Martha Schwartz Landscape and Common Culture Since Modernism, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 38
[p. 38] "In this century, landscape architecture has produced a small but well-known cadre of designers such as Roberto Burle-Marx, Garrett Eckbo, Thomas Church, Lawrence Halprin, and Dan Kiley who, aligning themselves with modernist theory, broke from classical and beaux arts traditions. These designers believed that landscape architecture was an art form related to the other visual arts and that landscape could also serve as a cultural artifact, expressive of contemporary culture and made from modern materials. Although these practitioners could be lumped together as modernists who believe that landscape could and should reflect the needs and values of a modern society, their individual design vocabularies ranged from surrealism to constructivism.
"A more recent generation of landscape architects, including Peter Walker, Rich Hoag, George Hargreaves, and myself [Martha Schwartz] practice within the same modernist tradition-but we are also being influenced by (as well as exerting influence upon) the art world. Today the boundary between art and landscape design has been at least partially effaced. Among this group are Richard Fleischner, Andrew Leicester, Andrea Blum, Elyn Zimmerman, Gary Reivschal, and Mary Miss. This coalition of artists and designers presents an opportunity for landscape to at last be seen again as an aesthetic enterprise and a legitimate art form capable of being judged on formal and intellectual grounds.
"Many aspects of modernism still hold promise for today's world (intentions such as social egalitarianism, honesty in the use of materials, optimism about the future, and, the belief in human rationality), but how have these ideas exhibited themselves in the landscapes of the recent past? While it was based to some degree on environment improvement, architectural modernism has not been kind to the landscape. A great distinction divides the modernist architect's attitude toward architecture and the modernist architect's attitude toward landscape. Architectural modernism has been remarkably disinterested in issues of collective space, for example, focussing instead on the space within buildings. Nor has it developed a formal attitude toward the built landscape. Instead, this was left as a moral arena, unmanipulated although actually socially utilized. Curiously, even those architects who see buildings as being able to manifest ideas are often antagonistic toward landscapes that display visual or intellectual power. Viable landscapes, those landscapes with obvious form, are perceived as competing with buildings and as being too formally active. To allow the building to read more clearly, content must be drained from the landscape. Although every other aspect of the designed environment from buildings to soap spoons has been seen as fair game for architects, modernism never envisioned the landscape as manufactured space or allowed landscape to address issues of form and composition. Well-designed, affordable manufactured products were a goal of the Bauhaus, but the landscape was to [p. 39] remain the pure interstitial fabric upon which buildings were placed. It was clearly not a field in which cultural attitudes and ideas could be explored. Exterior space was, and has remained, a moral battleground and until recently has rarely been viewed aesthetically, an attitude that has resulted in a remarkable lack of design talents in the field of landscape architecture during the last three decades. Those interested in design seek their expression in more fertile fields, such as the visual arts. This, among other factors, has contributed to our degraded visual environment.
[p. 39] "The lack of a modernist vision for our manufactured landscape has had a devastating effect on our urban and suburban environments. Architecture's myopic and self-serving attitude towards landscape as the passive, untouched setting for heroic objects, has been disastrous visually and ecologically. Ironically, it has positioned modernist architects comfortably next to those whom they perceive to be their antagonists, that is, the neoclassical and historicist landscape architects. Modernist landscape architects have been left out on a limb, isolated by an ironic agreement between the lay person and the modernist architect on the point that the landscape should function environmentally and socially, but not intellectually or aesthetically. Landscape architecture has been in existence as a profession in this country for over a century, and the fact that only a small body of notable work of any intellectual rigor exists after those hundred years attests to the infertile ground for the proliferation of landscape design ideas.
"Many ideas central to modernism are still attractive to me, and thus I distinguish my work from projects by historicist and neoclassicist designers. Of modernism's social agenda, the basic optimism toward the future-where good design can be available to all classes-holds the most power. I view [p. 40] the manufacturing process not as a limitation but as an opportunity, and I see rationality in a positive light. Great landscapes can no longer be made in the tradition of carved stone and the fountains of Renaissance Europe. Instead they must be made today from concrete, asphalt, and plastic, the stuff with which we build our environment on a daily basis. Non-precious materials and off-the-shelf items must be used artfully, and with this attitude we can build beautiful landscapes, not only for the rich, who today will no longer pay for precious materials, but also for the middle class who can't afford them. That we must embrace technology to find the aesthetic opportunities inherent in mass production appears as valid today as it was to the early modernists. While these modernist sentiments are certainly not new attitudes in architecture, landscape architecture has been slow in dealing with the aesthetics of technology, and has evolved a profession based on the romanticizing of the past.
[p. 40] "For example, cheap and ubiquitous landscape materials such as asphalt and concrete are often regarded as lowly and are shunned by developers trying to sell an image of quality. Developers often commit to budgets that can accomodate only lowly materials, although the true (low) value of the project must be hidden from a prospective buyer by attempting to make the product look expensive. The decision to veneer or stamp concrete into stone patterns, for example, ultimately fools no one and simultaneously expresses the lack of value and discomfort with this ruse. It is possible, however, to appreciate asphalt and concrete for what they are-simple, cheap, and malleable-and for their potential beauty when used and maintained properly. This, I believe, is a more realistic and hopeful attitude than the reliance on fine materials applied only superficially.
[p. 40] "Having trained as an artist for ten years . . . My initial interests in the landscape came from sculpture made by artists such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Long, Walter DiMaria and Mary Miss, artists who broke from the tradition of the studio and the commercial New York gallery scene by venturing out into the wilderness to do their work. There they created monumental landscape-inspired sculpture that could not be contained in a gallery or sold for profit. Producing early examples of both conceptual and environmental art, those artists were the bellwethers of a new wave of environmental awareness. They had gone beyond modern art by redefining art as something that was neither a painting to be hung on the wall nor conventional studio sculpture. Art was reinstated as a part of our environment, not as an isol [p. 41] ated event accessible only to the effete gallery world.
[p. 41] "From making discrete landscape objects to shaping the landscape as an integrated work of art and space seemed to me a completely logical sequence. The next step was to move from the pristine natural environment and apply the same ideas of interaction and intervention to the complexity of the city. I am as energized and challenged by this gritty arena as the early earthwork artists who took inspiration from the untouched landscapes of the American southwest.
"My interest as an artist has always been in the mystical quality of geometric forms and their relationship to each other . . . the landscape must be depicted as architectural space so that it is both recognizable and describable . . . Simple geometries are thus best used in the landscape as mental maps . . . the use of geometry in the landscape is more humane than . . . stylized naturalism. Lastly, [geometry] deals with our manufactured environment more honestly; geometry itself is a rational construct and thereby avoids the issue of trying to mask our man-made environments with a thin veneer of naturalism.
[p. 41] "During my training in landscape architecture, I began to study the works of minimalist artists such a Robert Irwin, Carl Andre, Richard Long, and Don Flavin, artists who deal with the description and manipulation of space. As landscape encompasses a much greater field than painting or most sculpture, the effects must be accomplished with an economy of means . . . Michael Heizer collapsed the vast space of a valley by connecting the viewer with the far side of the mesa along a single bulldozed line . . .
[p. 41] "Artists such as Ron Davis, Robert Mangold, Mel Bochner, Frank Stella, John Newman and Al Held are of particular interest to me. They explore a range of emotions produced by particular visual [p. 42]relationships and delve into the mysticisms and symbolisms inherent in geometry . . .
[p. 42] "The Pop artists-Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg-interest me for their concern with banal, everyday objects and common materials. . .
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[p. 42] "In conclusion, the modernist architect's break from the beaux arts tradition and neoclassicism was an important event for landscape architecture. As architects had to shed the old in order to develop an aesthetic and philosophical stance to deal with the social needs of post-World War I Europe, we must now shed out romance with our wilderness heritage and the English landscape in order to deal effectively with our expanding urban- and suburbanization. The nostalgia for the (imagined) English countryside (idealized in English landscape and Hudson River School painting) has prevented us from seeing our landscape as it truly is and inhibited the evolution of an approach to landscape appropriate to urbanization. We shake our heads at collective disgust in the ugliness of our manmade environments, and yet we do little to fully consider the scope of the problem or its possible solution. To improve the visual blight, we place diminutive mounds in our median strips and at the bases of our buildings . . . we dredge up the rolling English countryside like a universal balm, without questioning its appropriateness or viability . . . Our professions's narrow and moralistic view of what constitutes a correct landscape has disallowed . . . and hampered . . . seeking alternative solutions.
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[p. 42] "Landscape architecture, as a field, has barely touched upon the questions raised by modernism. To many practitioners, modernism and its attendant growth and embrace of technology are viewed as the cause of the degradation of our natural environment. There continues, however, to be a steady stream of landscape designers who search for meaningful relationships between our natural and built environments, and who work less with romantic sentiment than eyes opened to the world around them."