1992 Mann AC 1992

Lian Hurst Mann, AIA, From the EditorArchitecture California14. no. 2, November 1992 p. 2, pre-1768, Forward and Back

     "When the ice melted, the sea came up and drowned innumerable, river valleys-drowned the Sacramento-San Joaquin from the Golden Gate through the Coastal Ranges and into the Great Central Valley, filling the Bay Area's bays." So the story goes, describing the change that has shaped the California landscape for centuries and continues today, as told by John McPhee in his recent installment of Annals of the Former World in The New Yorker. Then came homo sapiens inhabitation, the Spanish, Mexican, then U.S. waves of colonization, the rush for gold, the fight for water, and at each stage the growth of the population, the built environment, and the imperative for "the control of nature." The control of nature is now so pervasive that only the artifice of a second socially-constructed 'Nature' is known to us-except when history's forces of necessity wrench us out of self-certain self-centeredness: earthquake, fire, flood, or civil insurrection.

     "From within this second Nature, J.B. Jackson, in his book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, defines landscape as the spatial expression of social order: "the field of perpetual conflict and compromise between what is established by authority and what the vernacular insists upon preferring." "Whatever its shape or size [landscape] is never simply . . . a feature of the natural environment; it is always artificial . . ." Thus, landscape is given as societal flux written in the dimensions of space.

     "Closer yet to the everyday practices of architects is the challenge to design the landscape within socially- and environmentally-constructed parameters. Here the control of nature actually means its rendering, "the charm of the wilderness, tamed and diversified for convenience and accessibility," as David Streatfield tells us the poet Charles Keeler wrote.

     "The articles compiled in this number of Architecture California address these senses of landscape-the physical, the social, the artifactual-each with its particular characteristics of change. Jackson focusses on shared experience of recurring events as the signal characteristic of place-making. Doolin, reflecting flux as a painter can, draws our attention to the profound depth of illusion that characterizes this shared experience. Crawford, projecting a new landscape of "spontaneous malling," shows how the exchange of attributes achieved according to the operation of "adjacent attraction" has successfully made commerce the genius of place and privatized the space of public life. Groth introduces us to vernacular parks, unseen by the official eye of government (and design professionals). [Skateboarding defines itself in part as the constant creation of park and flow, perhaps. KR] Looking at development patterns in the San Joaquin Valley and in northern San Diego County, Newman and Lieberman examine disparate aspects of change originating in the imperatives of economic growth and in the search for symbols of stability in a radically changing social and physical landscape.

     [p. 3] "Streatfield and Schwartz describe opposite moments in the history of modern landscape architecture-the Arts and Crafts search for the seemingly appropriate and the beyond-the-modern artist's play with now natural manufactured materials, the new 'appropriate' for landscape. Field, rejecting the vernacular veneer of an imagined past, reminds us of the way we never were, challenging California practitioners to lead a new and responsible shaping of the landscape. Suisman and Phelps take up the challenge by analyzing two artifacts that have transformed the contemporary urban landscapes: the boulevard and the freeway. They embrace the apparent disorder of late capitalist urban development and its postmodern culture and, from this stance, engage the possibility (and illustrate the danger) of harnessing the formal power of these 'monumental' artifacts. They anticipate a new urban order in a larger frame-a possible symbolic unity in the cultural landscape within the context of radical disuntiy in the social terrain.

     "Lastly, Stanton and, yes, the Bloods and Crips, address disaster as a force of acute rupture in the changing landscape: the ravages of the earth and of civilized society. Bringing all senses of the term landscape together, one disaster is the result of nature resisting human design, the other of human force resisting the (survival of the fittest) laws of second Nature. Each piece grapples with the potential of radical change-in one case articulating, in the other silently anticipating, the failure to harness our collective knowledge in historical moments of opportunity.

     "In the interstices between these points of view I cannot help but see revealed the map that Fredric Jameson envisioned in his 1988 essay Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the map of a new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and Unconscious." We fight to protect the remnants of agricultural lands (which Newman points out were originally wetlands), to recapture the qualities of the wooded East Bay Hills environs (which Streatfield explains were originally grassland), to celebrate the stability symbolized in the Sycuan chief's bell tower "watching over her people" (which Lieberman tells us actually recalls the memory of the colonial mission at which her grandmother was a slave). We fight to restore the sanctity of Nature (always ever the fabrication of social consciousness) and the integrity of the individual Unconscious (always ever the product of social being). Here we are reminded by Doolin of his cardinal rule for making art: "Don't be fooled by your own illusions." Yet, it is the production of illusions, particularly illusions about the nature of Nature, that constitutes the late capitalist/postmodern landscape of history as we make it today. The architect, as artiflex, has no choice but to embrace a second Nature: this is our business. However, behind the power of architecture to achieve a visible and symbolic unity is its tendency to efface differences of origins, culture, and class, immersing them in the larger unity of a utopian society. The challenge, and correspondingly the wondrous responsibility of the artiflex, is to contribute to the quality of daily human life and the wealth of our collective culture, mastering the illusory qualities of artifice without illusion, practicing in the company of nature's forces of contradiction and change as yet unforeseen. After all, as McPhee theorizes, "For an extremely long percentage of the history of the world, there was no California. Then, a piece at a time . . . parts began to assemble. An island arc here, a piece of continent there . . . came crunching in upon the continent and have thus far adhered."

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 Kelyn Roberts 2017