Corner Landscape
Corner Landscape
Corner Landscape
THIS TWO-PART ESSAY examines the theoretical work of James Corner across the
1990s. Part one begins with a polernical analysis of Corner's originating notion of a
hermeneutic practice of design as published in Landscape Journal in 1991. The essay
necessarily broaches themes of ecology, critical regionalism and the broader panoramas
oflandscape planning as they are encountered in Corner's writings. Part one identifies
an emergent dialectic between landscape architecture as scenography or infrastructure
in his writings. In order to appreciate Corner's work, part one establishes and discusses
the philosophical grounding of his position. Part one is concerned with theory, part
two with praxis.
Part two, following Corner's lead, summarises and comments upon some emerging
design methods and specific design projects so as to situate the issues raised in part
one. Part two begins with the unbuilt Parc de la Villette of 1982 by Rem Koolhaas
and discusses its ramifications. Part two revolves around arguments put f()rward by
Corner in the late 1990s for the agency oflandscape design as structuring development
rather than symbolising culture and nature, arguments tor what landscape design
does not only what it means. To facilitate this, the writings of Bart Lootsma and Alex
Wall who, along with Corner, presented the most pertinent and provocative themes
in Corner's latest book Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape
Architecture, are considered in some detail. Part two concludes with thoughts on
datascaping - a new design methodology synonymous with current trends in Dutch
urbanism and one that impresses Corner with its capacity to manage and manipulate
complex design programmes.
Taken as a whole the essay offers neither a set of findings nor feigns conclusion;
rather, it goes to the co-ordinates Corner has set out and explores the field they
demarcate. The essay does, however, seek to qualifY the claim that James Corner is
articulating a middle ground between the deleteriously exclusive categories oflandscape
planning and landscape design and that this middle ground is crucial for landscape
architecture's future as a 'synthetic and sttategic art form'.
Telephone: +61-8-9380-1567
Fax: +61-8-9380-1082
www.room413.com.all
Email: rweller@cyllene.U1ua.edu.au
KEY WORDS
Hermeneutics
Critical Regionalism
Ecology
Landschaft
Vertigo
Programme
lnfmstntcturc
Fields
Objects
Mapping
Datascape
Modernity
INTRODUCTION
HIS TWO-PART ESSAY is an interpretation of, and extrapolation from, James
Corner's intellectual endeavours of the past decade. l Over this time span,
Corner has covered a diverse subject matter, ranging from philosophical musings
under the rubric of hermeneutics in the early 1990s, to a recent concern for how
data and design processes can be more creatively and critically interwoven and
REFLECTION
HERMENEUTICS
Corner's intellectual impact began in the early 1990s with two essays in Landscape
JournaL 'Discourse on Theory l: Sounding the Depths - Origins, Theory and
Representation' provided a useful cursory history of the philosophy of science as a
way of contextualising landscape architecture's own narratives. 6 'Discourse on
Theory II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the Alternative of
Hermeneutics' went on to sketch a contemporary philosophy of landscape design
based on, and borrowing from, hermeneutics, the study of textual interpretation.
Hermeneutics, unlike scientific claims to objectivity, is concerned with the
subjective and situated construction of meaning. 7 Corner explains that, in its
application to the arts, hermeneutics "relates to textual exegesis (interpretation
and explanation) and to the more general problems of meaning and language.
Hermeneutics necessarily involves reflection and cannot be reduced to rule-governed
technique or method. Interpreters are not passive observers but bring with
themselves certain ideas and knowledge that necessarily enter into the interpretation
(Le., an inevitable prejudice or bias)".8 That is to say, that what a scientist might
consider bias, a hermeneutician would identify as an inescapable part of the
formation of knowledge, a key post-structural tenet. In so far as both science and
art are modes of interpretation leading to the construction of meaning, the scientist
and the artist are both engaged in hermeneutic processes but, unlike science,
hermeneutics accepts and begins with the truism that knowledge is only ever partial
and relative. Engaged in poetic interpretation, hermeneutics opens itself to
speculation, oscillating between subject and object, mapping the intrigues of
ephemeral understandings and illuminations.
Because a landscape architect is responsible for the act of embodying
interpretations oflife and world, attention to hermeneutic structures and processes
is well advised. Indeed, the garden (landscape architecture's home) is a richly
hermeneutical site, structured as it is by metaphor that, in turn, embodies profound
interpretations of space, place and time. Taking into account, or trying to trace,
the multifarious interpretations involved in the creation, location and subsequent
interpretation of a design is then to register the work's hermeneutic valency.
Hermeneutics finds a corollary in landscape architecture because both seek to
understand and account for the distance between the subject/object, a divide that
characterises western scientific, philosophical and environmental traditions.
However, unlike late modern landscape design and planning rationales that overdetermined design with positivistic methodologies, Corner's hermeneutic landscape
approach is metaphorical and rhetorical, one in which the subjectivities of the
author are implicated reflexively.
Obviously closer to the ambit of hermeneutics th~n methodological planning,
is landscape architecture's traditional concern for site-specific poetics. Such poetics
found a postmodern incarnation in the phenomenology of Norberg Schulz and his
resurrection of genius loci. Coupled powerfully, and yet problematically, with Martin
Heidegger's notion of dwelling profoundly, Schulz turned away from a modernist
RICHARD WELLER
utopia and alternatively advocated a renewed sense of the everyday and the corporeal:)
This embodied yet somewhat mystical spirit of place became the more rational notion
of the sense of place as eminently sensible advocates of landscape architecture, such as
George Seddon, moved to temper the inherently unpredictable existentialism of
art with the reason of science. lO As I read it, Seddon sought, understandably, to
guide the mass production of landscape architecture (that loomed toward the end
of the 1970s) with a method based on natural science.
Although no enemy to art, Seddon's emphasis on method and biophysical
characteristics sidelined the designer's speculative free will that Corner's
hermeneutics not only accepts but foregrounds in the design process. Respect for
site conditions and techniques of mapping them, remain fundamental to the act
of landscape architecture but, as a design method that marginalises the necessarily
hermeneutic intrigues of creation and experience, Seddon's positivism was destined
for reduction in rote learning, as peddled throughout design schools in the early
1980s, and for trivialisation in commercial practices that found that it not only
concealed but also authenticated the otherwise capricious nature of development.
It is too simplistic to polarise positivism and hermeneutics. Nonetheless, it helps
to appreciate that Corner's inclinations toward the poetic are invoked against this
backdrop where, by the 1990s, landscape design methodologies, deterntined by
environmental psychology and natural science, were widely acknowledged as
aesthetically and intellectually reductive. Accordingly, by emphasising that the design
and designer are both culturally situated and constructed, Corner's hermeneutics,
following Roland Barthes, opens up the world as a textual field - it writes us and
we write it. To become self-conscious of this reciprocity between subject and object
implies a resurgence of that which has been largely repressed or at least oversimplified in twentieth-century landscape architectural design methodologies.
A vague and malleable cluster of ideas, hermeneutics, in Corner's estimation,
is not only attentive to the fact that an author and an interpreter are situated in,
and contingent upon, their time and place but, also, it means any particular mode
of cultural production is to be interpreted as situated within its disciplinary traditions
- its historiography. Prefiguring the theme of his latest book, "recovery", as early as
1991, Corner explains that, contrary to the apparent originality of the avant garde,
which exhausted itself in the tangents of twentieth-century art history, a hermeneutic
landscape architecture is conscientiously "placed in space-time and tradition, and
is equally about resurgence or renewal as it is about invention". For Corner, the
intersection of tradition and the contemporary can forge "new joints of meaning". tt
The idea of tradition and progress intertwining happily around the fulcrum of
the landscape architectural project is by no means a new ideal, so what is of interest
throughout this essay is not new ideas per se so much as new approaches to old
ones. The notion of the landscape as the locus of reconciliation between change
and stasis implies a pastoral modernity but, it is actually a theme that reaches back
to the role of the first symbolic landscape designs in the first cities. Therein the
garden begins playing paradise lost to architecture's utopian imperatives, assuaging
settled society for having broken with nomadic rhythms. Thus, designed landscapes
begin their complicity with the receding reality of that which they represent, and
the garden assumes its profound role as a memento-mori. Corner, however, hopes
to take his landscape architecture well beyond the symbolic compensations of
the garden, and, once over the garden fence, his challenge will be to connect
hermeneutics to planning.
In considering the broader spectrum of late twentieth- and early twenty-firstcentury landscape architecture, there is a temptation, albeit a crudely dichotomous
one, to suggest that Corner is returning landscape architecture from the sciences
to the arts. Late twentieth- and early twenty-first century landscape architecture is
moving from Ian McHarg's planning to Corner's poeticsY But, if this historical
sketch seems linear and dualistic and thus betrays landscape architecture's greatest
potential to be art grounded in science, bear in mind that, as the 1990s unfolded,
Corner increasingly (re)turned his art toward more instrumental concerns. Indeed,
the rhythm of aesthetic and intellectual change in any field is not linear but
pendulous, that is, circuitous yet never quite returning to the same. Before we trace
this pattern we should first ask: what is the general philosophy of history upon
which Corner is constructing his landscape architecture?
RE-ORIENTATION
Not surprisingly, Corner believes in a culture that values meaning over materialism,
quality not quantity, landscape as culture rather than real estate and resource. The
tectonic of his early work is that design is potentially a reconciliatory agent of
metaphysical import between human and natural history. Accordingly, in the early
RICHARD WELLER
notwithstanding, for Corner, to renege on what can yet be created, and to turn
back on the imagination, is to suffer a greater loss, the loss of hope. 22
The philosophical footing of Corner's early writing is finally made clear by the
somewhat fervent exhortation that "to forge a landscape as a hermeneutic locus of
both divination and restoration, prophecy and memory, is to help figure and orient
the collective consciousness of a modern culture still caught in transition". 21
Whether landscape architecture can do this or not and whether, if it doesn't, it is
free to be something else or just lost are questions shaping the ontological rite of
passage Corner moves through. This labyrinthine route is one wherein a real
danger lies in whether such profound desire for the role of landscape architecture
is a point of departure toward opening out, or closing down the potential diversity
of design's meanings and agencies. One of Corner's more memorable quips is "to
remain forever open to the world", and he should be held to it.24
Any opening out of the meanings of landscape design might be incited, but is
not sustained, by romantic abandon; rather, one must chip away at the monumental
edifices of 'culture' and 'nature'. If, as we are often told, landscape architecture is a
hybridised and idealised construction of culture and nature, then Corner's
hermeneutic middle ground does not proselytise an easy and, therefore, phoney
harmony of such opposites. Corner appreciates the creative tension that oscillates
in the space forged between a humanity that knows itself to be both within, and yet
different to, its surroundings. In Corner's worldview we are caught between
recognising ourselves as part of nature and yet separate, tantamount to "the liminal
space between signifier and signified, mind and matter, intellect and body". 25
RE-CONSTRUCTION
As it affects landscape architecture, whilst remaining in a dialectical position, this
creative relationship is not one of culture to nature, rather it is of humanity
inextricably woven into the synthetic environment of its own conceptual creation.
In the face of this de-naturing, debate has polarised along an axis from those who
seek to reconstruct, and those who would further deconstruct, once stable semiotic
entities. Corner's preferred prefix for key words is 're', not 'de', a fact borne out in
his latest book, which foregrounds the idea of recovering landscape, and it is an
expression he rightly struggles to distance from its inherent conservatism. 26
Even though deconstruction and hermeneutics intersect, back in 1991, Corner
made a point of distancing himself from deconstruction. As Corner read it,
deconstruction represented a "massive assault on the bases of meaning and stability
in the world seeking instead to maintain the irreconcilable contradiction of our
times"Y Alternatively, the faith Corner wants to share is that landscape design
can secure increasingly tremulous relations between sigl~ifier and signified, between
culture and nature, self and world, future and past. The bridge across these divides
is metaphor. Corner explains that, through the agency of metaphor "meanings
once considered disparate or antithetical can be joined to find commonalityconnections between art and science, theory and practice, humans and nature, for
R1CHARD WELLER
10
CRITICAL?
Corner's notion of a hermeneutic landscape can be located between the two
poles of urban design discourse in the early 1990s; neo-conservative postmodernity
at one end of the spectrum and deconstruction at the other. In 1991, concurrent
with his celebration of hermeneutics, Corner writes himself in to the frame of the
middle ground, the frame of Critical Regionalism. 31
Citing Kenneth Frampton, who seminally defined Critical Regionalism as
resistance toward, and mediation of, the global through the local, Corner elaborates
his critical disposition through three other areas of theory and praxis. The first,
'Critical Resistance', involves one's cognisance of, and activism within the political
orders that generally determine our collective landscape. In theory, as Corner targets
it, the main focus of resistance is directed at "techno-scientific reasoning", whatever
that really is. The second is 'Critical Continuity', the rather cautious creative practice
of innovation through tradition. For Corner, as we have seen, such a practice is
defined by a rejection of both sentimental nostalgia as one exclusive arrow of time,
and avant-garde utopianism the other. Thirdly, Corner's notion of 'Critical Making'
RICHARD WELLER
11
12
Laying out their methods and ideals in Corner's Recovering Landscape: Essays in
Contemporary Landscape Architecture under the heading of 'Recovering Place and
Time', these European sensLlalists all claim to reveal the hidden forces in a given
site via their own heightened intuition, as well as careful observance of empirical
and archival research. Having uncovered the depths of a site's biomorphic and
cultural essence, Marot, Descombes, H0)'er and Girot all explain how they proceed
to stake out the mnemonic geomancy of a site as if design were a form of
acupuncture, seemingly unconcerned that the truth they claim to find in situ might,
in fact, not even exist nor translate as such. Proudly, Girot explains how he can
extract a certain "je ne sais quoi" from a site, and although this was distilled after
arduous empirical analysis he says it is usually the same thing as was revealed to
him by his first impressions and intuitions of a place. 33 There is something shamanic
and therefore dubious at the heart of this explanation. Whilst clearly conforming
to the prerequisites of a hermeneutic practice by being situated in place and time,
such work, or at least writing about such work, contains pretences that go beyond
Corner's insistence that fundamental to hermeneutic multivalence, is an acceptance
of the partiality of our knowledge.
Explaining his position a little further, Girot suggests that art and science, the
split hemispheres of modernity's quest for absolute knowledge, are synthesised in
the creative act of landscape architecture. 34 Theoretically correct and attractive
on one level, there is also an overly simplistic didacticism at work in sLlch ideals
of synthesis and, surely, there is much in our science and art that would not lead
to a landscape architecture of restitution and reconciliation. We should also
consider whether the role of landscape architecture in the larger cultural milieu
should be that of the city's psychiatrist as is implied by prioritising the recovery
of site memory. Additionally, it might be fruitful to question to what degree
cultural continuity is really manifested in the palimpsests that landscape architects
extrude, and, also ask why it is not enough that the landscape architect is a
raconteur, as much concerned with inventive fictions as with pathological
recollection.
Landscape architecture's raison d'ttre of intimacy with place is quite correctly a
profound re-orientation of twentieth century design culture, however, this initial
intimacy seems to tend toward either essentialism or tokenism. I argue that both
extremes ensue because landscape design practice continues to cut itself off from
the criticality and diversity of both contemporary and twentieth century aesthetic
practice. For example, writing about current design techniques and some of her
own work, Jacky Bowring reminds us, the aesthetic revelations of twentieth century
art practice have been more to do with conditions of sur-reality than reality.35 We
find generally in art practice (in particular, literature and cinema) that memory is
not neat and layered but, rather, distorted, fragmentary and subjective. The
fundamental lesson of surrealist aesthetics is also that many things are best placed
out of place, a shock tactic perhaps, but also a reminder that landscape architecture
has acquiesced in simply reasserting the comforts of the familiar.36 Although
Corner rejects the avant-garde impulse of revolution for revolution's sake, it is
RICHARD WELLER
13
ECO-LOGIC
Corner, in a 1997 essay entitled 'Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity',
asks "how might landscape architectural creativity (informed through its
representational traditions) enrich and inform the ecological idea in the imagination
and material practices of a people?".37 Embedded in this question is the framework
of the ensuing discourse, namely that ecology is as much mind as it is matter.
Collapsing the nature/culture divide by intellectualising 'nature' and naturalising
intellect, Corner claims that human creativity and ecosystems share the same
tendency toward the increased "differentiation, freedom, and richness of a diversely
interacting whole". 38
If a little spooked by hard science and too quick to scapegoat the scientific
lTlethod for modernity's calamitous conditions and existential abyss, Corner's
necessarily complex thinking on ecology is redolent with the creative potential of
contemporary scientific metaphors. Diversification, instability, indeterminacy and
self-organisation become liberating and fecund ecological metaphors for creative
design processes. He goes on to suggest that "similarities between ecology and
creative transmutation are indicative of an alternative kind of landscape architecture,
one in which calcified conventions of how people live and relate to land, nature
and place are challenged and the multivariate wonders of life are once again released
through invention". 39 Toward that end, landscape architecture is urged to develop
a creative relationship with ecology in order to exploit a "potential that might
inform more meaningful and imaginative cultural practices than the merely
ameliorative, compensatory, aesthetic, or commodity oriented". 40 Corner then
identifies the problem that creativity in landscape architecture has "all too
14
of net(' understandings of
RTCHARD WELLER
15
VERTIGO
The most powerful narrative of landscape architecture, that of socially and
ecologically reconciling modernity with place, finds its main frame in the aerial
photo or the satellite image. But, as soon as we think about it, aerial images
become contradictory representations. Contradictory, because they conceal the
real socio-political and ecological relations of the working landscape they purport
to lay bare. In viewing an aerial image one is confused by seeing everything but
knowing nothing. One is excited by the powerful overview but equally crippled
by its detachment. If at once Faustian, the aerial image is also disempowering,
effectively reminding the individual viewer of their incapacity to affect the vast
spread of mass culture and its landscape. In the aerial view, individuality is effaced
by the obvious prospect of being a speck in a larger system.
The aerial image smoothes out conflict and reduces cultural complexity to a
marvellous pattern, a contemporary sublime, which by virtue of sheer scale and
technological virtuosity appears to be meaningful photography. Unlike the
kinaesthetic limitations and disorientations of being on the ground, in a body
and in the labyrinth, aerial imagery deceptively simplifies things, inviting the planner's
sweeping generalities. The aerial view, particularly from the distance of satellites
also naturalises civilisation's sprawl, smoothing out the violence of development.
From high above, civilisation can be seen as either a virus or a bloom.
Extending the logic of the aerial image we can zoom out until we see the
whole earth. This postmodern icon is also a troubling image because there is as
16
much about the void as the object and any viewer of this lonely blue orb in the
middle of nowhere must make sense of the fact that it is both one's 'home' and
yet also, from that viewpoint, utterly foreign. That we now learn the earth emerged
by chance from 15 billion years of cosmological history - a history that knows
no teleolo!:,'Y and would appear to m.ake meaningless curlicues through space/
time toward heat death, is unthinkable.
So much for that sense of place.
A book that purposefully indulges aerial imagery, and also sets the broad scene
of a contemporary landscape architectural and ecological vision, is Corner's Taking
Measures Across the American Landscape. 41 Throughout this elegantly conceived
project, in collaboration with the aerial photographer Alex MacLean, Corner
manipulates maps, photos and texts in "an atternpt to acknowledge the primacy
of rational synoptic measure in the forging of the American landscape while
revealing the fictional and metaphorical dimensions of the land's construction".44
A post-mortem of modernity, the images in this monumental book concern the
tension between paradise and utopia, the tension between Christian nostalgia
and humanist futurism that shape the new world imagination. What Corner is
really measuring then is a mindscape, which manifests itself in the massive denaturing effects of super-power infrastructure, set sublim.ely against the vastness
of the earth's immemorial crust.
By placing himself at the panoptic point of the aerial overview, Corner's concept
is to turn the gaze of instrumental reason upon itself, and take its measure. That is,
Corner's appropriation of the overview is intentionally vertiginous and not heroic.
The metaphorical scope of the concept of measurement, which binds the book,
connotes a society obsessed with quantity but confused by (ecological) value. Corner
works the metaphor to recall classical notions of cosmological harmony, proportion
and beauty while punning on the discredited anthropomorphism of humankind
as the measure of all things. 'Vetruvian Man', no longer centred in the geometry of
a rational world sanctioned by God, is now a disembodied eye inside a machine
falling toward the surface of a ravaged planet.
Even if the hard science of ecology, itself based in supposedly objective
measurement, can in some way come to control or maybe temper its ruthless capitalist
nemesis (also based on measurement and distorted values), Corner's concern is not
just a world with balanced inputs and outputs. For Corner, as for German political
theorist Jilrgen Habermas,45 modernity is not so much bankrupt as incomplete,
and its humanism can be, as he puts it, "critically appropriated and imaginatively
redirected for its full, liberating promise to appear" .46 In this sense, the landscape
architecture of a better world remains within the ambit of aesthetics, values and
meanings - the qualities of dwelling poetically as well as pragmatically. Indeed,
without these qualities, modernity is merely a fatally flawed skein of cornu cop ian
images straightened into fictions of progress to conceal an enlightened void.
Faced with the impossibility of its scope, Corner's Taking Measures Across the
American Landscape nonetheless anticipates and marvels over a synthetic future of
constructed ecology. However, this is not a book with a plan - Corner does not
RICHARD WELLER
17
design the ground he sees, nor does he propose any form of procedural method
for us to do so. Whereas, Ian McHarg's didactic overviews of how to reorganise
the world below had an answer for everything (except why the plan can never be
achieved), Corner's images are best understood as indications of what a hermeneutic
site analysis might be, but that is all. They are unlikely to "occasion future
landscapes" as he claims because they possess neither the propositional force nor
the actual intimacy with a certain place that is necessary to a proposition. It is also
difficult to believe that these mappings "subvert cartographic conventions" by
not following them.
If we can, in retrospect, see the impossibility of McHarg's eco-logical and
methodological fundamentalism, can we not also foresee an overly aesthetic, selfconscious postmodernism in Corner's all too beautiful images? Just as McHarg's
method could be rote learnt and practised badly by everyone, Corner's
representational elegance and attendant theoretical sophistication seems destined
to remain detached and voyeuristic. His postcards from high above the earth end
up falling prey to the Western intellectual and scientific problem of distantiation
that Corner actually wishes to shut down. Certainly, Corner's gorgeous graphic
designs do overtly bring maps to art and art to maps. That they are neither art nor
maps should not worry us because more important than disputing whether they
mean or enable anything much in themselves, is the fact that Corner is now
taking hermeneutics up to the planner's perspective.
So, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape is a crucial marker, one that
sets the scale and terms of reference of what would constitute a relevant,
contemporary landscape architecture. However, vast as its images are, they might
also be of a landscape architecture never to come, unless design techniques are
developed that emerge from between those of both the poet and the planner.
Corner's project of developing contemporary landscape architectural design theory
will cancel itself out if it cannot find grounding within the design process. Hence,
we must fall from these scenic heights into the real conditions of the working
landscape they pictorialise.
LANDSCHAFT
In his book Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture,
Corner's interest in landscape shifts markedly from what designed landscapes
might mean to how they " ... work, what they do, how they interact, and what
agency or effects they might exercise over time",47 He declares that he is making "a
return to complex and instrumental landscape issues" and that this necessarily
"involves more organisational and strategic skills than those of formal composition
per se, more programmatic and metrical practices than solely representational".48
In his 1999 essay 'Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes', Corner isolates his
subject by rejecting lam/skip (constructed scene) and favouring lane/schaft (working
place).
Corner's frustration with design as a commodified image and with landscape
architecture's infra-structural impotence is palpable. He rejects landscape designs
18
that indulge in scenic and semantic expressions because, as he sees it, they "fail to
activate anything more than the imagery of their own obsolescence, stylistic issues
notwithstanding".49 He banishes the "sentimental aestheticization" of places because
it "compounds the difficulty of forging a critical and fresh landscape".5o Dismissed,
too, is the academia and fine art of landscape architecture, when Corner chides us
with a Marxist ruse: "whereas the connoisseurs and the intelligentsia may enjoy the
associative play of narrative references in high art design, little that is socially
emancipating and enabling results from authorial representational landscapes".5l
Corner now insists that a relevant practice of landscape architecture cannot
work the landschaft of late capital with "still life vignettes", nor, I take it, a sulking
romanticism that seeks aesthetic resistance in what he pejoratively refers to as
"semantically encoded reserves",52 But, if Corner is, with the stroke of a pen, cutting
off landschaft from the history of the fine art of the garden, then he is about to lose
contact with the hermeneutic wealth his enterprise is constructed upon. Given his
earlier work, he could not mean this, indeed, as recently as 1997, he spoke of
"semantic reserves" such as parks, gardens, words, images and maps as having had
"immeasurable" impact on the formation of cultural and existential values. 53 Rather,
Corner's general philosophical position remains steadfast but his interest now is
less to do with what art might mean and more to do with how it might connect to
life, or, how we take the garden to the landscape. Therefore, he claims that in his
new quotidian landschaft "issues such as program, event space, utility, economy,
logistics, production constraints and desires become fore grounded, each turned
through design toward newly productive and significant ends".54 Unlike gardens,
which are generally constructed and received as mediated scenic and semantic
constructions, landschaft, we are told, means "an occupied milieu, the effects and
Figttre 7: Photomontage by Richard \Veller and Tom
Griffiths, 2002.
RICHARD WELLER
19
significance of which accrue through tactility, use, and engagement over time".55
Corner asks, rhetorically, if the landscape architectural project can align with "the
productive and participatory phenomenon of the everyday", arguing that the
designer's attention should be focused on staging the "conditions necessary to
precipitate a maximum range of opportunities in time", 56 and that design be turned
from aesthetics to "engendering strategies" and "strategic instrumentality". 57
Acknowledging Foucault, Corner is perturbed by both the panoptic and
voyeuristic corruptions of design (and master planning). He then follows the cultural
geographer, Denis Cosgrove in thinking that real people, working in real places,
develop eidetic maps of their reality and that these mental 'maps of place' are not
dominated by the visual, the contemplative, or the ideoiogicaP8 Cosgrove believes
that for the insider, "there is no clear separation of self from scene, subject from
object".59 Similarly, Corner asserts that the eidetic richness of a place is only
created and disclosed through habitual engagement, and hopes that a designer
could join in this unselfconscious "collective sense of place" that communities
have apparently "evolved through work".60
First, even if Corner is theoretically correct to warn against the abuse of power
that can flow from a designer's separation from the object, it seems impossible for
the designer to escape their condition. Secondly, surely one must ask: who are
these working communities and where are their fields? Obviously, Corner is not
referring to prelapsarian hunters and gatherers or feudal enclaves but, by the saIne
token, he does not seem to be describing the contemporary working landscape,
one that is post-industrial, de-natured, suburban and global - a landscape where
no-one digs the earth and knows its genius but, rather, a landscape in which
postmodern masses purchase genetically modified food on credit and spend their
time suspended in cyberspace. Indeed, this is the un-authentic but nonetheless
obscenely (hyper) reallandschaft of our time.
No doubt Corner's hypothetical designer sees that the seemingly innocuous,
ameliorative compositions of commercial landscape design tend to conceal their
complicity with existing ideological regimes. Regimes that, on the one hand,
promulgate a mechanised hell of industrial and post-industrial working landscapes
and, on the other, cultivate sentimental beauty spots and leisurely resorts to lull
"little consumers" into a false consciousness. 6l Postmodernism, however, has almost
no patience with the notion of hapless consumers being deceived, rather, it
appreciates that people make shifting, and increasingly complex, sense of their
lives and their place. A part of this postmodernism is, perhaps, a craving for simply
community (gemeinschaft) as is implied by lanclschaft, but the landschaft we now look
upon is more likely a sign of our failed utopias, than the setting for the next.
As touched upon earlier, landscape architecture has met the appalling yet very
real onslaught of 'commodity culture' with a deeper 'sense of place'. Landscape
architecture has met Frederic Jameson's notion of late capitalism's "perpetual
present" by conjuring memory, part of a postmodern tendency to situate
knowledge. 62 Both "nature" and a "sense of place" have, however, been easily
appropriated as representations and flaunted as commodities, as is the evil genius
20
of capital. But capitalism, and its machinations, is not a force out there, and Corner's
critical subtext is that landscape architecture has allowed itself to become complicit
and acquiesce to the treatment of places in a merely scenic way. Counter to
postmodern tendencies, Corner clings to hopes of a more "authentic public life"
and of "cultural relationships to the earth" other than those prescribed by a
comnHxlity culture, a disposition that goes some way toward explaining his
recourse to the Germanic idea of landschaft. The invocation of such a working
landscape seems not only inappropriate to a culture based increasingly on images
and information but, even if not intended, it also falls prey to undertones of a
sentimental socio-economic authenticity that is coterminous with, rather than
dialectical to, the sentimental aesthetics against which Corner first set it.
The binary of landschaft and lanclskip seems an unnecessarily Spartan opposition,
especially as it unleashes a stream of other misleading oppositions that sit awkwardly
with postmodern culture. For example, Corner's argument is structured so that it
exacerbates differentiations between aesthetics and work, the designer and the
worker, the surface of images and the depth of place, eidetic immersion and panoptic
master planning. Irrespective of the distracting internal contradictions we might
find in the polarity of landschaft and lanJskip, I believe that Corner's resounding
theme is simply that landscape architecture is distracted from designing structurally
relevant time developmental strategies, by its own aesthetics, which are, in recent
history, trivialised, acritical and increasingly hard to take seriously.
As will be verified amI exanLined in part two of this essay, Corner's landscape
architecture is not going to play the game of postmodern surfaces; rather, he wants
to set out the game's rules.
NOTES
I
James Corner is currently Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and
directs his own practice, Field Operations, with the architect Stan Allen.
2 This
study began when I was prompted by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT)
Graduate School of Design in Melbourne, Australia to scrutinise my own design work. The origin
of this text lay in a superimposition of Corner's decade of writing abOltt design upon a decade of
Room 4.1.3 doing design. Corner's writing, and the range of our design work seem to share more
than a little, even though the projects have been carried out in isolation. This superimposition was
then a strategy for testing the pretence of theory to practice and practice to theory. Through this, it
seemed possible to circumscribe simultaneously some of design's blind spots and fray the edges of
theory's tendency to neat enclosure. Due to the unwieldy size of the result, however, I have elected
to remove the descriptions of design projects. Interested readers can find the work at
www.room413.com.au.
J
Although this paper stays close to the writing of James Corner, I do not mean to give the
impression that no-one else has been part of this conversation. Indeed, a more comprehensive essay
would have been able
to
but also placed his work in its North American context. Although I regret not having done this
extra work, it became clear that it was legitimate to engage explicitly with Corner's body of work,
which incidentally, I think is outstanding in its proximity to contemporary design issues.
4
Corner never actually says that he is trying to work a space between design and planning. This is
my categorisation of his project. In conversation he has said that he is only interested in increasing
RICHARD WELLER
21
the efficacy of the field and, in that sense, avoids the binary structure of the two areas into which
postmodern landscape architecture has subdivided.
Corner, J (1999) Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice in Recovering
Landscape: ESSdys in Contemporary Ldndscape Architectllre, Corner, J (ed), Princeton Architectural
Press: New York.
Corner, J (1990) A Discourse on Theory I: Sounding the Depths - Origins, Theory, and
Corner, J (1991) A Discourse on Theory II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the
Schulz, N (1980) Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, Rizzoli: New York, pp 166202.
10
Seddon, G (1979) The Genius Loci and the Australian Environment, Landscape Australia, No 2,
Feb, p 66.
11
12
One could also make this point as regards the work of John Dixon Hunt and his inheritance of
latest book, Greater Perfections is perhaps the single most reliable account of landscape architecture's
representational scope. Indeed, if one wanted to make more sense of Corner's emphasis on
hermeneutics then Hunt's book will help to do just that, although Hunt never mentions the term
hermeneutics as such. See Hunt, J (2000) Greater Perfections, University of Pennsylvania Press:
Philadelphia, pp 76-179.
11
The cultures of reason and romanticism can be (stereotypically) equated with landscape
architecture's planning/design divisions. As regards these broader historical patterns and themes of
modernity, I have found The Pdssion of the Western Mind useful, especially because it resolves the
contradictions of Western history by an appeal to reconciliation, which has parallels to Corner's
early work. See Tamas, R (1991) The Passion of the Western Mind, Pimlico: London.
14
Contrary to an empty, Godless or mechanistic universe, postmodern scientific writing, that tries
to make meaning of twen-tieth century physics and biology, presents a marvellous anay of
profoundly speculative ideas on life. The popularity and frequency of such books testifies to the refiguring of the universe, contrary to Corner's premise that metaphor disappears in a void. Corner
only really enters the area of the new sciences in 1997 in discussions of ecology, but does, in
passing in 1991, make the point that a contemporaneous hermeneutic practice of landscape design
would need to concern itself with "investigations in to the galaxies, or at the opposite scale into
the very structure of genes, challenging our conceptions of space and time". See A Discourse on
Theory II, above n 7, p 121.
15
16
17
18
10
Gesselkhaft translates from German as 'society' and Gemeinsclwft as 'community'. The Nazis
favoured the latter and broadcast the former as a threat to a German genills loci. In theory,
postmodern landscape architecture has favoured the local and vilified the abstract and global as if it
were synonymous with modernism. Yet it seems to me that the concept of the global, whilst
22
ecologically clear, remains culturally unclear. See Berman, M (1982) All That's Solid Melts to Air: Tile
Experience of Modernity, Verso: New York.
20
Ricoeur, Paul (1961) History and Trtfth, Northwestern University Press: Evanston, cited in Corner,
J (1991) A Discourse on Theory II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the Alternative
of Hermeneutics, LancLscape Journal, v 10, p 127.
21
Corner, J (1997) Ecolo s')' and landscape as Agents of Creativity in Ecological Design and Planning,
Thompson, G and Steiner, F (eds), John Wiley & Sons: New York, pp 81-108, p 82.
22
23
26
closure available, and as a reconciliation of the tension within modernity, is evidenced in his
discussion of the Krier brothers, who would see us reconstruct cities according to classical templates.
Although equally wary of the recklessly and fashionably "new", Corner indicates his progressive
desire not to be "negligent of what it means to be modern", an intellectual and creative
preparedness to experiment that enlarges over the course of the 1990s.
27
28
20
30
Corner, J (1999) The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention in Mappings
Corner, J (1991) Critical Thinking and Landscape Architecture, Landscape Journal, v 10, p 162.
32
Frampton, K (1986) Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance in
Postmodernis111, Appignanesi, L (ed), ICA Documents. Institute of Contemporary Arts: London, p 78.
33
Girot, C (1999) Four Trace Concepts in L'lndscape Architecture in Recovering Landscape: Essays in
Contempomry Landscape Architectare, Corner, J (ed), Princeton Architectural Press: New York, pp 5969, p 64.
J+
35
36
Whilst much of twentieth-century art practice still eludes landscape architecture, it is worth
noting that surrealism has influenced some relatively recent work. One thinks, for example, of the
Harlequin Plaza by George Hargreaves that, although I had not visited it, was by all reports, trying
to be a De Chirico painting writ large and, accordingly, met with public disapproval.
37
38
39
40
41
42
Weller, R (1989) The Future Generations University, Landscape Review, May, pp 62-74.
+3 Corner, J and Maclean, AS (1996) Taking Measures Across tlte American Landscape, Yale University
RICHARD WELLER
23
,I
The German political theorist and philosopher Jflrgen Habermas has attempted to counter
strains of postmodern thought that argue that contemporary cultural conditions have moved so far
Ii'om modernity's originating ideals that no direct recourse to them is possible. See Habermas, J
(1985) The Philosophicul Discotll'Se of Modernity, Frederick Lawrence, (trans), Cambridge and Oxford:
Polity Press and Basil Blackwell, 1987.
," Taking Measttres Across the Amerimn LancLlmpe, above n 43, p 25.
,) Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, above n 5, p 9.
,8 Corner, J (1999) Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes in Recovering Landswpe: Essays in
Contemporary Lancismpe Architectttre, Corner, J (ed), Princeton Architectural Press: New York.
,Q Introduction:
50
II
12
11
56
5)
58
5Q Cosgrove, D (1991) Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape, in Eidetic Operations and
New Landscapes Corner, J (ed), above n 48, piSS.
60
A point explored by Alan Balfour (1999) in Afterword: What is Public in Landscape? in Recovering
Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecwre, Corner, J (ed), Princeton Architectural
Press: New York, pp 275-282.
61
Jameson, F (1984) Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, New Left Review, 146,
pp 53-92.
61
24