LANDSCAPE + ARCHITECTURE ABOUT ALMOST NOTHING
Part Two MORE ABOUT ALMOST NOTHING
THE PRESENT-PAST / MERCI BUTTERCUPS - Useless Beauty - "For the buttercups grew past numbering, in this spot which they had chosen for their games among the grass, standing singly, in couples, in whole companies, yellow as the yolk of eggs, and glowing with an added luster, I felt, because, being powerless to consummate with my palate the pleasure which the sight of them never failed to give, I would let it accumulate as my eyes ranged over their golden expanse, until it became potent enough to produce an effect of absolute, purposeless beauty; and so it had been from my earliest childhood, when from the tow-path I had stretched out my arms towards them before I could even properly spell their charming name -- a name fit for the Prince in some fairy-tale -- immigrants, perhaps, from Asia centuries ago, but naturalised now for ever in the village, satisfied with their modest horizon, rejoicing in the sunshine and the water’s edge, faithful to their little glimpse of the railway-station, yet keeping nonetheless like some of our old paintings, in their plebeian simplicity, a poetic scintillation from the golden East." --Marcel Proust, "Swann’s Way", Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1, Pléiade edition, trans. C K Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage, 1982), p. 183 / Proust’s elegant evocations of “useless beauty” notwithstanding, perhaps it is Flaubert’s desire to write a novel nominally ‘about nothing’ that echoes here in the provisional and elective ‘nature’ of Landscapes About Almost Nothing, an almost nothing that is, indeed, /S/ome-thing Else, a some-thing else that is, in turn, a type of ‘nothing’ only in the sense that such an almost nothing passes through phenomenological reduction (the formalist moment) toward everything else (everything repressed in the normative, present-day deployment of landscape architecture as a singular, professional discipline) ... Therefore the call and allure of Landscape + Architecture (+ +), until the cows come home, so to speak ...
PRECIS - Not so much about Burle Marx as /S/ome-thing Else, the material presented herein is intended to underscore the irrepressible élan of formalism + phenomenology, the twin peaks of modern artistic experience, as represented in the fusion of landscape + architecture. This compilation is intended as an adjunct to the essay Landscape Formalism, Anyone ???, where a return to a type of formalism is rehearsed.
Formalism + phenomenology is not to be confused with mimimalism, which is a game unto itself. Landscape formalism is not landscape minimalism, and landscape + architecture about almost nothing is not a return to the serial excesses (flapdoodle) of mid-century modern landscape architecture (something which, in fact, persisted well into the 1980s). Instead, this amalgam (which is essentially synchronic and approaches the universal) is in many ways the synthesis of what Hal Foster has noted as the unresolved Constructivist-Surrealist dilemma -- or a "cultural" duplicity -- that rises and falls on subject-object problems associated with perception and ideation. As architecture moves away from fixity -- buildings frozen in time and space -- landscape moves closer to architecture and the amalgam. When this amalgam (perhaps a just-milieu) is also infused with hermetic utopian characteristics, then, and only then, is the fusion of the sign and the signified accomplished.
1/ BURLE-MARX TIME
The gardens and parks of Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) constitute one of those rare moments in landscape architecture when things take precedence over the clamour of sensibility (aesthetics) -- or when landscape architecture becomes nearly an index (inventory) of "almost nothing". By "almost nothing" is meant nothing less than the Real versus the Symbolic.
The work of Burle Marx has remained influential to this day because of this incipient universality -- because his work is not overloaded with the stylistic (syntactic) apparatus (detritus) of a time and place, and because within this almost nothing there are signs of pure desire, a quest for configuring radical contingency -- the well-worn and tiresome reference (recourse) to Cubism by scholars, to explain Burle Marx, is, in fact, an unintended red herring. Yes, Burle Marx returned from Paris, in the 1920s, infused with enthusiasm for formalist games -- but he did not merely transcribe those games within the circle of then contemporary landscape architecture. A dispassionate look at his work indicates that he inscribed within the horizon of garden design a passion for the autonomy of things that is belied (vigorously concealed) by the geometric intricacy of his designs.
What betrays this artistic agenda, however, is the expansiveness of Burle Marx landscapes. Even within the more modest outlays of land or territory -- such as Sítio Roberto Burle Marx -- the vectors of his design apparatus swerve away off/into the anamorphic hinterland of perception (the gap in-between Self and Other) illuminating along the way the superb isolation of things, or the primal authority and autonomy of the object. This in-betweenness is not the same thing as that thing which haunts architectural discourse today -- i.e., the in-between thing of architecure + landscape, or the inside-outside thing of dematerialized architecture (inclusive of the digital vortex). This time, or in Burle Marx time, the in-between is more like that in-between time that is registered in the paintings of Gerhard Richter -- the eerie, preternatural time inside of/illuminating the constitutional myopia of the Symbolic as it fails to register accurately (i.e., without re-ordering/disfiguring) the object of contemplation -- and, as it ultimately fails to comprehend and contain the thing it sets out to encompass. (It is no coincidence that Burle Marx was also an accomplished painter.) This failure, when inverted, becomes artfulness itself, or the seeing of the other as an autonomous subject -- to be revered -- in the liberation of things from duplicity and the still-born canons of authorized sensibilities.
SELECT OUTTAKES
Sítio Roberto Burle Marx / Burle Marx & Cia Ltda / Portrait of Roberto Burle Marx / A Landscape Designer's Hideaway (The New York Times, 07/29/01) / *** (Secretaria de Estado da Fazenda do Espírito Santo) / Self-Portraits (Museus) / Roberto Burle Marx's Legacy at Risk (Harvard GSD)
HIGHLY SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Roberto Silva, New Brazilian Gardens: The Legacy of Burle Marx (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006) - Cloth, 192 pages, 0-500-51286-8
Marta Iris Montero, Burle Marx, jardins lyriques (Paris: Actes Sud, 2002) - "Paysagiste, peintre, musicien, sculpteur, architecte, le Brésilien Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) aimait avant tout la nature et les plantes. Ses parcs publics et ses jardins, tout en pleins et déliés, colorés de grands aplats monochromes ondulants, s'inscrivent en douceur dans la ville ou le paysage. Pour lui, chacune de ses créations devait faire coexister en harmonie monde végétal et vie humaine. Ce livre, écrit par sa collaboratrice-complice, est l'un des rares consacrés à cet artiste, qui révolutionna pourtant dès les années 30 l'art des jardins." - English Edition
Christopher Bradley-Hole, Jardins contemporains (Paris: Flammarion, 2001) - "Lignes fluides et dépouillées, plantes sculpturales, couleurs en demi-teintes, le jardin de style minimaliste inspire calme, sérénité, énergie. Contemporain, ses racines piochent dans les religions méditatives de Chine et du Japon, et dans les proportions géométriquement pures de l'architecture de la Renaissance italienne. Moderne, il refuse les pastiches du passé, se construit en accord avec les nouvelles technologies et l'écologie. Ce livre nous propose un passionnant tour du monde d'œuvres minimalistes par un adepte de cette philosophie."
Rossana Vaccarino w/ William S. Saunders and Eric Kramer (eds.), Roberto Burle Marx: Landscapes Reflected, Landscape Views 3 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000) - This book, an outgrowth of Rossana Vaccarino's researches of Burle Marx's legacy, while at the Harvard GSD, contains essays by Silvio Soares Macedo, Lelia Coelho Frota, Rossana Vaccarino, and Anita de la Rosa de Berrizbeitia. Berrizbeitia's essay is significant in that it undoes much of the damage done by "scholars" attributing Burle Marx's "aesthetic" to his association with European modernism. Berrizbeitia's essay argues that the work of Burle Marx was, in fact, endogenous -- her critique of Parque del Este (in Caracas, Venezuela) resists the opposing contemporary discourses of "critical regionalism" and the reductive, formalist historiography of modern art and architecture. "Endogenous" in this context means "growing from within" Burle Marx himself and Venezuela itself -- a hybridization of forces that is unique versus categorical.
Anita Berrizbeitia, Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956-1961 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) - Cloth, ISBN 0-812-23804-4
Ivo Mesquita (ed.), Roberto Burle Marx: Landscape Architect (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004) - Cloth, ISBN 3-764-37103-X
2/ MORE ABOUT ALMOST NOTHING
WTC PARK? - The New York Times Magazine (May 16, 2004) - Vision plans for a possible World Trade Center (Ground Zero) park - For details (and links to the on-line exhibition), cliquez ici ...
TIME OUT OF TIME - Funerary Monument for Commemorating the Dead at the World Trade Center - "An important emotional aspect of this proposal arises out of the fact that it is immersive. The immersive level of involvement (which has the power to change the way people feel) has been an efficacious impulse since prehistoric times -- occasioning elegant sacred mounds and evocative funerary temples. This experience was aptly demonstrated to me on my visit in 1995 to a prehistoric immersive funerary space built atop a small hilltop in Ireland called Newgrange. Newgrange is a stone and turf mound about 280 feet in diameter and 44 feet high (in restored form) which contains a thin passage leading to the central apse-like burial chamber. Entry into its inner space was arduous. It was not a long passage, but a difficult one, because one must slither through a very narrow passage corridor before reaching the pivotal opening." Joseph Nechvatal (New York, New York) ...
THE ABSENT FATHER - "Things are forever misleading us ... They feign singularity when in fact they are the result of manifold factors and forces ... Nothing is simply black and/or white ... The work of architecture, as it stands alone and mired in singularity, effaces the entire spectrum (the spectral nature) of its being ... All architecture is haunted by its own mythic reserve ... its own repressions and sublimations (continuous or dialectical ...) ... It must, in fact, be addressed as a person ... " - Regarding the figure of the Absent Father in Serra, Noguchi, and Kahn, see Pieces of San Francisco (Travelogues / Songs & Dances) ...
'WINTER' AND MAYBE 'SPRING' IN BERLIN - "Duration is experienced by a descent into self. Each instant is there; nothing is definitive since each instant remakes the past." (Emmanuel Lévinas) - Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe ...WAVE GARDEN by Yusuke Obuchi @ Storefront for Art & Architecture, May 16 through June 29, 2002 - "Wave Garden is an electrical power plant that floats off the coast of Central California, and derives energy from the movement of ocean waves. Yusuke Obuchi's installation, Wave Garden, features what he refers to as a drawing machine -- a 4' x 6' floating membrane made of 1734 articulated panels suspended by a system of 3468 counter weights and over 8 miles of fishing line." - "For most viewers the immediate parallels for the Wave Garden will be the Earthworks of the 1960s and '70s, but it sits uneasily in this genealogy. It might be reminiscent of another California dream, the Running Fence of Christo, but it is the Running Fence with brains that retain a social substance [...] The Wave Garden is wondrously altruistic in comparison with such projects." (Hal Foster) / Wave Garden was published in Archiprix International (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004), pp. 66-67 - ISBN 9-064-50447-4
MISCELLANEOUS TREES - Takenosuke Tatsui (ed.), Garden Views IV: Tree and Moss Gardens (Tokyo: Kenchiku Shiryo Kenkyusha, 1991) - Cloth, ISBN 4-874-60251-7 – A short, exacting survey of very small, mostly residential modern gardens in Japan, based on traditional precepts, utilizing zoki (‘miscellaneous trees’, deciduous species grown in the Kanto plain with ‘calculated abandon’) and supplemented by carefully-crafted plantings of moss, ferns, bamboo, azalea, and grasses architecturally accentuated with elegant stone walks, walls, occasional stepping-stones, and splashes of water - The premiere moss-gardening territories in Japan are, therefore, the provinces of Kansai and North Honshu ...
DILLER & SCOFIDIO - Blur Building - See Water + Architecture + Water for a review of the Van Alen Institute exhibition "Architecture + Water" - The Blur Building (plus several other Diller + Scofidio projects) was published in Prototypo 006 (Lisbon) - Also, on the Prototypo Web site, you will find Jump Cuts and Bad Press, two disquisitions on the discursive architecture(s) of Diller + Scofidio - The Blur Building was part of Expo 2002 (Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland) ...ANAESTHETICS - For the seminal 'deconstructivist' (anaesthetic, architectural) works of Gordon Matta-Clark, see Matta-Clark Retrospective(ly) (Yellow Pages)
LANDSCAPE FORMALISM, ANYONE ???RELATED DOCUMENTS
CAPITALISM'S GOLGOTHA
PARC DOWNSVIEW PARK
THE VELVET LANDSCAPE
/S/OME-THING ELSE
