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Richard Weller The Keynote Address delivered at the MESH Conference at RMIT, Melbourne, 9 July 2001 Let me say at the outset that I am well aware that the term 'Art' is untrustworthy, much maligned and rife with pretensions. But - art's pretensions are not bad for landscape architecture. Apart from our obvious debts to environmental art over the last decades it is more generally art's exalted meanings, its rigorous processes of creation and the critical culture that surrounds the work of art which landscape architecture should always aspire to. Not only is this good for landscape architecture but also good for art because through the common ground of landscape rarefied art can come as close as possible to becoming life. To conflate art and infrastructure as my title does is obviously idealistic. And yet, before we discard such idealism consider that landscape architecture is nothing if not a space in-between romanticism and reason, the useful and the useless. Moreover, these are times when we have to many artless plans and too many artists without plans. I am also invoking art because it is possible to read the subtext of this conference as a backlash against it and this is an undercurrent I want to tease out of contemporary and foreseeable landscape architecture. Most importantly Art will keep us from the reductionism inherent in the notion of landscape as infrastructure. Regardless of whether high or low, good art effects the mindscape of a culture and ultimately it is that mindscape which in turn manifests itself in the actual landscape. Landscape is by definition a case of mind over matter. The inspirational theologian, Thomas Berry describes the mindscape of the 20th century as responsible for the desolation of the landscape. He says that the desolation of the earth is becoming the destiny of the human. He speaks for the next century when he says that the ecosystem is primary and everything else is secondary. In this sense, and in this magnitude, the conference program is right to imply that landscape is infrastructure, but more than that, landscape is the infrastructure. Landscape is the infrastructure because the landscape is a medium through which all ecological transactions must pass - from whence all things come and to where all things go. But this is all just sophistry because, in common parlance infrastructure is overwhelmingly understood as basic public works, increasingly subject to cynical political and economic motives. In common landscape practice, work is more often than not conducted in the shadow of the infrastructural object, which is given priority over the field into which it is to be inserted. The basic question then which I think we should dig out of the core of this conference is quite simply, as follows; to what extent do landscape architects determine or decorate infrastructure, and, if they are to argue convincingly for the precedence of the field (landscape) over the object (infrastructural element or system) then how, through the languages of design is this to be achieved in a critical and creative manner? It seems that landscape architects are usually employed to deal with spaces where infrastructure is not, to say where infrastructure should not be, or to create the perception that it is not where it is. Indeed post-modern landscape architecture has had done a boom trade in cleaning up after modern infrastructure as societies - in the first world at least - shift from primary industry to post industrial, information societies. To know where things should not exist and how to make voids in an increasingly cluttered world, as landscape architects do, is important but as is oft bemoaned, landscape architecture often ends up just arranging the bouquets for its own funeral, crying crocodile tears for the nature and neighbourhoods of yesteryear. Alternatively, Landscape design as a fine art with pretensions to the critical disposition of cultural studies, is often seen as the decadent creation of what James Corner refers to as "semantic reserves" - sites where, as he puts it, only the connoisseurs and the "intelligentsia enjoy the associative play of narrative references." Landscape architecture's indulgences in the semantics of the garden are paralleled by planning's tendency toward reductionism, and environmental design's grandiloquent narratives of salvation. Of both, intellectual closure, even advanced forms of self-righteousness, are all too often the characteristics. Both escape the criticism applied to any other art. The gap between landscape planning and landscape design which weakens landscape architecture is in some ways demanded by professional specialisation but it is also a consequence of landscape architecture being stretched so far across the intellectual and actual geography of what is meant by landscape. But if landscape architecture has seemed unwell, it is - as James Corner's latest edited work announces - recovering - and it is this text as well as some of his other work, which I want to mainly draw on today. Simply put, this recovery, of which this conference is a timely indicator, involves a mergence of the seemingly separate sensibilities and techniques, which typify planning and design. This we might call an art of infrastructure, although, Corner refers to it as simply a more instrumental or efficacious practice of landscape architecture than the one we currently know. So - what I am looking for, regardless of scale, are instances where we might see the intellectual and creative rigour of design merge with the open ended structural and enabling strategies of planning. Now, let me qualify my position as regards infrastructure. I am well aware that my sort of work has limited application and that part of its imaginative potential is actually realised by virtue of its removal from the responsibilities and challenges of mundane infrastructure. Obviously, then, I am not qualified to speak of important local infrastructural issues and sites. For example I am not, professionally in the business of empowering indigenous communities to deal with infrastructure, I am not in the business of planning to avoid the salination of our agricultural landscapes, and nor am I trying to design the ecological Australian suburb of social justice for the 21st century. My studio work with students touches on these areas but professionally I have not focused on any one of them. But if I were to do so I would still approach each of these project areas as much as art works as exercises in instrumental reason. And to reiterate, by art work I mean self reflexive attention to meaning and its processes of construction as opposed to merely streamlining the world or for that matter saving it. Returning then to the question of landscape architecture as infrastructure and landscape architects as either planners, designers or decorators, I want to begin with the very general rubric of 'ecology'. The reason for this is that ecology's ubiquity as the substratum of all cultural activity necessitates that the landscape is indeed thought of by all professions as culture's fundamental infrastructure. This is good for us if we can work it. From the very general theme of ecology I will move toward the particular as regards design techniques, because that is after all how we make our art. A popular culture as much as a scientific discipline, ecology is still a vague cluster of ideas wherein the lyric and the rational merge. Although popularly manifesting a victimised 'nature,' ecology is also increasingly synonymous with new and more sophisticated models of universal (dis-)order such as chaos and complexity theory - kaleidoscopes through which both romantics and mathematicians find what they want. Ecology, whilst redolent with the epic poetics of evolution, primarily concerns the logical extension of instrumental reason - a development in science from the analysis of mechanical objects to the modelling of non-linear systems. This means ecology uses the tools and fruits of that which it critiques. Although a little spooked by hard science, much recent thinking on ecology is ripe with the creative potential of contemporary scientific metaphors. Diversification, instability, indeterminacy and self-organisation become design generators - enigmas and energisers of change as much as measures of change. Perhaps somewhat adrift in the immensity of ecology, writing in 1996, James Corner says that, "[S]imilarities between ecology and creative transmutation are indicative of an alternative kind of landscape architecture, one in which calcified conventions of how people live and relate to land, nature and place are challenged and the multivariate wonders of life are once again released through invention." He urges landscape architecture to develop a creative relationship with ecology in order to exploit a "potential that might inform more meaningful and imaginative cultural practices than the merely ameliorative, compensatory, aesthetic, or commodity oriented." Most importantly, he also identifies the problem that creativity in landscape architecture has "all too frequently been reduced to dimensions of environmental problem solving and aesthetic appearance". The association of ecology with creativity and creativity in turn with degrees of instrumentality is long overdue. The axiom of ecology, and something now confirmed by the butterfly effect of chaos theory, is that all things are interconnected. Therefore every act, every design is significant. Add to this the axiom of the 21st century that every surface of the earth is not a given, but rather a landscape decided over by human agency, then clearly landscape architecture can only blame itself if it does not become more powerful. To see the landscapes at stake and on a scale befitting the terms of this conference, I want to now take up the grand perspectives of landscape planning, the potential breadth of landscape architecture. Landscape architecture's grand narrative of reconciling modernity to place finds its frame in the aerial photo or the satellite image. But aerial images are contradictory representations. Contradictory - because they conceal the real socio-political and ecological relations of the working landscape they purport to lay bare. The aerial image smooths out conflict and reduces cultural complexity to a marvellous pattern. Unlike the disorientation of being on the ground, aerial imagery deceptively simplifies things, inviting the planner's generalities. If Faustian, then the aerial image is also disempowering, effectively reminding the individual viewer of his or her incapacity to effect the vast spread of mass culture and its landscape, let alone make a good "semantic reserve". In the aerial view individuality is effaced by the prospect of being a speck in a larger viral outbreak otherwise known as civilisation, not to mention that we now know this comes after 15 billion years of cosmological history - a history that knows no destiny and would appear to make meaningless curlicues through space/time toward heat death. A book which indulges aerial imagery and is relevant to infrastructure and also sets the broad scene of ecological vision is Corner's Taking Measures Across the American Landscape. This book's essays and images metaphorically 'measure' the values of the late capitalist landscape by assuming its own militant, instrumental gaze - the aerial photo. Unlike Le Corbusier and McHarg who believed in, and were eventually bedevilled by the panoptic powers of the overview, Corner's concept is vertiginous, that is, it turns the gaze of instrumental reason back down upon itself, onto the landscape of its own making. Corner manipulates map, photo and text, scanning the face of a spectacularly denatured land, a land now only beautiful from the air. A post mortem of modernity, the images concern the tension between paradise and utopia, a tension between Christian nostalgia and humanist futurism in the New world imagination, a mindscape which now manifests itself in the massive denaturing effects of infrastructure set sublimely, perhaps tragically, against the vastness of the earth's immemorial crust. Yet, even if the hard science of ecology, itself based in objective measurement, can come to control or even temper its ruthless economic nemesis, Corner's concern is not just a world with balanced inputs and outputs, but remains within the ambit of aesthetics, values and meanings - the qualities of dwelling poetically as well as pragmatically. Indeed, without these qualities modernity is merely a fatally flawed cornucopia of distorted images straightened into fictions of progress to conceal an enlightened void. The book nonetheless anticipates and marvels over a synthetic future of constructed ecology. But, this is not a book with a plan - he does not design the ground he sees, nor does he propose a strict procedural method for others to manage the land. Whereas Ian McHarg's didactic overviews of how to redesign the world below had an answer for everything (except why the plan can never be achieved), Corner's collages of maps, photos and site data seem to remain merely representational, just graphic recordings of particular intersections of topos and technology. If we can in retrospect see the impossibility of McHarg's eco-logical and methodological fundamentalism, can we not also foresee an overly aesthetic, self-conscious postmodernism in Corner's all too beautiful images? Just as McHarg's method could be rote learnt and practiced badly by everyone, Corner's representational elegance and theoretical sophistication seems destined to remain detached, voyeuristic. It is doubtful that Corner's postcards really "occasion future landscapes" as he claims or that they "subvert cartographic conventions" by simply not following them - but, to be fair, it is also long over due that a designer got out of town and took hermeneutics - i.e., poetics to the planner's perspective. In other words Corner is taking art up to infrastructure. Hence my ongoing interest in his work. From high above the earth, Corner declared that modernity is an unfinished project, one that, as he puts it, can be "critically appropriated and imaginatively redirected for its full, liberating promise to appear". But to get closer to the complex particulars of actually doing design we must fall from these heights and land in suburban Paris, in a site well known but often not well discussed. A mere green patch on the infrastructure planner's chart, La Villette is nonetheless seminal ground for late 20th century landscape architecture. Along with Tschumi's winning scheme Koolhaas' unbuilt design for La Villette announced landscape design as the installation of various infrastructures for an array of programmatic potential rather than a completed work, or an earnest mimesis or abstraction of a landscape type anterior to the actual city. Both Tschumi and Koolhaas also rejected landscape design as a struggle with contextual integration, formal elegance or geometric composition, and yet their work is arguably not as free of these qualities as has been claimed. Actually - I want to focus on the unbuilt Koolhaas scheme because it continues to be reinvented as a polemical device, miraculously avoiding the negativity which generally returns from the built park by Tschumi. For its authors it is "a field of social instruments", whatever that really means. More recently James Corner has extrapolated directly from it to suggest "that a truly ecological landscape architecture might be less about the construction of finished and complete works, and more about the design of 'processes,' 'strategies,' 'agencies,' and 'scaffoldings' - catalytic frameworks that might enable a diversity of relationships to create, emerge, network, interconnect, and differentiate". In a word, infrastructure. Corner agrees with Sanford Kwinter's exaggeration that Koolhaas' proposition is an evolutionary leap, that its qualities of indeterminacy, non-hierarchical striations and programmatic overlays can be understood not only as ecological metaphors but actually as socio-ecological catalysts instigating self organising processes and injecting "indetermination, diversification and freedom into both the social and natural worlds." Closer to the truth of Koolhaas' proposal is simply its legitimate claim to hybridise and facilitate a range of programmatic events. Although a deft solution forced perhaps by an over determined brief, the complex fabric and its accidental coincidences are in my view, happily intentional and probably premeditated. Despite its desire to be somehow beyond aesthetic predilection it is not formless nor an anti-aesthetic and one has to wonder what exactly Koolhaas would have built because upon closer examination the drawing is full of junk. As regards ecology though, perhaps if masses were to interact with its bands of 'stuff' then the park's potential theatricality could bespeak - or at least represent - a sort of contemporary cyborgian ecology - the worlds largest gymnasium perhaps. But if the abattoir, which the park meant to replace, was an absolute end point in the monstrous, ecosystem of feeding a city, one wonders by comparison what ecological order Koolhaas really had in mind when he ruled it up and sprinkled confetti over its corpse? What was slaughtered or perhaps sacrificed at La Villette by both Tschumi and Koolhaas was landscape architecture's precious yet festering fantasies of resistance and redemption. At La Villette the lullaby of landscape in the city became big warehouses without roofs and even after 20 years no one really knows what to do with the mutilated corpse. And so, the public vote with their feet and head to Buttes-Chaumont, a 19th century Arcadia just up the road. Funnily enough, if you study Tschumi's and Koolhaas's recent work at Downsview Park in Toronto you will find that they too seem to have grown somewhat fonder of Arcadia. What matters now is not that Arcadia is a more reliable model for urban landscape design, or that programmatic indeterminacy = ecology. For no-one can claim the true ecology. What matters is that Koolhaas' programmatic alchemy has gestated into a broader, contemporary conception of landscape shared by a new generation of urbane landscape architects and architects. In short, Koolhass' La Villette has become a model for the whole landscape. As Anna Klingmann explains it, Koolhaas reads the city as simply "SCAPE" a condition in which architecture, infrastructure and landscape are interwoven and transformed so as to form a new hybrid condition wherein everything is relational and nothing autonomous. It is this that has gripped the imagination of Alex Wall who contributes an article entitled "Programming the Urban Surface" to Corner's Recovering Landscape. Wall thinks of landscape as "a catalytic emulsion, a surface literally unfolding events in time." He explains that this new landscape is best understood as "the functioning matrix of connective tissue that organises not only objects and spaces but also the dynamic processes and events that move through them". He goes on to explain that "this is landscape as active surface, structuring the conditions for new relationships and interactions among the things it supports." Wall speaks of landscape as if it were a power-board, a surface through which to run internet cables, sewerage systems and whatever else is needed to, as he puts it, "increase its capacity to support and diversify activities in time." One wonders whether this increased capacity is biocentric or anthropocentric, and vague as it is, I want to persist with Wall's conception and take it seriously because his rationale for a new conception of landscape lies with new urban conditions of placelessness and the mobility of capital, goods and people, very real and not yet well understood conditions seemingly at odds with or now way beyond landscape architecture's traditional desire for groundedness, orientation and emplacement. For him the conditions of late capitalism have forced a shift from seeing cities in formal spatial terms to reading them as dynamic systems of flux. And this is a reading we could arguably extend out across all landscapes. As opposed to new urbanism which would have us reconstruct images along classical or vernacular lines, Wall says that the contemporary landscape is one made up of "network flows, non hierarchical ambiguous spaces, spreading rhizome like dispersals and diffusions, strategically staged surfaces, connective tissue, ground as matrix and accelerant, unforseen programs and other polymorphous conditions." This jargon embellishes a conception of landscape as service matrix and owes more to modernism, futurism, and contemporary systems thinking, than it does to the orthodox landscape architectural pedigree of English gardens, democratic parks, garden cities, and Jane Jacobs. Most importantly, what Wall is trying to say is that the field and not the object is premiated. This announces an architectural paradigm shift involving a turn to relational readings of objects, a turn inspired not only by increased complexity and contingency in urban conditions, but also derived from the way in which both ecology and physics teach us of interconnection. In this sense, the 18th century landscape becomes the 21st century "field". To privilege the field is to assert landscape as the infrastructure to which all other infrastructural elements or networks are answerable. Wall could be speaking of the ambitions of landscape planning when he stresses that the new field is "designed not so much for appearances as for its instigative and structural potential. Strategies are targeted not only toward physical but also social and cultural transformations, functioning as social and ecological agents." He could also be speaking of Modernism, albeit and ecological derivative, and perhaps landscape architecture is yet to really have its own modernism. Exciting as that might be, one wonders whether the field will ever determine the city or really just be seduced and subsumed by it in new ways. But if I sound sceptical I want to stress that any new discourse of landscape architecture must also be appreciated in terms of what is arguably the failing of orthodox landscape architecture to either resist and critique the post-modern city, or on the other hand, to creatively re-imagine it. Certainly, in theory, Wall's stated intention is to engage and then structure the forces of the city in a critical rather than compliant manner. In fact, Wall sounds like a good old critical regionalist when he explains that his conception of the landscape as a dominant matrix "may be the only hope of withstanding the excesses of popular culture - restless mobility, consumption, density, waste, spectacle, and information while absorbing and redirecting the alternating episodes of concentration and dispersal caused by the volatile movement of investment capital and power." But he does not sound like a critical regionalist nor have much in common with landscape architecture's arcadian antipathy toward the city when he says that "the emphasis is on the extensive reworking of the surface of the earth as a smooth, continuous matrix that effectively binds the increasingly disparate elements of our environment together." Interestingly, you will find Kenneth Frampton, the main author of resistance to such potentially homogenising aesthetics, saying similar things in his recent address entitled "Seven Points for The Millennium". In trying to gather examples where the landscape has played structurally influential roles Wall turns to, among others, the Dutch landscape architects, West 8. West 8's boss, Adriaane Geuze, made his larger landscape architectural concerns clear when he stepped up to the Netherland's Institute of Architecture in 1995 and apparently spread out almost 800,000 model homes. This darkly comic model of a landscape of anonymity and mass culture, abruptly shifts one's focus from boutique landscape design toward broad planning issues. Of course, to really work with infrastructure is far less glamorous or interesting than the Dutch have made it seem - but vocal people like Geuze are important in other ways. For instance, Geuze's image of the contemporary urban citizen for whom we do our work, marks a long overdue difference in landscape architectural sensibilities. Geuze tells us that "the urbanite is self assured and well informed, finds his [sic] freedom and chooses his own sub-cultures. The city is his domain, exciting and seductive." Although this is just a male flaneur, it will do for now to replace the pathetic victims of modernism, or the hapless suburban consumers that much text book landscape design must have in mind when it sets out its familiar palliative comforts. Perhaps Geuze's flaneur would wander out into West 8's square in Rotterdam, a place Wall cites as one "where the public can appropriate and modify the very surface of the city." When we ask why this is so in West 8's design and not in any other empty square in a dense city, we learn only that the square has a purpose built floor with built in footings for marquees. It also has interactive lights - follies which fetishize infrastructure, and fun as this is, to exercise our free will over robots is not to enter the landscape of liberation. Although this well crafted minimalism is too cool for mine, and something about West 8's work smacks of a new streamlined mainstream - to their credit they seem to know what not to do. They have not littered the place with the detritus of their own subjectivity, palimpsests of the past or mimetic representations of lost landscapes. This can also be seen in their simple environmental installation at Oosterschelde, which, fortunately for them is a photogenic super-graphic which also happens to have some ecological merit. West 8, an office dominated by architects, are also up dating the image of the landscape architect as an active urban agent. Their landscape architect is not a decorator, or nature's representative, nor an artist, but rather, a creative negotiator capable of bringing an influential breadth of environmental, architectural and infrastructural understanding to bare at the formative stages of design propositions. Many landscape architects would say they have always done this, but then why is so much landscape work so marginalised and trivialised? Following Koolhaas, West 8 seem to be convincing those they work with of the importance of the field over the objects, gaining and maintaining the rights to holistic design strategies - and even if they are not, it wont hurt us to think they are. In order to achieve this West 8 are part of a movement which agrees that new techniques of design creation and representation are required if landscape architecture is to gain more influence and efficacy in contemporary culture, a culture increasingly saturated in information. To get on in a culture of too much data and produce design amidst the pressures of increasingly regulated environments architects and landscape architects are developing computerised techniques of design mapping and representation known loosely as datascapes - and it is into this land of 0's and 1's that I now want to go. Bart Lootsma, another contributor to Corner's collection of essays celebrating the recovery of landscape explains that datascapes are "visual representations of all the measurable forces that may influence the work of the architect or even steer or regulate it." Corner himself, advocates datascapes as "revisions of conventional analytical and quantitative maps and charts that both reveal and construct the shape-forms of forces and processes operating across a given site." Form then, evolves through a close, almost obsessive mapping of data. Not unlike landscape architecture's recourse to site analysis to justify its outcomes, datascapes are thought to have great persuasive commercial and bureaucratic force, because the subjectivities of the designer can be embedded in seemingly objective data. Optimistically Corner asserts that "the datascape planner reveals new possibilities latent in a given field simply by framing the issues differently [...] in such a way as to produce novel and inventive solutions." Whereas more romantic conceptions of the design process see the autonomous creative designer invent an ideal form which then more or less collides with limitations and is endlessly contested, corrected deformed and starved in the name of the original - the datascapist does the inverse and begins with a project's outer limits and an acceptance that a project is always already a site of negotiation. Deferring a preconceived design outcome datascaping actively embraces restrictions and its regulations. For example, Lootsma tells us that some of the most important threads running through West 8's landscape design work are "such apparently uninteresting things as traffic laws and the civil code, things often seen as annoying obstacles by designers who put their own creativity first." But is there not a strange twist of logic and a misplaced, residual romanticism at work when he goes on to claim that for a designer to set aside their subjectivity and follow the bureaucratic rules of a given place, means that designer, as he puts it, "commits a genuinely public act in which everyone can participate and perhaps even subvert". Subversion through conformity is always an art worth refining but for datascaping to be anything other than a vapid field of compromise or robotic design by numbers, a creative and subjective author must control the process. Especially in landscape where there is a relative paucity of programmatic data, the datascapists, not without a touch of da-da must then coax, push and probably exaggerate banal data until it exudes interesting solutions and interesting forms. But what guides this? It is easy to understand how datascapes are descriptive of design problems and programs but it is not so easy to see how they are generative of design responses, how the representation of data morphs in to the third and the fourth dimension. As Kwinter says, diagrams do not lead causally to forms, so conceptual and aesthetic leaps are made in datascaping that can really only be accounted for by computers and their design programs because it is computers that take masses of banal information and make marvellous form. In emergent processes of creative computer generated design new intellectual, and representational problems arise, but so too, gaps between idea and thing, poetics and pragmatics begin to at least smooth out. The unique author wrestling with translating poetic problems of meaning and its responsibilities is replaced by the cyborg manipulating computational limits and real world rules. Reams of data seems somewhat novel for architecture at the moment but landscape architecture is no stranger to data, on the contrary it has made site analysis data central to its design process and philosophy for the last 3 decades. It was almost that long ago that cautious intellects such as George Seddon sought to ground landscape architecture's high ideals of critical regionalism in pragmatic, almost foolproof design methods. Although still fundamental, Seddon's seven point plan for any site to be assessed according to basic biophysical characteristics became reductive, puritanical or cynically commercial. This, by the way, is not Seddon's fault. Landscape architecture, both design and planning, has been good at collecting data but it could not be said it has been good at creatively manipulating that data. Whatever creativity has emerged in landscape architecture recently is traceable to the influence of environmental art practices not data manipulation. It is however time for us to make our own art. Although some of the design results and claims made for datascaping seem as faddish as they are inflated, we can productively ask that, if the datascaper can now take banal data and make novel and inventive solutions without collapsing into crude functionalism, then why hasn't the landscape design process as we know it been able to? Of course, the actual medium of landscape should not and does not always lend itself to the pursuit of novelty. Secondly, computer aided landscape design is really young, but consider also that landscape architectural design techniques to date have not in fact been following their basis data carefully enough, and that much design short cuts the datascape of site analysis and leaps directly into preconceived and more often than not, conservative images. Alternatively it is possible to also argue that landscape design and especially landscape planning operations have often been over-determined by a blind faith in data and that the preoccupation with merely overlaying the basics of natural science is too limited. Corner, at his best as a champion of experimental design techniques, is right to persistently remind us that the entire process of assembling and interrelating data is creative, that it is, as he puts it, "not the indiscriminate listing and inventorying of conditions as in a tracing or chart but rather a strategic and imaginative drawing out of relations". If ecology and indeed society is becoming as complex as we think then every site can be understood as a richly imbricated datascape and it is increasingly at that level that creative strategies will be played out. What is more, the computer, can work in time, simulating and visualising dynamic processes of change under specific conditions, modelling complex ecological and cultural flows. In the same way that computers made or found fractals, the potential for designers to work with more complex sets of data and convert that into form is now real. Finally, Lootsma tells us that the datascape "is less about philosophy, theory, and aesthetics, and more about how the visionary and the pragmatic may be combined in creative and paradoxical ways". Why the visionary and pragmatic can only mix where philosophy and aesthetics are not, is a question he doesn't answer, stating finally that datascaping is concerned with "critical pragmatism" not critical regionalism. We know that the grand narrative of reconciling modernity with place rules the passion of critical regionalism, so the question to ask of Lootsma's critical pragmatism is "critical of what and pragmatic toward what end?" Lootsma, Wall and Corner all answer that design's purpose is to realign the conditions of late capitalism toward more socio-ecologically enriching ends." They are in this sense critical regionalists although they might well discard regionalism's aesthetic baggage and landscape architecture's narrow site specific methodologies. Gerrit Confurius, one of several editors of the [late] great journal Daidalos, sees datascaping as a form of modernism cured of the great illusions of the twentieth century. But that could be understood as postmodernism which can be and has been described as modernity without hope. Its a cliché but it is also a fact to say that hope in this next century lies in the landscape. I said at the beginning of this lecture that every surface of the earth is not a given but rather a landscape decided over by human agency and intent. That intent is shaped in turn by the mindscape of a culture which is the domain of art. I also said that if landscape architecture does not become more powerful, by which I mean more influential it will only have itself to blame. Despite the boom industry in postmodern landscape architecture one cant help but feel that the discipline and profession of landscape architecture remains intellectually, culturally and aesthetically weak. One of the explanations for landscape architecture's weakness in the face of contemporary culture has been its inability to convincingly embrace and direct the objects (infrastructures and buildings), which actually happen in its field. To alter this has consequences for education and one wonders for how much longer two disciplines, architecture and landscape, can represent what is increasingly being theorised and actualised as one. Another explanation is that critically inclined post-modern landscape design, of which my own work is a part, has neglected the real machinations of the city and its ecosystems by retreating into the semiotic gaps of the city - so as to lick its wounds and artistically 'recover'. Speaking from experience this has however, has been necessary. Landscape architecture has also needed time to write its recent history and sort out its postmodern theory, and this too has been necessary. But now, having gained some hermeneutic and aesthetic sophistication, Corner and his cohorts are urging a timely return to instrumental concerns. As I mentioned right at the outset I can sense a backlash against design culture which is overtly based in theory and art - or if you like, cultural studies. Partially necessary as that might also be, I would warn against a shift toward instrumentality for the mere sake of gaining the functionalism landscape has never had. Picking up an echo from Corner in 1997 we are reminded that "landscape architecture's focus of concern simply can never be that of the external environment alone but must always entail profoundly cultural interests and ideas." It is this implied balance between art and efficacy that I mean to convey when I say; it will be an art of ecology, an art of instrumentality and finally, an art of infrastructure which delivers landscape architecture's promised land. Richard Weller is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture and Fine Arts at the University of Western Australia and Director of the design company Room 4.1.3 P/L. Bibliography (c.1997) - James Corner (Harvard GSD - Loeb Library) Download/print Richard Weller's essay The Garden of Intelligence (PDF) VISIT Room 4.1.3 (Australia) |
(C) Richard Weller - 2001