Design Observer :: Join the Discussion http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-mound-in-the-wood-on-sculpture-and-architecture/31248/ en-us Design Observer Group 2011-12-17T12:00:43-05:00 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0
As noted in the previous response, this essay is not concerned with defining 'landscape'. That same response addresses several other issues you bring up, which were not precisely Loos’s concerns.

It is possible to apply Loos's logic to complex urban landscapes, and several of the buildings you mention, including the Hearst and Nelson Atkins, actually do so very well (there are many other exceptional examples from the past 25 years - e.g., Moneo's Murcia Town Hall). There is no reason the same logic could not be applied to postindustrial landscapes: the Siza pool at Leca when seen against the concrete breakwaters of the port is extraordinary in this regard.

Loos must have had a clear notion of how the modern city was developing, as is evident on the one had in his entry for the Tribune Tower competition, and, on the other, in the design for the ‘Looshaus’, the public outcry around which led him to write this essay in the first place .

Piano’s argument about time mostly has to do with an older idea, about the neutrality of a spatial and structural order allowing for the eventual replacement of program, like the Roman Basilica (like the Imperial Romans, Piano has the budgets to make the argument).

It is not clear that Loos had the same thought: it would seem so on the surface, but the Raumplan does not follow the same dictates. The Iqualada cemetery offers a different notion altogether, though I am not convinced that decay and overgrowth has actually been thought through there as well as promised, less that it is a practicality of budget that has been interestingly conceptualized.

The photo you mention actually shows two buildings by engineers, equally neutral. The water tower foregrounds because of the painting. I am sorry to not fully respond to your post. The issues you bring up are beyond the scope of a short reply!
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Loos is not actually seeking to define landscape, and so does not address the interesting (and really difficult to pin down) limit to which you refer. In this regard Loos’s definition of landscape is like that old Supreme Court method for defining pornography: we know it when we see it (beyond that everything is troubling semantics, where words exact their revenge).

You are right that beauty and harmony are not inherent to any definition of landscape - or any landscape. But those concepts were explicitly Loos’s concerns in his essay, which has to do with the inherent agenda of architecture as a cultural activity vs. the perceived consistency of a harmonious and beautiful landscape.

The reason I am referring to Loos here at all is because in the prior essay I pointed out that consistency of landscape (often framed rhetorically with terms verging on beauty and harmony) is an explicitly stated agenda of much recent architecture; yet this architecture arrives much as Loos’s villa. It is that inherent and interesting contradiction I am writing about, rather than giving a definition to landscape.

Thanks again for your useful observations. These pieces are part of an ongoing manuscript, and many of the issues you bring up are subjects of other essays, which your comments will help sharpen.]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-mound-in-the-wood-on-sculpture-and-architecture/31248/#comments 2011-12-16T10:10:58-05:00
- When you look at many landscapes that feel coherent, in a time-conditioned sort of way (e.g. your Austrian lake village, or villages on ocean cliffs in Greece, or the older parts of many European cities), the individual buildings rarely fit in the category of "sculpture" or "interpretation". But I brought up the industrial sublime question because Nye argues that even complex, modern cities -- many of whose buildings *do*, at least in their infancy, fit into these categories, and *don't* necessarily relate obviously to one another -- nonetheless sublimate with time, use and remove into something more whole, inexplicable and experiential... more poetry than calligraphy, though that hardly means they rhyme in easy couplets. The question, then, is what will time and use do to all these young sculpture-buildings? The Guggenheim in New York, the Thompson Center in Chicago, and other sculpture-buildings that are now aging may be useful examples to consider... or the Hearst Building or Soldier Field or the Nelson Atkins addition, which graft something un-time-conditioned onto something time-conditioned, then release the odd pairs back into time once more.

- Actual tombs and monuments both strike me as things that strictly gain -- in power, in resonance, in importance -- with time, even though they are hardly "used" as most buildings are. Perhaps they have something to say about the role time plays, distinct from use or inhabitation, and distinct from their role in Loos' argument (but probably related).

- If you're an architect trying to take Loos' advice and design something that's *not* a sculpture, don't you still have to acknowledge that time and use will do things you can't, over the life of your building? If so, what *can* the architect do to be sensitive to this? (Renzo Piano, of all people, has published many questions along these lines.) The Igualada cemetery strikes me as a good example here, because the architects intentionally designed the thing to be "grown in to", as it were. Similarly, Cerda's plan for Barcelona (intentionally or not), in its softness and quirkiness compared to other grid plans and in its incompleteness compared to its intended self, left room for the modernistas (as with Domènech i Montaner's St. Pau Hospital, which lays itself out at 45 degrees to Cerda's grid) and many future generations to take it somewhere new.

- Although your argument about the water tower is fascinating, I wonder whether there, too, time and use play as much of a role as the building's purpose. (Although it may well be true that water towers can ease more quickly into the role of "useful necessity" than other comparably dominant buildings.) Your choice of a black-and-white photo of a pretty tame water tower also biases the question. Do you feel the same way, for example, about this one (http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/images/il/ILWATwatertower_harrell.jpg) compared to the building beside it?

There are probably more ways time plays into your argument, but this is probably plenty for now. Looking forward to your reply!]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-mound-in-the-wood-on-sculpture-and-architecture/31248/#comments 2011-12-15T15:52:23-05:00
For me Loos' is wrong in three ways. One, he doesn't go far enough in defining a landscape. Your characterization of his definition (thank you for that clarification :) could be used to describe most anything, I think. Loos lists a number of objects and imagines/analyzes their dynamic relations to one another (all spot on, by the way) but he does not understand or admit that there is an act of territorialization going on in constructing the landscape. There is a limit, whether it be a property line, a mountain peak, a forest edge, or a blast wall topped with barbed wire. This limit is constructed, because of course it's not a total limit. It is still conceived of as a limit however, and this tension is fundamental to an idea of landscape.

Second, he seems to imply that naturalization is inherent in the idea of landscape. I think this interesting, there is a indeed a relationship there. But it doesn't make sense that it would need to be naturalized (by this I mean perceived as ahistorical- "of course all of those airplanes are lined up on a tarmac, this is an airport!"). One test for this might be- if a scene of some kind (a set of objects in dynamic relations that exhibit some mark of human intentionality) was not natural (Loos' villa was placed there for instance) then it is not a landscape. Is it anything? Is the whole concept of landscape undone when the specter of nature is demolished?

Lastly, Loos' definition for landscape is really invested in beauty and harmony. I assume this is a product of the time? I would argue that there is nothing fundamental about those concepts to a definition of landscape. Leaving aside the idea of naturalization, wouldn't an arrangement of planes on a tarmac with a massive parking lot on the right, a marsh to the left, and a control tower in the distance be a landscape? This may or may not be considered beautiful, but it is certainly a landscape if anything is.

(enjoying the series...!)]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-mound-in-the-wood-on-sculpture-and-architecture/31248/#comments 2011-12-14T18:46:10-05:00 http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-mound-in-the-wood-on-sculpture-and-architecture/31248/#comments 2011-12-14T17:23:04-05:00
I have many questions to ask, but here's one: doesn't time play a crucial role in all this, and perhaps even help resolve some of the dilemmas you're posing?

In reality, nobody's landscape gets frozen... but time blends everyone's landscape, or at least all that remain, into something constantly changing, well beyond any one architectural act, something of which we only ever get a one-dimension-too-few snapshot.

There's plenty that suggests (for example, the writing of historian/geographer David Nye about the urban "industrial sublime") that we do, in some of these snapshots, relate to overwhelming built landscapes the way we relate to overwhelming natural ones.

So doesn't time have to play a role in any explanation of *that* effect, and for that matter the related ones you and Loos so helpfully dissect, in this essay and your two others?]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-mound-in-the-wood-on-sculpture-and-architecture/31248/#comments 2011-12-12T18:32:39-05:00 "But — to be absolutely clear — that isn't doing the Richard Serra sculpture any favor. In fact, it only serves to devalue the Serra. Mommy, that sculpture looks just like our nature center!"

followed by the photo of Woodhead International, Karijini National Park Visitor Centre, Pilbara, Australia, is a real critical, punch....]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-mound-in-the-wood-on-sculpture-and-architecture/31248/#comments 2011-12-08T22:40:31-05:00
Loos does not make the definition you quote: that is my trying to explain how Loos' definition operates. It is not so different from Jackson's definition, except that it is not static. You don't explain why you think it's wrong, which I would find helpful: this is murky semantic territory, and I appreciate all help getting through it.

Thanks,

David]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-mound-in-the-wood-on-sculpture-and-architecture/31248/#comments 2011-12-08T22:02:46-05:00 difference in landscape, architectural, art, and engineering practice.

Loos is wrong when he defines landscape as a "finely tuned set of complex, understood relationships between constructions and perception," although in fairness it's a better definition than most. Other than JB Jackson, it seems few people ever even try to figure out what we are talking about with that word (which is especially problematic when you try to pose it as the basic unit of analysis for cities). But his definition and the author's thoughts on it seem to imply naturalization of some construction is intrinsic to landscape. Is this true?]]> http://places.designobserver.com/feature/a-mound-in-the-wood-on-sculpture-and-architecture/31248/#comments 2011-12-08T00:02:32-05:00