that come close to simulating reality. Landscape architecture as a profession has no time or capital for that. Like all technology over time, VR development will lower in cost and time to develop, and perhaps then it could be a viable option for design pitches and project development.

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Final Cut Whether it is with a beautifully framed photograph that allows for mental recreation of an experience, or the spatial experience represented through the passage of time with film, a designer has options in representing a landscape design. Even the most talented photographer or filmmaker will be unable to successfully recreate a personal journey through a landscape, and even with the eventual evolution of VR it will still never compare to reality. The nuances of landscapes might not ever be recreated entirely in any medium, but hopefully they will continue to be designed and valued.

Notes 1. “Film,” 2016. In Merriam-Webster.com.

Retrieved May 2, 2016, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/film.

2. Emrah Duzel, Roberto Cabeza, Terence W. Picton, Andrew P. Yonelinas, Henning Scheich, Hans-Jochen Heinze and Endel Tulving. “Western Landscape Photography: Then and Now,” in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 96, no. 4 (1999), 1794-1799 (National Academy of Sciences).

3. John Jonides, Steven C. Lacey and Derek Evan Nee. “Processes of Working Memory in Mind and Brain” in Current Directions in Psychological Science 14, no. 1 (2005), 2-5 (Sage Publications, Inc. on behalf of Association for Psychological Science).

4. Edward Anthony to H.H. Snelling, February 1, 1849, reprinted in Snelling, preface to The History and Practice of the Art of Photography (New York: G.P. Putnam).

5. Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim (eds.), Is Landscape…? Essays on the Identity of Landscape (London and New York: Routledge, 2016).

6. https://www.oculus.com/en-us/ & https://www.google.com/get/cardboard/

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Is Landscape Heritage?

Anna Nau Landscapes are part of our shared identity. Asking the question “is landscape heritage?” builds on the premise of Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim’s edited volume Is Landscape? that explores the “multiple identities of landscape” and its relevance to a variety of disciplines and professions.1 Analyzing the significance of landscape as heritage provides a framework for considering landscape’s relationship to culture. It also provides a lens through which to view the central role of preservation and planning in maintaining and protecting landscapes, because it points to the heart of why certain landscapes have cultural meaning. Heritage implies shared culture. To speak of heritage, we necessarily speak of people and their relationship to their environment, both natural and designed. What is landscape’s unique role in cultural heritage? Landscapes contain a wide variety of cultural meanings. How can understanding landscapes as heritage serve as a tool for culturally sustainable landscape planning?

Defining Landscape The term landscape can imply two fundamentally different meanings. According to planning and landscape scholar Frederick Steiner, the first relates to the eighteenthcentury English idea of landscape painting that defines landscape as “a view, usually a rural one.” The landscape theorist Anne Whiston Spirn argues that this understanding of landscape as a “mere visible surface, static composition, or passive backdrop to human theater” is insufficient. The second meaning of landscape comes from the original Dutch word landschap and the German landschaft that mean “a territory made by people,” that is, a place both natural and cultural, shaped by its inhabitants. Using this definition of landscape highlights how “landscape associates people and place.”2 The term cultural landscape is fundamentally linked to this second definition of landscape. The cultural heritage field, which includes historic preservation, has increasingly embraced the concept of cultural landscapes as a way of signifying this concept of the complex and interwoven relationship of people to their environment. Cultural landscapes are places where nature and culture intermingle.

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Defining Heritage Heritage is an elusive concept; its definition is always dependent on those who are defining cultural values for a particular group or community, and is always debatable. Heritage is open to interpretation because deciding what does and does not constitute heritage is implicit in the “process of social inclusion and exclusion.”

Yet every culture claims a unique heritage. Brian Graham and Peter Howard define heritage as “the ways in which very selective material artifacts, natural landscapes, mythologies, memories and traditions become cultural, political and economic resources for the present.”3 The preservation of historic places, buildings, and landscapes inherently relies on this definition of heritage. It involves a diverse interplay of identity, memory, and commemoration and is ultimately concerned not with the past, but with “our relationship with the present and future.”4 We use the past as a way of framing our values for the present.

In much of Europe and North America, the nineteenth century witnessed an important intellectual transformation in the way the past was viewed, defined, and commemorated. At this time, the rising bourgeoisie searched for new ways to define their collective identity largely as a result of the disruptive social, economic, and political changes of the great industrial age. The preservation movement emerged at this time because of this shift in intellectual understanding of the past as “foreign” to the present. Historic buildings and celebrated landscapes became “cultural anchors in turbulent times.”5 As historian Eric Hobsbawm has argued, “invented traditions,” formal and informal, flourished as a way to create a perceived continuity with the past that was especially useful for that particular nineteenthcentury phenomenon – the nation. Historic preservation and the heritage industry have often been interpreted as outgrowths of this impulse for “invented traditions” that fostered a commemoration and valorization of the national past as a form of “civic religion.”6 By the early twentieth century, however, significant attempts were made to form international consensus regarding heritage protection.

Heritage Protection of Landscapes The 1972 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) World Heritage Convention represents the legislative culmination of efforts by several nations throughout the twentieth century to create a systematic, international standard to recognize and protect cultural heritage, both built and natural, on a global scale. Spurred by the damage of the First World War and the spirit of international cooperation following the establishment of the League of Nations, those concerned with historic places sought to create standards for the protection of cultural heritage that could be agreed to on a broad, international level.

Amplified efforts to foster increased international agreement on the identification

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and protection of cultural heritage followed the destruction wrought by WWII on many European cities. This included the establishment of UNESCO in 1945 as part of the United Nations, the creation of the Council of Europe in 1949, with a stated goal of promoting awareness of a common European identity, and the 1954 Hague Convention, which included agreements on the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict.7 The notion that the built heritage of one nation or cultural group should be valued universally was a key argument of the 1964 Venice Charter, which established another significant organization in the lead up to the World Heritage Convention - the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS). In the preamble, the charter states that there is a growing awareness of the “unity of human values” that increasingly “regard ancient monuments as common heritage,” therefore it is critical to define a common set of principles for their protection on an “international basis.”8 The 1972 World Heritage Convention codified the idea that “the deterioration and disappearance of any item of cultural or natural heritage constitutes a harmful impoverishment of the heritage of all nations of the world.” It broadly defined what constitutes cultural heritage (monuments, groups of buildings, sites) and natural heritage (natural features, geological and physiographical formations, natural sites), and argued that heritage worthy of international recognition and protection must have “outstanding universal value.”9 In addition to the cultural destruction wrought by war, the concern with international heritage values seen in the Venice Charter and the World Heritage Convention were strongly tied to the ideas of environmental protection of the 1960s and 1970s. The United States, including conservationists in the National Park Service, played a critical role in establishing the idea of a World Heritage list and the recognition of the need to protect both cultural and natural places as emblems of national and global heritage.10 In 1992, UNESCO added cultural landscapes as a new category to the World Heritage Convention that mediated the separate concepts of cultural and natural sites. Under World Heritage, cultural landscapes are defined as the “combined works of nature and humankind” that “express a long and intimate relationship between peoples and their natural environment.” UNESCO divides cultural landscapes into three categories. First, those landscapes designed and created intentionally by people, such as gardens and parklands (Figure 1). Second, organically evolved landscape that “results from an initial social, economic, administrative, and/or religious imperative and has developed its present form by association with and in response to its natural environment.” An example of this second category includes the World Heritage site of Papahānaumokuākea, a cluster of islands and atolls near Hawaii that has both ecological and deep cosmological significance to ancient and current Native Hawaiian peoples, as evidenced by numerous shrines. The third category is associative cultural landscapes that maintain their significance “by virtue

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Figure 1. The Villa Medici del Belcanto, part of the Medici Villas and Gardens of Tuscany World Heritage Site in Italy (Wikimedia Commons).

of the powerful religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural element rather than material cultural evidence.” These include sacred landscapes like the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia, home to geological rock formations sacred to the Anangu Aboriginal people (Figure 2).11 These last two categories of cultural landscapes help expand the World Heritage concept of cultural heritage to include more non-Western understandings of heritage, focusing less on the built environment, and more on the relationship between people and their environment on “intangible” and spiritual levels. While most cultures value landscape as an integral component of shared identity, the specific relationship between the local or regional landscape and cultural identity varies considerably.

Landscape as Heritage The concept of cultural landscape as defined by the World Heritage Convention provides a useful model of assessing planning approaches for all landscapes.

In the definition of landscape established above, nature and culture cannot be separated. As Anne Whiston Spirn argues, landscape suggests the “embeddedness of culture.”12 If heritage assess the meaning of culture and its value for the future, how then, does understanding landscapes as heritage serve as a tool for culturally 107

Figure 2. View of Ayres Rock in the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park and World Heritage Site in central Australia (Wikimedia Commons).

sustainable landscape planning? Frederick Steiner identifies landscape planning as the “application of knowledge about natural and cultural processes for decision making.”13 UNESCO heritage protection strategies for cultural landscapes also stress the need to understand the relationship between natural and cultural processes.

“Protection of cultural landscapes,” according to UNESCO, “can contribute to modern techniques of sustainable land-use and can maintain or enhance natural values in the landscape” because “the continued existence of traditional forms of land-use supports biological diversity in many regions of the world.”14 If individuals and policy makers alike are able to see our landscapes through the framework of shared cultural heritage – the way we see architecture, art, language, and music as markers of cultural identity – it can bring a greater appreciate and sensitivity to both our designed and natural environments.

Landscape is Heritage: the Mission Reach of the San Antonio River The recent rehabilitation of the San Antonio River along the south side of San Antonio, Texas illustrates how understanding landscape as heritage can be a successful tool for approaching landscape planning from a cultural framework.

Completed in 2013, the Mission Reach portion of the San Antonio River Improvements Project includes eight miles of hike and bike trails, recreations areas, flood control, and restored aquatic and riparian woodland habitats (Figure 3).15 The project also reestablished the river’s historic connection to the eighteenth-century Spanish colonial missions, now a UNESCO World Heritage site (designated in 108

Figure 3. The Mission Reach of the San Antonio River, showing the restored river with native plants and cultural amenities, including informational signs and hike and bike pathways (photo by author).

2015). The river was the reason the five missions were established in the area in the early eighteenth century. Mission inhabitants channeled water from the river into earthen ditches, or acequias, that allowed for irrigation of the farm fields that sustained the growing population of the mission complexes. These acequias continued to serve irrigation needs of local small-scale farmers well into the latenineteenth century. By the mid-twentieth century, however, the historic connection of the city to the river had largely been lost due to various channelization efforts to prevent damaging floods in downtown. The Mission Reach project repaired the straightened, channelized river to “replicate the original flow of the river while maintaining flood control, reducing erosion, re-introducing native vegetation and creating an environment more suitable for recreation and wildlife.”16 The project also restored the physical connections between the river’s edge and the mission complexes at Concepción, San José, San Juan, and Espada through the creation of pathways and “portals.” These portals include artwork and interpretive information that educates visitors about the river’s connection to the missions (Figure 4). Additionally, the River Authority worked with the National Park Service to restore water to the acequia at Mission San Juan. Today, the San Juan acequia provides irrigation for the park’s demonstration farm, which educates visitors on 109

Figure 4. Conceptual plan of the Mission Concepcion portal area on the Mission Reach of the San Antonio River (San Antonio River Authority).

Figure 5. The Missions San Juan acequia, showing the sluice gate that controls the flow of water into the irrigation channels of the nearby demonstration farm run by the National Park Service (National Park Service).

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the traditional cultivation practices of the mission inhabitants (Figure 5).17 Both the ecological rehabilitation and restored physical connection between the river and the missions provided by the Mission Reach project illustrate the environmental and cultural significance of the river landscape for the community.

Conclusion In his remarkable 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’: Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis includes the role of culture as part of his theory of “integral ecology.” While the Pope uses the term environment instead of landscape, he defines it as the “relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it” – a clear parallel to the definition of landscape as the mixture of nature and culture. That relationship between nature and society is fundamental to cultural values. “Culture,” he says, “is more than what we have inherited from the past; it is also, and above all, a living, dynamic and participatory present reality, which cannot be excluded as we rethink the relationship between human beings and the environment.”18 He argues that it is our duty as “responsible stewards” of the environment to look out for its “common good” for “future generations.”19 Cultural heritage protection is often presented as stewardship, as a means of ensuring the survival of culturally significant places for future generations. In fact, UNESCO defines heritage as “our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations.”20 Understanding landscape as heritage thus necessitates the duty to care for landscapes as a cultural resource of the present and the future.

Pope Francis argues that “environmental education should facilitate making the leap towards the transcendent which gives ecological ethics its deepest meanings.”21 I believe that just as environmental education can help to create good ecological stewardship, heritage education can play a critical role in expanding how we value landscapes as both ecological and cultural resources. Acknowledging and attempting to understand how landscapes are meaningful to people is part of a holistic approach to, in the words of Pope Francis, “caring for our common home.”

If we think of landscapes as not just local or regional heritage but also as world heritage we can move towards a greater appreciation of the way in which the survival and continued adaptability of cultural landscapes depends on international cooperation, not just among government organizations and advocacy groups, but also among individuals.

However, there is danger in holding onto heritage too tightly, especially if heritage is seen as static and immutable. Change is inevitable, particularly in landscape.

Insisting on a particular landscape as heritage that cannot change or should not change over time is a dead-end approach. However, if we use the definition of heritage as something that is continuously being defined and re-negotiated, heritage

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provides a useful framework for protecting landscapes from rapid, unnecessary, or destructive change.22 It can also be a tool for landscape planning, both on a local and regional level. Identifying heritage values can work together with traditional planning tools to understand landscape needs based on social and cultural value.

The cultural value of landscapes goes beyond the history of their creation and use. It is tied more intimately to personal and group association and feeling. The meanings that people assign to landscapes makes landscapes heritage.

Notes 1. Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim, “Introduction: What is landscape?,” in Is Landscape?, ed. Garteh Doherty and Charles Waldheim (Abdingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), Kindle edition.

2. Frederick Steiner, “Chapter 6: Is landscape planning?,” in Is Landscape?, ed.

Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim (Abdingdon and New York: Routledge, 2016), Kindle edition; Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998 3. Brian Graham and Peter Howard, “Introduction: Heritage and Identity,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, ed. Brian Graham and Peter Howard (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2008), 2-3.

4. Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches (Abdingdon and New York: Routledge, 2013), 4.

5. Miles Glendinning, The Conservation Movement: A History of Architectural Preservation, Antiquity to Modernity (London: Routledge, 2013), 65.

6. See Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

7. Francioni, Francesco (ed), The 1972 World Heritage Convention: A Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

8. Venice Charter, 1964. http://www.icomos.org/charters/venice_e.pdf 9. World Heritage Convention, 1972. http://whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/ 10. Peter H. Stott, ‘The World Heritage Convention and the National Park Service, 1962–1972’, George Wright Forum, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2011), 279–80.

11.“Cultural Landscapes,” UNESCO World Heritage Convention website, accessed April 30, 2016, http://whc.unesco.org/en/culturallandscape/ 12. Spirn, 17.

13. Steiner, “Chapter 6: Is Landscape Planning?,” in Is Landscape?

14. “Cultural Landscapes,” UNESCO World Heritage Convention website, accessed April 30, 2016, http://whc.unesco.org/en/culturallandscape/ 15. San Antonio River Authority, San Antonio River Improvements Project website, accessed May 2, 2016, http://www.sanantonioriver.org/ 16. Ibid.

17. San Juan Capistrano, San Antonio Missions National Historical Park website 112

https://www.nps.gov/saan/learn/historyculture/sanjuanhistory1.htm 18. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: Care for Our Common (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015), 139, 143.

19. Ibid., 159.

20.. “World Heritage,” UNESCO World Heritage Convention website, accessed April 30, 2016, http://whc.unesco.org/en/about/ 21. Pope Francis, 210.

22. National Park Service, Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes (1994), accessed March 15, 2016, http://www.nps.gov/tps/standards/four-treatments/ landscape-guidelines/index.htm

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Is Landscape Performance?

Doug Norman This essay draws inspiration from the collection Is Landscape… ? Essays on the Identity of Landscape. Key to my approach here is the subtitle of the book, which frames the theoretical explorations in terms of identity. Drawing from poststructuralist psychology, Foucauldian social theory, and ideas surrounding the performative nature of language, performance theorists of the late twentieth century advanced multiple versions of performance theory to articulate new ways of understanding identity in terms of performance rather than core or static personality. The concept of identity traverses the cultural, psychological, the geographical, political, sexual, aesthetic, and on and on; individuals, nations, and places can all be said to have identities, ones that are deeply interrelated to one another. Querying the identity of landscape, rather than proposing a definition, opens up the topic to fruitful dialogue rather than attempting to contain it within a strict set of disciplinary boundaries to be authoritatively policed. The editors intended to initiate a conversation across disciplinary boundaries in order to “problematize landscape’s promiscuity, while prolonging reflection upon its flexible fecundity.”1 The erotically tinged language playfully invites readers to consider the sensual as well as metaphorical reproductivity of our engagement with “Nature” through the concept of landscape. The sensual also prompts us to think about the relationships between identity and embodiment, another important facet of performance theories. This invitation might then entice the reader to enter into her/his own dialogic inquiry, which I do here as I ask: “Is Landscape Performance?”

From Literature to Performance Gareth Doherty flirts with the idea of landscape as performance in his essay on landscape as literature citing Terry Eagleton’s argument that the staging of a dramatic text is not an expression or reproduction of the text, rather it “‘produces’ the text, transforming it into a unique and irreducible entity.”2 This move positions performance in the realm of poesis rather mimesis, adopting the Aristotelian model of poetry as an active making or creating rather than merely representing or mirroring. He parallels this idea to Denis Cosgrove’s concept of landscape as necessarily “mediated through subjective human experience,” not the landscape in and of itself but how one’s mind constructs it within a certain epistemological framework. The notion of the self as constructed, while distinct from the model 114

of identity as performance, serves as a good starting point to develop the theory of landscape as performance. The constructed subject mediating or producing the landscape s/he moves through helps set the stage for this theoretical exploration.

This approach seeks to circumvent the binary or oppositional thinking that many contemporary theorists of landscape argue must be jettisoned in order to come to a deeper synthesis of theory with the practice of landscape design and planning; to capture the richness of landscape and its inextricable bonds with human perception; to open up the concept in a way that allows us to articulate the myriad ways we interact with and are a part of landscape and vice versa. This theory explores the way we form landscape and the way landscape forms us.

Theatre, Performance, and Landscape Architecture: A Partial Genealogy for Landscape as Performance By invoking performance as a theoretical model we risk inhabiting a field too broad, a theory to diffuse. If we consider landscape a promiscuous concept, performance might be considered wildly licentious in comparison. So let’s begin within the circumscribed traditional domain of performance, theatre and drama. Theatrical metaphors are no strangers to the field of planning. In his 1937 address to American planners, Lewis Mumford presented his theory of the city as “a theatre of social action” and argues that well planned and designed, beautiful cities “through the deliberate efforts of art, politics, and education, make the drama more richly significant, as a stage-set, well-designed, intensifies and underlines the gestures of the actors and actions of the play.”3 We can even find traces of this idea of the city, its design, and landscape setting the stage for the social drama in the writing of Frederick Law Olmsted, the grandfather of landscape architecture. In “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns,” he makes the case for the social value of trees and open space: The change of both scene and air which would be obtained by people engaged for the most part in the necessarily confined interior commercial parts of town, on passing into a street of this character after the trees have become stately and graceful would be worth a good deal… a very great number of people might thus be placed every day under influences counteracting those with which we desire to contend.4 The well designed landscape here provides healthier bodies and in turn improve the social performances of everyday life that shape individual and community identities.

Even in the roots of American landscape architecture, the issues of embodiment, identity, and performance circulate as powerful planning metaphors emphasizing the social value of graceful and beautiful.

The twentieth century saw a prodigious expansion of the notion of theatre,

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dramatic forms, and what might be considered performance. From experimental theatre of the German Expressionists and Da Da performances to post-World War II experimental dance and performance art, this expansion paralleled developments in landscape design and planning. In some cases, the cross pollination of these various disciplines was direct, as in the case of Bauhaus emigre Walter Gropius. In the context of the highly collaborative and interdisciplinary Bauhaus movement, Gropius designed several theaters and stages across his career. Working with choreographer/designer Oskar Schlemmer and theatre theorist László MoholyNagy, he designed innovative performance spaces that threw traditional notions of on- and off-stage into questions. In his Total Theatre project for Erwin Piscator, he sought to dismantle the opposition between performer and audience by designing a space in which “passive playgoer would be turned into an active participant.”5 Landscape architect and planner Lawrence Halprin studied at the Harvard School of Design under Gropius who planted the seeds of what would grow into the Halprin’s performance-based approach to landscape design that he developed with his wife, choreographer Anna Halprin. Their work also sought to break out of disciplinary silos and to transcend binary thinking in order to liberate the creative process. Identity, performance, and embodiment were important components of the RSVP cycle process of developing open scores.6

Performance, Dialogue, and Embodiment The discipline of performance studies and the body of performance theory emerged on the heels of the expanded field of performance described above. In his essay “What is Performance Studies Anyway?” Richard Schechner points out that “Any event, action, item, or behavior may be examined ‘as’ performance. Approaching phenomena as performance has certain advantages. One can consider things as provisional, in-process, existing and changing over time, in rehearsal, as it were.”7 Schechner’s observation echoes many theories of planning and landscape architecture from Mumford’s enacted cities and Ian McHarg’s dynamic ecological planning to the more recent theories of Cultural Landscape Studies, Ecological Design and Planning, and Landscape Urbanism. The provisional and in-process aspects of performance allows us to access Putnam’s middle way, a both/and approach, “releasing us from endless debate between positions that are natural or cultural, scientific or artistic, theoretical from practical, value laden from quantitative.”8 The both/and approach, as opposed to either/or binary thinking, embraces a dialogic “to and fro” without insisting on synthetic closure. The polyvocality of the dialogue genre represents one model of the both/and aesthetic in which two or more points of view remain unresolved in a productive tension.

Dialogue is also key to both the traditional performance genre of drama and an essential component in the practice of planning and landscape design. As Anne

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Spirn suggests, carefully attending to the dialogue between performance and space allows the landscape architect or planner to understand how identities of people and places shape and are shaped one another. She explains John Widrick’s process of designing a meeting place for Aspen Farms Community Garden in which he considers “the constellation of activities surrounding meeting: movement, exchange, gathering,” in order to more fully grasp the meaning of the place to the people who use it.9 The lesson here, she concludes, is that “To concentrate on formal qualities of space and neglect performance is to mistake the shell for the practices which shape and activate it; both are important.”10 She describes her own design practice based on a concept of performance spaces: My own approach sees space as a setting for performance of activities; it begins with the processes that generate places, rather than with their expression in particular forms, and then asks what settings are necessary to sustain these processes… Performance spaces are also relevant to inorganic processes and other life forms to the extent that the processes that generate those spaces are shared.11 This approach to landscape as performance instances the both/and to-and-fro of dialogue to comprehend how embodied performances engender the identity of particular places and those place in turn come to fashion the identities of communities and individuals. It also works to break down the divisions between people and animals, culture and nature, and the hierarchical, gendered way of thinking about land and natural resources, a way of thinking we can longer afford to indulge.

Performance theory’s feminist attack on the gender binary itself provides another effective theoretical tool for escaping Western dualist thinking about both embodiment and landscape. In her article, “The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture,” Elizabeth K. Meyer takes up the project of dismantling the discursive system that disseminates from the conventional association of nature as female and culture as male. Landscape under this regime is understood as “unstructured, informal, irregular, [and] wild,” the very terms deployed to subjugate women, colonized peoples, and land to patriarchal control. What Lawrence Halprin refers to as the Biblical score, this hierarchy makes Man the master of Nature, and men the masters of women and disenfranchised “others.” This score polices and constricts performance and, writes Halprin in the late 1960s, bears culpability for the “polluted, overpopulated, ugly environment we have built for ourselves.”12 It also traps society in an ideology of individualism that maintains a deep divide between one another, other creatures, and the Earth. Meyer draws inspiration from Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” to contest these divisions in the context of landscape architecture. The manifesto, itself a performative genre, proposes “a myth about identity and… [explores] how to weave eroticism, cosmology, and politics from imagery of embodiment” to resist this dominating system of control.13

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Haraway’s counterhegemonic myth introduces the figure of the cyborg, which she places in a long line of boundary creatures who have had a “destabilizing place in the great Western evolutionary, technological, and biological narratives.”14 Cyborgs defy discrete categories, challenging these Western binary scripts by being multiple, provisional, and in-process. Meyer applies the cyborg’s hybrid model of embodiment to landscape architecture, calling for “a land ethic and aesthetic predicated upon a continuum between human nature and nonhuman nature.”15 Viewed in this way, embodiment becomes intimately intertwined with spaces, other organisms, and inorganic elements. This perspective insists on physical, sensual connections that speak to reality of our physiology comprised of atoms, elements, micro-organisms, and bacteria that we share in common with the planet and our fellow creatures.

These interpenetrating relationships continually shape bodies and identities in a complex ecological dance always already underway.

Meyer develops this idea of the landscape cyborg with the notion of the figuredground, “an undulating body between the figural object and neutral field, between mass and void,” in effect hybridizing the spatial fields traditionally defined as opposites with the suggestion of a body dancing in the liminal space between presence and absence.16 In a sense, she expands the field from static representation to performance, which refuses to sit still. She offers Olmsted and Eliot’s work in Boston as an example of the landscape cyborg, “the hybrid of human nature and nonhuman nature” that performs a deconstruction of the natural/artificial binary.17 The Emerald Necklace serves as an apt example of the landscape cyborg, because it defies the gendered categories of natural and artificial. The park system appears “irregular, informal, [and] wild,” yet is a choreography of “found and made landscapes.”18 She points to “the constructed water systems within the park” which “confound the most discerning eye” as “hybrid of machine and organism, a nineteenth century landscape cyborg.”19 Curiously, Meyer credits Olmsted and omits the contributions of Charles Eliot, whose peripatetic process resonates with the notion of landscape as performance I propose here. Eliot’s oeuvre embodies the shuttling to-and-fro creativity between painting, poetry, and ecological systems he encountered, unsettling the same hierarchies Meyer aims to.20 His thinking about the practice of landscape architecture and his approach to designing landscapes that take into account the identity of the place and the people who have shaped it emerge from walking the land. A habit that helped him develop his skills as a landscape designer and one deeply connected to performance via the origins of theatre in ritual. The roots of theatre lie in ancient rituals that formalized human relationships with nature, the passing of seasons, and the significance of life-giving places. The “undulating body” of Meyer’s figured ground seems to invoke such an ancient foundational performances. It also calls to mind Derrida’s description of the specter which he uses to elaborate his notion of hauntology, a playful pun on ontology that evokes the slippery uncertainty and in-between-ness of performance:

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[the] specter is a paradoxical incorporation, the becoming-body, a certain body phenomenal and carnal form of the spirit. It becomes, rather, some ‘thing’ that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other. For it is flesh and phenomenality that give to the spirit its spectral apparition, but disappear right away in the apparition, in the very coming of the revenant or the return of the specter.21 The specter instances a similar liminal figure of the body in performance, provisional, in the process of becoming embodied. The ghostlike apparition is also a way of summoning the past and recognizing the human cultural histories embedded in landscapes, similar to Spirn’s “deep context” that—interwoven with the “deep structure” of the “fundamental geologic, hydrologic, and bioclimatic that form the landscape”—comprise the identity of a given place.22

Performing the American Landscape: Amazons, Cyborgs, and Ghosts in Utah I want to conclude by considering these ideas about performance, identity, embodiment, and landscape in the context of Terry Tempest William’s Refuge and the landscape of Utah as performance. William’s epilogue “The Clan of the Onebreasted Women” brings together many of the strands explored here by claiming the Amazon as the ancestral mother of her clan. The mythological figure of the fierce women warrior who ritually amputates her right breasts to better wield her bow. The masculine woman warrior stands a symbol of wild and savage rebellion against the Classical, mathematically portioned male body idealized in ancient Greek sculpture. For Haraway, the Amazon is hybrid boundary creature prefiguring the cyborg: “The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits of the centered polis of the Greek male human by their disruption of marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and woman.”23 As such, she is a fitting emblem for Williams’ own articulation of place, identity, and embodiment, one deeply imbued with ritual, reverence, and resistance. The landscape of Utah is perhaps the quintessential American landscape both marked by its inhabitants and also marking them in constantly unfolding process of becoming that illustrates the theory of landscape as performance.

As Williams writes against the grain of American and Mormon foundation narratives, she relates her intimate relationship to landscape through her ritual visits to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, performance emerges in the rhythms of returns to refuge, the migrations of birds, wingbeats, the rising and falling waters of the Great Salt Lake, the returns of cancer, hospital visits, memories, ghosts, dreams, and nuclear blasts. Human performances of conservation and destruction shape and activate the landscape as her interaction and connection to the land shape her and her matrilineal ancestry and her imagined tribe. Throughout the book, she blurs the boundaries between the landscape and women’s bodies—especially

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her own—in a way that reinforces the interconnectedness or hybridity of both landscape and inhabitant. In the epilogue, Williams describes a dream in which a global band of women gather in the desert, dancing, drumming, and singing paean to the planet in order to reclaim a place ravaged by patriarchal exploitation in the form of nuclear bomb tests. This dream rite might stand as a poetic image for Meyers figured ground, undulating hybrid bodies neither fully spirit nor flesh, past nor present. They sing an ancient Shoshone chant as part of the ritual to heal of the landscape, as rebellion against the dominant patriarchal order, and as a performative act of making a vow: “A new contract was being drawn by the women, who understood the fate of the earth as their own.”24 She then segues into an actual act of civil disobedience, the political performance of a protest at the Nevada Test Site. After being arrested the protesters are dropped in the desert, left to make their own way into town on foot. She ends the book with these words: “The officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the desert with no way to get home. What they didn’t realize was that we were home, soul-centered and strong, women who recognize the sweet smell of sage as fuel for our spirits.”25 Williams’ Amazons contest the hierarchies of an environmentally destructive system that undergirds the military industrial complex and results in practices such nuclear bomb tests. Those tests can be understood as performances of American military prowess, as attempts to fashion and position a nation as the supreme world power, ones that marked downwinders’ bodies with cancer and devastated the ecological systems of the blast sites and surrounding areas. In contrast, Utah is home to another site of performance of our national identity, some of the most beautiful and geologically unique National Parks in the country. These landscapes our inextricably tied to way we understood the American frontier and the way we still tend to think about our national character. The American West looms large in the American imaginary and it was the sublime grandeur of these landscapes that inspired the tradition of land conservation that began with John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, and Theodore Roosevelt.

Visitors to Bryce, Zion, Arches, Capitol Reef and Canyonlands National Parks cannot experience these places without a sense of wonderment and appreciation for the forces that shaped them. Park trails designed to enhance those experience are good examples of a performance approach to landscape design that is both rooted in and constantly changing our individual and collective identities. The struggle between these two conflicting strains of American identity continue in debates over extracting natural resources from such public lands. Williams recently penned an Op-ed in the New York Times describing another act of resistance in which she and her husband leased a piece of public land being auctioned to oil and gas companies.

When confronted by the Bureau of Land Management representative who warned she could face prosecution for misrepresenting herself as an energy developer, she responded: “You can’t define energy for us. Our energy development is fueling a movement to keep it in the ground.”26 This wry piece of political theatre deploys

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a playful humor in the face serious threats to the landscape and instances a potent way of thinking about landscape as performance.

Notes 1.Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim eds., Is Landscape… ? Essays on the Identity of Landscape (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 2.

2. Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim,19.

3. Lewis Mumford, “What is a City?” in The City Reader, eds. Richard T. Le Gates and Frederic Stout (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 93.

4. Frederick Law Olmsted, “Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns” in The City Reader, eds. Richard T. Le Gates and Frederic Stout (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 324.

5. Wendell Cole, “The Theatre Projects of Walter Gropius,” International Observatory of Theatres at Risk, nd, http://espaciosescenicos.org/The-theatreprojects-of-Walter-Gropius-Wendell-Cole (accessed 29 April 2016).

6. See my essay “Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP Cycles: Performance-based Landscape Design and the Portland Park Sequence” earlier in this volume.

7. Richard Schechner. “What Is Performance Studies Anyway?” in The Ends of Performance, eds. Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

8. Kathryn Moore, “Is Landscape Philosophy?” Is Landscape… ? Essays on the Identity of Landscape, eds. Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim, (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 292.

9. Anne Whiston Spirn. The Language of Landscape (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 123.

10. Ibid, 124.

11. Ibid, 121.

12. Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Process in the Human Environment (New York: George Brazilier, 1969), 99.

13. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), 173-174.

14. Ibid, 2.

15. Elizabeth K. Meyer, “The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture,” in Ecological Design and Planning, eds. George R. Thompson and Frederick R. Steiner (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1997), 51.

16. Ibid, 52.

17. Ibid, 64.

18. Ibid, 66 & 64.

19. Ibid, 64.

20. See my essay “Poetry, Painting, and the Humanized Landscape: Charles Eliot’s Vision of Landscape Architecture” earlier in this volume.

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21. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 6.

22. Frederick R. Steiner, The Living Landscape: An Ecological Approach to Landscape Planning (Washington: Island Press, 2008), 291-292.

23. Haraway, 180.

24. Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, 10th Anniversary Ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 287-288.

25. Ibid, 290.

26. Terry Tempest Williams, “Keeping My Fossil Fuel in the Ground,” New York Times, 29 March, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/opinion/keepingmy-fossil-fuel-in-the-ground.html?_r=0 (accessed 2 May, 2016).

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Design Landscape as Place Haoyang Li “A rich and beautiful book is always open before us. We have but to learn to read it.”

-- John Brinckerhoff Jackson. 1951 When I visited the Wuxi Canal District with my parents in 2014, my father looked at the Starbucks at the entrance (Figure 1) and started to describe his childhood experience at the waterfront. He told me: “the canal was the “home” for local people (Figure 2) and was polluted thirty years ago by factories. The new design solved the water pollution problem and created a commercial district with restaurants and bars to ‘protect’ the old houses. Local people left the waterfront. They never came back.”

Since then I started to think: How to design landscapes to respect people’s life?

How to design landscapes to achieve cultural identity and to awake local people’s memory connected with their history?

Figure 1. Entrance of the Canal District in 2014 Source: http://travel.sina.com.cn/

Figure 2. Wuxi Canal District in the 1960s Source: Chinese National Industry and Commerce Museum

In his book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (1984), JB Jackson describes the emergence and quick decline of what he called vernacular communities attracted by elementary public services and other utilities, ruled by its own custom without following political procedures.1 He believed that these communities, if well designed and given an identity, could last longer and become a place where people have a history and stories. He suggested that the profession of landscape architecture should know “a great deal about land, its uses, its values, and political and economic and cultural forces affecting its distribution.”2 The major idea in his concept is that landscape architects should pay more attention to people as well as their cultures. This paper illustrates the idea that designers should design landscapes as places. It talks about a series of terms including space, place, identity, ideology and 123

conversation through which a sense of place can be understood. It also uses some related design examples and thoughts to argue for designing places related to local culture and social values.

Space When we talk about landscapes, including designed landscapes, the term space is fundamental to people’s experience of the landscapes. We experience spaces through the physical volume created by walls, vegetation, topography, ground and other physical phenomenon including sound and light. We engage them with the full range of our senses. We define them through architectural forms, distance, scales and modulation of light and shade.3 Having a good sense of space has become a basic criterion of a lot of design firms when recruiting new designers.

Place I prefer using the term place to talk about landscapes since it combines space and the notion of time. Landscapes have evolved and will continue to evolve over time along with human activities that happen within the landscapes. Through time, we have gained our history and stories, and through history and stories we read landscape with its layers of human spirit that inform the sense of place. If space is related to tangible phenomenon such as physical forms, place also contains intangible components including social values, memories and meanings. Designed places contain meanings that will attach to not only the forms, patterns and structures within the spaces but also to the experiences of the space users.4

Identity In his book Place and Placelessness (1976), the Canadian geographer Edward Relph suggests that in order to maintain and manipulate existing places or create new ones, people need to improve the knowledge of the places.5 The main idea of his concept is that all places have identities and memories. In order to create a site as a place for people, designers need to carefully study the identity of the place and understand the landscape not simply as a beautiful picture or natural scenery, but as a cultural process.6 It is a process through which identities are created. We could not understand ourselves if the landscapes we dwell in lose identities, for they are clues to our history and culture.

If we look at major cities in China we could see more similarities than distinctiveness.

For certain people who seldom leave the neighborhood, it is even difficult for them to find their way back if they walk out of their houses for a long distance. Frequently, we see elders campaigning about the difficulty of way finding. People may ask:

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are they in a condition of declining mental abilities, especially their memory? Is it because the city is growing too fast? No matter what questions we ask we cannot deny that today’s designs of city landscapes in China have seldom considered respecting people’s lifestyles and memories of the city thus have lost their legibility. In The Image of the City (1960), Kevin Lynch argues that a workable image for recognizing a city requires “first the identification of an object, which implies its distinction from other things…called identity,…with the meaning of individuality or oneness. Second, the image must include the spatial or pattern relation of the object to the observer and to other objects. Finally, this object must have some meaning for the observer, whether practical or emotional.’’7 If we use Lynch’s framework to test major cities in China, it’s increasingly difficult to recognize the distinctive image of each city because the cities are losing their identity and emotional meaning especially for the old generation of city dwellers. For a big part of the elderly populations in urban areas of China, the cities where they grew up are losing their sense of place.

Context Defined by the Australian landscape architect Ken Taylor, context is “the way in which we make comparisons with other places. It is related to our range of experiences through which we situate a place, see it and interpret it, and construct meaning from it.”8 By “context,” I refer to cultural context through which we define the boundary of a place. In landscape studio projects, it is almost necessary for students to create a series of context maps related to site contours, drainage, plant communities and animal habitats as a way to drive the concept of design. We seldom see design proposals, including my own, that look seriously at local materials and colors, history, economic conditions, people’s life styles of a site and its surrounding areas.

Most attentions have been paid to restoring natural patterns, capturing and filtering storm water, the use of native plants to mimic ecoregions and providing habitats for birds and other wildlife. It is almost the similar, if not the same, idea as creating a sustainable site as the goal of design. I’m not saying it is not important to consider landscape ecology as a big part of our design. Proposing green infrastructures to provide ecosystems services is a significant way of considering sustainability and ecological functions of a site which will contribute to health, safety and welfare of the community. But the truth is that the designs have largely been driven by an approach which majorly considers ecological sustainability, not by one which focuses on the cultural context. There is really little room for considering cultural heritages, social values, and everyday life of a place. Laurie Olin has critiqued fundamentalist ecology’s failure to appreciate cultural importance.9 As James Corner has suggested, landscape architecture should not only focus on natural science and techniques of ecological restoration because a landscape is a cultural product.10

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Ideology and Conversation British geographers including James Duncan at the University of Cambridge have indicated that landscape as a cultural construct reflects the characters of the community and is people’s ideologies that are illustrated as concrete.11 Landscape therefore is a cultural phenomenon interpreted by our minds.12 As a cultural production, landscape does not emerge by itself. It is created by human intentions, a result of the ideologies of human society. It should be supported and defined by the common vision and values of both the designers and the users of the place.

One big challenge for designers is to engage users and allow them to understand the intent of the design. The understanding of the designed landscape is based on users’ experience as well as their values. The sense of place comes from a strong relationship between the identity created by the design on the one hand and the cultural background of the users on the other hand. Thus, a conversation is needed between designers and the users, while the designed landscape is the medium. I do not mean to suggest designed landscapes should be conservative and copy historic models without considering modern techniques and new theories. What I’m suggesting is to maintain the cultural identity and the continuous flow of experience that fit in the cultural context and historic background; thus landscapes could be read by the users even in different time and space. A successful example is the China Town Park in Boston designed by Turenscape in 2005. The design of the entrance used red, which has always been regarded as the Chinese color. Since the red color roots so deep in Chinese culture, it connects users’ personal experience and memory to history. The sail-shaped structure (Figure 3) which looks like a Chinese version of the “Mayflower” has a strong gesture. It works as the threshold of the China town area, represents the history of Chinese immigration, and stirs the emotions Figure 3. A Steel Panel Installation at Shanghai Houtan Park13 of overseas Chinese. The design uses such eye-catching color and form that clearly started a dialogue between the designers and the users from a Chinese cultural background. Such dialogue has the power to cross time and space to provide the opportunity for the participation and imagination of users in the designed place.

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A Model of Designed Places in China Kongjian Yu and his Firm Turenscape have tested the idea of “new vernacular” for over ten years. He defines “new vernacular” as an approach of using native material and plant, and combing “old vernacular,” especially agriculture, and new technology to address the “changing relationship between land and people.”14 Shanghai Houtan Park has become a milestone of his experiments in cultural landscapes for its richness in historic meaning and cultural context.

In addition to the iconic red color as his design language, his design has created several layers of meanings. The use of terraces as form represents traditional Chinese agriculture. The reclamation of waste metal as material for paving, railings and pergola demonstrates the cultural heritage of the site (Figure 4) and 15 recalls the memory of local people that Figure 4. Entrance of Boston China Town Park Shanghai was the birthplace of China’s modern industry. The design gave the park its cultural identity and sense of place.

Conclusion Although Yu thinks that his “new vernacular” approach is a unique model for Chinese contemporary landscapes, and although different societies have different understanding of their own history and culture and different ways of creating their living environments, I believe Yu’s idea could be a reference for the global practice of creating landscapes as places. No matter which society the landscapes belong to, as JB Jackson illustrated, “We create them and need them because every landscape is the place where we establish our own human organization of space and time.”16 The same idea is to respect local culture and history, to connect landscapes with people’s stories and memories, and to create cultural identity that promotes a sense of local distinctiveness, and thus a sense of place.

Notes 1. Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven and

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London: Yale University Press, 1984), 156.

2. Ibid.

3. Bacon, Edmund N. Design of Cities (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 15.

4. Taylor, Ken. “Design with Meaning.” Landscape Review 3, no. 2 (1997): 3-21.

5. Relph, Edward, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976), 44.

6. Taylor, Ken. “Landscape and Memory: Cultural Landscapes, Intangible Values and Some Thoughts on Asia” Communities and Memories: a Global Perspective, Australia Memory of the World Programme (2008): 1-6, http://www.icomos.org/ quebec2008/cd/toindex/77_pdf/77-wrVW-272.pdf,..

7. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: MIT Press, 1960), 8.

8. Taylor, 3-21.

9. Olin, Laurie. “Form, Meaning, and Expression in Landscape Architecture.”

Landscape Journal 7, no. 2 (1988): 149-168.

10. Corner, James. “Ecology and landscape as agents of creativity,” in Ecological Design and Planning, ed. G. Thompson and F. Steiner (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 100.

11. Duncan, J. and N. Duncan. “(Re)Reading the Landscape,” Environment and Planning D, Society & Space 6, no. 2 (1988): 117-126.

12. Meining, D. W. “The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene.” Landscape Architecture 66, no. 1 (01, 1976): 47-54 13. designboom architecture. “turnescape: shanghai houtan park best landscape project at WAF 2010.” 12 Nov 2010. Na. Web. www.designboom.com 14. Yu Kongjian, Wang Zhifang, Huang Guoping,. “Discussion about the Vernacular Landscapes and Their Implications to Modern Landscape Architecture,” Huazhong Architecture 4 (2005): 40.

15. Photo by a fellow student Yiqing Wang, 2013.

16. Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, 156.

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Camillo Sitte: Space, Enclosure, Tradition and the Healthy Modern City David Sharratt Millennials increasingly choose urban habitation over the suburban patterns often preferred by their parents. As density grows so does the necessity for the built environment to evolve in ways that create culturally relevant, sustaining and healthy landscapes. In that search we recursively look to past models while re-interpreting modern ideals.

By the 1930s architects’ and planners’ increasing enchantment with the International Style manifested in mass repetition of unapologetically functionalist social housing, devoid of empathetic atmospheres or sensitivity to the physical reality of architecture in everyday lives. At the scale of a city, modernist city design has revealed the weakness of a narrow interpretation of function. The examples of modernist city design’s failures abound and are common occurrences in our day-to-day lives: unwalkable neighborhoods, cities cleaved and divided by major interstates, and urban renewal. Modern city design, most clearly and astringently represented by Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, represented a figure-ground relationship in which the open park was ground (or even void), and the cruciform tower was clear figure in primary focus, in juxtaposition to the ground. The relationship of building to land, and figure to ground in the contemporary era has increasingly been questioned, blurred, or reversed. At opposite ends of current debate on the qualities of our urban lives, both the New Urbanists and the Landscape Urbanists argue to prioritize the quality of public life over the individual building -- that is, a reversal of the modernist figure-ground relationship of landscape to building. These dialogues -- between New Urbanists and Landscape Urbanists, and between modernity and historical continuity -- have the potential to offer meaningful trajectories for praxis which can be traced back to and more meaningfully understood through study of one of the important originators of traditional city planning, Camillo Sitte.

Camillo Sitte’s major work, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, was published in Vienna in 1889, ten years after the completion of the Votivkirche and just over thirty years after Vienna’s medieval walls were razed and the development of the Ringstrasse began. Sitte criticized the Ringstrasse development for its dehumanizing emphasis on barren open space, inefficient transportation, and monumental vistas. Instead, through a rigorous cataloguing of medieval city figureground studies, Sitte argued for the primacy of intimate sensory experience of the 129

city and the benefit of enclosed space appropriately scaled to promote chance interaction.

The creation of cities that provide such experiences for its citizens was both an ethical obligation and an artistic undertaking. In contrast to strictly functionalist aspects of city design, which Sitte refers to as “traffic, hygiene, etc.,” he invoked Aristotle. Aristotle’s writing on cities, in keeping with his larger thinking on Eudaimonia, emphasizes the aesthetic dimension to well-being and ethical action. “A city must be so constructed that it makes its citizens at once secure and happy. To realize the latter aim, city building must be not just a technical question but an aesthetic one in the highest sense.”1

The Ringstrasse and Its Competing Critics To understand Sitte’s arguments requires an understanding of the context from which they arose. By invoking “a great and genuine art of the people,” Sitte makes a larger criticism of the Ringstrasse development for a failure to fulfill its own ambitions. For, among the many ambitions of the development, was the liberal aspiration to extend access to civic and cultural arts from the aristocracy to middle class society.

The Ringstrasse represented in visible form the new values and abilities of the liberals ruling Vienna. In rapid succession they developed the basic infrastructure to enable the relative health and safety of a rapidly burgeoning population. In the sixties the city developed an excellent water supply the Danube. The Danube was controlled to prevent the flooding that had periodically devastated the city, and the municipality developed a public health system that ended most major epidemics of the time.2 By 1870, the buildings, roads and parks of the Ringstrasse development had transformed Vienna. Along with Haussmann’s work in Paris, it was the greatest civic project of the time.

The Ringstrasse development differed from Haussman’s Paris in two significant ways. First, it did not cut through existing development, and therefore, secondly, it did not afford the clarity and efficiency of Haussman’s plan. The Ringstrasse itself was broad and efficient, and its vast width afforded the type of long, fixed monumental views found in Paris. However, its circular nature did not allow efficient means to move across and through the city. Its development was more attuned to projecting liberal ideals of “beautification”3 and iconographic cultural sophistication; that is, the city’s image as opposed to the city’s practical adaptation to modernity. In this way, the ambition of the Ringstrasse development was largely symbolic. To move radially across the city, one would have to traverse narrow eighteenth century roads, then sections of broad nineteenth century boulevards,

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then back to eighteenth century organization. For this, the development of the Ringstrasse was criticized by modern thinkers such as Otto Wagner. Wagner, as a prescient early modernist, believed that new methods of construction combined with new patterns of living necessitated new building and planning typologies. In the preface to the 1895 printing of Modern Architecture (his inaugural talk as Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts) he wrote: One idea inspires the whole book, namely THAT THE WHOLE BASIS OF THE VIEWS OF ARCHITECTURE PREVAILING TODAY MUST BE DISPLACED BY THE RECOGNITION THAT THE ONLY POSSIBLE POINT OF DEPARTURE FOR OUR ARTISTIC CREATION IS MODERN LIFE.4 Embracing the modern condition, Wagner wrote that city planners must “make visible our better, democratic, self-conscious and sharp-thinking essence, and do justice to the colossal technical and scientific achievements as well as to the fundamentally practical character of modern mankind.”5 In his 1893 competition plan for Vienna, Wagner made the resolution of transportation problems the organizing principle. He proposed regulating, channelizing, and running train lines along the Danube, covering the Vienna River to add three or four train stations, and adding another circular line concentrically offset from the Ringstrasse.

In 1911, Wagner developed the Modular City District plan, envisioning rationalized patterns for unlimited outward growth of the city. He advocated that the modern perils Sitte lamented--“traffic, hygiene, etc.”--should be the fundamental parameters of city design. His 1911 drawings for the Modular City District show an uncompromising belief in rational uniformity organized around open space placed at points of intersection. These air centers, much like the Pope’s plan, were punctuated by monumental objects at their centers, emphasized open and rationalized space, and were framed by rigidly geometric shaped vegetation.

The central idea of this plan – an infinitely expanding urban module where open space was either found in the linearity of the street or the residual space of removed blocks – would later evolve with Le Corbusier and the Congrès Internationaux D’architecture Moderne (CIAM), influencing the creation of modernist superblocks. Although Le Corbusier expressed admiration for Sitte’s ideas early in his career,6 like Wagner, he ultimately rejected them as “an appalling and paradoxical misconception in an age of motor-cars,” and emphasized the priority of the street over pedestrian experience as a modern necessity: “A city made for speed is a city made for success.”7 In City Planning, Sitte extensively diagrams, using figure-ground drawings, lineages of city patterns that he understands to enhance civic experience. He wrote that

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ancient cities developed organically to create patterns of spatial enclosure. Instead of prioritizing the long fixed view to a monumental object, ancient cities created a sequence of changing views. By enclosing space and tying important civic buildings to differential building fabric, the building can create an important outdoor social space to be used, instead of being monumentalized and symbolized. For Sitte, the application of historical styles to the facades of civic buildings, while not egregious, was superficial. More importantly, he believed planners and architects needed to look to ancient, proven models of city form for the effect they have on people’s experience and behavior.8 The reason Sitte was so concerned with the psychological and social impact of city design on people can be more clearly understood by his address to the Vienna Wagner Verein in 1875. In his address, Sitte expressed the importance of the musician Richard Wagner’s theory in forming his own synthesis of historical and artisan tradition into an aesthetic social ambition.9 In the wake of the 1873 economic crash, Wagner’s glorification of an artisan community as an antidote to the woes of capitalism spread rapidly among Viennese intellectuals. Sitte, in Wagnerian fashion, articulated how the development of science and capitalism had supplanted meaningful and coherent cultural values. Both he and Wagner understood the arts as offering the potential path of redemption. Where Wagner described the composer as the regenerator of culture, Sitte extolled the city planner. Where Wagner proposed music as the redemptive tool towards a meaningful and satisfying cultural life, Sitte proposed the city square.10 In the chapter ‘Relationship between Buildings and Plazas’, Sitte succinctly describes his understanding of the town square’s function: In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance there still existed a vital and functional use of the town square for community life and also, in connection with this, a rapport between square and surrounding public buildings.11 This statement is prefaced with a pragmatic understanding of the requirements of a modern city; Sitte clearly establishes a hierarchy of functions, in which the picturesque is secondary to the type of hard functions that Wagner emphasizes: That which is essential for hygienic or other compelling reasons has to be carried out, even at the cost of any number of pictorial motifs. But this in turn must not prevent us from studying carefully all features of the planning of old cities -- even the merely picturesque -- and establishing parallels to modern conditions.12 Because Sitte and Otto Wagner occupied opposite sides of a debate on city design, and because Sitte looked to history for alternative patterns of development to the Ringstrasse’s characteristic elements of the Parisian consensus, Sitte is often

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misunderstood as a romantic progenitor of historicism. Carl Schorske, in the classic Fin-De-Siecle Vienna tells the story of ‘The Ringstrasse and the Birth of Urban Modernism’ through this polar duality. He contrasts this duality as, “Camillo Sitte and Otto Wagner, the romantic archaist and the rational functionalist, divided between them the un-reconciled components of the Ringstrasse legacy.”13 Ironically, it is precisely this reading of Sitte that has earned his work its most robust contemporary attention -- first by the Postmodernists, then by New Urbanists. However, a closer reading of his work reveals a different ambition, one that is far more compelling and applicable to current conditions than the romantic archaism that runs through both postmodern and new urbanist design.

Sitte, both in practice and writing, did not propose the kind of irregularity or historicist interpretations that are often attributed to him. His 1894 Expansion plan for Olmutz (Czech Republic) shows a synthesis of scaled squares and extensive parks with clear orthogonal planning and modernist sensibilities to the realities of efficient traffic. At a smaller scale, his proposal for enclosing the precinct around the Votivkirche in Vienna demonstrates the application of his belief that the social experience of spatial enclosure is more important than the symbolic communication achieved by placing monumental buildings to terminate long axial vistas. But it also shows careful consideration to maintain orderly traffic flow, as well as his comfort with using straight streets and rectangular city blocks.14 In his writing he directly addressed the faults of copying historical precedent: Modern living as well as modern building techniques no longer permit the faithful imitation of old townscapes, a fact which we cannot overlook without falling prey to barren fantasies. The exemplary creations of the old masters must remain alive with us in some other way than through slavish copying; only if we can determine in what the essentials of these creations consist, will it be possible to harvest a new and flourishing crop from the apparently sterile soil.15 And, on recreating the type of irregularity he documents in medieval precedents he writes: But can the accidents of history over the course of centuries be invented and constructed ex novo in the plan? Could one, then, truly and sincerely enjoy such a fabricated ingenuousness, such a studied naturalness? Certainly not.16 Sitte understood the realities of modern cities and that increasing traffic and efficient circulation were fundamental to a plan’s success. Where he dramatically differed from the modernist approach of the CIAM and Wagner was that he believed that the pedestrian experience should not coincide with the scale of open space required for automobile traffic. Where Le Corbusier and Wright romanticised the automobile city, Sitte presciently advocated for planning that facilitated enriching

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and healthy experiences on foot. This is a sentiment that would later be picked up in careful empirical study by architect Jan Gehl, who worked in Copenhagen to give primacy to pedestrians and, in turn, preserve the city from high speed traffic and building demolition for parking lots. In perhaps the most succinct defense of traditional city planning Gehl states, simply: “Life takes place on foot.”

In this context we can understand Sitte’s arguments for a psychological functionalism that learns from long historical lineages, in similar vein to the way in which Adolf Loos approached modernity. Like Loos, he objected to the secession’s stylish, artsy treatment of everyday objects. Like Loos’ comment about the confusion between the urn and the chamberpot, Sitte ridiculed the designer who treated a spittoon as worthy of artistic imagination. He expressed his admiration for Otto Wagner’s work but criticized its exterior for style of “glass and iron” not de-facto, but questioning its appropriateness as a monumental building and stating it was out of context. Like Loos, Sitte believed in a discerning approach to buildings, depending on their type. In his opinion, the danger with style is to confuse categories. Sitte came to see style as something alien to urban context, and that advancing a new, inflexible style (secession) should be avoided because it represented a lack of humility vis-à-vis the totality of the city.17 In 1859, Loos, with Paul Engelmann, developed a plan for the expansion of Vienna. It was a utopian exercise, a “flash-back” before the start of the Ringstrasse.18 It proposed a far more extensive and experience-based plan than the enacted Ringstrasse; in many important areas it represented an important interpretation of Sitte’s principles. Their design process overlays plan sketches with street level perspectives, showing emphasis given to the effect of the plan on Raum - spatial experience of the individual. Looking closer at the plan surrounding the Kaiserforum, Loos, like Sitte, uses green spaces and parks as essential components in the larger urban design. Furthermore, on both sides of the Kaiserforum these green spaces are bounded.19 As Sitte proposed, Loos also eliminated the long direct visual connections between the Parliament and the Rathaus. The plan, in so many regards, resembles applications of Sitte’s principles such that we can look to it as a similarly-minded modernist’s attempt to reconcile historical continuity with modernity. Lejune, in his essay Schinkel, Sitte, and Loos: The “Body In The Visible,” analyzes the plan and concludes: “Loos’s plan for Vienna was not a nostalgic exercise, but a forward thinking attempt at developing modernity with tradition,” and that, “it was Adolf Loos who furthered Sitte’s thinking to the entire ring and the inner city.”20 It is in this light that we can understand Sitte’s theory not as regressive or nostalgically utopian, but, like Loos, as a proposition for a more complex, seemingly contradicted modernity. It is a modernity that seeks to be relevant to current cultural trajectories,

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but does not need to sever its ties to the past. It is a modernity that takes a wide and adaptable view to function -- that it should reflect the particularities of its place and the collective happiness of its people. Human experience need not be dulled to a subservient position to uniformity, or lost to the scale and speed of the machine.

Sitte’s legacy: Garden Cities, New Urbanism, and Landscape Urbanism The Congress for New Urbanism, or CNU charter, established in 1993 by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, was created as a direct response to the charter of the CIAM. Its’ authors’ previous planning work, as well as their writings, are inspired by many of the theories of Sitte. They stress walkable neighborhoods over automobile-dominated places, and that buildings should be designed, not as isolated objects, but to contribute to coherent spatial enclosures around streets and public spaces.21 While the influences of Sitte’s theory is evident, the elements that make the CNU so unappealing to many contemporary designers should not be credited to Sitte.

Plater-Zyberg and Duany have become increasingly traditional in their design approach, evidenced by Plater-Zyberg’s role on the board of Classical America, and that both Duany and Plater-Zyberg were awarded the Direhaus Prize in 2008.22 As I have already argued, despite his characterization as a historicist, Sitte advocated no particular style, but rather the appropriateness of style. And while he did advocate coherence in that a building should be deferential to its role in the larger city, as shown by his critique of the Secession, he was critical of undifferentiated adherence to a singular style. Furthermore, while the New Urbanists draw on the typologies that Sitte advocates, specifically the turbine square (Plater-Zyberg), they advocate a level of systematized rules to be applied to ensure appropriate urban character of places depending on their location in an idealized “Urban Transect” of evenly graduating density. For example, alleyways are allowed in urban places closer to the city core, but not further along the transect in areas categorized as rural.23 The timeless strength of Sitte’s ideas is that they are articulated as principles, and therefore allow contemporary and regional adjustment. The CNU, in their ambition, define precise rules and thus put forward a somewhat frozen proposal, less adaptable to the evolving character of culture and place.

Sitte’s most direct influence would be carried through the lineage of thinkers on garden cities and garden suburbs, and the role of the picturesque in town planning. Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin’s design for Hampsted, influenced

by Ebenezer Howard’s seminal book Garden Cities of To-morrow, with its cul-de-sac streets and groupings of buildings into courts, had immediate effects on suburbs internationally. By the time Parker and Unwin were working on this design they would have read Sitte in the German publication Der Stadtebau.24 Sitte’s emphasis on

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sequential perspectival experiences over plan logic would have resonated with the English sensibility of the picturesque, as would his advocacy for using topography to organize planning and the importance of plants and park space for psychological health.25 Unwin’s Town Planning in Practice, published in 1909, became the first serious treatment of Sitte’s theories to be published in English. Like Sitte, Unwin codified principles based on comparative experiences, and argued that monumental plazas should be replaced with walled in, carefully studied and scaled space.26 With shared values, the influence traveled both ways; the contemporary work of Sitte on the plan for the new district of Marienberg shows influence or Unwin / Parker.27 These lineages of two-way influence through garden cities, the picturesque, and suburban planning should not support a misreading of Sitte’s ideas as antiurban. Sitte’s work was primarily concerned with the changing urban condition and how it can best perform for sustained psychological and community health. When writing about plantings and greenery in cities, he advocates for their psychological import but discredits their use for ecological services on air quality.

Garden cities would have a large international impact, from Canberra in Australia, to American corporate campuses, to American suburbs. They also share, at their fundamental principle of a landscape-centered approach to planning, a direct affinity with landscape urbanism.28 It is here, with the landscape urbanists, that Sitte’s approach to designing cities has the most promising contemporary application. Charles Waldheim defines landscape urbanism as a condition where “landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism.” Unlike the suburban interpretations of Garden Cities, the landscape urbanists in direct degrees look to integrate and celebrate the urban condition, and its multiple forces of movement and expression, with occupied landscapes. Writing about Adrian Geuze, principal of West 8 Landscape Architects, Waldheim describes how several of their projects, as exemplars of landscape as urbanism, “imaginatively reordered relationships between ecology and infrastructure, deemphasizing the middle scale of decorative architectural work and favoring instead the large scale infrastructural diagram and the small-scale material condition.”29 A hierarchy of scale which prioritizes planning around the large scale infrastructural systems - including networks of walkable public space, and the direct experience at street level over the scale of buildings as objects, is absolutely congruent with Sitte’s writing. The landscape urbanists (Corner, Waldheim, etc.) have been heavily influenced by Rem Koolhaas and here too is a surprising intersection of theory, applicable to Sitte’s conception of the artful city. In uncanny parallel with Sitte’s criticism of the depersonalization of the city experience by automobile traffic and commerce, Koolhaas coins the term “junk space” to describe a shattered, disoriented stage of public life wrought through the disconnection of signified and

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sign, transitory space and commodification, leading to a “collective of brooding consumers in surly anticipation of their next spend.”30 Sitte’s emphasis on scaled and designed public space is a prescient call to design antidotes to the “junk space” we all, as modern city dwellers, are all too familiar with. Koolhaas’ description of touristic commercial space wrought with competing cultural signs also caution of a misapplied Sitte-esque nostalgia. We must be careful not to create fake, disorienting places, but rather ones, as Sitte urges, that nurture our civic psychology with situated direct experiences in shared, claimed spaces.

West 8 was involved in a city building project that can be understood as a contemporary manifestation of designing for Sitte-esque city–space typologies while eschewing the nostalgia, signifiers, and touristic scenography that creates ‘Junk-Space’. The Bo01 district in Malmo, Sweden was enacted with meaningful principles of public space planning without the kind of prescriptive formality and nostalgic building form symbol sets that the CNU relies on. West 8’s contribution was relatively small: a garden which questions the intersections of public art, social experience, and bound space. The critical importance of the larger project is that central to its development principles are not individual architectural agendas, but rather the planning of linked, pedestrian-centered public spaces designed for comfortable microclimates and ecologies that are simultaneously beautiful and productive.

The architecture is allowed to be diverse in expression, but its overall massing and location is designed to facilitate the integration of multidimensional city types with sustainable aspirations. Buildings enclose and knit together plazas, squares, promenades, gardens, parks, and green infrastructure. The Bo01 is simultaneously practical and aesthetic, traditional and modern and for this it represents a rich prospect for healthy and culturally relevant development.

Figures 1 and 2. Bo01 pedestrian space as soft functionalism (photos by author).

Sitte provides us with a rich perspective told from the edge of the burgeoning modern city. It provides lineage and means for reconciling traditional city planning

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with the contemporary condition, with the aim of strengthening places that can be understood as locci of regional community and craft. On the other hand, recalling the Wagnerian summons towards cultural cohesion and unified national myths reveals ambitions towards regional identity that are outdated -- and even frightening in today’s pluralistic context. That said, the sentiment of lost meaning in modernity -- the sort of placeless uniformity that finds its way from strip malls through aspects of CIAM city design and Otto Wagner’s totality of rationalism in the Modular City -- is increasingly recognized as psychologically and ecologically unhealthy.

Instead, we should take an approach of soft functionalism, one that seeks creative solutions to a broad range of contemporary conditions while utilizing successful models of the past. An approach that understands psychological health as intertwined with the environment, and aesthetics and experience as fundamental criteria for a city’s ability to function well, must also understand the role of the arts in city planning, architecture and landscape architecture as subservient to larger humanistic ends. The art and the artifact should not be the aim, but rather the development of enriching places. In this manner, the role of aesthetic experience should be understood within the larger lineage of thinking on aesthetics that can be traced through John Dewey’s Art as Experience to Aristotle’s Nichomacian Ethics.

Sitte’s soft functionalism of appropriate public space is best understood in the contemporary condition from a broader ecological perspective. Public space should be thought of as hybrid space in continuity with regional histories and cultural meaning. In today’s pluralistic society of competing histories and cultural identity, the most fertile medium for a shared regional identity is, in fact, the more-thanhuman -- the dynamic, healthy, local ecology. Cities should be designed for public space, understanding its social and psychological functions as well as its ecological functions, as these are fundamentally interdependent.

Notes 1. Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, 141.

2. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siecle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1981)25.

3. Ibid, 26.

4. Otto Wagner, Modern Architecture: A Guidebook for His Students to this Field of Art, introduction and translation Harry Francis Mallgrave (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1988), 60.

5. Carl E. Schorske, 74.

6. Brian Ladd, “The Closed Versus the Open Cityscape: Rival Traditions from Nineteenth-Century Europe,” Change Over Time, (2014, Volume 4, Issue 1), 70.

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7. Le Corbusier, The City of To-morrow and its Planning, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Dover, 1987), 10.

8. Ibid, 65.

9. Ibid, 68.

10. Ibid, 70-71.

11. Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, 154.

12. Ibid.

13. Carl E. Schorske, 100.

14. Jonathan Barnett, City Design: Modernist, Traditional, Green, and Systems Perspectives (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011) ,89.

15. Camillo Sitte, City Planning According to Artistic Principles, 249.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid, 18-19.

18. Jean-Francis Lejune, “Schinkel, Sitte, and Loos: The “Body in the Visible,” in Charles C. Bohl and Jean-Francis Lejeune, ed., Sitte, Hegemann and the Metropolis (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 88.

19. Ibid, 93.

20. Ibid, 97.

21. Jonathan Barnett, 103.

22. Ibid, 105-106.

23. Stanford Anderson, “Camillo Sitte: Orders in Reception,” in Charles C. Bohl and Jean-Francis Lejeune, ed., Sitte, Hegemann and the Metropolis (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 107.

24. Jonathan Barnett, 120-130 25. Camillo Sitte, “Greenery Within The City,” 303-321.

26. George R. Collins, and Christiane Crasemann Collins. Camillo Sitte: The Birth of Modern City Planning (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications Inc., 2006),128.

27. Jonathan Barnett, 130.

28. Ibid, 120.

29. Charles Waldheim, “Landscape as Urbanism,” in Charles Waldheim ed., The Landscape Urbanism Reader (New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 45.

30. Bernhard Langer, “Artistic Planning versus Junk Space,” in Charles C. Bohl and Jean-Francis Lejeune, ed., Sitte, Hegemann and the Metropolis (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 150.

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Divine Love, A Manifestation in Nature Plumeria J. Alexander A sacred place is a place made holy by an active and relational divine presence. Creation is sacred because it is the dynamic realization of divine imagination and the locus of divine immanence. A sacramental place is a place that reveals signs of the transcendent and immanent creating Spirit.

People who are open spiritually (consciously or unconsciously) are able to see these signs, are drawn into a conscious experience of divine presence, and are inspired to walk in creation in a new way.

It is the mode of consciousness and a way of conduct in which they care for Earth and all life, and are compassionate toward all people.

All places are sacred because all creation is present in and to the Creator. Since the transcendentimmanent Spirit simultaneously is in creation and is not limited by space or time, every place is as a sacred place. But the sacrality of a place is visible only to those who use their physical and spiritual eyes to see beyond the immediately apparent. Then they participate in all of reality in its spiritual, social, and personal dimensions. Spiritual vision enables people to experience the sacred presence of the immanent-transcendent Spirit who permeates Earth and the cosmos at large. Creation mediates the Creator. The eyes of the human spirit, when open to the divine Spirit, see signs and symbols of the Spirit in the cosmos and commons, in nature an in human communities.

--John Hart from Sacramental Commons: Christian Ecological Ethics1 I could not be more poetic than the above quote by John Hart, nor come close to the intensely integrated explanation that he has given of the transcendental awareness, known as Spirit, that permeates our living conditions as spiritual beings in this world. He explicates clearly an undergirding sense of theosophic experience that provides the underpinning for the intent of this paper.

The Two Worlds In indigenous and traditional esoteric traditions around the world, human experience is described as two planes that are happening simultaneously (referred to as “the two worlds�). One plane is that of the physical reality we experience everyday--that of objects, nature, relationships, thoughts, feelings. The other reality is the force or consciousness which is causing all of that experience to happen, or that is imbuing that physical experience and the outcome of that experience. When humans choose, they can experience these planes as one intertwined reality. This 140

allowance of the union of the two worlds is the non-dualistic path of theology, and has been the methodology of experiencing the world for most, or perhaps all indigenous traditions, and some modern spiritual traditions. The way to experience the intertwining of the two realities is through the “spiritual eyes” as John Hart describes above, or, as the Hawai’ians say, with the “eyes of the heart.”

Seeing with spiritual eyes is a process that can be entered into through prayer and meditation. Although “prayer” is often associated with Western traditions, and “meditation” with Eastern traditions, I think of them more as a cycle of listening and communicating.

In my experience, meditation, though often thought of as ‘emptying the mind’ is actually a much easier and successful process when participated in through the heart.

It is very difficult to stop the mind from its current of ever-flowing perceptions— like “trying to change the ocean from waving.”2 Meanwhile, it is incredibly easy to simply listen to one’s heartbeat, to focus on the love that a person, or experience brings you, or to imagine the love of the Buddha or Mother Mary, for example, flowing to you. From my time experiencing soul by means of the heart, I have come to learn that the heart is more then the life-preserving center of one’s body. The heart is actually a brain. And the thoughts of the heart are what we call “feelings.”

In my experience, the heart also perceives all incoming information first, and then sends it to the brain afterward for further processing. Beyond the physiological state, the heart is a living, spiritual portal to a way of life that is non-dualistic, nonthreatening, and encourages a thorough engaging of the entire body and soul as an integrated moral being. By engaging the heart, both as an organ, and as a mode of perception, we will be able to engage the ethical dilemmas necessary to resolve our approaches toward environmental degradation.

The Heart-Brain There is also a body of neurocardiology research that has been developing over the last twenty years that verifies my meditative understanding of the functioning of the heart. The heart is now known to be a nervous system independent of the brain and nervous system, with its own “neurons, neurotransmitters, protein, and support cells.”3 It processes information, stores memory, encodes aspects of personality, and “communicates with the brain in ways that significantly affects how we perceive and react to the world.”4 The heart communicates to the brain and throughout the body through its electromagnetic field, which permeates every cell and the brain, and extends three to five feet outside of our bodies in all directions.5 The electromagnetic field of the heart is more than one hundred times the size of the electromagnetic field of the brain. It has been proposed that the heart “acts as a carrier wave for information that provides a global synchronizing signal for the entire body.” The

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information in the electromagnetic field of the heart is sensed by the brains of other people within its circumference, and can cause synchronization in their brains. The heart also acts upon the body hormonally. Oxytocin, a hormone secreted by the brain that aids in childbirth and lactation, has been found in equal amounts in the heart, where it is involved in “cognition, tolerance, adaption, complex sexual and maternal behaviors, [and] learning social cues…”6 What’s even more fascinating is that “the heart’s field was directly involved in intuitive perception, through its coupling to an energetic information field outside the bounds of space and time. Using a rigorous experimental design; there was evidence that both the heart and brain receive and respond to information about a future event before the event actually happens,” and that “the heart appeared to receive this intuitive information before the brain.”7 Clearly, the scientific and research community is only beginning to understand how the heart motivates the body biologically; how the communication between the heart and brain affect consciousness and participate in our perception of stimuli; and, for the focus of this paper, how the physiological functioning and transcendental experiencing of the heart can offer profound understandings of perceived reality, and hence aid ethics and morality concerns.

The Heart as a Spiritual Portal There are many ways to engage the heart in life—though intellectual pursuits, relationships and friendships, physical disciplines and romantic passions, however, one of the least talked about is through spiritual passion. You may even by wondering how “spiritual” and “passion” can be in a descriptive relationship. Indeed, people often can only wonder at the motivation and experience of persons who give up possessions and worldly ambitions to become monks and nuns, and to engage the “second layer of reality” on a daily basis. Some think it must be very hard to restrict oneself from rich food, comforting furnishings, or exciting physical passions.

Some think that these persons are running away from the harshness of the world, attempting to seek refuge from a world that they feel they cannot control. In truth, they are running to a reality that is infinitely more wondrous and satisfying than the experience of the material world. In mystic and religious traditions around the world, the backdrop to the visual world that is experienced is simply “love.”

Christian doctrine says “God is Love.” Hindus practice Bhakti, or devotional love as the most direct approach to the Divine. In Sufism, the mystical component to Islam, a Dervish is one who follows the path of love and service.8 Hawaiian mysticism lives the concept of Aloha--love, mercy, and compassion.9 In Ancient Greece, Eros or Love, “is nothing less than the magnetism that holds the entire universe together.”10 People who devote themselves to the spiritual realm through a path of deep prayer or meditation, experience the ecstasy of pure Love--a love that is poured forth from

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the consciousness that resides behind the veil of the material world.

God as Love in Christianity The concept of “God is Love” in Christianity is well known and documented. One popular bible verses states: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” 1 John 4:8. The passage of Apostle Paul on love in Corinthians one and thirteen is also a highly cited discourse on love in action.11 The Encyclical Letter by Pope Benedict XVI from 2005 is devoted to a discussion of love in human life, and specifically the merging of the experiences eros and agape, of human love and Divine love, as well as the reciprocity that is inherent in a loving attitude.

Bhakti in Hinduism Bhakti is one path to understanding of the Divine presence, among many, in Hinduism. It can be defined as “pure love of God”, and is often symbolized in Hindu iconography by the two lovers Radha and Krishna. Krishna symbolizes God, and Radha, the soul. Together, they express “the soul’s intense longing and willingness for the ultimate unification with God.” When these principles are united within the individual, one enters the state of enlightened bliss.12 In the Bhakti path, the soul’s “dormant love for God…is seen as the very essence of our being,” and the purpose of human life.13 I have included parts of the Narada-Bhakti Sutra in an addendum, for further explanation.

Hawai’ian Aloha One needs not look too far to find the principle of “love” in Hawai’ian culture, because it exists in the culture at large, not buried in religious practice. All who arrive on the island will hear of the Aloha Spirit, a sense of kindness, helpfulness, humility, and givingness, that is present in both the spirit of the land and attitude of the Hawai’ian people. The word itself, Aloha, effectively means “hello with love,” “goodbye with love” and “love,” and is essentially a philosophy of living. Author, Minister, and Lawyer, Dr. Ian Ellis-Jones explains the greeting, as a multilayered expression, to translate as: “My conscious self joyfully gives you the gift of my life’s breath.” Breath, in the Hawai’ian sense, translates to mana, life-force, similar to the Hindu concept prana. Ellis-Jones expands upon the two terms, “the loving power and energy of what is sometimes referred to as alohamana binds the entire universe together.” It is interesting to note that Aloha is not only just “love,” but is also a greeting, implying that Love is a reciprocal activity and must be shared for its true expression to take form.

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In addition, Ellis-Jones explains The Aloha Spirit Law, which is an ethical practice that can be given regard in executive and judiciary decision-making in the State of Hawai’i. The law is recognized as the “’working philosophy of native Hawai’ians.’”

It says much more, but I will include a short part: --Aloha is more than a word of greeting or farewell or salutation --Aloha means mutual regard and affection and extends warmth in caring with no obligation in return --Aloha is the essence of relationships in which each person is important to every other person for collective existence.

--Aloha means to hear what is not said, to see what cannot be seen, to know the unknowable.

I have included the long version of the law in the addendum.

Sufism, the Path of Love Sufis are traditionally known as the mystics of Islam, but according to Sufis, Sufism cuts across religions, as it is intrinsically a spiritual journey in the broadest sense.

According to author and Sufi Puran Bair, Sufis “worship love, harmony, and beauty; their scripture is the book of nature, and their altar is the heart.”14 Sufis essentially recognize all religions as one path to Love, or God. Authors James Fadiman and Robert Frager, of Essential Sufism, explain: “For the great Sufi teacher and poet Rumi, love is the only force that can transcend the bounds of reason, the distinctions of knowledge, and the isolation of normal consciousness…it might be more fully described as love for all things, for creation itself. Love is a continually expanding capacity that culminates in certainty, in the recognition that there is nothing in this world or in the next that is not both loved and loving.”15 In this sense, Sufism shares the relationship between loved and beloved with both Christianity and Bhakti Devotion, however, some practitioners allow that since Sufism recognizes the aspirant as anyone who is on the path of Love, anyone, from any background or religion, can also be a Sufi.16 Fadiman and Frager also stress that Sufism teaches that practitioners engage in not only a loving mindset, but also service, because to serve others is to serve God.

Hinduism, Buddhism and Caring In reference to my earlier paper on Spiritual Ecology (in section II of this publication), the author of “Gandhi and Deep Ecology,” Thomas Weber described how Gandhi kept a pair of tongs at hand to remove any snakes that made their way into his abode.17 Gandhi’s attitude and framework for action of ahimsa, or nonviolence, can only stem from a type of deep caring. It is hard to imagine going to all the

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effort of avoiding harming in so many ways without a personal, deep caring in the heart of the actor. One author on Hindu philosophy explains that ahimsa means not just abstaining from violence, but abstaining from causing harm, including subtle abuse and simple hurt.18 Buddhist and Hindu precepts of ahimsa, compassion, and loving-kindness similarly imply a deep caring. These words ahimsa (nonviolence), karuna (compassion), and metta (lovingkindness) are actions directed towards oneself and others, and the terms are more useful and specific concepts for teaching and communicating then the broad term of “Love.” Nevertheless, they are, by no mistake, actions informed and directed by Love. It is no wonder that Gandhi considered “ahimsa” to be synonymous with “Truth”--“ahimsa” is synonymous with “Love.”

Deepening the Journey You may be wondering why I have spent so much time describing the esoteric values of so many cultures, and not spoken yet about landscape or nature. I include the above because it is important to note that the overarching recognition of Love as an ultimate motivating force exists in many religious traditions from around the world, originating in many periods in time in history. My personal experience affirms that the true fabric of reality is the consciousness that is Love, and by opening ourselves up to the true nature of that reality, we can more easily move toward a more caring and consensual relationship to Nature.

Quite uniquely, the Hawai’ians maintained a functional belief that no one will ever be abandoned by the Universal Consciousness. What this means is, no one will ever be abandoned and left to die by themselves—some occurrence in nature will always prevent that from happening. This belief can only be rationalized with another belief, that the Ultimate Consciousness cares for us, loves us. Indeed, in a world where we will never be abandoned, a safety and internal sense of security arises that allows one to function from a love-based mental framework rather than a fear-based framework. This is significant, because, what act of harm, from lying, stealing, to violence is not motivated by fear? As Pope Francis delineated in his Encyclical Letter, Laudato Si’: On Common Care for Our Home, it is the pervasive language of greed, corruption, and indifference that has created a world that ascribes to personal relativism.19 One can begin to understand how operating from a lovebased consciousness can be quite a radical departure from this norm.

What the Hawai’ians are also implying by believing that one will never be abandoned, is that this Consciousness responds to, and freely participates, in our momentary reality. As described by John Hart, at the beginning of this paper, by allowing this force of Love to permeate the daily reality of the material world in their minds, spiritually open people come to experience the daily world as precious,

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imbued with soul, magic, and the hand of that Consciousness. For example, I once was on my way to see a talk by the Lama Rinpoche at the Buddhist Temple on 45th Street in Austin. When we arrived in the nearby neighborhood in which we were to park, there was a vulture in the middle of the road gnawing at a freshly scavenged animal. Not being from Texas I had never seen such a sight. While my friends weren’t particularly impressed, I was rather taken aback. In certain cultures, the Vulture symbolizes non-duality, as well as spiritual evolvement, because it never kills, but only consumes what has already been killed. It also is considered cooperative, because vultures contact other vultures to share in the feasts. This was quite a sight and was a symbol of the fact that we were about to be in the presence of a highly evolved individual, the Lama, who is considered to be a living incarnation of the Buddha. In my experience, the Ultimate Consciousness is always sending messages and symbols, which are delivered through nature, just as it was in the case of the vulture. As explained by John Hart, one’s “spiritual eyes” must be open in order to take part in the reality of integrated Consciousness. To someone whose spiritual eyes are not open, the vulture was simply a bird in the street.

In another instance, one day through my general ruminations, I had posed a series of questions to myself regarding a series of problems I was facing. Not sure how I could possibly resolve all these concerns, I decided not to worry, and to consider it all the next day instead. The next morning while coming out of my apartment complex, a breeze sent a fortune from a fortune cookie tumbling across the pavement into my path. I picked it up and read it, only to receive the answers to all my ruminations of the day before! In my experience, the hand of this Love consciousness is intimately involved in every detail of our day, responding freely to our thoughts and actions, in a most generous, and sometimes quite humorous way!

Curby Rule, author of “The Deeper Meaning of Aloha” writes that the Hawai’ians did not have a word for nature, because nature was their daily reality that they did not perceive as separate from themselves. They did, however, have a word for “world” or “Earth”, called honua, which also means “background,” or “foundation.”

When investigated, the root definitions of honua mean “1. To give generously and continuously; 2. To indulge as a child; and 3. Surfing, rising in swells, as the sea.

So, a deeper meaning of honua is that the foundation of our physical reality, Nature, is continuously and generously giving to satisfy our needs and fulfill our wishes.”20 I have to say that this basically explains my experience of Nature, Love, or the Ultimate Consciousness.

The Simplicity of Ethics A second effect of allowing one’s mind to be permeated by the consciousness of Love is shedding the shield of indifference that we all wear in order to protect our

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minds from the pain, anger and misfortune that we all encounter in the first layer of reality. Fadiman and Frager explain one of the stages on the road to spiritual development: “At this stage the individual is not only content with his or her lot, but pleased with even the difficulties and trials of life, realizing that these difficulties come from God.”21 One is aware that there is an internal logic to experiences that seem difficult, or “blockages” that deter our path. Life can be viewed as a series of experience that contribute to an integrated path of learning, growth, and progress, rather than a series of uncontrollable events that happen to us. As Sufi Sheikh Muzaffar put it “Love is to see what is good and beautiful in everything. It is to learn from everything, to see the gifts of God and the generosity of God in everything.

It is to be thankful for all of God’s bounties.”22 To interpret, in a highly integrated reality informed by Love, one can be thankful, even for experiences that aren’t pleasant. Resting in the security of Love’s logic, the ego’s boundaries of defense no longer seem necessary, and the heart becomes free to care, because it is no longer encumbered by fear.

This type of spiritual understanding holds importance and solutions for all individuals, careers and professions. It is only in the understanding of life as purely a material experience that the flow of money (security) and the flow of Spirit operate by separate laws. Opening up to Love as the fabric of consciousness, by its nature hews the two worlds together. For instance, I once had a friend who had an uncanny knack for being able to merge the earthly and spiritual planes in her solutions to problems. Around one in the morning, after leaving a nightclub in a creepy part of town, we encountered a homeless man stretched out, on the ground, lying in a in a nook. It was not clear from his reclined position whether this man was sleeping, sick, or even alive. I, like many others, was afraid to encounter this person, and preferred to take the coward’s way out, by ignoring him. While everyone else walked by him without acknowledgement, my friend, who was much farther down the path of Love than I at the time, said to him “Excuse me, Sir, are you okay?” He replied something she could not understand. She said, “Sir, do you have a family?

Do they know where you are?” The man mumbled, “I don’t know where they are.”

She replied, “If you don’t have a family, make your work your family.” Although, in this particular situation, the solution wasn’t immediately applicable because the man had no employment, consider the extreme practicality of that solution. In America, we actually spend more time at work than with our true family, and at a good workplace, one’s coworkers become a second “family.” In the absence of family, this solution heals the human spiritual need for familial belongingness and nurturing, as well as practical financial matters. When fear is no longer an operating principle, as it no longer was with my friend, morality gets simpler, and solutions arrive freely. Morality itself becomes nondualistic. My friend was free to care, and the solutions inherent in that state of mind became available to her.

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Morality also becomes not only nondualistic, but self-affirming. The strength necessary for true development lies in no longer fearing. Last year, I came to understand that a lie is essentially a violation to one’s own soul. A lie lowers the dignity of your soul, because the soul feels no sense of inadequacy, and does not need to lie in order to justify its value. Instead, one can simply choose to accept their self and choices, as adequate. As we spend more time experiencing the consciousness of Love, the fears of the weaker person that you once were fade away, and one can choose a more integral path of being in the world.

I also have another friend who has meditated daily for the last fifteen years. He also experiences this constant whispering of “Love” in his meditations. We recently got into a conversation about making decisions. He offered a profound, yet also incredibly simple way to analyze a future course of action. “When making decisions, ask yourself two things: One, is it what you want to do? Two, does it serve Love?” One must consider the first question, to make sure that one is not being overly influenced by the desires of others around you, and the second, to make sure the act is in alignment with the higher plane of ethics.

The second question may be better extrapolated to action if we replace the word “Love” with “kindness” (remember the Buddha’s loving-kindness). Is an action you are about to engage in exhibiting kindness? Are the decisions that we make as environmental and city planners truly kind to all people, creatures, and the environment? It sounds like a kindergarten concept, and yet, humans have proven through the annals of history that being kind requires great courage, discipline, and integrity.

Conclusion What I have been proposing is a loving world that is constantly communicating with us through the materiality of itself. The esoteric symbolism present in the form of the vulture, for instance, exists not just out of a void. It exists because humans have looked to, and received wisdom from other life forms in nature throughout history and cultures. Humans have learned lessons from plants, animals, the ocean, the breeze, about growth and ways of being in the world, and then passed on those lessons to successive generations through stories and wisdom. This tells us three things: 1) if we can learn better ways to exist in the world from other species or phenomena of nature, then these phenomena are deserving of careful and respectful treatment 2) if our experience is being guided through spiritual encounters with the various species and phenomena of nature, then our own moral, spiritual, and physical growth is intimately tied up with their own existence 3) if nature is continuously communicating with us and promoting our spiritual growth, then we can put aside a fearful outlook and engage life, landscape, and governance

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from a more integrated ethical standpoint.

Some people do not wish to take this giant leap of faith and love to accept that there could be some kind of deep intelligence that encourages our moral and spiritual growth. However, it is human nature, and, I would argue, a human necessity, to attempt to find meaning in life. Even scientists, who claim to be objective, are motivated by awe for the deep mysteries of nature, and the deep love and joy they feel when engaging in scientific research.

Just as these scientists and others act out of their feelings of love and joy; and Aloha is a greeting of love that is passed between two people; and Bhakti is experienced as the love between soul and the Divine, we can understand that Love is an expression that is completed by its exchange across two or more entities. It is a reciprocal relationship.

As I previously proposed, Nature, as a continually communicating life force, is “continuously and generously giving to satisfy our needs and fulfill our wishes.”

Curby Rule expands on the reciprocity of this relationship: But here is also a meaning of give and take. Just as the rising swells of the sea recede to gain renewed energy, Nature must also “recede” to renew Itself and give strength to the foundation of our reality. So, just as Nature gives of itself to us, we must give of ourselves back to Nature….The life and death cycle of plants sustain all creatures, including us. We must remember to then tend the ‘everlasting cycle.’ The gift of life passes from human to the plants, and then back to humanity. …the quality of our existence is ultimately tied to Nature. Nature’s continuous transformative cycles of water, air and growth are necessary for existence…It is in Nature that we can discover the wonder of our existence here on Earth. Where else but in Nature is the spirit of Aloha easier to experience? Its beauty is awe-inspiring and energizing and draws you into the present moment, not unlike the feelings brought on by love and joy.23 Indeed, to affirm Pope Francis, “respecting the possibilities of things in themselves,” and “receiving what nature allow[s]” in the present moment, may be the proper opportunity for transforming our current perception of Nature from “insensate order,”24 to that of a profoundly intentional, deeply reciprocal and responsive life force that can be ‘inhabited’ in the truest sense.

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Addendum Narada Bhakti Sutra25 Chapter 1 1. Bhakti is intense love for God. 2. It is the nectar of love; 3. Getting which man becomes perfect, immortal, and satisfied for ever; 4. Getting which man desires no more, does not become jealous of anything, does not take pleasure in vanities: 5. Knowing which man becomes filled with spirituality, becomes calm, and finds pleasure only in God. 6. It cannot be used to fill any desire, itself being the check to all desires.

Chapter II 1. Bhakti is greater than Karma, greater than Jnâna, greater than Yoga (Râja-Yoga), because Bhakti itself is its result, because Bhakti is both the means and the end (fruit).

2. As a man cannot satisfy his hunger by simple knowledge or sight of food, so a man cannot be satisfied by the knowledge or even the perception of God until love comes; therefore love is the highest.

Chapter III 14. He who gives up the fruits of work, he who gives up all work and the dualism of joy and misery, who gives up even the scriptures, gets that unbroken love for God; 15. He crosses this river and helps others to cross it.

Chapter IV 1. The nature of love is inexpressible.

4. Beyond all qualities, all desires, ever increasing, unbroken, the finest perception is love.

5. When a men gets this love, he sees love everywhere he hears love everywhere, he talks love everywhere, he thinks love everywhere.

9. Bhakti is the easiest way of worship.

10. It is its own proof and does not require any other.

11. Its nature is peace and perfect bliss.

12. Bhakti never seeks to injure anyone or anything not even the popular modes of worship.

16. Merging the trinity of Love, Lover, and Beloved, worship God as His eternal servant, His eternal bride — thus love is to be made unto God. Chapter V 10. Ahimsâ (non-killing), truthfulness, purity, mercy, and godliness are always to be kept.

Thus following the ancient sages, we have dared to preach the doctrine of Love, without fearing the jeers of the world.

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Aloha Spirit Law 5-7.5 The Aloha Spirit26 a) The Aloha Spirit is the coordination of mind and heart within each person. It brings each person to the Self. Each person must think and emote good feelings to others. In the contemplation and presence of the life force, Aloha, the following unihi laoula loa (free translation) may be used: Ahahai, meaning kindness to be expressed with tenderness; Lokahi, meaning unity, to be expressed with harmony; Ou’olu, meaning agreeabe, to be expressed with pleasantness; Ha’aha’a, meaning humility, to be expressed with modesty; Ahonui, meaning patience, to be expressed with perseverence.

These are trains of character that express the charm, warmth and sincereity of Hawai’i’s people.

It was the working philosophy of native Hawai’ians and was presented as a gift to the people of Hawai’i.

Aloha is more than a word or greeting or farewell or salutation.

Aloha means mutual regard and affection and extends warmth in caring with no obligation in return Aloha is the essence of relationships in which each person is important to every other person for collective existence.

Aloha means to hear what is not said, to see what cannot be seen and to know the unknowable. b) In exercising the power on behalf of the people and in fulfillment of their responsibilities, obligations and service to the people, the legislature, governor, liutenant governor, executive officers of each department, the chief justice, associate justices, and judges of the appellate, circuit, and distric courts may contemplate and reside with the life force and give conseration to The Aloha Spirit.

Notes 1. John Hart, Sacramental Commons: Christian Ecological Ethics. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006), xiii.

2. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—and Your Life. (Boulder, Colorado: Sounds True, Inc. 2012), 35.

3. Mohamed Omar Salem. “The Heart, Mind and Spirit,” 2007. Accessed June 2016. www.religionandpsychiatry.com/ 4. Ibid.

5. Rollin McCraty, Science of the Heart: Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance, 2 (Boulder Creek, California: HeartMath Institute: 2015), 36.

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6. Mohamed Omar Salem.

7. Ibid.

8. James Fadiman and Robert Frager, Essential Sufism (San Franciso: HarperCollins Publishers: 1997), 16.

9. Ian Ellis-Jones. “Hawaiian Spirituality and Meditation.” March 2012. Web. Accessed April 2016. http://www.slideshare.net/ianellis-jones/hawaiian-spirituality-and-meditation 10. Thomas Moore, The Soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an Act of Love (New York: HarperCollins Pubishers, 1998), 13.

11. Encyclopedia of Love in World Religions. Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, Ed. (Santa Barbara, California: ABC_CLIO, Inc, 2008), xxii 12. Guin, Maduri. “Radha Krisnha: A Divine Love”. Dolls of India. Web. nd.

Accessed July 2015. http://www.dollsofindia.com/library/radhakrishna/.

13. Radhanath Swami. “What is Bhakti?” Web. Nd. Accessed June 2016. http:// www.radhanathswami.com/ 14. Puran Bair, Living from the Heart: Heart Rhythm Meditation for Energy, Clarity, Peace, Joy, and Inner Power, (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1998), 18.

15. James Fadiman and Robert Frager, 14.

16. Puran Bair, James Fadiman and Robert Frager.

17. Thomas Weber, “Gandhi and Deep Ecology,” in Journal of Peace Research 36. no.

3, May 1999.

18. “Hindu Ethic of Nonviolence”. Hinduism Today. Web. Nd. http://www.hinduismtoday.com/modules/smartsection/item.php?itemid=3578 19. Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, (Vatican City: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division: 2015).

20. Curby Rule, “The Deeper Meaning of Aloha.” Aloha International. Web. Nd. http://www.huna.org/html/deeper.html. Accessed May 2016.

21. James Fadiman and Robert Frager, 22.

22. Ibid, 114.

23. Curby Rule.

24. Pope Francis, 72.

25. “Narada-Bhakti-Sutras,” Nd. Na. Web. Accessed June 2016. http://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_6/notes_of_ class_talks_and_lectures/narada-bhakti-sutras.htm 26. Ian Ellis-Jones.

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