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IF YOU PLEASE Construct a philosophical, searching, original, pensive 1000 word essay on some aspect of 'modern' landscape architecture (1900-2000), as it relates to architecture and art, if you wish, drawing on Readings 5 and Readings 6. You may look retrospectively (longingly or with disgust) over the 500-year trajectory of Modernity Itself, but through a modern lens, and from your own personal place in time. Focus on the 20th century and its various forms of cultural and artistic agitation as expressed in landscape. Essays should be grammatically and typographically perfect. Please utilize the MLA style bibliographic format (template supplied) and cite only works you have read and utilized in the essay, including page numbers when quoting or paraphrasing sources. Do not cut and paste from the reading lists. Preliminaries - You may e-mail questions & ideas up til December 15th Absolute deadline - December 20th (by e-mail only) - No extensions E-mail to - ateliermp@netscape.net (as attachment) Preferred subject matter: 1/ 'Agonistic Modernism' (see: Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty) - In the attempt to rid itself of the past did 20th-century modernism throw the baby out with the bath water? Is the modernist's 'professed' break with history clean, nonexistent, honest, dishonest, or simply a rhetorical gesture? Illustrate with specific projects. Consider Wittgenstein's language games and Derrida's grammatology. 2/ Central Park & Parc de la Villette - Are Tschumi's claims for the park justified and, if so, why the reliance on Euclidean geometry at this 'late date'? Is the Central Park-New York City relationship any different than the La Villette-Paris relationship? Is this not perhaps a case of the timeless danse macabre of landscape urbanism being played out in two distinct time warps; i.e. Olmsted's brain and Tschumi's brain? See Five Parks for documents and texts. 3/ Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism, Situationism - Utilizing texts from these four seminal (radical) movements, intimately related to proto-anarchic ideas vis-a-vis urbanism and modern experience, consider in contradistinction the tenets of Constructivism, Suprematism, Purism and Functionalism. Subject-object operations and utopianism are common to both tetralogies yet there existed an inherent animosity between the two paradigms. Indeed, there are two conflictual modes of Surrealism - the Bataille mode and the Breton mode. Consider what is at stake, and how 'it' - once you discover it - came into play in architecture and landscape architecture. 4/ Land Art - Did Land Art save Landscape Architecture from banality - a fate worse than death? Illustrate with specific sites. Consider the thematic significance and jouissance of archaism(s). 5/ The Villa - Extract from the canonical villas of modernism - see Four Villas - the principles that came to structure modern landscape architecture for well nigh fifty years. 6/ Heroic Modernism - Two tragic figures, Adolf Loos (1870-1933) & Robert Smithson (1938-1973), are alike in ways that transcend their oeuvre. Utilizing original texts of Loos & Smithson (and maybe Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals & Bernard Shaw's Man & Superman) unearth the secret fire that animates such renowned heresiarchs. What is the source of that fire? How is it played out in design? See also Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire and Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower. 7/ Language, the Virus - Laurie Anderson has called language a virus, after Burroughs. What is the virus called landscape architecture and how has it mutated over the last five centuries to produce the latest rash - signifying chains / grammatological structures / etcetera - and is it lethal? 8/ Giorgio Agamben's Infancy & History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience proposes that language contains an originary territoriality that is metaphorically a zone of 'infancy'. What are the implications of this theory for landscape? Is this topology translatable to landscape terminology? According to Derrida, "natural writing is immediately united to the voice and to breath. Its nature is not grammatological but pneumatological" (Of Grammatology, p. 17). Also, according to Derrida (same work) Nietzsche demolished the 'originary' and Heidegger reconfigured it, or historicized it. Nevertheless, the concept of the 'originary' - e.g. phonological forms - is in fact an ur-faktum significant to landscape. Dare we go there? 9/ For the truly brave at heart, please tackle the problems associated with appropriating Artaud for Landscape. See Landscape & Its Double. Good luck! See you in Bali. |
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