MUTATIS MUTANDIS - 07/15/07
Landscape Agency New York was founded by Gavin Keeney c.1997 and encompasses a wide array of activities -- e.g., research, writing, design, consulting, and teaching. SOMA (Syntactical Operations Metaphorical Affects) is the design module within LANY -- a compilation of past, present and future projects that hover between the 'here' and the 'there', the fictitious and the real, the hypothetical and the actual production of serial, (ir)real environments.Recent research (2004-2005) tackled analysis and documentation of the always-deferred complex or amalgam of Landscape + Architecture (This + That), the high-and-sometimes-low art of intertextuality, and the fascinating but mostly neglected symbolical terrain situated in-between the conceptual twin peaks of milieu(x) and anti-milieu(x) (landscape and architecture), a.k.a. Pays de Tendre (perhaps the originary 'terrain vague'). This phase of deconstructing Architecture in search of Some-thing Else was effectively jettisoned with the arrival of the horrific exhibition at MoMA entitled "Groundswell", for reasons both obvious and less obvious, or for reasons consistent with the problems of architectural production as fashionable adjunct to Capitalism Triumphant. In essence, the promise of Landscape Urbanism, arriving more or less in the 1990s, was sold down the road for an empty-headed 'neo-modernism' (e.g., infrastructural hubris) versus anything resembling an urbanism that actually restores landscape to the highly formalized and highly artificial terrain of contemporary cities.
Present research (2005-2007) involves the restructuralization of the thing otherwise known as Formalism, as a provisional Way Out of renascent architectural nihilism (as above), and the production of an admixture of rhetoric, poésie, and criticism (a.k.a. philosophical-aesthetics). See Poésie et Paratactics (HTML) ... See PDFs/RTFs (HTML) for documents tracing this path to the 'here and now' ('hic et nunc') ...
SUBDIRECTORY/PROJECTS
Winter ParkPiazza della Signoria
Citronovy Dvur - Lemon Court
Cascadilla Circus
Pavillon de la Mer
The Near and the Far
Villa Dragon
Mantova Mise en Scène
Bazantnice (Prague Castle)
Competition X
Sugar Plum!
THE SMALL PRINT
POST-RATIONALIZATIONS - The rhetorical works of Landscape Agency New York circle round the recondite, the elliptical and the problematic (if not emblematic) 'nature' of landscape. In fact, LANY prefers the 16th-century term 'garden architecture' to 'landscape architecture', for both polemical and practical reasons. This preference has mostly to do with the desire to unmask architecture (through paratactical operations) or to excavate the so-called 'origin of things' (the ur-formalist origin of design operations). In the quest to unearth the figurative and the typological (to reach the topological), two prominent concerns of the Venice School (Tafuri, Cacciari, et alia), the conditions of this quest are framed by 'linguistic' tropes and investigations of the rhetorical nature of landscape and garden architecture, always seeking the implicit 'eXit' -- the existential-metaphysical nexus ('X') always already embedded in works of art, architecture, literature, etcetera that join (link) the Ideal and the Real.Such a bare-naked landscape or garden architecture is also an attempt to circumvent the self-inflicted vanities of modern landscape architecture and reincorporate the idea of the architectonic in the manner in which it was first understood -- i.e., as an intellectually-inflected field of things ("of architecture; constructive; of the systemization of knowledge") -- while in pursuit of the topological source of the architectonic.
This inherent surplus (in built form) has been effectively shunted aside in the quixotic development of design languages that invariably refer only to themselves. To restore some of this potentially sublime content, the pursuit of landscape + architecture must free the foundations of figuration while at the same time amplify the emergent tendencies of inspired formal operations. These emergent tendencies are in excess of the typological and figurative operations of design and, in many ways, represent an associative magic (the topological) all but missing from the vast terrain of contemporary landscape + architectural production. This 'surplus' includes the social and ethical dimensions of design, issues that have foundered on the reef of stylistic iteration and avant-garde posturing.The "recondite, the elliptical and the problematic" (as above) represent possible scenarios (extra-territorial concerns) that may be encoded in design and function without the typical imposition of synthetic anomie (mere structural fixity). A discursive synthetic, on the other hand, may, ironically, carry and re-introduce the very suppressed elements found only in rare, uncompromising works of (im)modern landscape plus architecture.
Therefore, and for unreasonable reasons, 'Upstream' (toward a revivified 'Formalism') is, paradoxically, also the proverbial Way Out.
‘Upstream’, then ... Past the lovely, long-legged birds wading in toxic lagoons here and there, over rapids with the shining, slippery salmon, past lakes as smooth as mirrors, through ravines (dodging hungry puma), past forests (skirting fires and landslides), beyond all demonizations of nature, to the source of things; meaning, to steal a mnemonic image from Theo Angelopoulos’ latest film, toward the ‘Weeping Meadow’, to the non-place where clouds condense and drops of water run down blades of grass. To singular things, then -- to things forming things: sublime singular things.
