form, meaning, and expression in landscape architecture

Form, Meaning, and Expressionin Landscape ArchitectureLaurie Olin

Laurie Olin, a landscape architect, is afounding Principal of Hanna/Olin,Ltd., in Philadelphia. His practice hasa broad and international scope andcurrently includes design for CanaryWharf in London and the restoration ofBryant Park in New York City. He hascollaborated with many prominentarchitectural firms such as I.M. Pei &Partners, Skidmore Owings and Mer-rill, and Davis Brody; his workincludes prizewinning competitionssuch as the Ohio State Visual ArtsCenter with Peter Eisenman and theCodex Corporation Headquarters withFred Koetter, and public works such asBattery Park City, New York and the15th Street Transitway/Mall in Den-ver. While in practice, he has alsotaught and pursued historic research inlandscape design. From 1982-1986 hewas chairman of the Harvard Gradu-ate School of Design, Department ofLandscape Architecture; prior to this,from 1974-1982, he was a member ofthe Landscape Architecture faculty atthe University of Pennsylvania. For hiswork and study in the field he hasreceived Guggenheim and Rome PrizeFellowships; he is currently a Trustee ofthe American Academy in Rome, aSenior Fellow in Landscape Architec-ture at Dumbarton Oaks, and amember of the Advisory Panel to theDesign Arts Program of the NationalEndowment for the Arts.

Abstract: This essay develops the thesis that the range in landscape design forms derives, directlyor indirectly, from nature and its processes, often translated through a series of abstractions andartistic expressions. Limitations upon the range and diversity of forms created have resulted largelyfrom cultural norms. Recent projects seeking to expand the choice of formal structure, materials,palette, and expression, including intended meaning, are examined and compared to seventeenth-and eighteenth-century works of Brown and LeN~tre, which are found to be more successful inthe# transformation of preexisting prototypes, first as abstractions from nature and second in thetradition of devices used to invest meaning. Despite a perceived tension between the evolutionarytendency of art to renew itself through change and transformation, and the general accessibility ofworks which is very much dependent upon their normative properties, the greatest examples ofdesign in the field accomodate both needs. Devices which can combine to create meaning andcharacterize style are considered in works of the nineteenth century (Olmsted) and twentieth century(Haag, Halprin). The conclusion affirms the centrality of metaphoric device and concern fornatuml process in the creation of work that eschews literal imitation of nature, but rather strives forunderstanding and emulation, informed by consideration of the history of endeavors to do so.

H ’istorically, landscape.design has derived a con-

siderable amount of its social value andartistic strength from three aspects ofthe endeavor: the richness of themedium in sensual and phenomeno-logical terms; the thematic contentconcerning the relationship of societyand individuals to nature; and the factthat nature is the great metaphorunderlying all art.

Human landscapes exhibit a

complexity akin to living organisms.They are composed of disparate ele-ments that form entities different fromtheir parts; they inhabit real time andinteract with their environment. Theycan be evolutionary, undergoing mor-phological change (e. g., trees growingand maturing with subsequent visual,spatial, and ecological changes), andcan even die, both physically and met-aphorically.

Recently, two important and, in

my view, incorrect theoretical assump-tions have become so ubiquitous thatthey have seriously weakened land-scape architecture as an artistic field,despite its social utility. The first hasbeen to confuse human landscapes andthe needs and achievements they em-body with natural landscapes and theirprocesses. Students, teachers, andpractitioners alike demonstrate a lackof understanding of the relationshipbetween the author/artist/designer and

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Figure 1. Yankee ethos of rockbound coast meets modern metaphysics: a fountain of rocks and mist at the Harvard University Science Center,by Peter Walker. Source: Laurie Olin, 1987.

the medium of expression; also, theyfail to understand its limits, range, andpotential on the one hand and displayan ignorance of the formal issues with-in the field and an anti-cultural stancethat eschews aesthetic concerns andtheir history on the other. The secondassumption is a new deterministic anddoctrinaire view of what is "natural"and "beautiful" that has replacedolder, alternative, views that wereequally doctrinaire. Couched in aborn-again language of fundamentalistecology, this chilling, close-mindedstance of moral certitude is hostileto the vast body of work producedthrough history, castigating it as "for-mal" and as representing the domi-nance of humans over nature.

This failure to appreciate the for-mal possibilities, typological reper-toire, and potential content (alle-gorical, iconographic, symbolic, em-blematic) of the field that have beendeveloped through history is encour-

aged in part by an anti-intellectual andanti-historical bias that runs deep inAmerican society and the profession,and in part by the wide scattering of thebuilt work in time and space. The diffi-culties that accompany the amount oftravel necessary to visit this diffusebody of work are compounded by thedifficulties of describing and recordingthe phenomenological nature of sitesthat possess even minimal complexityor subtlety. As long as I can remember,the vast majority of practitioners haveespoused a functional and "problem-solving" ethic which, although sociallybeneficial up to a point, has in effectasserted that mere instrumentality issufficient in the creation of humanenvironments, eschewing the more dif-ficult issues that are raised if one alsoaspires to practice at the level of art.

In theory, the range of formalexpression in landscape design couldbe as broad and varied in scope as thatof the numerous landscapes, things,

and events in the universe, if not moreso, since one might presuppose anopportunity for new experiments andcombinations of existing phenomena.The things we make might only be lim-ited by the laws of physics, chemistryand biology. As Buckminster Fulleronce remarked, "The opposite of natu-ral is impossible." 1 Yet despite theastonishing number of different land-scape designs built since pre-history,there has emerged a finite, even lim-ited, repertoire of favored formalstrategies and expressions that havebeen applied to countless different andparticular places through time.

Experimentation inContemporary Landscape Design

The principal reason for the lim-itation of formal expression thus far ispredominantly cultural, although cer-tain constraints in building materialsand physical intervention transcendboth art and technology. Water, when

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Figure 2. Harlequin Plaza, Denver, Colorado, by SWA (George Hargreaves, principal designer) and Genzler Associates.Source: Terry Campbell.

unrestrained, runs downhill; plants diewhen their biological needs are not met.Nevertheless, the choice of materialswith which to build--soil, stone, card-board, tin, etc.--is determined almostexclusively by social factors (economics,safety) and cultural factors (aesthetics).The stir created by revolutionaries indesign is usually brought about by theirtransgression of what is culturallyacceptable regarding the choice of mate-rial or form or composition.

Three recent American land-scape designs that exemplify suchtransgression of convention, therebyattracting critical scrutiny, attack, andpraise, are Martha Schwartz’s BagelGarden in Boston, SWA’s (GeorgeHargreaves) Harlequin Plaza in Den-ver, and SWA’s (Jim Reeves and DanMock) Williams Square at Las Colinasnear Dallas. These projects have fol-lowed other contemporary art anddesign fields in an attempt to broadenthe range of acceptable (and serious)

formal expression from that which isnormative in the field. No one does thisin the name of program, function, orbiophysical imperative except asbroadly defined--i.e., only if aestheticsand the risk taking that accompaniesinquiry and a craving for change (tosee what is around the next bend) aredefined as functions. In fact, one of thethings that all of these projects have incommon is how little they use the mosttraditional materials and devices oflandscape design, specifically plantsand reference to natural landscapes.Their shock value derives from thisabnegation of "normal" imagery andtexture. They are "contrast gainers"that in every likelihood will lose theirstrength and energy over time as theybecome members of a new class oflandscape designs that eschew depen-dence upon planting or direct referenceto natural form for its organization.This is not to say that they do not referto nature. They do, but indirectly, by

reference first to other works of art thatwere more directly inspired by "na-ture." As in transmission of energy inother forms and media, there is at eachstep a loss and a dissipation of thatenergy.

One dilernma of much recentavant-garde landscape design is that,in the desire to reinvigorate the field,many have turned to devices or strat-egies that lead away from the centralsource of its power: Nature. In theattempt to avoid banality and tran-scend imitation, a crisis of abstractionhas developed. By adopting strategiesborrowed directly from other fields andby referring to work that is itself anabstraction from the referent, manycontemporary landscape designers areproducing work that is thin, at best asecond- or third-hand emotional orartistic encounter.

MaterialsThe work of Martha Schwartz

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(the Bagel Garden, and her mother’sgarden in Philadelphia), of Schwartzand Peter Walker (the Necco field in-stalled temporarily at MIT), andWalker’s Tanner Fountain at HarvardUniversity raise the issue of palette.They argue that landscape design canuse a host of untried and unconven-tional materials. Garrett Eckbo andGabriel Guvrekian pioneered thisendeavor earlier in the twentieth cen-tury with mixed results. Both experi-mented with industrial materials as sub-stitutes for traditional materials. Onethinks of Eckbo’s use of plastic panels(corrugated and otherwise) and variousprecast elements and shapes in lieu ofwood arbors, masonry walls, andscreens: his search for new colors, tex-tures, and shadows; and his adoption ofshapes from the School of Paris painters,or of Guvrekian, who substituted shinymetal spheres and crystalline polygonsfor shrubs in his remarkable "Garden ofLight."

Landscapes throughout historyhave predominantly been made of nat-ural materials, with the objects andstructures placed within them madefrom processed or manipulated naturalmaterials. In the nineteenth century,iron, concrete, asphalt, and glass wereadded in the works of Lenne, Paxton,Alphand, Olmsted, and others. Recentprojects of artist Robert Irwin withephemeral qualities that are both anal-ogous and complementary to those ofplants and the play of light and shadethrough their structure and surfaces,and the successful mingling of metaland wire with natural elements shouldconvince any thoughtful person that theproblematic effort to expand and invig-orate the palette with which we work isa worthy one. On the other hand, whenone considers the overwhelming varietyof plants and the almost endless varietyof patterns that one can achieve withonly a few colors and shapes of pave-ment stones, it is easy to understandwhy some of the most gifted designersin the field have spent their careersworking with a limited palette that wasself-imposed, gradually reducing theirchoices to fewer and fewer elements,thereby producing profoundly poeticworks. In fairness, one must furtherremark that Schwartz and Walker haveembarked upon a similar reductiveregimen and that their exploration oftainted or unexpected materials and

formal orders has been carried out withenormous self-control and restraint.The self-conscious, continual referenc-ing to contemporary works or art ratherthan to the world itself, however, is agenuine weakness.

ImageryWilliams Square at Las Colinas,

Texas, near the Dallas Airport bySOM, SWA, and the sculptor RobertGlen can be considered to haveexpanded the range of expression cur-rently practiced by attempting torescue rhetoric and imagery from thepast, specifically that of Baroqueaquatic sculpture groups. This is arevisionist (even historicist) piece thatmakes the assertion that a landscapedesign composition today can includeelements that are figurative, narrative,and that they can be heroic in scale andunderstandable to laymen of theregion. This work of folk imagery"wild horses"--is raised to a level ofcivic prominence with violent and illu-sionistic presentation. The frozenmoment of the Hellenist traditionwhich was revived by Bernini and con-tinued by the Vanvitelli in works suchas Acteon and his dog the fountains atCaserta come to mind. The little jetswhich forever record the splash of thehooves are a touch that both the dilet-tante and connoisseur of the eighteenthcentury would have liked.

CompositionAt Harlequin Plaza (Figure 2),

George Hargreaves and his colleaguesused old and accepted materials ar-ranged in geometric compositions thatwere new and startling to landscapedesign in America. The materials--stone, stucco, soil, plants, metal, andwater--can all be found in the Bois deBologne and Central Park. What isnew and different (and unsettling tomany) is the compositional methodsand devices employed. The composi-tion is indebted to strategies developedin painting, especially surrealism. Thisis a landscape of displacement, distor-tion, and dislocation. There are echoesof Dali and DeHooch, of DeChiricoand Haight Ashbury, of Latin Amer-ica, and of the School of Paris. Thingsassume positions or weight that wedon’t normally expect. The floor, orpavement, which we usually expect tobe a fairly neutral ground quietly hold-ing everything in place, is not only a

brightly contrasting and active surface,but its orthogonal patterns are skewedand begin to writhe under the com-paratively weightless objects that breakand interrupt it more than sit upon it.Walls rise and fall, or are pulled apart,the outsides of which are harsh. Inside,between two central walls, things aresmall, fragile, oddly domestic, and outof place. Regardless of one’s personalpleasures and aesthetic preference, thisis an effective and moving work. Itstimulates and disturbs. It pleases andteases. It winks and talks tough. In thiswork we can see an old strategy thathas led to a succession of design stylesin painting and architecture. Style islargely concerned with the develop-ment of a set of formal characteristicsthat are common to a group of objectsor works of art (Renaissance, Baroque,Rococo, Picturesque, Gardenesque,Deco, Modern, etc.). Once such a setof characteristics becomes obvious, atleast to the point where a designer canconsciously know how to achieve them,then it is only a matter of desire to beable to break from those conventions.Examples of how to break from theconventions of classical, beaux arts,and picturesque design composition lieall about us like beacons in the work ofmany twentieth-century artists, writ-ers, architects, and musicians. Har-greaves simply stepped over that line,and utilized several of the most com-mon devices of our era--principallycollage and distortion.

A CritiqueI am a little uncomfortable with

the results of all of these works, partlybecause of my own predilectionsregarding what I wish to make myself,but also because of my skepticismabout either the position taken by thedesigner or the choice of subject ormaterials. Experimentation with newmaterials is desirable and Walker/Schwartz in their emulation of FrankGehry and numerous sculptors such asCarl Andre are to be applauded.Walker’s fountain in front of the Phys-ics building at Harvard--which placesa series of handsome glacial boulderswithin a field of asphalt and water,steam and an eerie hum--is a remark-able piece (Figure 1). In my opinion, itis stronger than many of Walker/Schwartz’s other works because it refersmore directly to the material that it


Figure 3. The horses of Las Colinas, near Dallas, an over life-size sculpture more in the spirit of Will James and Landseer than Bernini,by Robert Glen (plaza by SWA and SOM). Source: Tom Fox, Landscape Architecture 75 (September/October 1985), p. 65.

abstracts: natural landscapes of vio-lence and erosion. I would have ar-ranged the stones differently--denserto looser and not so uniform and equalin space and stone sizes--and I wouldhave set them within a sea of pebblesand smaller stones. This would, ofcourse, have completely changed theeffect and the meaning, which raises animportant question: How can changingthe spacing of the stones or the simplesubstitution of what is, after all, only thebottom of a basin (but it isn’t really abasin either, which is important) changethe meaning? Because we invest certainpatterns and materials with particularideas and meaning, especially regardingnature and man’s works, these patterns

are loaded with associations. In thiscase, the material--asphalt--and theuniformity of position between solid andvoid have an association in our culturewith the mechanistic and artificial, evento the point of abhorrence, whereas,stones and water are quintessentially"natural" and are almost universallyenjoyed by people, both old and young.This juxtaposition of the abhorrent andthe delightful creates a challenge to ourexpectations of what is normal orproper. Likewise, the mechanical repe-tition of the near grid and near random-ness of the stones, which denies particu-larity of place and focus, is both ironicin its self-denial (it is a particular placeand a focal point within its context) and

alludes to the absolute infinity of matterand its extension throughout the uni-verse--a clearly evocative and aptmetaphor to find at the doorstep of anacademic building devoted to the studyof matter.

This is a powerful and successfulwork, employing traditional artisticdevices for the presentation of mean-ing, some of which are referred toabove. There is more here, for thosewho take the time to consider, about theseasons, the mutability of matterm

water, steam, and ice, for instance--the deception of appearances, theenergy that comes unbidden from theearth or from the sky, volcanoes andsea coasts, and so on. The piece also

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raises questions about alternatives toconventional fountains with their cas-cades, basins and pools, copings, wallsand ornament. Although this designeschews planting, it relies for its successupon the circumstantial planting thatexists there as its context. The treesand grass of its campus setting form abackground, a benign cultural inter-pretation of "mother earth" againstwhich this disruptive and stimulatingcomposition is positioned. Like manyso-called site sculptors such as MichaelHeizer, Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, orAlice Aycock, who are enormouslydependent upon the pre-existence of abroad, cohesive, often beautiful, natu-ral or cultural setting in which to maketheir disruptive gestures or to buildtheir mysterious large-scale objects,this fountain (and the early work ofMartha Schwartz as well) are gesturesthat play off and against an environ-ment but are not about nor capable ofcreating an environment beyond that ofan extended object.

Denver’s Harlequi~ Plaza con-fronts different expectations and raisesother questions. How are we to regarda landscape of disorientation and alien-ation? Is surrealism an acceptablestrategy to employ in constructing an

ordinary part of the workaday world?Why or why not? Such thoughts firstoccurred to me upon seeing severalprojects ofAldo Rossi. These werevisually powerful schemes (for housingand education) that were obviouslysophisticated works of art. The mostapparent source of Rossi’s visual sche-mata is the early work of the Italianpainter DeChirico, whose hauntingwork I greatly admire. I balk, however,at its use for the design of everydayenvironments for family and civic life. Ido so because the principal focus ofthese paintings is upon alienation and ahallucinatory and obsessive preoccupa-tion with loneliness, self, and unful-filled yearning. DeChirico’s paintingsare among the most poetic works cre-ated in the twentieth century, but it isdebatable whether such private (even ifuniversal) attitudes regarding aliena-tion can and should be used as a basisfor design of environments for dwell-ing. The other undiscussed aspect ofRossi’s work is its familiarity andnostalgic evocation of the architectureof twentieth century totalitarianism--especially that of Fascist Italy and Ger-many. Do I think that Harlequin Plazais crypto fascist or perverse? No, but Ido think it transgresses the boundary

between that which is acceptable andunderstandable in private and thatwhich is welcome and desirable in pub-lic. This does not imply a doublestandard, but rather that we have dif-ferent needs as individuals and as agroup. That with which people mayindulge themselves on private estatesmay be of arguable justification whenproposed for the public realm. Myreaction has more to do with the rhet-oric of coercion and gratuitous violencethan it does with dreamlike distortionsof traditional architectural elements.Harlequin Plaza is, nevertheless, awatershed in American landscape com-position and imagery. It has opened uppossibilities that did not seem to existbefore its brash appearance.

The horses ofLas Colinas, likethe exuberant figure of Portlandia thathunkers (or floats?) above the entry toMichael Graves’s celebrated bunker inthe City of Roses, attempt the retrievalof a distant trope from a society pro-foundly different from our own. Sev-eral questions are raised by this revi-sionist work. Is any single image--regardless of its merits--adequate forcivic contemplation and elevation toheroic scale in an era of so manypowerful and multiple images? If the

Figure 4. View from Heaven’s Gate at Longleat Park in England, as redesigned by Lancelot Brown. Source: Laurie Olin, 1972.


answer is yes, is this the one to be sin-gled out for such an honorific situation?Or is it like many by Andrew Wyeth, awork that is nostalgic in its emulation ofthe technique and appearance ofauthentic work of the past yet lackingthe authority of those works, an emptysimulacrum of something else? Is it adaring and genuine piece, burstingwith disarming energy and innocence?Have its creators simply said that nar-rative and figurative sculpture used asthe centerpiece of a public space ispass6 only until someone steps forwardand dares to attempt it? ls this privateplaza in this suburban office sprawl apublic place? I am skeptical of thispiece, which seems too pat, too senti-mental, too much a product of westerncowboy commodity art of the sort thatfills galleries throughout the Southwestwith the kitsch that has devalued thework of Russell and Remington. Thereason to devote attention to this designlies in its attempt to shift the boundaryof what is acceptable, to retrieve anartistic strategy that has slippedbeyond the grasp of the modernistnorm. It is a powerful and evocativework; it has been embraced by thecommunity and has been the recipientof an ASLA award. It is art regardless

of how lasting or great it may turn outto be. What authority it possessescomes from cultural values and whatform it has comes from art, not fromnature or any fresh insight or abstrac-tion therefrom.

Landscape FormEverything that exists has form.

The words "formal" and "informal" asused in everyday speech are mean-ingless and an obstacle to a discussionabout design which by definitionalways contains formal properties ofsome sort. Where do forms come from?Forms come from forms first. Forms donot come from words. They cannot.Words can describe physical forms, butthey do not (or did not) originate them;nor can they perform operations uponthem. One must be familiar with a rep-ertoire of forms before one can usethem or manipulate them. This in-cludes the forms found in nature andthe forms of art, our art and that ofothers--other media, other cultures,and other periods. In nature are all theforms. In our imagination is their dis-cernment and abstraction.

Art, and landscape architectureas a subfield of art, proceeds by using aknown body of forms, a vocabulary of

shapes, and by applying ideas concern-ing their use and manipulation. Land-scape architecture, like other fields,evolves as it finds new ways to performoperations upon a particular corpus offorms--re-using, re-assembling, dis-torting, taking apart, transforming,and carrying forward an older set offorms--often quite limited in range,but constantly making new things withnew meanings. Occasionally a few newforms will be let in or discovered, butmore generally new material consists ofthe re-presentation or recombination ofmaterial that has been forgotten or hasbeen deemed banal or out-of-boundsfor some reason.

Once again, where does this rep-ertoire of forms come from? As I haveremarked elsewhere in a discussionabout places and memory, the onlything that we can ever know for certainabout the world is that which existsnow or has existed in the past. To makesomething new we must start with whatis or has been and change it in someway to make it fresh in some way. Tomerely repeat or rebuild that which hasexisted is not creative and does notadvance the field, eventually devaluingthat which is repeated. How to makeold things new, how to see something

Figure 5. Pastoral scenery in Blenheim Park by Oxford, England, as redesigned by Lancelot Brown. Source: Laurie Olin, 1985.

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common and banal in a new and freshway is the central problem in Art.Arthur Danto in the essay "Works ofArt as Mere Real Things" goes so faras to say that the central activity of artis to transform ordinary (or extraordi-nary) real things into things that areart, i.e., no longer ordinary or merereal things.2 Examples range from rep-resentations of landscapes (say inClaude or Innes) to Marcel Duchamp’sdeclaring a urinaI or bottle rack to beart works. The planting of trees inrows, whether good or bad, new or old,is an act of transformation and canunder particular circumstances be artof a very high order.

Two of the greatest landscapedesigners that ever lived are Andre LeN6tre and Lancelot Brown. Neither ofthese artistic giants invented the ele-ments that comprise the parts of theirgreatest compositions. In the case ofBrown, the meadows, clumps, andbelts of trees, lakes, dams, classicalpavilions, even the positioning strat-egies, all existed in the landscapegardens of his contemporaries andimmediate predecessors. Nevertheless,he produced unique, startlingly fresh,and profoundly influential designswhich still possess energy and author-ity. The elements he used can ’be foundin the works of Kent, Bridgeman, andWise and the villas of Rome, especiallythe vignas of the Villas Madama andJulia, but it was his particular assem-blage that blended these elements intocohesive and tightly structured (albeitlarge scale) compositions that were notepisodic or disjointed, but plastic and"whole." The source of cultural author-ity for these pastoral compositions wasliterature (from classical verse to theGeorgian poets) and graphic art (fromRoman frescoes to Claude and theDutch landscape school especiallyRuisdael, Hobbemaa, and Cuyp).Also, there was a predisposition on thepart of his audience to understand andappreciate his constructions, both assensual environs and as emblematicrepresentations of agrarian socialviews.

For Le NOtre, one could say thesame thing. Every shape and form heused exists in seventeenth century pat-tern books and in the sixteenth centuryItalian and French gardens which heknew as a child and young adult. Whatthen is so special and creative about his

work? Like Andrea Palladio in his workat I1 Redentore or The Villa Rotundaat Capra, he is working in a tradition,using standard elements, yet the resultsare more than a skillful or interestingrepetition, more than traditional. Hewas highly original. His invention isone of recombination and transforma-tion, frequently accomplished througha jump in scale with the simplest of ele-ments and unexpected juxtapositions.Take Chantilly as an example: everyshape--oval, square, circle, rectangle,ramp, parterre, and cascade--can befound in any of a dozen Roman gar-dens of the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies. Part of the transformationwas to take elements originally con-ceived as furnishings for terraces orsmall garden rooms adjacent to houses(admittedly Villas and Pallazzi) and tochange their scale, enlarging and fre-quently stretching them, and then touse these new figures to organize andunify entire estates or large tracts ofland, reversing the relationship untilthe building was essentially a furnish-ing or embellishment of the landscapecomposition. This is true even when, aswas usually the case, the building wasthe seed about which the enormous gar-den had grown. IfVaux-le-Vicomteand Versailles are two of his centraland most fundamental creations,Sceaux and Chantilly are possibly hismost original. This is largely becauseof the amount of transformation fromprototype and the relegation of thechateaux in each case to a peripheral ortangential relationship to the composi-tion, especially in its relationship to themost important water elements whichexist as if for themselves with the parkssubservient and organized about them.Here the shape, spirit, and meaning ofthese axial bodies of water and verdureare transformed from those that pre-ceded them in France and Italy, in hisown work as well as that of others. Thesource of their energy and authority issimilar to that of Brown’s work: foreignprecedent and aesthetic paternity(especially Roman literature, archae-ology, and Renaissance masterworks)plus contemporary science, particu-larly optics. How does one go aboutdoing such things? How did he know todo this? It is hard to say. It is obviousthat he had to abstract, perhaps Ishould even say extract, the forms, thetypes of basin, terrace, and bosque

from the works he was exposed to, fromhis practical and immediate experi-ence, and from representations inviews, prints, and plans. Then, too,there was probably a certain felicitousamount of chance and direction givenby the society, his clients, their budgets,programs, and desires, as well as thecapabilities and constraints imposed bythe site, the climate, and technology.

If one returns to my opening the-sis that the strength of landscapearchitecture derives from the fulsomesensual properties of the medium, itsexpression of the relationship of societyto nature, and the centrality of natureas the ur-metaphor of art, it is not diffi-cult to understand why the works ofBrown and LeN6tre are among thevery greatest in the field. Despite theirdifferences in geometric form and orga-nization, both men worked with thesame limited palette which reduced theelements of their designs to the mostbasic--earth, trees, turf, stone, wa-ter-and arranged them at a scale thatdwarfed the individual and created anambience which, if not resembling anynatural scene, by its very extent, diver-sity, and texture possessed theattributes of one. It is difficult to exag-gerate the impact of their work uponone’s sensibilities when on the spot,moving through their compositions.Artificial as they may be, ecologicallysimplified as they are, the effect is thatof being in a landscape larger thanoneself and beyond the immediatecomprehension or control of oneself, ofmany of the feelings one has in a "natu-ral" landscape--of light and space, ofamplitude and generosity. Althoughtwo generations apart, both men pro-duced work that responded to a partic-ular moment in the economy and socialstructure of their society, that could notbe sustained beyond their own life andcareer, and that was impossible to imi-tate or extend. Both refer to agricul-ture-whether that of pastoral herds orforest plantations, irrigation, anddrainage schemes--the larger organi-zation of the cosmos, and whether it isknowable or not. Both were masters ofthe simple detail and the subtle, com-plex, large design, thereby renderingtheir work truly analogous to the natu-ral landscape. Redundancy and profli-gacy does not appear to have been aconcern or issue, another natural anal-ogue. Neither ever designed or built a


Figure 6. The principal canal at Chantilly, by Andre Le N6tre. Source: Laurie Olin, 1983.

composition that visually or formallyimitated nature; both abstracted theirforms from nature, farming, and art.The lakes at Blenheim and Stowe, atVaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles allwere, in part, responses to an abun-dance of rainfall, surface water, andpoorly drained soils. Each one expand-ed or drowned the work of a predeces-sor with an uncanny sense of organiclogic. Until one has actually seen theseworks, on foot with one’s own eyes, onecannot appreciate their character,achievement, or worth. Students whoonly know this work from slides orplans in books have no idea what theyare like. In this way they also resemblenatural environments of great scale,beauty, and cohesion.

All of this may be true enoughand still one might ask, where did theprototypes Le N8tre found in the six-teenth century Italian gardens comefrom? In large measure they derivedfrom the villa gardens of ancient Rome,especially as codified in the great land-scape villas of the first century A.D.These in turn seem to have been de-rived from earlier eastern Mediter-ranean prototypes brought by Syrianand Greek architects working in thenew western centers of power andindustry. If one examines these remoteworks and their formal repertoire, one

finds a host of venerable and familiargeometric and organic shapes. Nearlyevery bronze age culture shows a pre-dilection for compositions composed ofprime geometric shapes, often elabo-rated into surfaces of intricate texturesof lines, whorls, and abstractions ofpowerful ambiguity--circles, squares,triangles, and their elaboration, recom-bination, and distortion. Knowledge,power, and the religious beliefs of thesepeoples were often embodied in suchimages and diagrams. The evolution ofsocial authority and power was coinci-dental with the development of theoriesof reality and technology. The elemen-tary shapes found in nature and ab-stracted by humans were, for manycenturies, both sacred symbols and thebuilding blocks of secular analyticalmethods. Today, spheres and cubes,triangles and cones are not as chargedwith meaning as they once were. Nev-ertheless, their ancient lineage andindisputable primacy in the vocabularyof formal structures are still sources ofconsiderable authority. In a world con-sisting of small towns, irregularconstruction, straw roofs, and fewpaved streets, surrounded by farmsand wilderness, overlooking broadplains, vast oceans, and dwarfed bymountains, the perfection of a sphereor cube and the order of geometric

symmetries were powerful inventions ofthe human imagination. Today, as anurban culture, housed continuously ina world of crisp Euclidian geometriesand surrounded by a surfeit ofmachined surfaces extending inDescartean order to the limits of thehorizon, it is the biomorphic shapes ofnature, the blurry, unclear, compound,and complex forms of natural processesthat intrigue us with their mystery,promise, and atavistic energy. Perfec-tion, regularity, and ancient geome-tries, especially those of classicalGreece and Rome, have been drainedof their energy due to overuse andexposure. Despite recent developmentsin post-modern architectural endeavorsthey remain empty to us of their origi-nal meanings. Once great abstractionsof nature itself, today they only refer toformer leaps of imagination. They havebecome too far removed from theiroriginal source and inspiration to beanything but derivative and banal tous. An echo of their former power stilloccurs, however, when small childrentake these platonic solids in their handsand stacking them one atop anotherconstruct their first imaginary worlds,miniature structures that invoke andreflect aspects of their known andimagined world.

Even the most casual examina-

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Figure 7. Bursting with life, this vegetationtypifies the ornament of sacred and civicarchitecture of classical Rome and Greece,a period which also codified numerousgarden plan forms still in use. Source:Laurie Olin, 1981.

Figure 8. Central Basin of the great water organ of the Villa D’Este at Tivoli in Italy.Source: Laurie Olin, 1974.

tion of forms used in Roman gardendesign and ornament reveals a directand rich tradition of natural forms andabstractions from nature as well as rep-resentational images that assume thestature of figures. By figure I intend themeaning as defined by Alan Colqu-houn who has differentiated the wordsform and figure approximately thus:form applies to "a configuration withnatural meaning or none at all" wherenatural meaning signifies meaningwithout the overlay of an interveninginterpretive scheme otZa culture; figureapplies to a "configuration whosemeaning is given by culture.’’~ Thisdistinction implies that the syntheticinvention of a figure organizes ideasand thus is both expresssive and didac-tic. There are therefore two traditions,the formal and the figurative which arealmost never totally separated, indeedoften inextricable. Each one, from timeto time, seems to have more or lessimportance or dominance in a workand its intentions and success. Much oftwentieth century art could be said tohave been interested to varying degreeswith abstract formalism and its pos-

sibilities (or limits). Recently,considerable interest in a renascent fig-ural exploration has been evident in allof the arts, including architecture andlandscape design. The three examplesof so called "post-modern" landscapeexperimentation with which I beganare part of this renewed interest in the"figural" aspect of the landscapemedium.

Landscapes and MeaningThe subject of meaning in

human expressions of all sorts is adaunting one with an enormous liter-ature. It is the province of numerousphilosophers of widely opposed views(Husserl and Wittgenstein, for in-stance, or Kant and Hegel, Plato andPopper). Husserl seems useful as astarting point in this matter. In his firstlogical investigation he says, "eachexpression not merely says something,but says it of something," it not only has ameaning, but refers to certain objects.¯ . . But the object never coincides withthe meaning."4 Immediately we areconfronted with a thicket of words, def-initions, and problems. Suffice it to

say, we are interested in non-verbalexpressions, those of landscape designand what they can mean. As NelsonGoodman put it in his stimulating dis-cussion of style in Ways of World-Making,’~Architecture, non-objective paintingand music have no subject. Their stylecannot be a matter of how they saysomething, for they do not literally sayanything; they do other things, theymean in other ways.’’5

Despite the frequent use of theanalogy of language and linguisticstructures and operations (my own useof the concept "vocabulary of forms"above, for example), landscapes are notverbal constructions. They can expresscertain things, can possess symbolsand refer to ideas, events, and objectsextrinsic to their own elements andlocus, and in certain circumstances canbe didactic and/or highly poetic. Howthey do this is not well understood.That they do is. Recent issues of vari-ous art history journals or the publica-tions of papers delivered at DumbartonOaks symposia are rich with examplesof sympathetic and recondite readingsof the meanings, iconography, and


imagery contained in various land-scapes, from classical antiquity to themodern era, both in the west and east.Particularly well-known examples arethose of sixteenth century Italy andJapan (Villa Lante, Villa D’Este,Ryoanji, Katsura, etc.).6

The fundamental questions con-cerning meaning in landscape designare probably the following:

What sort of meanings can a landscapeconvey or hold?

How do they convey or embody thesemeanings?

What, if any, correlation or rela-tionship is there between the intention of thedesigner of a landscape re: devices intended formeaning and the subsequent interpretation,reception and understanding of this or othermeanings by a viewer, user, or recipient of thelandscape?

Concerning the first two of thesequestions--there seem to be two kindsof meaning or large categories thatlandscapes possess (in Alan Colqu-houn’s terms all of these are figural tomore or less degree). The first kind is a"natural" or "evolutionary" meaninggiven to a landscape in the past orrecent times. (I regret using the word"natural" but have no better term athand as I hope will become clear.) Gen-erally, these relate to aspects of thelandscape as a setting for society andhave been developed as a reflection orexpression of hopes and fears for sur-vival and social perpetuation. Theseoften relate to particular places or fea-tures that are (or have been) sources ofsustenance and danger, safety, andplay, of stimulus and rest. The secondcategory are those that I shall refer toas synthetic or "invented" meanings.These encompass most of the works oflandscape design and represent ourart: Often, however, these works referto aspects or examples of the formernon-designed, although culturallyfreighted, group of landscapes andtheir meanings. I don’t mean to implyin this distinction that I think thatthose in the first category are not prod-ucts of human activity and imagina-tion. It is, after all, people who projectideas upon nature, who create values,systems, and structures of thought, notthe other way around. Whatever mean-ing occurs in any landscape, natural orotherwise, is only that which has beencreated by society. This we have seen

when cultures are in conflict, so trag-ically demonstrated when Europeaninvaders desecrated the sacred lands ofthe native American peoples. In themining of metals in the Black Hills ofSouth Dakota one can see how invisiblethese powerful and elaborate meaningscan be to those not of that society andits beliefs.

Archetypal settings developed inone culture and place after anotherhave contributed to the repertoire offorms and meanings used as founda-tions or structural elements of subse-quent synthetic, designed landscapes.These include landscapes of work,mysticism and worship, dwelling (bothindividually and as group settings),authority, pleasure, and death. Worksettings have included pastoral andarable farms as well as piazzas, streets,and roads. Patterns and structures ofsimplicity and elaboration associatedwith agriculture have a powerful reso-nance in this category. Religious andmystical settings are frequently cen-tered around unusual and dramaticlandforms, large or prominent featuresthat dominate regions, or sources ofwater and secret or inaccessible sites.Group settings related to dwelling andcommunity have often included thepiazza or forum-type of enclave, clear-ings, commons, and partially boundedspaces. These become transformed intoplaces invested with authority whencombined with approaches, avenues,frontality for presentation, and distor-tions in scale. Places most associatedwith pleasure have been those thatapproximate or have inspired gardensor areas of floral and natural beautyand delight--grottos, pools, cascadesand streams, bizarre and stimulatingformation of rocks, landforms, plants,and water. Consistently these land-scapes have induced feelings of fascina-tion, awe, fear, contemplation, amuse-ment, and delight--in short, visual andsensory interest and stimulations of allsorts.

Among the oldest and incontesta-bly most meaningful landscapes arethose that I would term "sacred" land-scapes, those associated with spiritualvalues and especially those of the originmyths of ancient peoples: Ise andItsukushima in Japan; Delos andDelphi, or Mt. Ida and Olympus inGreece; Clitumnus, Cumae, and Aver-nus in Italy; Yosemite and Shasta in

California; etc. Other sites have be-come special because of events thathave transpired there or persons whohave been associated with them.

Battlefields and the scenes of nat-ural or human disasters are one exam-ple. These range from the ruins ofancient imperial pleasure grounds(Hadrian’s Villa, Tivoli) throughbucolic farms turned battlefield (Get-tysburg, Pa.), to sites not remarkable inthemselves such as Walden Pond,which come to be shrines for those whohave embraced a set of ideas associatedwith the place. In this last case ideasassociated with freedom of the indi-vidual, contact with nature and itsprocesses, self-reliance and traditionsof civil disobedience and transcenden-tal literature in America and Englandare all conjured up to the initiated bythis scruffy glacial pond and its setting.Nothing of the sort is possible, though,for those unfamiliar with the writingsof Thoreau.

In many cases the meaningassigned to these sites was not origi-nally intended or anticipated. In oth-ers, particularly those dedicated togods or believed to be the ancestralhome of a people, it has been imposedor in some way intended toward thesite, invested and cultivated throughhuman action and designation. Arecent example of such intentions withsuccess (of sorts) has been the creationof the National Park System of theUnited States. Consider Yosemite,Niagara Falls, Yellowstone, the GrandCanyon, and the great peaks of theThelvest which were originally thesacred sites of American Indians andhave become so to us who, in the hun-dreds of thousands, annually make ourpilgrimages to them. Other countrieswhich have followed our lead do sowith recreation and ecological values inmind, but probably not with the quasi-religious motives of those involved inthe creation of our parks, especially thegreat western preserves that initiatedthe system. John Muir, Frederick LawOlmsted, and others involved in theircreation shared a transcendentalistpoint of view and an urge to establishnatural sanctuaries (sanctuary in thefull sense of its meaning) for the consid-eration and reverence of nature and theAmerican landscape in its most origi-nal, wild, and dramatic state. This wasin part a reaction to the rapid urban-

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Figure 9. Yosemite Valley, California, one of America’s sacred landscapes, looking east from the original trail into the valley.Source: Laurie Olin, 1987.

ization and industrialization of thecountry and partly an urge to forge acreation myth for the re-birth of thenation after the horror of the recentcivil war that had very nearly destroyedthe nation. The strength and beautyperceived in these landscapes, theirscale, and character was seen to beuniquely American and un-European;their association with Indian peoples assacred or treasured sites also contrib-uted to their being chosen. They were abalm and a stimulus. They were pureand innocent of human order. Protect-ing them from exploitation became acause for intellectuals, liberals, andupper-class members of the rulingestablishment. Yosemite came first;other sites were added later: NiagaraFalls, the Grand Canyon, Glacier, etc.This history is well-known but rarelyconsidered. These landscapes still havea number of meanings that can be readand articulated by some (but not all)members of our society and representwhat I have referred to awkwardly as"natural" or "evolutionary" meaningin landscapes, whether of human con-

struction or not.Now let us turn to those land-

scapes that are constructed and forwhich we might consider meaning to beinvested or synthetic as a part or prod-uct of our art. The methods of injectingmeaning into a designed landscaperange from creating tableaus with rec-ognizable creatures and figures toabstract references implied by thestructure or arrangement of non-repre-sentational elements totally unrelatedto those to which the design refers. Thecontent or "meaning" of many of themost famous landscape designs of thepast often was established through theuse of works of sculpture and architec-ture that already carried associationswith or recognizable references to par-ticular ideas and other works of art,literature, landscape, or society. Theiconographic program of the VillaLante or the Villa Aldobrandini withtheir classical figures and fountainsexpressing neo-Platonic concepts, andsuggesting or recalling passages fromOvid’s metamorphosis and classicalmythology while referring to the

patron, his family, and works are famil-iar to today’s student of landscapehistory. The study of iconography inRenaissance art and architectureestablished by Panofsky and Wittkowerhas introduced the theory that a workcan contain at least three levels of con-tent:

1. The subject of the work--that which is present or constructed(Denoted), i.e., it is a park, a garden,or a piazza, just as a painting presentsa subject, say a bowl of apples or aRoman soldier with arrows stickinginto him.

2. The reference of the work tothings not present but invoked (Con-noted); a range of mountains that onecares for, the martyrdom of a saint, atime or moment that has passed, etc.The things that are connoted can benumerous, all at once; there can bemultiple layers of reference within anyparticular image or composition, andoften times the higher the art, the moresuch connotations there are.

3. A mood or feeling about thesetwo previous things which is developed


through expression or style. A garden, likea painting, can be somber or gay, wittyor matter-of-fact. This is an issue thatproduces considerable confusion andhostility, for this aspect of design is theone that has the most to do with mat-ters of change in taste and fashion,although the previous one is moreclosely related to the recent change inattempts to reinvigorate the boundariesof the field of landscape architecture.

Goodman and Danto disagree insome respects concerning the effective-ness of meaning that can be intended.Some of the meanings that landscapedesigners of the classical tradition havecarried include thoughts about dutyand love for family and country(Stowe, Stourhead, Rousham), or havecombined attitudes toward classicallearning and the duties of the Christianchurch (Villas Lante and D’Este), orhave explored themes of passion andlove, of mental disorder and analogousforces in nature (Villas Farnesina andBomarzo). Themes such as metamor-phosis and transfiguration recurfrequently, as do those of a hero over-coming a variety of obstacles, whetherhistoric in neo-Ptatonic Christian over-lays upon pagan tales as in the choicebetween virtues of Hercules in the Pan-theon at Stourhead, England orcontemporary themes such as the Cal-vinist rocky path to the Temple ofWisdom and Piety (Apollo), also atStourhead. The tradition of depictingand pointing out through the use ofrecognizable and symbolic elements,combined with the emotive and con-notative device of naming things orplaces to insure the desired associationor "reading" of landscape compositionscontinued from the renaissance untilnear the end of the nineteenth century.Consider an example. At the end of along and stately mall of elms in CentralPark--the principal geometric figurewithin the entire park--at a placewhere the most important pedestrianpromenade intersects the principal car-riage drive, at an overlook to acarefully contrived lake with a "natu-ral" backdrop of a skillfully re-forestedhillside (now known as the "ramble"),the designers placed a remarkablefountain, piazza, stairway, and boatlanding. The entire ensemble is pre-sided over by a graceful angel, createdin Rome by Emma Stebbins. The namegiven to this place is Bethesda Fountain

(Figure 11). To the public today thename is not particularly emotive, butto the Christian, Bible-reading popula-tion of the years after the Civil War, thereference was a particularly mean-ingful one. Bethesda was the name of abasin in ancient Jerusalem that hadfive entryways. Its waters were consid-ered to possess healing powers, andmany who were ill, crippled, or inphysical or mental distress came tobathe in it. The Apostle John related(John 5:2) that one of Christ’s miraclestook place on this spot on a Sabbath,wherein a man who was too crippled toenter the basin on his own and had notbeen assisted by anyone lay languish-ing beside it. Christ told him to pick uphis quilt and walk, whereupon he wasable to do so. The result, of course, wasto get Jesus in further trouble with theauthorities for attending the sick on aholy day and for giving vent to the peo-ple’s excitability, stirring up their

expectations by this action. The repre-sentation of a source of cleansing,healing, and recovery was both person-ally (to Olmsted) and publicly anemotional and welcome message to beunderstood and appreciated at the timeby the citizenry regardless of class--notnecessarily regardless of faith, ofcourse. Additionally, parks were seenby Olmsted as performing a cleansingor purifying role within cities, an asso-ciation of great lineage. Alberti and theancients all have asserted the relativeimportance of nature as a therapeuticdevice. The central symbol of CentralPark, therefore, is one of healing andpurification.

This sort of representational andsymbolic narrative was not, however,to continue much longer in landscapedesign--at least in the most advanceddesignnin fact, not even in Olmsted’sown work. Just as in the work of Capa-bility Brown there is a rapid evolution

Figure t0. One of the ritual clearings within the Sacred Grove of Ise, Japan. It servesas an ancient site of worship within a cryptomeria forest on the Shima peninsula.Source: .Laurie Olin, 1985.

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Figure 11. Emma Stebbin’s Angel at Bethesda Terrace in Central Park, with the Ramble visible across the lake. Source: Tripp Sanders, 1980.

toward a more pure formal abstractionutilizing landscape structures to con-note landscape imagery. This can beobserved as early as Prospect Parkand becomes more noticeable afterOlmsted’s separation from CalvertVaux and the team of designers andcraftsmen associated with the New Yorkpractice who exemplify many of theaesthetic propositions of Ruskin andPugin. I refer to the more transcenden-tal and abstract tendencies of Olmstedwhich are revealed in his proposals forMount Royal in Montreal, Quebec, theFenway and Muddy River designs forBoston, and the quasi-southern marshlandscape he proposed for the southlake shore of Chicago which becamesuch an inspiration for Jens Jensen.

Let us consider some of the imag-ery of Prospect Park and its formalstructure. Although much has beenadded and destroyed in this park toblur the original meaning and intent, Ibelieve it can still be read and under-stood. Unlike Central Park, ProspectPark is not a patchwork quilt of objectsand entertainments stitched together ina rectangular setting or frame--epi-sodic and jumbled. Instead, it has apurposeful and plastic structurederived from the landform (Calvert

Vaux the genius here) which has beendeveloped with only a few major fea-tures and themes, each of which wasthen furnished to the degree appropri-ate to its use and purpose, with a care-ful eye to mood and thematic unity.The principal parts are the longmeadow and woodland belts thatdefine it; the broad lake and its shore;and a tumbled rocky set of ravines,ledges, and highlands which both sepa-rate and connect these first two. Withinthis wilder and more "natural" portionstands an enormous, crude, and puz-zling structure. It is a bridge carrying apedestrian trail over a stream andbridal path, unlike anything producedby the Olmsted consortium up untilthen. Its rude form should not be mis-taken for accident, poverty, or lack ofsophistication, for nearby stands themusic terrace, a feature analogous toBethesda terrace, replete with elabo-rately conceived and carved walls,piers, and sculpture with ornamentderived from native American floraand geology similar to that at the U.S.Capitol in Washington, D.C., andCentral Park. This sophisticated placewith busts of composers such as Bee-thoven faces west, out across the waterof the lake, to receive the full reflection

of the late afternoon and setting sun.Returning to the comparatively

paleolithic structure of Boulder Bridge,we are faced with a problem of mean-ing and intention. What are we tomake of it? Crude things go with wildplaces? In a way, yes, but much morethan that. Earlier in Central Park, thesame office had produced one elegantand delicate bridge after another withdetails of resplendent and enthusiasticcharacter, bursting with life and refer-ences to nature and its processes, espe-cially vegetation, with floral motifs,rosettes, entwined branches, and so on.The relationship to Morris and Ruskin,to the roots of art nouveau is every-where evident. But in this park all ofthe bridges are different in mood orexpression from those of Central Park,as are all of the landforms. Larger, sim-pler, more robust, several of thebridges are made of heavy industrialmembers, evocative of railways, ships,boilers, and the new heroic machines ofthe day. They are, however, touchedwith a few grace notes of a particularsort of ornament--the sort one associ-ates with Frank Furness and LouisSullivan, of singular floral motifs, oftenonly in one place, and low down nearthe pressure point, the contact area


between the engineered object and theearth. The machine devoted to humanand social purpose is portrayed as anoutgrowth of man and as a creature ofnature. Earlier there had been a fewhints, as in the partial step cut into arock ledge at The Ramble, of anattitude of man in nature as co-worker,making minimal gestures, and ofnature completing the art. LaterOlmsted even wrote in his Montrealreport:

When an artist puts a stick in theground, and nature in time makes ita tree, art and nature are not seenapart in the result .... the highestart consists, under such circum-stances, [in] making the leastpracticable disturbance of nature;the highest refinement in a refinedabstinence of effort; in the leastwork, the most simple and the leastfussy and pottering. 7

In my view, Prospect Park is ameditation on post-Civil War America.It presents Olmsted’s renewed inspira-tion drawn from the scenery of the farwest and his ernotional transcenden-talism-the grandeur and roughness ofthe landscape on the one hand andyearnings for peace and prosperity, foragriculture and industry to serve theneeds of the nation and to producegraceful, livable cities on the other.

Boulder bridge does not stand for anyone thing. It is a contributing elementto a larger fabric, a mysteriously geo-logical and non-cultural detail, ambig-uous and heavy, the metamorphosisof boulders into the semblance of abridge. In this fashion his later workcan be seen as poetic and emblematicin much the same way as those ofBrown and Repton were. Unlike Kentand Hoare, or other earlier connois-seur-designers whose work presentedits meaning through a series of tab-leaux of silent assemblages of pavil-ions, inscriptions, evocative sculpture,and titles, Olmsted moved to a moreabstract and sophisticated presenta-tion. This is partly because the ideas tobe presented made reference to otherlandscapes and to their meaning forsociety, not to stories about gods orpatrons, and had more to do with gen-eral concepts of the medium, theexpression of physical properties, andthe manipulation of them as part of thepresentation (the denotation) and as anembodiment in these works of the for-mal ideas that were contained withinthe earlier and more anecdotal nar-rative landscapes. In this development,he had retraced the evolution of thestrategy of presentation and analogouscontent of the Japanese stroll gardens(which he never saw).

Rhetoric and Metaphor inLandscape Design

Regarding expression, one mustaddress "rhetoric" and "metaphor" inlandscape design. If works of designcan be considered to refer to things thatare not present and can do so whileestablishing a particular mood or feel-ing, then those devices that are used tosuggest, persuade, or lead an audienceto the desired conclusion are what hasbeen called rhetoric. A rhetorical ques-tion is used to make a statement not bystating it, but rather by leading the lis-tener to complete the thought, to reachwhat might at the time or situation cre-ated by the author of the rhetoricalquestion appear to be the obvious or"natural" conclusion. Aristotle, whounderstood such things as well as any-one ever will, believed that rhetoricconsisted of those effects that seek toarouse certain attitudes toward what-ever is being presented (he was mostlyreferring to verbal structures). In hisview rhetoricians must have a sufficientunderstanding of human sensibilityand emotion so that they can charac-terize an action or an object sufficientlyto induce the desired response in theiraudience, i.e., anger, sympathy, dis-tress, patriotism, etc. "It is not enoughfor a rhetorician to demonstrate that acertain feeling ought to be felt, or that

Figure 12. This mysteriously lithicstructure, Boulder Bridge, spans the greatravine of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, part ofOlmsted’s post Civil War essay in thedevelopment of an American landscapeidiom. Source: Laurie Olin, 1978.

Figure 13. Floral detail in iron of Bridge No. 24 over a bridle trail in Central Park, representa-tive of the influences of William Morris, OwenJones, and Ruskin. Source: Laurie Olin, 1981.

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Figure 14. Basin, Bloedell Conservancy, Bainbridge Island, Washington, by Richard Haag. Source: Laurie Olin, 1983.

his audience would be justified to feel itand perhaps unjustified not to feel it:he is only worth his salt if he gets themto have that emotion and does not justtell you what you should be feeling.’’s

The devices and strategies that design-ers use to manipulate a setting and itsfurnishings to produce responses aremany and normally involve a remark-able amount of craft and learning. Asin every other art a certain amount offeeling and instinct for the medium andits devices are necessary. To this, onemust then add a level of performanceability before one can begin to manipu-late or discuss style, expression, andmeaning. Consider the phenomenon ofrhetoric in the art of building design.Many critics, historians, and philoso-phers have commented upon the"verticality" of Gothic cathedrals, andthe fact that this expression of the ideaof verticality, this property that has

been invested into the inert materialsthrough the manipulation of form,structure, and detail, gives these build-ings a property that is not possessed byother buildings. Furthermore, in someways this "vertical" characteristicwhich we read in these buildings islinked to metaphors for soaring, risingup from and leaving the earth in somemanner similar to ideas held by thepeople of the religion that built themand that were associated with the pro-gress of the human soul after death aswell as the assumption of the resur-rected Christ and his mother intoHeaven, which was poetically consid-ered to be away from the earth, upabove the clouds in the sky or heavens.

The piety and yearning forrelease from life on oarth was embod-ied in these structures through numer-ous strategies of design related to thesuppression of architectural motifs that

normally connote mass or weight, andwhich emphasized verticality over hori-zontality through distortion, stretchedproportions, segmenting of structuralmasses into what appear to be bundlesof tall thin elements, etc. That thearrangement of parts and their artic-ulation and shape can change morethan a building’s appearance is anestablished theory of architecturalpractice and analysis of our time. AlanColquhoun, Kenneth Frampton,Anthony Vidter, Robert Venturi, PeterEisenman, and Jorge Silvetti have writ-ten eloquently and at considerablelength about the rhetoric and devices oftwentieth-century architecture and itspredecessors. Very little has been writ-ten about the rhetorical devices em-ployed in landscape architecture,especially by its greatest practitioners.Hazelhurst and Woodbridge areamong the few who have tried. Even


Figure 15. Pond, Bloedell Conservacy, Bainbridge Island, Washington, by Richard Haag. Source: Laurie Olin, 1983.

less has been written about such mat-ters in contemporary practice. Theentire effort is clouded by the nature ofthe medium. The fact that naturalmaterials, some of them alive, are fre-quently used to represent aspects ofnature and landscape (i.e., the referentand referee may be made of the samesubstance) greatly complicates matters.This is especially so when one turns tothe most powerful rhetorical device--metaphor.

The most common and per-suasive poetic device used in all fieldsof art is the metaphor; indeed, meta-phor seems to be almost synonymouswith art. Metaphor is commonly de-scribed as a figure of speech in which aname or descriptive term is transferredto some object to which it is not prop-erly applicable. There must, therefore,be an untrue equation. It is thedescribing or presentation of one thing

in terms of another. It is not literallytrue at all, but there is a discoveredtruth or insight that does in some waymake sense and gives us a new under-standing of the world or some aspect ofit, whether small or large, funny ortragic. The old cliches that use a riveras a metaphor for time or life are exam-ples; Shakespeare’s phrase "all theworld’s a stage" is another; or KennethKoch’s student who in error penned themasterpiece, "a swan of bees." ArthurC. Danto in The Transfiguration of theCommonplace describes at great lengththe mechanisms of metaphor and itscentrality to the creation, meaning,and understanding of all art. It wouldbe foolish to attempt either a synopsisor to paraphrase this remarkable essay.I refer readers to it.9 In his view onething essential to the workings of meta-phor is a phenomenon of incomplete-ness and correlation upon which the

audience must react for the metaphor towork. In important ways this is relatedto and partially derived from the "rhet-oric" employed by the artist/designer.It is also conditioned by the education,experience, and attitudes of theaudience. Therefore, as education,experience and beliefs change, meta-phors can die, lose their potency,become clichfis or stale figures ofspeech, design or art.

It is also through the evolution ofsociety and education, knowledge andvalues, especially as stimulated by his-torians, critics, and artists, that dead orlost metaphors can be revived. Itseems, therefore, that there is a guar-anteed tension between the nature ofart (its processes for renewal, evolu-tionary transformation, and thepotency of its metaphors) and theaccessibility or immediacy of its mean-ings in a changing society. This process

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has intensified in recent decades. AsClement Greenberg has commented,"modernization" in art has largely con-sisted of discarding expendable con-ventions. 10 As long as conventions sur-vive and can be identified, they will beattacked. This will continue until theresultant work begins to deny its ownessence or can no longer be understoodto be art in the form or medium as pre-viously intended. In the view of manypeople, painting and music have cometo a halt, for now, in terms of formalinvention and revision and can onlyretrace various aspects, nooks, andcrannies of their historical corpus--appearing to have reached the limits oftheir recognizability and validity. Thesame cannot yet be said for the archi-tecture of landscapes and buildings.

Often the most "advanced" art-ists do not set out to be revolutionaryor advanced, but rather to be good.The "advance" comes from an emula-tion of those qualities that they admirein previous work. As a rule, havingdigested the major art from the preced-ing period or periods, the young artistor designer usually looks for alternativeones in order to break away from over-powering precedents. In landscapedesign it would appear that a momenthas arrived where many practitionersand students are looking for alter-natives to conventions that are per-ceived to be empty and used up. Some(as I have remarked earlier) haveturned to the conventions of art. This,however, is to place oneself in a second-ary or derivative relationship to thefundamental source of form and imag-ery in the field, i.e., the world ofnature, natural processes, and the cul-tural landscapes of the past, whethersacred, agricultural, or ornamental.

Several of America’s most origi-nal and powerful landscape designersof the twentieth century appear to havedrawn upon these primary sources.Richard Haag, A. E. Bye, and Law-rence Halprin have all produced directfresh abstractions of natural phe-nomena. Thomas Church and DanKiley have done the same with particu-lar landscapes and gardens of the past.All of these individuals have under-stood the need to abstract and distillformal essences without imitating orbuilding miniature encapsulated ver-sions of the source of their inspiration.Their work represents the first truly

fresh development (both stylisticallyand formally) since the late eighteenthcentury.

Ed Bye has produced some of themost abstract work, for instance theSoros garden in Southampton on LongIsland which looks neither like a paint-ing, nor a garden, nor a naturallandscape. It is truly a compositionthat could only exist in the landscapemedium. It is pared down and yetdeeply sensual. Its subject matter is theearth and its surface is delineated bylight, the texture of plants and water inall of its forms--mist, water, and snow.

Haag, too, has plumbed thedepths of our urban and rural psyches,maneuvering the City of Seattle intoleaving the monstrous heart of a gasrefinery as a colossal memento-mori inthe center of a park on Lake Union.Despite a citizenry that wanted to builda pseudo-sylvan realm, Haag sub-verted the plan into an archaeologicalplayground of genuine meaning andpoetry. This park now exists and maycome to be a fine one, in a conventionalsense, in terms of its verdure and facili-ties. But it also has a sculpture manytimes more powerful than all the siteartists in America could make, onewhich speaks to us about our past inways that only the broken aqueductsand fallen columns of ruined templescan. There is no foolishness, no senti-ment, no false note. There is also noother urban park quite like it.

Elsewhere, in the woods of Seat-tle’s Bainbridge Island on PrenticeBloedell’s estate, Haag quietly laboredfor over fifteen years on another highlypersonal and startlingly fresh series oflandscape studies (Figures 14 and 15).Linked to each other and to the place,they constitute an extended essay onthe making of landscape compositions.Most are produced by a strategy ofsubtracting from the second-growthforest. Several examine traditionaldevices of the Orient--moss gardensand miniature abstractions that dwarfthe adjacent larger landscape, the strollsequence of views; or western conven-tions-the reflecting ponds, hedges,and geometrics of the Renaissance, theinvented naturalism of the eighteenthcentury (in this case a natural-seemingpond created to attract blackbirds forthe pleasure to be had in their song),and so on. I know of no other personwho could so cunningly create a garden

room in the forest presided over by ahaunting collection of moss-coveredstumps, that stand as gaunt remindersof the primeval forest that once stoodthere on what is now the estate of one ofAmerica’s wealthiest timber barons.

Haag’s work, like that of an oldZen monk (which he often resembles),confounds us with its apparent direct-ness and deep subtleties. Like Sungdynasty scrolls or an old koan, it seemsto grow directly from experience andthe forces of nature. The artist hassomehow stepped back out of the pic-ture. It seems simple, yet contradic-tory. What had been a swimming pooland terrace have disappeared. In theirplace a great mound of white marblechips has appeared, next to a hole inthe ground--also of the white stonechips. This act of quiet displacementsits within a green sea of grass. Theterrace itself has been sawed up intobits, some of which remain driftingabout in this lawn. Like fragments of ashattered planet they move away fromthe center of the space and appear toorbit the haunting white pyramid. Thisin turn is encircled by planted moundswhich, in their color and texture,appear like distant mountains. Beyondthese, the light filters through clearingsand deep vistas that Haag arranged faroffinto the woods of Agate Point. Thiscomposition demonstrates a masterywhich grows out of a lifetime of devel-oping abstract representations. Haag’sBloedell designs are among the mostpowerful works of this century in theirexploration of the relation of gardens tonature. It is only to be lamented thatthe University of Washington hasrecently destroyed and mutilated sev-eral portions of his unfinishedmasterpiece.

Almost as the alter ego to thisquiet work executed in media rus, standsthe exuberant and equally inspiredwork of Halprin which burst forth inthe heart of numerous American citiesin the 1960s and 1970s, most notably inPortland and Seattle. Long after thisone man theater-workshop, circus, andhuman dynamo is gone, the work willremain, the best of which is superior toall of its imitations around the world. Itis no surprise to those who know of themany years of residences (e. g., MacIn-tyre in California) and suburbanshopping centers (e. g., North Park,Dallas) which Halprin cranked out,

166 Landscape,Journal

that his work is genuinely intended forthe pleasure and use of people. His cel-ebrated fountains (several of whichderive a considerable amount of theircharacter from the sensibility and intel-ligence of Angela Danadjieva whoworked on them under his direction)are both an extension of the EuropeanBaroque public fountain tradition anda departure from it, conditioned bytheir American context. Halprin, him-self, has been quite articulate about thesources of form and imagery in thiswork: the high sierras and their glaci-ated valleys, boulders, torrents, andmeadows; the carved cliffs and head-lands of the Pacific coast fromCalifornia to the Northwest; the over-whelming human creations anddevastation of granite quarries; and acouple of the great Italian fountains,especially the central passage of thewater organ of the Villa D’Este atTivoli. The Portland Auditorium Fore-court Fountain and the one built over afreeway in Seattle are not pastiches ofthis source material, however, butdeeply organic and plastic creations.Echoes of the sources of their inspira-tion reverberate through the massingand even the shape and batter of themonoliths, plinths, and buttress shapesover and down which the water cas-cades. Nowhere does this work reallyimitate or literally represent, or evenlook like its antecedents, either naturalor cultural. Halprin, like Bye, Haag,and Kiley, adamantly rejects the pos-sibility that one can or should imitatenature. One should be inspired by it,emulate its logic, generosity, processes,and forms, but eschew attempts ordesires to copy it; all of them have saidthis in their words and affirmed it intheir work.

The largest and most radicalbreak from the past in our time hasbeen our attitude toward composi-tion-the conventions of order. Tradi-tionally, in European art there has beena strong tendency to bring diverse ele-ments of any work into a balancedcomposition, replete with harmony,and symmetry (often in several dimen-sions), to complete a whole whichreaches a degree of resolution andfinality. This can be done with exuber-ance and considerable movement andformal complexity as in the greatBaroque works, or with a calm, quiet,restraint of form and shape approach-

ing near stasis as in certain neo-classical gardens and buildings. In astatement admired and quoted by E L.Olmsted, the French landscape archi-tect Edward Andre notes: "The firstlaw of a work of art, either on canvas oron the earth, is to be a whole.’’11

Although that probably is still trueenough, the criteria of what is anacceptable whole is probably very dif-ferent today than in his time. Twen-tieth century art has opened new pos-sibilities which have become part of ourmental equipment, significantly alter-ing our visual sensibilities. Cubism, forinstance, introduced the now com-monplace idea that multiple points ofview can exist within a single work ofvisual art and that apparent conflictsbetween them do not need to be re-solved. Collage has introduced furtherstudy of the relationship between rep-resentation and illusion and betweenthat of the fragment or part to thewhole, while utilizing a combination ofmass produced images and handmadeor preindustrial craft gestures as rawmaterials for representation. Theresults have been the recombination ofshattered or dislocated fragments intosomething other than that of their ori-gin. This use of real rather thanrendered material, when translatedinto the use of ready-made industrialitems or the use of things that aremeant to be absent yet referred to, butare in fact present, has a direct bearingupon landscape architecture. Thisironic position when taken toward thetradition of representation and the sur-plus of images in our society has onlybegun to filter into the field. FletcherSteele, Gabriel Guvrekian, and Gar-rett Eckbo certainly have broken someground here, but only recently haveWalker, Schwartz, Hargreaves, VanValkenberg, Weintraub, and a newgeneration, especially on the WestCoast, begun to mine this rich vein ofideas. Fragmentation, dislocation, dis-placement, and distortion have allbecome acceptable strategies for designmanipulation of traditional materialand imagery, and are central in effortscurrently underway as the field renewsitself. The schools are full of studentsexperimenting with these strategies,and we will probably be awash in work,much of it not very good, that attemptsto put it into practice. Nevertheless, itis probably for the best. Inevitably this

will lead some back to a re-examinationof the plant palette, landform, and nat-ural process. The forms available tocast this material into compositions,however, may partake of the new struc-tures revealed through the telescopeand microscope ranging from those ofrecombinant DNA to the most archaicobstructions of the Bronze Age andtomorrow’s computer technology.

The subject matter or meaningsthat I believe are being dealt with inthe most thoughtful landscape designstoday--beyond the programmatic andinstrumental--are the following:

1. Ideas of order.2. Ideas of nature including a cri-

tique of past views as provoked byknowledge of ecology.

3. Ideas about the arrangementof cities and thereby society and itsdesires (as well as needs).

4. Ideas about the medium as anexpressive one (the landscape asmedium) revealing something aboutour methods and its processes.

5. Considerations about the his-tory of art and landscape design, andthe history of places--their archaeology.

In these, the design expression isoften a critique of past designs andlandscapes. Many of the best works ofthe moment are inquiries into the valid-ity of past expressions and theirextension into the present, as well asbeing new and healthy creations of theirown. One need only think of RichardHaag’s Gasworks Park and BloedellConservancy Gardens in Seattle to real-ize the validity of this statement. Inworks like these one sees that the sensualproperties of the medium areundiminished, that it continues to carryan expression of our ideas about natureand our place in the scheme of things.Finally we see the power of freshabstractions and how futile are theattempts to replicate, nature--in frag-ment or toto--as a design method or agoal.

Author’s Note:

If this article hadn’t become so long I would haveliked to present some of the recent work of ourfirm to demonstrate particular aspects of how wehave attempted to introduce some of this into ourpractice. Another article, particularly dealingwith recent works, seems to be more appropriateand will be forthcoming.

Olin 167

I. The authr f irst heard Fuller say this in a public lccturc at Columbia University in the spr~ng of 1965. The concept pervades much of FulIcr's work and writing. 2. Arthur Danto, T m n s h ~ i m o/dc Com- mmplace. Cam bridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. 1981, pp 1-32. 3. Alan Colquhon, "Form and Fiwre," Opposi- rims 12. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 29-3 7. 4. Edmund Husserl, Lgitul T n ~ s t ~ : ~ # i o t u translated by J. N. Findlay. New York. Humanities Pmss, 1970, p. 267. Sce also J. N. Mohanv, " Husserl's Theory of Meaning. " in Frellcrick Ell~ston and Peter McCormick, eds., H u w l Expori!imt and Amisa ls South Bcnd, Ind .: Uni-

versity olNotrc name Pms, 1977, p. 18. 5. Nelson Gocdman, 1978, way^ of i&Idmakrn~. Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett PubIishinq Com- pany, 1978, p. 23. 6. See David Coffin, ed., The I!aliaa Garden, Washin~ton, D.C.: Dumbanon Oaks, 1972, especialIy Elisabeth MarDougall, "Ars HOP tulorurn: Sixteenth Century Garden Iconography and Literary Theory in Italy," pp. 37-59; or CoKin's own study of the Villa Lante, Tht Vslla in !he LI) ofRmrssnncc Home, Princcton, NewJ~mcy. Princcton Univcnity Press, pp. 347-351 Thcre are numerous books that discuss .Japanese gardens. One of the best remalns Masao Hayakawa, Thc &dm Art afJtpn, New York WeatherhilllTokyo: Heibonsha, 1973. 7. Frcdcrick Law Olrnsted. "Montreal: A Moun- tain Top Park and Some Thoughtr on Art and

Nature," in S. B. Sutton, CiniliringArnerim Crt- rcs: Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971, pp. 204-206. 8. Danto, op. crt., p. 169. 9. [bid., pp. 163-208. 10. Clcmcnt Grwnberg, "Amencan Type Paint- ing," in Art and Culture. Boston: Rea~on Press. 1961, pp. 208-229. This remarkable essay explores the notion that American Abstract Expressirmists managed to makc explicit matters that were left irnpl~c~l in previous European painting ancl vice versa. I 1. Quoted in David Bellman. "Frederick Law Olrnsted and a Plan for Mount Royal Park," Mount l?oycr/, MO~LYCU!, Supplement # I , Canadia~ Art Reuue, Ottawa, Canada, 1977, p. 537 (catalogue accompanying exhit)ition ofthe same name at the Musee McCord, MrGill University, Montreal).

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