Space in landscape design

Last updated

Space in landscape design refers to theories about the meaning and nature of space as a volume and as an element of design. The concept of space as the fundamental medium of landscape design grew from debates tied to modernism, contemporary art, Asian art and design as seen in the Japanese garden, and architecture.

Contents

Europe

Elizabeth K. Meyer cites Claude-Henri Watelet's Essay on Gardens (1774) as perhaps the first reference to space in garden/architectural theory. [1] Andrew Jackson Downing in 1918 wrote "Space Composition in Architecture", which directly linked painting and gardens as arts involved in the creation of space.

The origins of modern northern European thought is a German innovation of the 1890s. By the 1920s, Einstein's theories of relativity were replacing Newton's conception of universal space. Practitioners such as Fletcher Steele, James Rose, Garrett Eckbo, and Dan Kiley began to write and design through a vocabulary of lines, volumes, masses and planes in an attempt to replace the prevalent debate, centered around ideas of the formal and informal, with one that would more closely align their field with the fine arts.

According to Adrian Forty, [2] the term "space" in relation to design was all but meaningless until the 1890s. At that time two schools began to develop. Viennese Gottfried Semper in 1880 developed an architectural theory based the idea that the first impulse of architecture was the enclosure of space. Camillo Sitte extended Semper's ideas to exterior spaces in his City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889). Concurrently, Friedrich Nietzsche built on ideas from Kant which emphasized the experience of space as a force field generated by human movement and perception. Martin Heidegger would later contradict both of these schools. In his 1927 Being and Time and 1951 "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" he claimed that space was neither a construct of the mind nor a given, but was "that for which a room has been made" and was created by the object within a room rather than the room itself. Henri Lefebvre would call all of this into question, linking designers' notions of themselves as space-makers to a subservience to a dominant capitalist mode of production. He felt that the abstract space they had created had destroyed social space through alienation, separation, and a privileging of the eye.

James Rose and Garrett Eckbo, colleagues at Harvard in the 1930s, were the pioneers of a movement which adopted ideas about space from artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Kurt Schwitters, Naum Gabo and the Russian Constructivists, and from architectural ideas based om Mies van der Rohe's free plan. Seeing gardens as outdoor rooms or sculptures to be walked through, they prioritized movement. In analogy to painting and sculpture, Rose in particular saw elements of landscape as having architectural volume, not just mass: "In pure landscape, we drop the structural shell and the volume is defined by earth, paving, water and ground cover; foliage, walls, structures and other vertical elements on the sides, and sky, branching and roofing above." [3] Eckbo adopted the grid of columns and thin walls of the free plan to make a statement about the social function of the garden as a place where the individual and the collective coincide.

By the 1940s, writings about space in landscape design had proliferated. Siegfried Giedion, in his Space, Time and Architecture, reframed the history of architecture as that of the history of space. Ernő Goldfinger wrote several influential articles in Architectural Review [4] addressing the subconscious effect of the sizes and shapes of spaces. He notes that perception of space happens in a state of distraction: we are required to move through a landscape in order to fully experience it. Dan Kiley absorbed these writings and built upon the work of Rose and Eckbo, promoting asymmetry over symmetry, balance over hierarchy, multiple centers, and figure-ground ambiguity.

Minimalism

Minimalist art would have a profound influence on designers of the 1960s such as Peter Walker, Martha Schwartz, and Hideo Sasaki. On the one hand, Sol LeWitt's space-frame sculptures and Carl Andre's floor sculptures of mass-produced objects allowed a re-thinking of the necessity for walls in the formation of space. Geometry, repetition, and changes in ground plane created a "field of making" in which walls and even plantings were questioned as essential elements of landscape. Equally at issue in applied practice was the perception on the part of Sasaki that landscape had come to be seen as "open space", a white sheet of paper on which to display International Style buildings. This disconnection with the landscape was especially notable in corporate office parks, and Sasaki and Walker addressed this through an attempt to connect interior and exterior spaces.

James Corner considers landscape spatiality to be one of the three things that distinguish the medium of landscape (the others are landscape temporality and landscape materiality). He refers to Gaston Bachelard [5] in emphasizing the role of scale and psychic location, which distinguish the space of landscape from that of architecture and painting: "the immediate immensity of the world from the inner immensity of the imagination, the inner space of the self [6] ".

Augustin Berque analyses landscape space by comparing Newtonian universal space and Cartesian dualistic space, in which there is a distinct separation between subject and object, and Chinese mediumistic space, in which a unity of landscape and environment corresponds to a unity of mind and body. Thus postmodern thought brings together the concepts of space as product of mind, body and culture. Rather than being the negative of the objects that occupy it, space can be seen as its own volume with undeniable importance as a design tool. In contemporary design, it is considered a palpable, lived phenomenon that contributes to our perception and experience of the world in subtle but often intentional ways.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Urban design</span> Designing and shaping of human settlements

Urban design is an approach to the design of buildings and the spaces between them that focuses on specific design processes and outcomes. In addition to designing and shaping the physical features of towns, cities, and regional spaces, urban design considers 'bigger picture' issues of economic, social and environmental value and social design. The scope of a project can range from a local street or public space to an entire city and surrounding areas. Urban designers connect the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning to better organize physical space and community environments.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of gardening</span>

The early history of gardening is largely entangled with the history of agriculture, with gardens that were mainly ornamental generally the preserve of the elite until quite recent times. Smaller gardens generally had being a kitchen garden as their first priority, as is still often the case.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Garrett Eckbo</span> American architect (1910–2000)

Garrett Eckbo was an American landscape architect notable for his seminal 1950 book Landscape for Living.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fletcher Steele</span>

John Fletcher Steele was an American landscape architect credited with designing and creating over 700 gardens from 1915 to the time of his death.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harvard Graduate School of Design</span> Architecture school of Harvard University

The Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) is the graduate school of design at Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It offers master's and doctoral programs in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, urban design, real estate, design engineering, and design studies.

Urban morphology is the study of the formation of human settlements and the process of their formation and transformation. The study seeks to understand the spatial structure and character of a metropolitan area, city, town or village by examining the patterns of its component parts and the ownership or control and occupation. Typically, analysis of physical form focuses on street pattern, lot pattern and building pattern, sometimes referred to collectively as urban grain. Analysis of specific settlements is usually undertaken using cartographic sources and the process of development is deduced from comparison of historic maps.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isovist</span>

A single isovist is the volume of space visible from a given point in space, together with a specification of the location of that point. It is a geometric concept coined by Clifford Tandy in 1967 and further refined by the architect Michael Benedikt.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Tunnard</span> Canadian-born landscape architect, garden designer, city-planner, and author (1910– 1979)

Arthur Coney Tunnard, later known as Christopher Tunnard, was a Canadian-born landscape architect, garden designer, city-planner, and author of Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1938).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dan Kiley</span> American landscape architect (1912–2004)

Daniel Urban Kiley was an American landscape architect, who worked in the style of modern architecture. Kiley designed over one-thousand landscape projects including Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hideo Sasaki</span> American architect

Hideo Sasaki was a Japanese American landscape architect.

James C. Rose (1913–1991) was a prominent landscape architect and author of the twentieth century. Born in rural Pennsylvania he, his mother and older sister moved to New York after his father's death. Rose was a high school dropout, but this didn't stop him from being accepted into Cornell University as an architecture student. Later he transferred to Harvard University as a landscape architecture major. In 1937, he was expelled because his design style didn't fit into Harvard's program. In 1938 and 1939 Rose published a series of articles containing the design experiment ideas that led to his expulsion from Harvard. He later published numerous articles and books which heavily impacted design theory and practice in the twentieth century. In 1941, Rose worked for Tuttle, Seelye, Place and Raymond in New York where he became discouraged by the limitations of large public works, and decided that working on private gardens was more suiting to his style. Despite his dislike of the institution of school, Rose would often make appearances as a guest lecturer at schools of landscape architecture and architecture. Before his death he was able to fulfill his lifelong dream of establishing a design study and landscape research center, The James Rose Center. After Rose's death from cancer in 1991, he bequeathed his home in Ridgewood to the James Rose Center.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lebbeus Woods</span> American architect (1940 - 2012)

Lebbeus Woods was an American architect and artist known for his unconventional and experimental designs. Known for his rich, yet mainly unbuilt work and its nonetheless significant impact on the architectural sphere, Lebbeus Woods and his oeuvre are considered visionary, describing a radically experimental world built on the principles of heterogeneity and multiplicity and bridging thus the gap between numerous fields including architecture, philosophy, and mathematics. Reconfiguring the architectural space in environments of crisis, whether it be natural, social, political, or financial, Woods stated: “I’m not interested in living in a fantasy world. All my work is still meant to evoke real architectural spaces. But what interests me is what the world would be like if we were free of conventional limits. Maybe I can show what could happen if we lived by a different set of rules.”

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Architectural theory</span> The act of thinking, discussing, and writing about architecture

Architectural theory is the act of thinking, discussing, and writing about architecture. Architectural theory is taught in all architecture schools and is practiced by the world's leading architects. Some forms that architecture theory takes are the lecture or dialogue, the treatise or book, and the paper project or competition entry. Architectural theory is often didactic, and theorists tend to stay close to or work from within schools. It has existed in some form since antiquity, and as publishing became more common, architectural theory gained an increased richness. Books, magazines, and journals published an unprecedented number of works by architects and critics in the 20th century. As a result, styles and movements formed and dissolved much more quickly than the relatively enduring modes in earlier history. It is to be expected that the use of the internet will further the discourse on architecture in the 21st century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of landscape architecture</span>

The discussion of the history of landscape architecture is a complex endeavor as it shares much of its history with that of landscape gardening and architecture, spanning the entirety of man's existence. However, it was not until relatively recent history that the term "landscape architecture" or even "landscape architect" came into common use.

Landscape urbanism is a theory of urban design arguing that the city is constructed of interconnected and ecologically rich horizontal field conditions, rather than the arrangement of objects and buildings. Landscape Urbanism, like Infrastructural Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism, emphasizes performance over pure aesthetics and utilizes systems-based thinking and design strategies. The phrase 'landscape urbanism' first appeared in the mid 1990s. Since this time, the phrase 'landscape urbanism' has taken on many different uses, but is most often cited as a postmodernist or post-postmodernist response to the "failings" of New Urbanism and the shift away from the comprehensive visions, and demands, for modern architecture and urban planning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Trellis (architecture)</span> Architectural structure often used to support plants

A trellis (treillage) is an architectural structure, usually made from an open framework or lattice of interwoven or intersecting pieces of wood, bamboo or metal that is normally made to support and display climbing plants, especially shrubs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Royston</span> American architect (1918–2008)

Robert N. Royston was one of America's most distinguished landscape architects, based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the United States. His design work and university teaching in the years following World War II helped define and establish the California modernism style in the post-war period. During his sixty years of professional practice Royston completed an array of award-winning projects that ranged from residential gardens to regional land use plans. He is perhaps best known for his important innovations in park design. A recent book, Modern Public Gardens: Robert Royston and the Suburban Park, details this area of his professional creativity and philosophy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Miller House (Columbus, Indiana)</span> Historic house in Indiana, United States

The Miller House and Garden, also known as Miller House, is a mid-century modern home designed by Eero Saarinen and located in Columbus, Indiana, United States. The residence, commissioned by American industrialist, philanthropist, and architecture patron J. Irwin Miller and his wife Xenia Simons Miller in 1953, is now owned by Newfields. Miller supported modern architecture in the construction of a number of buildings throughout Columbus, Indiana. Design and construction on the Miller House took four years and was completed in 1957. The house stands at 2860 Washington St, Columbus Indiana, and was declared a National Historic Landmark in 2000. The Miller family owned the home until 2008, when Xenia Miller, the last resident of the home, died.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Schafer</span>

David Schafer is an American visual and sound artist based in Los Angeles, whose practice integrates aural, textual, graphic and sculptural elements to create installations, public art and individual works that critics describe as immersive, spatial experiments. His approach combines self-consciously formalist aesthetics, a Pop Art sensibility, and postmodern Deconstructionist intent, often appropriating and reframing cultural motifs in order to investigate systems of historical and cultural memory, built space, and language. Schafer has exhibited nationally and internationally in museums, galleries and public spaces, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, The Drawing Center, MASS MoCA, Baltimore Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, SculptureCenter, and Vleeshal Middelburg. He has received awards from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, among others, as well as public commissions from the Public Art Fund of New York and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. Los Angeles Times critic Leah Ollman describes his work as a "heady jumble" producing collisions, contradictions and convergences at the intersection of architecture, sound, sculpture, language and theory in order to "disrupt communication intentionally, incisively, through strategies of fragmentation and interruption." Schafer has taught sculpture, art theory, digital media and sound at institutions on the East and West coasts since 1985, and is currently on the Fine Arts faculty at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles.

<i>Sculptures Bachelard</i>

Sculptures Bachelard is an In Situ work by French artist Jean-Max Albert installed in 1986 in the Parc de la Villette, Paris, France. It is named after the author of The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard. It consists of a set of 8 sculptures arranged around the perimeter of the Jardin de la Treille.

References

  1. Meyer, lecture notes: "The Spatial medium of modernism between open space and figural space/Kiley's articulated spaces and multivalent landscapes: abstract modern grid and contextual response/The grid, the bosque, the allée. Planted form as spatial device".
  2. Adrian Forty, Words and Building: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 256-275.
  3. James Rose, "Plant Forms and Space" Pencil Points 10(1938), 227.
  4. "The Sensation of Space", "The Elements of Enclosed Space", and "Urbanism and Spatial Order", 1941-1942.
  5. Bachelard's The Poetics of Space was published in 1951 and had immense influence on designers and artists.
  6. James Corner, "Representation and landscape: drawing and making in the landscape medium" Word & Image 8(July-Sept. 1992) 246.