Chapter 6
The place of art

An art or a science?

For several years I was in the position to select students for a Master’s programme in landscape architecture which led to a professional qualification. This taught me that it is very difficult to predict who will make a good landscape architect or what sort of previous accomplishments might indicate potential. I looked out for an interest in places and some indication that a student might be able to think spatially. It was certainly helpful if they could produce evidence of an ability to draw. Beyond this, the subject or class of a first degree was little guide to performance. We recruited a lot of geographers, a number of architects, a quantity of botanists, ecologists, environmental scientists and horticulturists, and a smattering of fine artists. One interesting category consisted of students with a background in science who had enjoyed art at school but had been forced to abandon it through the constraints of the syllabus. They often proved to be good students, for whom landscape architecture offered the perfect outlet for their abilities. Usually it was a discipline they had not heard of while at high school.

The British school system and perhaps the structure of education in most parts of the world usually forces students to make an unwelcome choice between the arts and the sciences, a decision which often shapes their whole lives. It is rare to find students studying a ‘hard’ science, such as biology, physics, or geology, at the same time as pursuing courses in painting, photography, or graphic design. One of the most appealing aspects of landscape architecture is that it sees this kind of transdisciplinarity as a virtue. Some of its practitioners are genuine polymaths and most are at least generalists who can understand a report from an ecologist as well as they can see meaning in a painting by Constable or Cezanne. Social and political awareness is important too, and should be addressed in the landscape architecture curriculum. But if landscape architecture is a broad church, this does not mean that individual landscape architects are without their own inclinations and prejudices. The corny old question ‘Is landscape architecture an art or a science?’ has been kicked around in many a seminar, but it still divides opinion. There are those who, like McHarg, prefer to see landscape architecture as applied ecology and those, conversely, who see it primarily as a form of art, regard designed landscapes as carriers of meaning, and see the landscape as a medium for expression.

Of course, the word ‘art’ is difficult to define. At its broadest, it can mean something like ‘skill’ or ‘craft’. Olmsted often used the word this way: after visiting Birkenhead Park he remarked that ‘art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty’. However, Olmsted also suggested that the science of the engineer was ‘never more worthily employed than when it is made to administer to man’s want of beauty. When it is carried into works not merely of art but of fine art.’ This is an interesting assertion, not just because Olmsted was placing engineering and science at the service of art, but also because he was clearly saying that art is more than just a matter of skill and that it has some connection with beauty. Olmsted was much influenced by English aesthetic ideas from the 18th century, when landscape gardening had been the sister art of painting and poetry. Although we often describe landscapes as beautiful, it would be anachronistic to follow Olmsted in associating fine art with beauty. As the art critic Arthur Danto has suggested, the Modernist avant-garde dethroned the pursuit of beauty as the principal goal of art, replacing it with the purpose of embodying meaning—which is not to say that art cannot be beautiful or that beauty does not matter in our everyday lives (it clearly does), nor that landscape architects should not be concerned with it, but when thinking about the artistic possibilities available to landscape architecture, it is not necessarily the best starting point.

Jellicoe’s theory

Geoffrey Jellicoe, a staunch believer in landscape architecture’s credentials and mission as a form of art practice, saw this too. As we saw in Chapter 3, Jellicoe believed that landscape architecture is at its strongest when it has a firm connection with the fine arts, particularly (for him) the art of painting. For Jellicoe, landscape architecture’s mission was not merely to arrange things tidily or to clear up visual mess—that was just the pursuit of seemliness. The landscape architect’s higher calling was to create landscapes that were ‘as meaningful as painting’. Jellicoe had his own theory about the way landscapes could mean, although it is hard to find anyone who believes it today. Influenced by the analytical psychologist C. G. Jung, Jellicoe argued that by spending time on site a designer could tap into the ‘collective unconscious’, a sort of psychic substrata shared by all human beings. The subsequent design would embody universal archetypes, and these could have a powerful, but largely unconscious effect upon visitors to the landscape. The theory is mystical and untestable, but it sits comfortably with an experience that most of us have from time to time, which is the sense that a place has a powerful presence or atmosphere.

Most commentators agree that landscapes can be meaningful, but the extent to which meanings can be ‘designed in’ is often debated. The landscape architect Laurie Olin, who received the 2012 National Medal for Arts from President Obama and whose celebrated designs include the revamping of Bryant Park (1992) and Columbus Circle (2005) both in New York City, wrote an article in 1988 entitled ‘Form, Meaning and Expression in Landscape Architecture’ which was provoked by his sense that his discipline had fallen under the sway of the ‘born-again language of fundamentalist ecology’. Meaning came back into fashion, and tutors would earnestly demand that their students should explore metaphors and explain their concepts. This in turn prompted Marc Treib, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, to wonder ‘Must Landscapes Mean?’ (the title of an essay he wrote in 1995). Treib suggested that attempts to build in meaning from the outset often backfired and that designers should concentrate on making places which give pleasure. If designed places become popular, then meanings will accrue.

Isamu Noguchi and the borderlands between art and design

Although art and design are often bracketed together, there is a divide and most practitioners know which side they fall. A landscape architect once told me that he did not aspire to create art—his goal was to produce ‘good design’. Similarly a sculptor who placed work in public places said that he did not produce work to order—that would be ‘mere design’. However, there have been practitioners who defy easy categorization, such as the Japanese American Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) who trained first as a sculptor under Constantin Brancusi, but began submitting proposals for public spaces and civic monuments in the 1930s. He is as often described as a landscape architect as he is described as an artist, on the strength of some high profile garden commissions including the grounds of the Connecticut General Life Insurance headquarters in Bloomsfield, Connecticut (1956), a Peace Garden for the UNESCO Building in Paris (1956–8), and the Cullen Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas (1984–6). Noguchi was a modernist whose work was influenced by Japanese traditions, most notably in the Marble Garden for the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (1960–4), which features a low pyramid, a cube balanced on a point and a standing ring, all in white marble and without a plant to be seen, referencing the Zen tradition of dry gardens (kare-sansui) exemplified by the celebrated temple garden at Ryoan-ji. Noguchi also designed gently contoured children’s playgrounds with equipment that would have looked equally at home in a sculpture gallery. In effect, these proposed playgrounds would themselves have been large-scale bass-relief ground sculptures. Noguchi was able to collapse the distinction between ‘functional’ design and self-directed artistic practice, and his work has been influential in both spheres, even though he had great difficulty in persuading the authorities to build any of his playscapes. Only two Noguchi playgrounds were constructed in his lifetime. One is the Kodomo No Kuni (Children’s Land) Playground near Tokyo, which he built in collaboration with Yoshio Otani in 1966. The other, opened in 1976 and restored in 2009, is in the Olmsted-designed Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Georgia.

It is sometimes said that artists pursue self-imposed goals and seek answers to self-posed questions, whereas designers respond to a brief, work in the context of a need, and have the eventual users of their designs in mind throughout the design process. This is broadly true, but Noguchi’s eclectic and synthesizing practice shows that there is nothing hard and fast about these distinctions. The border between art and design can be porous.

Landscape and land art

With his interest in the earth as a medium for sculpture, Noguchi was a decade or two ahead of his times. The art form with the greatest influence upon landscape architecture in the latter half of the 20th century was not painting, as Jellicoe had thought, but sculpture, or at least the particular movement variously known as Land Art, Earth Art, or Earthworks. This emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, with its origins in Conceptual Art and Minimalism. It was also a specific response to the commercialization of art in the gallery system of the time. By choosing to make their works in remote places like the deserts of Nevada, New Mexico, or Arizona, land artists such as Robert Smithson (1938–73), Michael Heizer (1944–), and James Turrell (1943–) turned their backs on the galleries, though not necessarily upon the wealthy patrons and foundations that supported their work. Land Art shares certain characteristics with landscape architecture. It is generally ‘site-specific’, which is to say it can only be made in the place it is sited. Like works of landscape architecture, works of Land Art are responsive to the character or genius loci of the place in which they are created. Usually they are also made of the stuff of that place. As with landscape architecture, they can involve large scale earth moving. For instance, Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), one of the best-known examples of the genre, was built on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, Utah, using basalt rocks and mud. It is 460 metres long and 4.6 metres wide and it is now encrusted with salt crystals. Heizer’s Double Negative (1969) is a trench, 9 metres wide and 15 metres deep, which straddles a natural canyon in Nevada. Some Land Artists became involved with land reclamation after mining, another incursion into the physical and conceptual territory of landscape architecture. Heizer was commissioned by the Ottowa Silica Company Foundation to create a series of Effigy Tumuli at Buffalo Rock, Illinois. These works (completed 1985) draw upon Native American traditions of mound building and each represents a creature indigenous to the region: a catfish, a water strider, a frog, a turtle, and a snake. An up to date example of similar work is the Northumberlandia landform sculpture (2012) created by the architect/artist/critic Charles Jencks for a former open-cast coal mine near Cramlington, Northumberland. Artists who have associated themselves with open-cast mining have often become mired in environmental controversy, as they can be seen as aiding and abetting a destructive industrial operation, a charge that is also sometimes levelled against landscape architects who work in this sector.

Land Art implied no particular brief for nature, but some of its early practitioners were nevertheless interested in ecology and environment. Alan Sonfist’s Time Landscape (1965–present) consisted of a rectangular plot in Lower Manhattan which the artist planted with species that would have grown there in pre-colonial times. The area is managed by the city’s parks department as a developing woodland and is regarded as a living memorial to the forest that once covered the island. Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison (often referred to as ‘the Harrisons’) are pioneering ecological artists who have become involved in causes such as watershed restoration, urban renewal, and responses to climate change, which might usually be seen as the domain of environmental professionals such as planners or landscape architects. For instance, a recent installation, Greenhouse Britain 2007–2009 suggests ways in which people might withdraw from low lying land as sea levels rise. Land Art was succeeded by Ecological Art or Environmental Art, whose practitioners were motivated by ethical concerns about the consequences of human activity upon the planet. Some of this work shades into landscape architectural practice and there have been successful collaborations between artists and landscape architects. One of the most notable was that between artist Jody Pinto and landscape architect Steve Martino at Papago Park (1992), on the border between the cities of Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona. Martino has pioneered the use of indigenous, drought-tolerant plants for landscape work in the American south-west. He and Pinto created a water-harvesting structure which, when seen from above, resembled the branches of a tree. By detaining rainfall and allowing it to percolate, this design aided the regeneration of the flora on the site, including the characteristic saguaro cactus.

Landscape architecture’s avant-garde?

Regardless of the influence of architectural Modernism upon Halprin, Eckbo, Kiley, and their ilk, the philosopher Stephanie Ross has suggested that landscape architects and garden designers missed the avant-garde opportunities that were seized by other disciplines. Where are the garden equivalents of John Cage’s 4’33”, the musical composition which consists of four minutes, thirty-three seconds of silence, or William Burroughs’ literary cut-ups, writings that could be reassembled in any order? This sort of introspective attention to the materials and processes of the medium characterized the avant-garde. Ross tried to imagine what an avant-garde garden might look like—perhaps it would consist of a display of garden hoses?—before concluding that garden designers had baulked at the challenge and that Land Artists and their successors had stepped into the cultural vacuum this had created. Of course, for those who conceive of landscape architecture as design or as planning, the lack of an avant-garde is unproblematic.

In any case, Ross’s account, which is to be found in her book What Gardens Mean, oversimplifies the relation between Land Art and landscape architecture/garden design. There are examples of gardens which push the boundaries of what can be thought of as a garden, and some of these have been created by landscape architects. Martha Schwartz horrified those with settled opinions by using unconventional materials and fake plants in her projects. Coming from art practice, she launched her new career with the witty Bagel Garden (Boston, MA, 1979) which used shellacked (varnished) bagels as decorations in a domestic parterre (a parterre is a design on the ground, usually edged with box hedging and filled with coloured earths or gravel) which poked fun at its grander equivalents in French formal gardens. It was a pivotal work which caused a rift in the discipline at the time. Stella’s Garden (Bala-Cynwyd, PA, 1982), which Schwartz created for the yard of her mother’s duplex, employed chicken wire, netting and shards of Plexiglass in a design which required no gardening skills whatsoever to maintain. On the rooftop of the Whitehead Institute, Cambridge, MA, Schwartz designed the Splice Garden (1986) which apparently combined a Renaissance garden with a Japanese garden, but none of the plants were real. The clipped hedges were made of steel covered with astroturf and a faux topiary bush ‘grows’ horizontally from one of the enclosing green walls. Some landscapes architects harrumphed—this might be art, but was it really landscape architecture?

From these small beginnings, Schwartz built a large international practice, winning commissions for important public spaces in major cities, but she did not lose her provocative edge. Martha Schwartz Partners’ plans for the redesign of Exchange Square, Manchester, UK (completed 1999), ran into trouble with local politicians because she included five ersatz palm trees, a dig at the city’s reputation for grey skies and rain. They were replaced by windmills in the final scheme. Her design for Grand Canal Square, Dublin, Ireland (completed 2008), is an upscale descendent of Stella’s Garden with a red carpet made of resin and glass and an array of tilted red poles which are illuminated at night. Schwartz’s work is often visually arresting and she seems to carry the day with design juries, but she is sometimes criticized for not working in a more consultative way. The Hall of Shame website maintained by the Project for Public Spaces has featured some of her high-profile projects, including Exchange Square, Manchester, UK, and Jacob Javits Plaza (sometimes referred to as Federal Plaza/Foley Square) in downtown New York City. Schwartz’s design for the latter featured looping green benches around hemispherical green mounds, and it won an Honour Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1997. Critics, however, said that the pop-art treatment of the space failed to provide comfortable places for the workers from the surrounding office blocks to use, and it is perhaps significant that, at the time of writing, the square is being reconfigured by Michael Van Valkenburg Associates. But perhaps it is harsh to single Schwartz out for criticism. The Project for Public Spaces often criticizes renowned landscape architects for what it sees as self-indulgent design which creates dramatic imagery but not vibrant civic spaces. Schwartz has gone from enfant terrible to grande dame of the discipline and she now shares her role as provocateur with her protégé Claude Cormier, whose Boules Roses were discussed in Chapter 2. Cormier shares Schwartz’s irreverent sense of fun. His project for the Four Seasons Hotel in Ontario, Canada (2006–12), features a 12-metre high cast iron grand fountain, looking something like a giant cake-stand, along with the pixelated arabesques of an out-of-scale ‘urban carpet’ made from granite blocks.

The empathetic approach

Land Art at its most assertive can be seen as an imposition upon landscape, but there is a quirkier tradition, exemplified in Britain by artists such as Richard Long (1945–) and Andy Goldsworthy (1956–) and in Germany by Nils-Udo (1937–), which involve restrained and often delicate interventions in place. Much of their work eschews permanence and monumentality. This work is often much admired by landscape architects, because it seems to share the discipline’s concern for the genius loci or particularity of place. Trudi Entwistle, who teaches landscape architecture at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, is also a site-specific artist in this mould. She has made the opposite journey to Schwartz, training first as a landscape designer but becoming an artist. She says that her work ‘lies somewhere between the boundaries of land art, sculpture and design. It is site specific and investigates how sculptural forms integrate with their surroundings, interacting with human movement and the changing elements of light, weather, natural growth and decay’. Her work does not set out to compete with the landscape but in some way to complement it. They are subtle additions which one might stumble upon (Figure 7). Some, like Drift made for the Busan Biennale, Busan, South Korea (2002), and Wave Break, Guisseny, France (2007), are pieces which provide people with some temporary affordance such as shelter from the wind, but functionality is not their primary purpose.

7. Trudi Entwistle’s ‘Apple Heart’ (Turku, Finland, 2008) is situated in the grounds of ‘Life on a Leaf’, a fabulous house inspired by the forms of nature, created by artist Jan-Erik Andersson (built 2005–9). It was inspired by a Finnish love story, the ‘King and the Castle’, which also inspired the leaf house

Art as possibility not imperative

If we ask whether landscape architecture can be art, we can easily get ensnared in all kinds of muddle. We often use the word ‘art’ in a laudatory way, rather than as a descriptive term for a sort of human activity. In the laudatory sense, there can be no such thing as bad or indifferent art. ‘Architecture’ gets used in this way too (sometimes with a capital ‘A’) to mark out a special category of structures which transcend mere building. It is also a moot question whether Architecture can be considered Art, or whether the practical purposes it must serve somehow get in the way. In any case ‘landscape architecture’ is not generally used in this evaluative way, partly, I think, because it is a relatively recent term and partly because the range of activities that must squeeze under its umbrella includes so many things that owe more to rational planning than to creativity, such as environmental impact assessments or zone of visual influence analyses. We do not say: ‘this park is Landscape Architecture, but that one is just a designed landscape’. Nevertheless, there is a generally agreed canon of great works, including such masterpieces as Ryoan-Ji, the Villa Lante, the parks of ‘Capability’ Brown, Central Park, and Thomas Church’s garden for the Donnell Residence. Do works of this stature deserve to be called art? I think the answer has to be yes, but it does not follow that the motivating purpose of landscape architecture must be the creation of works of art. If Treib is right, then packing designs with allegories and allusions may not be the royal road to significance, in any case. It may be that making places which stir the emotions and give pleasure is a surer purpose to pursue. Indeed, even the pursuit of mere seemliness, contra Jellicoe, might be satisfying enough for many a practitioner and many a client.