Between Hermeneutics and Datascapes

Between hermeneutics and datascapes: a critical
appreciation of emergent landscape design theory

and praxis through the writings of James Corner
1990-2000 (Part One)
RICHARD WELLER
THIS TWO-PART ESSAY examines the theoretical work of James Corner across the Richard Weller is a Senior LectLtrer in
1990s. Part one begins with a polernical analysis of Corner's originating notion of a the Fawlty of ArchitectLtre, Landscape
hermeneutic practice of design as published in Landscape Journal in 1991. The essay and the Vislwl Arts at the University
necessarily broaches themes of ecology, critical regionalism and the broader panoramas of Western ALlStmlia and Director of
oflandscape planning as they are encountered in Corner's writings. Part one identifies the design company Room 4.1.3 P/L.
an emergent dialectic between landscape architecture as scenography or infrastructure Telephone: +61-8-9380-1567
in his writings. In order to appreciate Corner's work, part one establishes and discusses Fax: +61-8-9380-1082
the philosophical grounding of his position. Part one is concerned with theory, part www.room413.com.all
two with praxis. Email: [email protected]
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 KEY WORDS
Corner in the late 1990s for the agency oflandscape design as structuring development Hermeneutics
rather than symbolising culture and nature, arguments tor what landscape design Critical Regionalism
does not only what it means. To facilitate this, the writings of Bart Lootsma and Alex Ecology
Wall who, along with Corner, presented the most pertinent and provocative themes Landschaft
in Corner's latest book Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Vertigo
Architecture, are considered in some detail. Part two concludes with thoughts on Programme
datascaping - a new design methodology synonymous with current trends in Dutch lnfmstntcturc
urbanism and one that impresses Corner with its capacity to manage and manipulate
Fields
complex design programmes.
Objects
Taken as a whole the essay offers neither a set of findings nor feigns conclusion;
Mapping
rather, it goes to the co-ordinates Corner has set out and explores the field they
Datascape
demarcate. The essay does, however, seek to qualifY the claim that James Corner is
articulating a middle ground between the deleteriously exclusive categories oflandscape Modernity
planning and landscape design and that this middle ground is crucial for landscape
architecture's future as a 'synthetic and sttategic art form'.
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
LANDSCAPE REVIEW 2001:7(1) PAGES 3-24 3

represented in landscape architecture. The essay traces and discusses this
philosophical shift so as to identify and reflect upon key areas of landscape
architectural discourse at the close of the twentieth century and the beginning of
the twenty-first. 2
Forsaking academic austerity, Corner's writing is animated by a familiar sense
of urgency as he scans the breadth of what significant contemporary landscape
architecture should be and what it may become. 3 If at times Corner's theoretical
cartography has too many lines heading off in too many directions, his central and
ongoing project seems to be one of charting the rift between design and planning. 4
This essay does not account for the rift in later twentieth-century landscape
architecture, although that is work that should probably be done, it does, however,
attempt to distinguish between typical landscape architectural grandiloquence and
real moments of potential synthesis in Corner's work.
Following fashions to good end, Corner ventures regularly into a larger aesthetic,
historical and theoretical milieu. Sojourns out of the discipline are not uncommon
Figure 1: VmiOl15 cover sheets ji-om james amongst landscape designers and theorists typically frustrated by an institutionalised
Corner's writings, (1990-2000) relevant
and professional malaise, but Corner's significance is that he can always plot a
to this essay.
path back to the core concerns of landscape architecture. Corner is not lost to art,
architecture or ecology. Most importantly, the actual act of designing is never
forgotten and his theorising is accordingly tempered by its relevance to praxis.
Evidence of this is in his latest book Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary
Landscape Architecture, an unruly collection of essays that Corner dedicates to "greater
experimentation and daring in design ... more sophisticated forms of representation
critical foresight and cultural knowledge".5
FiglLre 2: Diawam hy Richard Weller,
2002, mapping some as/)ects of the
hermenelltic and historical location of the
western sllbject in its ii-aught relation to
external reality. The diagram sllmmarises
modes and methods of bridging the gap
hetween subject and object and the
narratives by which this is allthorised and
limited. Althollgh the diagram does not
explicitly account for the inner life of the
sllbject it does mean to imply thm the sllbject
is sitaated in Cllltllrally specific
cirCllmstances and that an)' \l'Qy of
knowing the world is filtered and shaped by
these circumstances.
4 LANDSCAPE REVIEW 2001:7(1)

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 over-
determined 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 5
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 over-
simplified 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-first-
century 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
Figme 3: Photomontage by Richard Weller and Tom

Griffiths, 2002, including icons of physical and
metaphysical orientation within which histories and
discourses of landscape architecture take place.
References are nwde to Aristotelian, Cl11'istian and
contemporary cosmology, to Darwinian evolution
and Eden, to Platonic geometries and renaissance
harmonies, to modernist utopias and the labyrinth.
RICHARD WELLER 7
1990s Comer positioned his postmodern hermeneutics against the "hardness" of a
world that was, as he felt, losing its mystery and enigma, a symptom typically sourced
to the Enlightenment and its production of a divided euro-centric culture of
romanticism and reason. 13 In this mechanical, empty or godless universe, Corner
thinks humanity cannot "figure" itself. 14 Consequently, Corner asks whether landscape
theory and, by extension, praxis could "rebuild an existential ground, a topography
of critical continuity, of memory and invention, orientation and direction?". 15 In
1991, Corner confesses to a desire for a "greater sense of wholeness, continuity and
meaning to our lived relations witl1 tl1e landscape",16 and in 1999, strikingly at odds
with postmodern placeless ness, he could not be unaware of the nostalgia involved in
rendering landscape as the basis for, as he puts it, "rootedness and connection, for
home and belonging"Y Such a disposition is not uncommon to those who love
landscape, and not just since the Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment wrenched
us from the soil, but it remains an essentially romantic and ambivalent relationship
to (post) modernity - ambivalence perhaps best kept in creative and critical tension
rather than reconciled. Indeed, Corner supports this when he qualifies his use of
terms such as "wholeness" by suggesting "difference, contamination, collision and
diversity may in fact be maintained, celebrated, or embodied. Indeed such tension
may be me very foundation of cultural wholeness and continuity".ls
In his early work, Corner essentially (re-)places the onus on landscape architecture
to reconcile creatively the quintessentially modern tensions between liberation and
grounding, between gesseUschaft (society) and gemeinschaft (community).lq Corner's
commitment derives from Paul Ricoeur, who famously asked "how to become
modern and to return to sources?" but it is a continuous theme in modern Western
culture, at least since Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 2o This question represents a conundrum
that, in turn, underpins the influential design theory of Kenneth Frampton, to
whom Corner seems heavily indebted. Whilst it is theoretically fitting to place
landscape architecture as a reconciliatory agent between the relentless displacements
of global modernity and our apparent need for earthbound emplacement, such a
profoundly oriented practice of landscape design, like the clarion of stewardship,
seems not only unlikely, but also grandiloquent.
In deference to Martin Heidegger, Corner desires "significant places for
dwelling", which, he says, would embody "alternative forms of relationship between
people, place and cosmos". 21 If this is an ecological trinity it also contains
metaphysical nostalgia resounding with deeper loss. In terms of landscape history,
this registers overwhelmingly as the loss of the world as a garden in both paradisiacal
and pagan conceptions, but it is also an ongoing sense of loss because everything
now becomes, to some extent, de-natured. However, Corner takes this bereavement
and turns it toward the contemporary global garden without the sort of polemical
and aesthetic closure one expects from an environmentalist or landscape planner.
As evidenced across Corner's polemics, the nostalgic impulse need not be
sentimental or conservative, and is, in many ways, a long-established, still legitimate
and critical landscape architectural subject and point of departure. That

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 commonality-
connections between art and science, theory and practice, humans and nature, for
R1CHARD WELLER 9
example. In addition to joining, metaphors also extrapolate new meaning and
usage to old figures thereby disclosing hidden and latent relationships. The
deployment of metaphor is both reconciliatory and innovative practice".28
Unconcerned by the theoretical problem that to build such bridges is also to
confirm the dualism one seeks to efface in the first place, Corner's hermeneutics
seek to bind the rend between culture and its world. Alternatively, deconstruction,
as I understand it, travels to either end of any bipolar axis and shows how each pole
is unstable in the first place. If one can demonstrate that, for example, nature and
culture are linguistic constructions with unstable foundations, then one finds oneself
building bridges over shifting ground and toward mirages. The figure of
deconstruction then is not a bridged divide but a labyrinthine marshland, where
all is in between. Certainly, deconstruction would seem to operate by unravelling
meaning and hermeneutics by shoring it up, but both share the impossibility of
absolute truth as a datum. Deconstruction opens to hermeneutics by setting in
motion an endless chain of signification, multiplying interpretative potential,
denying essential origins. However, if this achieves a resounding refutation of
monolithic truth and its attendant authority, it also collapses into relativisnl; a
charge also levelled at hermeneutics, and a central paradox of the postmodern
condition in general.
Corner's hermeneutics and deconstruction both share a critique of Western
intellectual frameworks and have the re-direction of modernity in mind. Arguably
though, the (architectural) work, which was (rightly or wrongly) corralled under
the rubric of deconstruction, did more to open the hermeneutic scope of design
than that of its detractors who were more overtly concerned with matters of regional
identity, ecological salvation or symbolism. For example, Daniel Libeskind's complex
and ultimately personal intersections of site, history, poetics and mathematics,
and Peter Eisenman's layered site-specific "texts", both of which are discussed in
part two of this essay, are commonly associated with deconstruction, but are also
the result of the hermeneutic design processes that Corner advocates. Not
surprisingly, over the course of the 1990s, Corner warms to Libeskind and
Eisenman's type of innovative work and, in 1999, writes that "there are more creative
reasons to reclaim sites than the merely nostalgic and compensatory - reasons that
see invention as an essential ingredient of reclamation, engendering new kinds of
landsca pe ... ".29
Unlike the threatening slippage of meaning that Corner associated with
deconstruction in 1991, writing in 1998, he finds a liberation of meaning through
an opening of signification made possible by the loss of a firm origin, in this case
the de-stabilisation of landscape architecture's grounding in the once seemingly
stable referent of 'nature'. He notes that: "While contemporary scholars have begun
to demonstrate how even the most objective descriptions of reality are culturally
'situated' and that 'nature' is perhaps the most situated yet shifting construction of
all, few have dared to develop and practise techniques for realising the potential
offered by such an emancipated (even playful and promiscuous) world of

Figllre 4: PllOtomontCIge b), Ric!wrd Weller
and Tom GrifJiths, 2002, including (j
painting by Salmdor Dali, which Corner
cites iLl emhlel1lCltic of the imagination's
ability to reveal hidden iLlpects of reality.
Dct/i's slmeal revelation is spliced into (j
rational geomorpllOlogical diagmm that in
t11rn is montagcd into tile frame of Rene
Magritte's icon of the prohlem of
representation, entitled 'The Human
Condition'. Additionally, Magritte's famoHs
semiotic deconstJ'Hction 'This is not a pipe"
11'0111 'The TreiLIon of Pictures' is altered to
read "This is not a landscape". All this
makes prohlematic the ways in which tile
stereotypiwllandscape arcilitect in tile bottom
left, interprets, creates (md represent.1 design.
constructions".3o Here, Corner's deconstruction opens the door to creation and

construction. This is not to say that the world is a mere playground of signification,
but that we come to realise there are many natures. Instead of claiming direct
access to an authentic nature, out there, beyond language and by inference,
designing the setting of a singularly authentic culture, a hermeneutic landscape
architecture is one concerned with, and even troubled by, its own representations.
Surely this is the first step of a critical disposition.
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
rejects the mass production of landscape architecture as a relatively mindless,
apolitical, service industry and advances a self-consciousness of the processes of
conceiving, representing and building design.
To try and place Corner's idea of a critical landscape architecture it is worth
recalling and questioning that, in 1986, Frampton, goes only so far as to say that
a critical culture of (landscape) architecture would be promulgated by "an express
opposition to the cultural domination of hegemonic power".12 This 'hegemonic
power' is almost invariably associated with the ubiquitous condition of political
and economic globalism on the one hand and aesthetic modernism on the other.
For the critical regionalist, both are thought to be synonymous with
homogenisation. As it takes shape in the twenty-first century it is arguable whether
globalism is the agent of homogeneity. Equally, it is doubtful if Frampton's
oppositional geography is an axis along which a politics of resistance can be
effectively played out. Additionally, consider that a critical disposition, as
encouraged by Frampton, could just as well be turned against the local condition
and its traditionally parochial trappings.
In the case of landscape architecture as a service industry eagerly delivering
an easy sense of place as a panacea for the trauma of globalism, the spirit of
critical regionalism to which Corner and Frampton allude, has, in my view,
been dissipated and reduced to user friendly, politically saccharine, commercially
expeditious design that only cries crocodile tears for the nature and
neighbourhoods of yesteryear. That is to say, as critical regionalism slackens its
connection to whatever is meant by 'critical', it drifts toward neo-conservative
postmodernity. Landscape architecture has, as everyone knows, tapped into a
profitable trade in feigning intimacy with local contexts. Sometimes this business
of symbolising place, might encapsulate the pride and resilience of local identity,
but more often than not it smacks of insecurity, ideology and asphyxiated
imagination. To avoid the jingoism that arises as regionalism becomes
parochialism, Corner emphasises the 'critical' instead of the 'regional'. Indeed,
he eventually abandons the aesthetics of a sense of place almost entirely.
Alternatively, Corner shifts attention to the more fundamental structural
matrices of places, seeking to apply influential ingenuity at that level. Be that as
it may, the highly wrought artifice of designing specific sites cannot be avoided
by the practising landscape architect and they should be exploited for their
critical representational potential within the surrounding city's empire of signs.
If landscape architecture can be easily criticised for the disingenuous mass
production of a 'sense of place', then so too we find in some essays in Corner's
'Recovering Landscape' the persistence of romanticism, the quest for authenticity
and profundity. Through design, landscape architects often see themselves as
providing cultural continuity by bringing site history to the surface, in spite of or
to even correct, the delusional and self-destructive global city. Whilst they all reject
sentimentality, this tendency to essentialise design in the mnemonic strata of a site
can be found in the writings of respected latter-day augurs such as Sebastien Marot,
Georges Descombes, Steen H0yer and Christophe Girot.
12 LANDSCAPE REVIEW 200 J :7( 1)

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
important to note that he emphatically believes in radical experimentation from
within a canon. He, too, draws frequently on the diversity of aesthetic practices
in early and mid-twentieth century art because, in contradistinction to the
landscape architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, landscape
architecture in the twentieth has become disconnected from its muses.
Even if landscape architecture had translated the visual revelations of twentieth
century art practice into designed environments with more rigour, it would still
not have arrived at a compelling ecological vision and, if anything, landscape
architecture is increasingly an art of ecology. For an ecological vision, landscape
architecture turned to science, which, whilst all seeing is aesthetically blind. Landscape
architecture aped the scientific method and stacked up verifiable biophysical
information to reach logical conclusions. Useful as this remains, science is only ever
part of the story. Philosophically, science is no longer able to offer objective
knowledge exactly. Consequently, with that dream of the West exhausted, science
has had to face its own post-quantum, hermeneutic intrigues. In this sense, science
can no longer be opposed to the arts. From here, there is no way Corner's belief in
landscape architecture as the topos of culture's existential orientation could develop
any further without becOlning intertwined in the ecological paradox of contemporary
culture and, in the mid-1990s that is precisely what he turns his mind to.
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

frequently been reduced to dimensions of environmental problem solving (know
how) and aesthetic appearance" .4l The association of ecology with creativity and,
in turn, creativity with degrees of instrumentality is long overdue.
As I have intimated previously in this journal, within the rubric of ecology we
necessarily see the rational and the lyrical merge. Ecology as a science primarily
concerns the logical extension of instrumental reason - a development from analysis
of mechanical objects to modelling of non-linear systems. Ecological awareness as
Figllre 5: Photomonwge by Ric/wrd Weller

and Tom Gri!iitllS, 2002.
Mandelbrat's Factal dimensions and the
buttn]ly effect are Ina two papillar
represenwtions of net(' understandings of
nature's self-organising, non-linear order
and complexity. Natttre's inherent
creativity, unlmdictability and
interconnectedness as revealed by Cham
theory (illd Complexity science seeml rife
with ecolol,>1calmetaphars. In the
backgrOlmd are some aflames Corner's
own graphic mappings. As a whole, the
montage assembles an ecology of
information, sllggesting a confluence of
mind and matter, albeit through the matrix
of the Cartesian grid.
RTCHARD WELLER 15
a broader cultural condition is somewhat more dramatic, because si tuates us
deep in time amidst epics of extinction and creation. As cultural history is enfolded
into natural history questions arise as to our traditionally privileged roles within
the community of living systems. New senses of place emerge, which neither the
narratives of (Western) theology nor enlightened humanism can adequately cope.
In so far as ecologists map generally deleterious impacts on ecosystems, the science
of ecology paradoxically amounts to an indictment of the culture that makes
science possible.42 This paradox is interesting but more pertinent is that the
ecosystem revealed by ecology is a cracked mirror through which to reflect upon
the entire trajectory of western theology, philosophy and science. Although
popularly manifesting a victimised 'nature', ecology is also effecting design culture
as it becomes increasingly synonymous with new and more sophisticated models
of universal (dis-)order such as chaos theory - itself a kaleidoscope through which
both romantics and mathematicians find what they want.
The axiom of ecology, and something now confirmed by the butterfly effect
of chaos theory, is that all things are interconnected. Therefore, every act let
alone every design is significant and bound in a web of relations, the consequences
of which cannot be predicted. Add to this the axiom of the twenty-first century
that every surface of the earth is decided over by human agency, and then clearly
landscape architecture is well placed to become the new mother of the arts, a
position of power it has always wanted and not yet earned.
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 LANDSCAPE REVIEW 2001:7( 1)

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
Figure 6: Photomontage by Richard Weller
tension between paradise and utopia, the tension between Christian nostalgia
and Tom Griffiths, 2002.
and humanist futurism that shape the new world imagination. What Corner is A Faustian Ian McHarg points to
really measuring then is a mindscape, which manifests itself in the massive de- landscape architecture's!)romised land. In
naturing effects of super-power infrastructure, set sublim.ely against the vastness his hand an image from James Comer's
of the earth's immemorial crust. 'Taking Measures Across the American
Landscape' is illuminated by a jXIssing
By placing himself at the panoptic point of the aerial overview, Corner's concept
satellite. Meanwhile, leams falL, tOHuyd the
is to turn the gaze of instrumental reason upon itself, and take its measure. That is, la bYlinth of the contemporary ll'orking
Corner's appropriation of the overview is intentionally vertiginous and not heroic. la ndsea pc belot!'.
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, self-
conscious 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

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.
Set against an aerial view of a mechanised nmil
landscape is a post-industrial subttrban sprawl
aligned with pictttresqlle sentimentality - cultural
conditions upon which the authenticity implied by
'landsclwft' would seem lost. A 'real worker' who
might have once known his place is rendered placeless
by multiplication. Paradoxically, it is the artists,
Robert Smith.son and Joseph BlIeys who are engaged
in actttally working the land but their works are
merely symbolic.
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

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 weave in a range of scholarship that not only examined Corner's sources,
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.
5Corner, 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.
6 Corner, J (1990) A Discourse on Theory I: Sounding the Depths - Origins, Theory, and
Representation, Landscape Journal, v 9, pp 61-78. (Hereinafter cited as A Discourse on Theory I.)
7 Corner, J (1991) A Discourse on Theory II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the
Alternative of Hermeneutics, Landscape Journal, v 10, pp 115-133. (Hereinafter cited as A Discourse
on Theory 11.)
H A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7, p 132, fn 21.
QSchulz, N (1980) Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, Rizzoli: New York, pp 166-
202.
10 Seddon, G (1979) The Genius Loci and the Australian Environment, Landscape Australia, No 2,
Feb, p 66.
11 A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7, p 129.
12 One could also make this point as regards the work of John Dixon Hunt and his inheritance of
McHarg's Chair at the University of Pennsylvania a suggested symmetry lost on no one. Hunt's
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 re-
figuring 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.
16 A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7.
17 Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, above n 5, p 12.
18 A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7, p 132, fn 29.
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

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.
2+ Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 24, p 83.
25 Ecology and landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21, p 97.
26 Corner's wariness of neo-conservative postmodernity as one form of aesthetic and intellectual

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.
20 Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, above n 5.
30 Corner, J (1999) The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention in Mappings
Cosgrove, D (ed), Reaktion Books: london, pp 213-152, p 224.
31 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 59-
69, p 64.
J+ Four Trace Concepts in Landscape Architecture, above n 33, p 66.
35 Bowring, J (2000) The Extra In Ordinary, Cross Section, October, pp 10-13.
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 Ecology and landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21, pp 81-108, p 88.
38 Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21.
39 Ecolo,gy and Landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21, p 100.
40 Ecology and landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21, pp 82.
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
Press: New Haven.
RICHARD WELLER 23
H Tcddng Mcasllres Across the Amerimn Landsm/Je, abow n 43, p 17.
,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: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, above n 5.
50 Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, above n 5.
II Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, above n 48, pp 153-170, p 158.
12 Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, above n 48.
5, Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, above n 48, p 159.

55 Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, above n 48, p 154.
5) Eidetic Operations and New L'lndscapes, above n 48, p 160.
5Q Cosgrove, D (1991) Social Formation and the Symbolic Landscape, in Eidetic Operations and
New Landscapes Corner, J (ed), above n 48, piSS.
61A 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.
61Jameson, F (1984) Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, New Left Review, 146,
pp 53-92.

Between hermeneutics and datascapes:
A critical appreciation of emergent landscape
design theory and praxis through the writings of
James Corner 1990-2000 (Part Two)
RICHARD WELLER
THIS, THE SECOND OF A TWO PART ESSAY, continues to trace the theoretical work of
James Corner over the period 1999-2000. Following Corner's lead, this second half
of the essay summarises and comments upon some emerging design Inethods and
specific design projects so as to situate the issues raised in part one. Part two begins
Richard Weller is a Senior Lecturer in
with the unbuilt Pare de la Villette of 1982 by Rem Koolhaas and discusses its
the Fawlty of Architecture, Landscape
ramifications. The essay revolves around arguments put forward by Corner in the
and the Visual Arts at the University
late 1990s for the agency oflandscape design as structuring development rather than
of Western Australia and Director of
symbolising culture and nature, arguments for what landscape design does not what it
the design company Room 4.1.3 P/L.
means. To facilitate this, the writings of Bart Lootsma and Alex Wall who, along with
Telephone: +61-8-9380-1567
Corner, presented the most pertinent and provocative themes in Corner's latest book
Fax: +61-8-9380-1082
Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, are considered in
www.room413.com.au
some detail. Part two concludes with thoughts on datascaping - a new design
Email: [email protected]
methodology synonyrnous 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 KEY WORDS
rather, it goes to the co-ordinates Corner has set out and explores the field they Hermeneutics
demarcate. The essay does, however, seek to qualifY the claim that James Corner is
Critical Regionalism
articulating a middle ground between the deleteriously exclusive categories oflandscape
Modernity
planning and landscape design and that this middle ground is crucial for landscape
Ecology
architecture's future as a 'synthetic and strategic art form'.
Landschaft
Vertigo
INTRODUCTION
Programme
established the philosophical grounding of James
P ART ONE OF THIS ESSAY
Corner's theoretical work in the early 1990s and discussed Corner's faith in
landscape design as the topos of culture's existential orientation. In following his
Infrastructure
Fields
Objects
decade of writing about landscape architecture, part one found that the edges of Mapping
Corner's thinking lie with the rubric of hermeneutics on the one hand and the Datascape
concept of landschaft on the other. Although hermeneutics and landschaft would
seem to diametrically polarise Corner's work, this second essay attempts to
demonstrate through design techniques and projects, that Corner's work leads to
and is part of a potential synthesis. In order to develop his arguments and continually
define his shifting position, Corner's writing has utilised oppositional structures,
however, if we fold his decade of theoretical work upon itself we find a potential
reintegration of practices generally isolated as modes of planning or modes of design. REFLECTION
LANDSCAPE REVIEW 2001:7(1) PAGES 25-43 25

To varying degrees, the design techniques, projects and practitioners put forward
by Corner, and surveyed below, could all be said to be in pursuit of an art of
instrumentality. As this essay will explain and explore, such a pursuit tends to
erode the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, landscape architecture and
planning.
In introducing his latest book, Recovering Landscape, Corner suggests sOlnething
similar to an art of instrumentality when he momentarily defines landscape
architecture as a "synthetic and strategic art form". I As opposed to arranging
scenery on the one hand or rationalising productivity and streamlining
development on the other, Corner's landscape architect is one who intervenes
more powerfully, creatively and critically in both the make up and meaning of
the world. Corner argues persistently that, in order to intervene in developmental
processes in such a way, landscape architects need new design methods and more
sophisticated modes of representation. Corner asserts that "landscape as a culturally
significant practice is dependent on the capacity of its inventors to image the
world in new ways and body forth those images in richly phenomenal and
efficacious terms".2 Corner's studio-based practices and writings champion the
creative processes of collecting, interpreting and representing data, particularly
when the processes lead to design propositions that locate meaningfulness at the
structural and programmatic level.
A place that has been formative in Corner's intellectual and creative shift away
from the semantic intrigues of design toward the programmatic motors of design,
and one that is seminal to a genre of work that seeks an 'art of instrumentality' is
Rem Koolhaas's un built design for the Parc de la Villette, produced in 1982.
This essay's focus on praxis in contemporary landscape architecture begins there.
SEMINAL GROUND
The last few decades of the twentieth century have been a boom for the landscape
design industry and one can sense an increasing architectural interest in the ideas
Figure 8: Photomontage by Richard Weller
and Tom Griffiths, 2002. and potential of landscape architecture. However, there remains a relative dearth
The sel{orl':anising striations of the plan by of speculative and critical landscape architectural projects. By this I mean there is
Rem Koolhaas for Parc de la Villette not a lot of landscape architecture created for landscape architecture's sake, that
(1982) becomes a model for the whole is, projects that risk safe amenity and specifically test ideas and new techniques.
landscape, one with no architect-Gods or
For this reason, among others, Corner is not alone in repeatedly reading a lot in
memories of paradise. Buildings, open
to Koolhaas's Parc de la Villette. The plan, now almost two decades old, appears
spaces and infrastwctttre are interu>ot'en
into one extensive hybridised condition -
in Corner's writings on ecology and mapping and is often cited in articles by
simply 'scape'. Corner, Wall and Lootsma in Corner's latest book, Recovering Landscape: Essays in
Contemporary Landscape Architecture.
It is a measure of Koolhaas's "cunning fluency with imaging"3 that the plan
can play an enduring variety of polemical roles. For Corner, the plan is an emblem
of "reformulating form and program into freshly hybrid conditions",4 but he also
borrows it to flesh out a discourse on designed ecologies, illustrating the point
that designed ecologies need not look at all like the way the world once was.
26 LANDSCAPE REVIEW 2001 :7( I)

Corner agrees with Sanford Kwinter in thinking of Koolhaas's proposition as an
evolutionary leap, that its qualities of indeterminacy, non-hierarchical striations
and programmatic overlays can be understood, not only as ecological metaphors,
but actually as socio-ecological catalysts instigating self-organising processes and
injecting "indetermination, diversification and freedom into both the social and
natural worlds".5
Closer to the truth of the proposal by Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan
Architecture (OMA), is simply the work's legitimate claim to facilitate a range of
"programmatic events, cOlnbinations, improvisations, differentiations, and
adjacencies".6 As Corner elucidates in his essay 'The Agency of Mapping', the
project deployed a system of programmatic layers, separated them out and then
superimposed them so that "the resulting structure is a complex fabric, without
centre, hierarchy or single organising principle".7 In fact, layering is a singular
organisational principle, but it is one that invites accident and creates complexity
as each layer is added to others. Layering programmatic parts of a design brief
deftly avoids two things: beaux-arts spatial structures and landscape as symbolic
imagery. Although each layer of Koolhaas's mechanical compilation can be
couched in purely functionalist, programmatic terms, the resultant "thickened
surface" forms a "mosaic-like field of multiple orders".8 Paradoxically, function in
this case leads to surprising form. Likened to the various different games written
over the one gymnasium surface, Corner suggests that the resultant fusion of
layers might incite hybrid games; a nice idea, but an unlikely reality. 'Reality' in
this case matters because the praise for Koolhaas's Parc de 101 Villette, and much
work designed in similar vein, claims to effect and create reality, not just re-
present it.
As regards ecology in the Parc de la Villette, perhaps if the masses were to
interact with its bands of 'stuff then the park's potential theatricality could bespeak,
or at least represent, a sort of contemporary cyborgian ecology, a gymnasium
without a roof. But if the abattoir, which the park meant to replace, was an
absolute end point in the monstrous, de-natured ecosystem of feeding a city, one
wonders by comparison what ecological order Koolhaas really had in mind for
the site when he ruled it up and sprinkled confetti over its corpse? This is not to
belittle the ecological allegory of indeterminacy in the programme of a park, but
one questions whether park design should be reduced to what the protagonists
of the performative over the representational refer to as 'organisational field-
systen1s'.
What matters in design culture is not that complex scientific and ecological
ideas such as indeterminacy may be [misjappropriated to new designs, for no-one
can claim the true 'ecology' or its representation, but that more fecund design
strategies are invoked and circulated as rhetorical icons of practice. Significantly,
Corner extrapolates from Koolhaas's Parc de la Villette to suggest "that a truly
ecological landscape architecture might be less about the construction of finished
and complete works, and more about the design of 'processes', 'strategies', 'agencies',
RICHARD WELLER 27
and 'scaffoldings' - catalytic frameworks that might enable a diversity of relation-
ships to create, emerge, network, interconnect, and differentiate":) Koolhaas's
programmatic alchemy has, in this sense, been good to think with and it is
remarkable that landscape designers and academics have done so little with it.
Equally remarkable is that Bernard Tschumi's victorious and realised scheme for
Parc de la Villette shares much in theory with the unbuilt diagrams of Koolhaas,
and yet the disappointments often reported from the fonner do not cast shadows
upon the latter. lO
At Parc de la Villette the lullaby of landscape in the city was sacrificed to the
model of big warehouses without roofs and, even after 20 years, no-one really knows
what to do with the mutilated corpse. So, the public vote with their feet and head to
Parc des Buttes Chaumont, a nineteenth-century Arcadia just up the road. Whether
Arcadia turns out to be a more stubborn model in the imagination of the public
than all the challenges to it might have expected, is not of immediate importance,
what is of interest is that Koolhaas's programmatic alchemy has gestated into a
broader, contemporary conception of landscape architecture, shared by a new
generation of urbane architects and landscape architects. Koolhaas's Pare de La
Villette has become a model for the entire landscape of contemporary culture.
In the early 1980s Koolhaas referred coldly to his systems approach to the
design of Parc de la Villette as an exercise in setting out a "field of social
instruments". Expanding upon this, he now approaches the whole city (including
its arable lands that are subject to the same systems) as simply "SCAPE©" a
condition in which architecture, infrastructure and landscape are understood in
a singular hybridised condition, one better negotiated by structural design strategies
than preoccupations with aesthetic finery. II It is this sensibility that has gripped
Figttre 9: Photomontage by Richard Weller

and Tom Griffiths, 2002.
The ghosts of Arch igra m and SHperstltdio
lead !is into a fll tltre \Uhere, as descri beel by
Alex \'(/all, the grOltnd plane of the city is
"catalytic emulsion" or a circuit board,
either determining or simply streamlining
development.

the imagination of architect Alex Wall, who contributes an article entitled
'Programming the Urban Surface' to Corner's book Recovering Landscape: Essays
in Contemporary Landscape Architecture. 12
FIELD CONDITIONS
Alex Wall introduces this new urban landscape as "a catalytic ernulsion, a surface
literally unfolding events in time" Y Just as Corner heralds his landschaft by
juxtaposing it with the landskip that it is not, Wall sets his 'catalytic emulsion' in
opposition to the pastoral. Wall explains that design strategies are strictly
"instruments, or agents, for unfolding new urban realities, designed not so much
for appearances and aesthetics as for their instigative and structural potential
•.. ".14 Echoing Corner, he explains that this new urban landscape is best understood
as "the functioning matrix of connective tissue that organises not only objects
and spaces but also the dynamic processes and events that move through them.
This is landscape as an active surface, structuring the conditions for new
relationships and interactions among the things it supports" .15 Wall speaks of a
landscape as if it were a power board, a surface through which to run internet
cables, sewerage systems and whatever else is needed to "increase its capacity to
support and diversify activities in time" .16 He reminds us that design strategies
should be "targeted not only toward physical but also social and cultural
transformations, functioning as social and ecological agents"Y
Wall's rationale for his conception of urban landscape design is based on new
urban conditions of placelessness and the mobility of capital, goods and people -
very real, but not yet well understood conditions seemingly at odds with landscape
architecture's traditional desire for groundedness, orientation and emplacement.
For Wall, these disorienting conditions of late capitalism have forced a shift from
seeing cities in fonnal spatial terms to reading them as dynamic systems of flux. As
opposed to the squares, parks and districts that the Krier brothers and new urbanists
would have us reconstruct along classical or vernacular lines, or the nature many
landscape architects mourn the loss of, Wall talks of cities in terms of "network
flows, non-hierarchical ambiguous spaces, spreading rhizome like dispersals and
diffusions, strategically staged surfaces, connective tissue, ground as matrix and
accelerant" .
What I think Wall and others are moving toward is this: All things ultimately
come from or go to the ground, therefore, the landscape is the infrastructure of
the future, not just the inert or decorative field into which mechanisms are placed.
To privilege the field is to assert both the landscape that exists, and that which
can be created as the conditions to which all other infrastructural elements or
networks are answerable. IS This announces an architectural paradigm shift in
landscape architecture's favour. The shift involves a turn to relational readings of
objects - a turn inspired not only by increased complexity and contingency in
urban conditions, but also derived from the way in which both ecology and
physics teach us of interconnection. This perception of landscape design owes
RICHARD WELLER 29
more to futurism, early architectural modernism and systems thinking than it
does the orthodox landscape architectural pedigree of English landscape gardens,
democratic parks, the garden city, ecology and Jane Jacobs. Although thoroughly
'modern' in its progressive spirit, the conception of landscape design to which
Wall alludes is contrary to early twentieth-century modernism because it privileges
rather than marginalises the landscape. To put it another way, perhaps what Wall
and Koolhaas are foreseeing and instigating is the arrival oflandscape architecture's
own belated modernism. With no memory of Arcadia, paradise or a golden age,
and probably unimpressed by anti-urban ecology, perhaps Wall and Koolhaas are
not so much architects as a new kind of landscape architect.
Even though both authors share the conception of a landscape as primarily an
infrastructural medium, Wall's futurism somewhat distorts Corner's humanisn,
as encountered in part one of this essay. It could be contended, therefore, that a
landscape as a service matrix is potentially reductive and easily degraded to an
instrumental complicity in nothing other than the technological streamlining of
the world, a world that Corner's hermeneutics once resisted. However, the
suggestions of such complicity in Wall's model must be measured against what is
arguably the failing of landscape design and planning, either to resist and critique
the postmodern city or to re-imagine it creatively. In simply begrudging the city,
landscape architecture ends up sulking in the corner of the metropolis or just
tending its gardens. Landscape architecture, a discipline that could read and direct
the field, needs, therefore, to entertain new design paradigms and scrutinise its
philosophical disposition in an effort to avoid the status quo where it is trivialised
and commodified by the very forces it might have once hoped to resist.
Landscape architects have always known that their field is more than inert or
decorative and that development should be structured from the ground up, but
they have had trouble articulating this to other traditionally more powerful
disciplines. Wall's hyperbole is different to landscape architecture's existing
philosophical base not only because of its futurism, but more so because it
encourages a landscape position that is co-extensive with, rather than dialectical
to, the city. And yet, Wall's ultimate aims are not dissimilar to those one expects
landscape architects to hold high. Wall declares that the control of field conditions
"may be the only hope of withstanding the excesses of popular culture - restless
mobility, consumption, density, waste, spectacle, and information while absorbing
and redirecting the alternating episodes of concentration and dispersal caused by
the volatile movement of investment capital and power". 19 In seeking to resist the
forces of globalism, Wall moves back to a more familiar critical regionalism, but
he does so without recourse to aesthetics of the local landscape. What then
would Wall's landscape look like?
FIELD FORMS
Despite his insistence that instrumental design strategies transcend aesthetics, there
is a systems aesthetic at work when Wall concludes that "the emphasis is on the

extensive reworking of the surface of the earth as a smooth, continuous matrix that
effectively binds the increasingly disparate elements of our environment together". 20
Wall illustrates his thesis with images by 'Superstudio' from the 19705, images
wherein the chaos of the city and the complexity of the real landscape is, miraculously,
smoothed over by Cartesian grids extended in all directions. Certainly then, on the
face of it, the landscape in Wall's vision can lose its cherished local difference and
become subsumed with, and enervated by, the mechanics of the city.
Corner's colleague, Stan Allen, articulates similar interests to Wall but arrives
at a vision of landscape that avoids homogeneityY Allen attempts a theory of
design that moves beyond the object of desire to the field of events. First, this means
that in situ assessments of site conditions pay particular attention to the process
Figure 10: PllOtomontage by Richmd
of change and have a sensitivity to flux. No site is a static platform waiting for Weller and Tom Griffiths, 2002.
something, rather the site is a four-dimensional interdependent system. Allen, The interactive lights from West 8's
like Wall and Corner, dismisses design's preoccupation with spectacle, grand Scho!l1vlmrgplein in Rotterdam have
semiotic messages and static, ideal geometries. Allen, influenced clearly by the walked up onto the roof of the Yokohama
International Port Terminal, an icon of
new sciences of chaos and complexity, argues that overall form ensues not from
building as landscape and object
the top down but somewhat unpredictably from localised iterations of parts,
becoming field, by Foreign Office
from the bottom up. Whereas in Wall's futuristic descriptions of new urban Arc1titects. Ot! to one side is also West 8's
fields there is a sense of impending homogeneity and streamlining, for Allen a bold supergraphic at Oosterschelde. A
sensitivity to field conditions ensures difference at the local level. Japanese tourist, a global post-modern
We can begin to more clearly imagine 'field conditions' by considering some of flanellr dra\('s the connection bettveen
contemporary 'field conditions' and
the examples Wall puts forward. Although seemingly at odds with Wall's
Einsteinian spacetime.
marginalisation of aesthetics, sensationally visual architectural projects, such as the
Yokohama International Port Terminal by Foreign Office Architects, seem intent
on blurring objects into their fields. In this project, the whole building is liquefied
into an idealised and abstracted landscape of fluid folds. Highly de-natured and
stylistic, yet wanting to explain themselves in functional terms, such architectural
meltdowns are easily induced in computers where, unfortunately, most of them will
remain. Nonetheless, such projects serve as powerful indicators of a hybridised and
increasingly fluid urbanism that seeks interconnection rather than fragmentation,
field conditions rather than objecthood.
Struggling somewhat to find evidence equal to his rhetoric, Wall presents the
Dutch landscape architects' 'West 8', led by Adriaan Gueze, as a model landscape
architecture practice. Although urban squares are superseded by his own account
of a new urbanity, Wall directs us to West 8's Schouwburgplein (Theatre Square) in
Rotterdam as an example of a zone "where the public appropriates and modifies
the very surface of the city". 22 When we ask why the public can do this here and
not in any other empty city square, we are told that the plaza has built-in footings
for ephemeral structures and that the public can interact with the spectacular
robotic lights that flank the square. The design's success is due to West 8 knowing
what not to do. They have not littered the place with the detritus of their own
hermeneutic subjectivity nor have they sought images of cultural continuity by
manifesting palimpsests of the site's historical context. West 8's minimalist neo-
RICHARD WELLER 31
functionalism can also be seen in their simple environmental installation at
Oosterschelde, a photogenic super-graphic that also happens to have some
ecological merit. The stripes of different coloured shells not only suit the visual
dynamics of a drive-by audience but also function well as a feeding ground for a
local bird population.
Gueze has emerged as a paradigmatic landscape architect by his well-publicised
turn to instrumental concerns and urban planning. West 8 claim to lead projects,
not clean up afterwards. Unlike the soft environnLental artworks that we have come
to expect from landscape architects, Gueze's only artwork in recent times was to
spread out 800,000 model homes in front of the Netherlands Institute of
Architecture. This alarming display of the impending suburbanisation of the Dutch
landscape not only focused debate but also demonstrated West 8's active embrace
of infrastructure and architecture. 23 It is also worth noting the 'model' citizens
that Gueze has in mind when producing design. He believes, "[rlhe urbanite is
self assured and well informed, finds his (sic) freedom and chooses his own sub-
cultures. The city is his domain, exciting and seductive". 24 So, in Holland at
least, the flaneur is back! But, even if Gueze's sociology seems romantic, landscape
architecture should welcome this ideal client as an alternative to the hapless victims
of modernism, or the desensitised suburban consumers that much landscape
design must have in mind when it spreads out its familiar palliative embellishments.
In addition, Wall talks of major public works, such as new transport interchanges,
networks and linkages, urging that they can be thought of as generating not destroying
urban landscape spaces. At the level of urban design, Wall cites the work of Koolhaas
(OMA) at Melun-Senart in France, which apparently shows how landscape can be
prioritised in the procedure of setting conditions for further development. In OMA's
scheme the only fixed entities are a series of negatives or tracts of landscape. 25
With these delineations the unpredictable and inconsistent nature of complex
urban development can, not only proceed, but be encouraged. To the landscape
architect, the idea of firstly securing open spaces as a strategy for place making is
Figllre 11: Photomontage by Richard
hardly new, however, it does seem as if it takes a glamorous architect of considerable
Weller and Tom Griffiths, 2002.
authority and rhetorical skill, to give it publicised credence.
The strangely soporific vision of 'Tree City'
by Rem (Capability) Koolhaas, the
winning design for Toronto's Downsview NOT GARDEN CITIES
Park (2001). The design is predominantly
Koolhaas's most recent attempt at landscape architecture (designed in collaboration
comprised of a labyrinth of 1,000 paths
and clumps of trees that cover the site like
with the graphic designer, Bruce Mau) is not a garden city, rather, it is a park
polka dots. Beneath this IJltbble (by graphic design entitled 'Tree City'. 'Tree City' is the winning scheme for the large, post-
designer, Bntce Mall) is the grid of industrial, Downsview Park in Toronto. Here, over a vast and banal ex-military
MVRDV's 'Plant-Pixel City', their site, Koolhaas proposes a matrix of 1,000 paths and intermittent clumps of trees.
"bettonesqlle" garden show tmitcd to Disarmingly simple and happily meaningless, if it is to be believed, this matrix is
become a new town olltside Potsdam in
a cost-effective superstructure, within which a diversity of other programmes might
Germany.
eventuate. Reminiscent of Capability Brown's eighteenth-century plantings that
were both beautiful and economic, and criticised as such, Koolhaas's groves of
trees create an easy, soporific identity for this site. 26 Once again, turning the

tables on the normal sequence of events, 'Tree City' is a landscape strate~'Y before
it is an architectural development.
The Koolhaasian offspring, MVRDV also demonstrate a desire to move
beyond crafting architectural objects and stake their new and noisy practice on its
ability to negotiate the complex field conditions of the contemporary landscape.
Not surprisingly, MVRDV have produced 'Plant City', a staged developmental
strategy beginning with the 2001 German National Garden Show (BUGA
Bundesgartenshau) held, on this occasion, in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin. 27
Here, as with 'Tree City', attention to programme and infrastructure in time
developmental stages with in-built degrees of diversity and unpredictability are
paramount. Almost making a mockery of it, MVRDV's negotiation of the Na-
tional Garden Show as an instigative event is instructive for its systematic yet
pluralist sensibility. In wanting expressly to free their labours from what they
read as landscape architecture's burdens of "'nature', 'purity', 'harmony', and
'nobility''', MVRDV asked "[i1f it is conceivable to make a park where all de-
mands, every imaginable paradox, all garden elelnents, all styles, all issues are
unceremoniously gathered together in an 'e-quality' that avoids morality and preju-
dice, one where every element can have the space to show its beauty and power".28
With apparent disregard for the site's intrinsic qualities, and the subsequent
abandon that this affords, MVRDV's first move was to spread out what they call
a "vegetal Manhattan", a horticultural Noah's Ark that was to exclude no plant
species or design styles. Indeed, MVRDV has described this supermarket of land-
scape architecture and horticulture as "Bettonesque". 29
For the actual garden show, everything is arranged alphabetically so as to avoid
what MVRDV refers to as "artistic composition".3o Top-soil is removed and stored
as hills, atop of which are restaurants where each table has a telescope so visitors
can enjoy the exhibits without actually walking through the show. Each grid unit
has one main night-light that projects as the concordant alphabetical letter. The
designers enthuse that this allows the site to be read from aeroplanes as a 'text
message'. After the festivities of the garden show are complete, housing, in a
range of styles and densities, is grafted on to the remnant gardens. The grid units
of the matrix of Plant City are 20 x 50 metres, deemed appropriate for a range of
building typologies MVRDV propose to developed. The grid is subdivided by
3.5-metre-wide paths that later become the streets of the new town. MVRDV
names this new townscape 'Pixel City' claiming it to be a "true garden city" and
one with such diversity and intensity that the differentiation between field and
object collapses, or as MVRDV puts it, the field itself becomes an objectY
There is something refreshing, yet juvenile in this exaggeration of design
programme and the designer's forecast of diversity, and one cannot help but envisage
a far tawdrier outcome. Although novel, and witty, MVRDV's Plant-Pixel City is
ultimately not that dissimilar to Rob Krier's 'Kirchsteigfeld', a formal, conservative,
beaux arts garden city for 35,000 people, itself not far from Potsdam. Krier's master
plan, developed in the early 1990s, accords with his renown aesthetic determination
R1CHARD WELLER 33
to model the future on what he understands as the best of (most legible urban
form) the past. Krier's master plan breaks down into courtyard components
wherein it attempts to achieve some measure of aesthetic diversity by ensuring
that different architects design different houses in each courtyard package. The
courtyards, designed by landscape architects Muller Knippschild Wehberg, are all
different in form but are also all designed primarily to hold stormwater. 12
Whilst he includes other architects in his version of confonnity Krier imposes
a strict level of homogeneity over the entire 'Kirchsteigfeld' development, whereas
MVRDV confuse botanic diversity with human diversity and propose the chaos
of the global supermarket flung across an American grid. Genuine difference eludes
them both.
MAPPING
MVRDV, and Koolhaas, are developing design techniques that can cope with the
contingencies and complexities of manifold design programmes in sites that are
expected to be many things over time. Corner, with a view to re-aligning landscape
Figure 12: Photomontage by Richard architectural projects more powerfully toward such cultural conditions, also argues
Weller and Tom Griffiths, 2002. consistently for new techniques of design process and representation, and it is to
From the ground lIP the overlaid maps this major aspect of his career that I now devote some time.
include Guy Debord's desire lines through Orthodox maps succeed brilliantly by reduction of that which they pertain to
Paris, Bernard Tschumi's Pare de la represent. Design, itself unable to proceed without studying and making maps,
Villette, OMA's Pare de la Villette, Peter
cannot work with the overly reductive nor the overly complex. Because designers
Eisenman's site analysis for the University
Art Museum of the California State
are interested in depicting and intervening in the manifold, interconnected nature
Unit'ersity at Long Beach and finally, of reality (in both poetic and pragmatic senses) they need mapping techniques
Raoul Bunsc/lOten '5 gameboards. that, on the one hand, open themselves to the infinitude of poetics and, on the
other, carefully hone and manage the facts of the situation. Such maps do not
exist, they must be constructed by design.
Instead of design paradigms that defer creativity until after the data is collected,
Corner stresses that the entire process of collecting, assembling and inter-relating
data is creative. 33 The data might in fact be 'pure' and 'objective' but the way it is
manipulated is not. Corner explains mapping is rhetorical and hermeneutic; it is
not "the indiscriminate listing and inventorying of conditions as in a tracing,
table or chart but rather a strategic and imaginative drawing-out of relational
structures".34 What also appeals to Corner is that the rhetorically crafted map
might be an end in itself, projecting not toward justifying yet another designed
commodity or spectacular image, but serving to activate a different reading of a
situation. To that end Corner, in his essay 'The Agency of Mapping: Speculation,
Critique and Invention', which is in many ways a seminal landscape design-studio
text, presents an array of new design techniques, entitled: 'Drift', 'Layering',
'Gameboard' and 'Rhizome' .15
'Drift' implies transgressive paths through institutionalised frameworks, an
example of which is the Situationist icon' Discours sur les Passions de l'amour', a montage
by Guy Debord. The artist has taken fragments of conventional maps of Paris and
rearranged them into a personalised, chimerical non-plan, a labyrinth of 'desire

lines' through the city. More concerned with (dis)orientation than linking A to
B, Debord's map proposes nothing by way of design and everything in terms of
imaginative re-occupation of a place. For Corner, the idea of drift "discloses hidden
topographies within ruling, dominant structures in an attempt to re-territorialise
seemingly repressed or spent ground". 36
The technique of 'layering', as regards its manifestation in Koolhaas's design
for Parc de la Villette has been discussed already, Corner, however, also takes time
to accredit the technique to Peter Eisenman, in conjunction with the landscape
architect Laurie Olin. 37 Eisenman's interest in layers is not driven by program-
matic facilitation so much as by his desire to use architecture to mine the way
texts and images entwine and distort within the mind. Corner says Eisenman
constructs "a radically new fiction out of old facts" forcing the data into new
forms. Certainly, the results of Eisenman's assemblages seem more troubled than
the innocuous contextualism that mainstream landscape architecture arrives at
by similarly layering information. lS
Gameboards, exemplified by the practice of Raoul Bunschoten, are interactive
maps that allow the multiple and inherently conflicting interest-groups within a
certain place to participate in the design planning process and 'play out' their
differences. The designer/facilitator attempts to translate the numerous and richly
eidetic projections that bear upon a certain place, into spatial tenns inscribed upon
the map. As Corner explains it, the facilitator is not a mere go-between but stages
the process rhetorically. This involves not the abstract accumulation of data as one
expects in a Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping inventory but, rather,
it is described as a "street level ethnography"39 that places the designer on a very
fine line of directing, but not predetermining, processes and outcomes. 40
Mapping, for Corner, is a creative process concerning" ... connections,
relationships, extensions and potentials ... " - in a word rhizomatic. 41 Like the
roots of mangroves, the principle of the rhizome is mainly horizontal growth but
also vertical extension. Each node in the system is its own centre yet bound to
every other in a non-hierarchical, multi-directional network. For example, unlike
the tree of knowledge, the Internet is rhizomatic and, as a spatio-temporal metaphor
of contemporary culture, its fundamental principle is not taboo and teleology
but connectivity.
Connectivity is also a fundamental ecological notion where we relearn, through
chaos theory, the ancient and Eastern notion of all things being interconnected.
We learn also that greater potential is conferred on the local event's ability to effect
the whole. It follows that cities and individual sites are increasingly understood in
terms of their interconnectivity, as opposed to their bounded isolation. Corner
describes a site in terms of its " ... connections, relationships, extensions and
potentials. In this sense then the grounded site, locally situated, invokes a host of
'other' places, including all the maps, drawings, ideas, references, other worlds
and places that are invoked during the making of a project".42 Denis Cosgrove
suggests that sites are encrypted with "postmodern geonletries and global images,
the emerging forms of locality implied by networks" .43 Similarly, cultural
RICHARD WELLER 35
geographer, Doreen Massey extends this new sensibility suggesting, "instead of
thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as
articulated moments in networks of social relations and understanding" .44 In
this cluster of associations, the rhizomatic metaphor comes to life as both a
mindscape and ecology of contem.porary culture. For Corner, the metaphor of
the rhizome heralds a mode of design that no longer seeks to reflect heaven's
Platonic forms, rather, it is "burrowing and extending", laterally interconnecting
and "structuring new and open-ended relationships".45
NOT A TRACING
Corner urges designers to make maps not tracings. In agreement with the celebrated
French spatial poetics of Gilles Deleuze, Corner argues that tracings "return to the
same" whereas maps can concoct, convey and connect up with alternative worlds. A
map to an alternative world is Daniel Libeskind's remarkable plan for the invited
FigllTe 13: Photomontage hy Richard design competition for the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin in 1992. Libeskind's plan is
Weller ami Tom Griffiths, 2002. primarily rhizomatic but simultaneously layered and not unlike a buildable rendition
Daniel Liheskind's rhizomatic and of Debord's Discours sur les Passions de l'amour.46 Unlike almost every other plan for
intentionally chaotic master plan for the
the resurrection of Potsdamer Platz, that elected timidly to end the twentieth century
centre of Berlin (1991) mOl1taged into an
by clinging to the palimpsest of the nineteenth, Libeskind could not return to the
aerial image of the Potsdamer Platz and
sllrrOlmding landscape. same.
The design proposition is structured along nine main lines of force that are
derived from specific events and specific places related to, but not necessarily within,
the site. This mandala is the author's own geomancy of the Potsdamer Platz, as
opposed to official maps and histories. Fractalising along the nine "muse" lines, the
design reaches out in all directions, transgressing any boundary it encounters.
Libeskind's proposed labyrinth is partially underground, at ground level and hovering
above ground. It is unclear what is open space, what is built space, what is street and
what is building, what is figure and ground. Layered into the maelstrom are particular
people's signatures, the periodic table, slices of many other cities and fragments of
the author's other projects, all questioning where Berlin begins and ends as an
idea, as a story and as a place. Libeskind's map ultimately hovers between the real
and the impossible, between a minc·l.scape and a cityscape.
Whilst the plan image would seem to indicate three dimensional form, it
obfuscates the readily quantifiable real estate packages that developers and
bureaucrats expect from architectural master planning. The plan is asking perhaps
for a different way of constructing a new city centre and maybe its seem.ingly
'natural' complexity is actually arguing that order will arise, not from the master
plan down but, from localised iterations up. Itself the result of somewhat
indeterminate processes, this map by Libeskind, clusters uneasily around one of
the twentieth century's most complex and excruciating sites. Whereas most other
submissions seemed ready, willing and able to build a more streamlined new
Germany, Libeskind's map beckons us into a city that is foreign to everyone and,
hence, a place anyone might make homeY If Libeskind's labyrinthine map leads
us anywhere it is out of the twentieth century.
36 LANDSCAPE REVIEW 2001 :7( 1)

Might this radically subjective and hermeneutic speculation on urban form
offer us the historical optimism lacking in Krier's Kirchsteigfeld, and the substance
lacking in MVRDV's Pixel City? Libeskind's scheme, sent to the judges in several
pieces, with the message attached that "Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall", was
resolutely rejected. It was rumoured that Rem Koolhaas, foreseeing the outcome,
resigned as a judge.
FORM FOLLOWS DATA

A new generation of designers are moving out of the shadow of poetic and
theoretical giants such as Libeskind and Eisenman. The designers are doing so,
first, because there is nowhere else to move and, secondly, because the dialectics
of design, as an intensely psychological or spiritual tension between form and
function, idea and reality, are now inappropriate orientations for generally getting
on in a culture of 'too lnuch data'. Whilst Libeskind projects a radically subjective
and poetic overload of information back into the world, maps of design processes Figttre 14: Photomontage by Richard
that, first, set the subjective author aside, and then saturate themselves in the Weller and Tom Griffiths, 2002.
banal data of a project, are known as datascapes. For the so-called datascapist the Tlte graplt by Rem Koolhaas at tile bottom
design process becomes a mode of form follows data, a question of computation of the montage demonstrates a way of
mapping the programmatic features of a
not semiotics, a question of negotiating statistical limits not hermeneutic intrigues.
project into what is known as a datascape.
Bart Lootsma, another contributor to Corner's recent collection of essays This two-dimensional organisation of
celebrating the recovery of landscape, explains that datascapes are "visual programme translates into the third
representations of all the measurable forces that may influence the work of the dimemion in two somewhat bi-pol(/1'
architect or even steer or regulate it".48 Corner advocates datascapes as: "revisions manifestations of data by the Dlach urban
of conventional analytical and quantitative maps and charts that both reveal and designers, MVRDV The fIrst, ,lirect/y
above the datascape by Koollwas, is 'Pig
construct the shape-forms of forces and processes operating across a given site" .49
City', MVRDV's response to the statistics
Optimistically, Corner asserts "the datascape planner reveals new possibilities
of pork conswnption. The second, evidenced
latent in a given field simply by framing the issues differently ... in such a way as to by shrapnel forms, is of MVRDV's
produce novel and inventive solutions".5o Intriguingly then, the datascaper must 'Claustra City'. The form has been
first convert data into a shape-form that can be used to form a project but that obtained not by intuition or art Imt by
does not betray the original meaning of the data. simply mapping banal regulations sHch as
fire restrictions and sun angles into a 100-
Not unlike landscape architecture's recourse to site analysis to justify its outcomes,
metre square block of (conceptual)
datascapes are thought to have great persuasive, commercial and bureaucratic force,
architecCllralmatter. MVRDVargue that,
because the subjectivities of the designer can be embedded in seemingly objective paradoxically, the result is anything IJllt
data. Whereas more romantic conceptions of the design process see the autonomous banal. In the backgroand is the perennial
designer descend from the ivory tower with an ideal form that then, more or less, spectre of robotics.
collides with site limitations and is endlessly contested, corrected, deformed and
starved in the name of the original - the datascapist does the inverse and begins
with the outer limits of a project and an acceptance that a project is always already
a site of negotiation. Deferring a preconceived design outcome, datascaping actively
embraces restrictions and its regulations. For example, Lootsma tells us that some
of the most important threads running through West 8's landscape design work are
"such apparently uninteresting things as traffic laws and the civil code - things
often seen as annoying obstacles by designers who put their own creativity first".51
Lootsma seems to suffer a residual and somewhat nLisplaced romanticism when he
RICHARD WELLER 37
goes on to claim, that for a designer to set aside their subjectivity and follow the
bureaucratic rules of a given place, means they "commit a genuinely public act in
which everyone can participate and perhaps even subvert". 52
Winy Maas of MVRDY, a group synonymous with datascaping, also willingly
embraces all the economic and regulatory constraints affecting any design project.
Maas argues that, in focusing on and working almost exclusively with this factual
material, a project's form can be pushed beyond the romanticism of artistic intuition
or known geometry and, further, that the result is somewhere between critique and
ridicule of a world unable to grasp the dimensions and consequences of its own
data. 5J For example, not unlike Adriaan Gueze literally making a model of 800,000
immanent new Dutch homes, MVRDV recently projected Dutch population
numbers so as to extrapolate the number of pigs being consumed at a certain
point in the future. This number equated to more land than the Dutch can
feasibly afford and so MVRDV producecl stark computer graphics of 'Pig City',
rows of skyscrapers full of pigs, replete with the systems necessary to their feeding,
slaughtering and processing.
In this sense, the datascape is both a dystopian shock tactic and a brave refusal
to recoil from reality into 'semantic reserves' or boutique design. Indeed, from the
perspective of 'Pig City', much design, and its discourse, seems decadent and largely
irrelevant. 'Pig City', however, is an extreme example, and a somewhat inappropriate
one because, by its nature, it can perhaps escape aesthetic concern. Pig City does to
pigs just what Auschwitz or Eastern European architectural modernism did to
humans and, therefore, when datascaping is simply a literal extrapolation and
manifestation of dramatic data, it is not only relevantly monstrous but also pathetic,
and dangerous.
As regards human cities, Maas points out that, in architectural terms, places
around the world are not so prone to homogeneity as critical regionalists would
have us fear. For Maas, places are manifestly different and this difference is quite
simply because of the basic data that lies behind their main fonnal qualities.
Manhattan is the result of certain simple building codes and other quantifiable
indices, just as different types of agricultural modes sbape certain landscapes. Self-
evidently correct as Maas's point is, it also smacks of an attempt to translate what in
the biological world is presented as genetic determinism, on to the plane of the
built environment. It is equally self-evident that every city and every landscape is a
manifestation of deeper layers of' data' such as the stuff of politics, language, memory
and mythology, most of which is hard to map empirically. Everyone knows this, but
MVRDV, to its credit, is trying now to get at things from a different angle and in
a manner that makes an impact. If this means abandoning ~r radically relocating
the fine art and craft of design then so be it. In this sense, the datascape not only
threatens to drain objects of authorial meaning it also challenges the hegemony
of the eye in the conception, construction and interpretation of design.
It is easy to understand how datascapes are descriptive of design problems and
programmes, but not so easy to see how they are generative of inventive (as opposed
to crudely neo-functionalist), design responses. How the representation of data

morphs into the third and the fourth dimensions is curious, but perhaps the
point is that datascapes are not chasing a final and unique aesthetic form. That is,
the designer/datascapist is more concerned to reframe the issues and manifold
contingencies operating over any given site and, in so doing, might restructure the
way a site is thought of or impacted upon by a range of different influences over
time. The creative and critical operation of design is directed at the nexus of social,
political and econoniic issues that will ultimately manifest themselves in any given
place, which is, in an old-fashioned word - planning. There is no doubt as to the
instrumental efficacy of the datascape but there are real doubts as to its potential to
collapse into precisely the sort of methodological reductionism Corner originally
set his hermeneutics against.
Making form, and crafting its semiotic load, cannot be indefinitely deferred or
completely conferred on to mechanisms beyond the author. One must take
responsibility. As Sanford Kwinter says, diagrams do not lead causally to forms, so
conceptual and aesthetic leaps are made in datascaping that can really only be
accounted for by designers manipulating computers and their design programmes. 54
The unique author, wrestling with the problems of translating poetic meaning
into form, is now replaced by the datascapist manipulating computational limits
and real-world rules. In emergent processes of computer-generated design, new
intellectual and representational problems arise, but simultaneously, the reciprocity
between designer and project across the gap between ideas, forms, site and
programme begins to accelerate. The computer encourages and enables a more
fluid design process between mind and matter.
Data related to a programme or a site is fetishised in architecture at the
moment. This is promulgated by the fact that computers can take reams of banal
information, convert it into zeros and ones and then visualise previously
unimaginable and unbuildable spaces. Landscape architecture, however, is no
stranger to site data. On the contrary, it has made site analysis data central to its
design process and philosophy for the last three decades. Landscape design and
planning have both been effective at collecting data, but it could not be said that
they have been good at creatively manipulating that data. Although some of the
design results and claims made for datascaping seem as faddish as they are inflated,
we can productively ask that, if the datascaper can now, according to Corner, take
bland data and make novel and inventive solutions why has the landscape design
process as we know it not been able to?
First, the purpose and medium of landscape design should not, and does not
always lend itself to the pursuit of formal novelty. Secondly, where landscape
architects have paid close attention to their data they have perhaps expected it to
do all the work. Positivist rather than hermeneutic sensibilities have reduced the
catalytic role of the author in any design process beyond recognition. Alternatively,
consider that much landscape architecture, whilst paying lip service to site analysis
data, has not in fact worked with the data carefully enough and allowed it to
come to the surface. This is because designers are often more intent upon usurping
the data rich design process as they make haste toward the mimesis of a
RICHARD WELLER 39
preconceived, expected or desired image. For example, regardless of what site
data might indicate, designers and clients will, as is often bemoaned, arrive at
something picturesque. Finally, in so far as the computer is an essential tool for
the creative manipulation of data, we should recognise that computer-aided design
in landscape architecture is incipient and, therefore, it is too early to admonish
for a lack of inventiveness. Certainly the opportunity is there for landscape
architecture, because every site is a richly imbricated datascape, a complex
ecological and cultural field condition that can be modelled and then shaped.
The computer can work in time, simulating and visualising dynamic processes of
change under specific conditions - modelling complex ecological and cultural
flows in relation to design interventions. What beckons within the conceptual
and technical frame of the datascape is an intersection of the deleteriously divided
art and science of the discipline.
Lootsma stresses that the datascape "is less about philosophy, theory, and
aesthetics, and more about how the visionary and the pragmatic may be combined
in creative and paradoxical ways".55 Lootsma continues to distinguish a new
generation from the old, declaring that datascaping is concerned with "critical
pragmatism" not critical regionalism. 56 We know that the grand narrative of
reconciling modernity with place, rules the passion of critical regionalism - so
the question to ask of Lootsma's critical pragmatism is 'critical of what?' and
'pragmatic toward what end?'. Lootsma, Wall and Corner all answer that the
purpose of design is to "realign the conditions of late capitalism toward more
socio-ecologically enriching ends". 57
In the final analysis, the datascape is either a canny placing of the art of design
where it is least expected, or an end game. Gerrit Confurius, editor of Daidalos:
Architecture, Art, Culture, sees datascaping as a form of modernism cured of the great
illusions of the twentieth century. But this could mean simply postmodernity, which
postmoden theorist, Dick Hebdige devastatingly defines as modernity without hope.
Perhaps, for our purposes, there is hope in thinking that a "form of modernism
cured of the great illusions of the twentieth century" could be a definition of a
relevant practice of landscape architecture. 58
CONCLUSION
With express support for the idea and methods of the datascape, Corner explains
that his own design work aims "to both subvert and engage dominant interests". 59
Importantly, Corner does design, but his projects do not feature in his writings
and it has not been the purpose of this essay to test Corner's theory against his
design work. Corner's design projects, in so far as one can tell, do start to give
form to his repeated priority, that design engages at the level of structural,
ecological, cultural, economic and political forces that impinge upon sites.
However, if there is attention to hermeneutic richness in Corner's work then it is
not explicit, but buried deep in the instrumental aspects of each place.
In the light of all that Corner has said about the theory and praxis of landscape
architecture his design projects deserve scrutiny, especially now that his finalist
40 LANDSCAPE REVIEW 2001 :7( 1)

scheme for Downsview Park in Toronto can be read against those by Tschumi and
Koolhaas. Additionally, the practice he shares with architect, Stan Allen has just
won a competition for the design of Fresh Kills, a vast wasteland on Staten Island,
in New York. This project seems well timed and is of such a scale and complexity as
to facilitate a manifestation of the issues this essay has circumscribed.
The n,ain feature in Corner's writings is his foundational faith in landscape
architecture as a medium through which larger historical questions of meaning,
modernity and ecology can be enacted and influenced. Part one of this essay drew
an arch, from hermeneutics to landschaft and attempted to chart the philosophical
undercurrents into which these columns are plumbed. Part two sought to apply
and examine this in closer proximity to design projects and emerging design
techniques. My purpose in this whole essay has been to offer an unashamedly
subjective survey of a body of work by a landscape architect I consider to be
particularly relevant. The breadth of the field Corner's polemics light up conveys a
grandeur that is properly within landscape architecmre's philosophical and practical
scope. James Corner's writings have not didactically prescribed what landscape
architecmre is or how it is to be made but he has set the coordinates for landscape
architecture to be discussed and practised as a "synthetic and strategic art form", if
not the Gesamtkunstwerk in the twenty-first century.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to thank the editors and reviewers of this journal for their
sincere and useful feedback. Tatum Hands has helped in keeping my writing
relatively simple without destroying its style and finally James Corner offered
constructive comment on the essay during the course of its final draft.
NOTES
1 Corner,J (1999) Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, in Recovering
Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape ArchitectHre, Corner, J (ed), Princeton Architectural Press:
New York, p 2.
2 Corner,J (1999) Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes in Recovering Landscape: Essays in
Contemporary Landscape Architectllre, Corner, J (ed), Princeton Architectural Press: New York, p 167.
1 Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, above n 2.

5Corner, J (1997) Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity in Ecological Design and Planning,
Thompson, G and Steiner, F (ecIs), John Wiley & Sons: New York, pp 81-108, p 102.
7 Corner, J (1999) The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention in Mappings,
Cosgrove D (ed), Reaktion Books: London, p 235.

8 The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, above n 7, p 235.
<) Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 5, p 102.
10 These disappointments are largely anecdotal and also based on my own experiences of four
different occasions. Academically, Elizabeth Meyer does a sound job of exposing the park's reality
versus its rhetorical positioning. Meyer, E (1991) The Public Park as Avante-Garde (landscape)
RICHARD WELLER 41
Architecture: A Cllmparative lnterpretation of Two Parisian Parks, Parc de la Villette (1983-1990)
and Parc des Buttes Chaumont (1864-l867), Landscape JOltrlwl, \' 10, PI' l6-26.
11 For a succinct summation of Koolhaas's continued conflation of architecture and landscape into
hybrid conditions, see Angeli!, M and Klingmann, A (1999) Hybrid Morphologies: Infrastructure,
Architecture, Landscape, Oaidalos: Architectllre, Art, Cultllre, v 73, pp 16-25.
12Wall, A (1999) Programming the Urban Surface in Recot't'rillg Landscape: Essays in Contemporary
Landscape ArchitectHre, Corner, J (ed), Princeton Architectural Press: New York, I' 23 3-249.
\J Programming the Urban Surface, above n 12, p 23 3.
14 Programming the Urban Surface, above n 12, p 243.
15 Programming the Urban Surhce, above n 12, p 233.
11 Programming the Urban Surhce, above n 12, p 234.

18 I have explored this further in a recent keynote address at the 200l MESH landscape conference
at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMlT). A transcript is available in CD format in

KERB, JOllrnal of Landscape Architect1l1'e, 2001, November, #10.
10 Programming the Urban Surt~lCe, above n 12, p 247.
21 Allen, S (1997) From Object to Field in Architectme After Geometry, AD, #127, pp 24-32.
23 A range of West 8'.1 projects can be found in, Molinari, L (ed) (2000) West 8, Skim Publishing: Milano.
H Gueze, A cited in Programming the Urban Surface, above n 12, p 242.
25 Programming the Urban Surt~1Ce, above n 12, I' 238.

26See the following website established by Tom Leader and others for the express purpose of
reviewing the five finalist schemes for Downsview Park, http://juncus.com/home/home.lltml.
27 The Bundesgartenshau - National Garden Show is a major event in the German design calendar,
and landscape design companies compete to win the event. The show itself is a major attraction, but
it is also expected to instigate more enduring urban design developments in any given locale.
28 MVRDY, FARMAX (1998) Exwrsions on Density, 010 Publishers: Rotterdam, p 620.

20 MVRDV, FARMAX, above n 28, p 621.
JO MVRDV, FARMAX, above n 28, p 622.
31 MVRDV, FARMAX, above n 28, p 623.
32Muller Knippschild Wehberg (MKW) is now reconfigured as Lutzow 7. I am aware of the design of
Kirchsteigfeld because, with MKW, I worked on it.
II The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, above n 7, p 217.

lSThe Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, above n 7, p 229-250. Not only do
these examples present an array of contemporary techniques that landscape architects can develop
further, as has been the trend in design studios for some time now, they also help qualifY Corner's
brash rejection of "the narrative references of high art".
]6 The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, above n 7, p 235.
]7 The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, above n 7, p 237-239.
]" The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, above n 7, p 239.
42 LANDSCAPE REV1EW 2001:7(1)

,,, The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, ahove n 7, l' 243.
-It' The Agency of Mappin.g: Speculation, Critique and Invention, above n 40.
41 The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Invention, above n 7, p 213-214.
4)Cosgrove, D (1999) Liminal Geometry amI Elemental Landscape: Construction and

Representation, in Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Lml(isCLlpe Arcilitectme, Corner, J (cd),
Princeton Architectural Press: New York, pp 103-119, p ll8.
H Massey, D (1993) Power, Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place in Mapping tile Futllres, Bird, J
(ed), Routledge: London, pp 68.
", I have described this scheme and others submitted to the 1992 competition more substantially
elsewhere. See Weller, R (1996) Lebensraum: The Life and Death of the Potsdamer Platz, Transition:
Discourse on Architectltre, v 50/51, pp 40-52.
47Writing in Corner's Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architectltre, Alan Balfour
passes over Libeskind's plan as "fantastic and outrageous". Whilst hardly enthusiastic for the
winning design, Balfour also intimates that Libeskind's work would fail to give fOl'lTl to public life.
Balfour suggests that the work is emblematic of a discipline corrupted by authorial subjectivity.
Balfour neglects to tell us upon what basis design work should then be placed and, in my view, he
misreads the spatial potential for public life that Libeskind's provocative plan could instigate. Balfour
mentions the landscape design proposition of replacing the existing earth of the site with that from
international borders as "the ultimate symbolic landscape". Through no fault of his own, Balfour
neglects to credit it to Room 4.1.3 in association with Muller Knippschild Wehberg. See Balfour, A
(1999) Octogon in Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architectltre, Corner, J(ed),
Princeton Architectural Press: New York, pp 87 -100, p 96.
4~ Lootsma, B (1999) Synthetic Regionalization: the Dutch Landscape Toward a Second Modernity
in Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, Corner, J (ed), Princeton
Architectural Press: New York, pp 251-274.
40 Eidetic Operations and New Lmdscapes, above n 2.
50 Eidetic Operations and New Lmdscapes, above n 2.
51 Synthetic Regionalization: the Dutch L'mdscape Toward a Second Modernity, above n 48, p 266.
52 Synthetic Regionalization: the Dutch Landscape Toward a Second Modernity, above n 48, p 266.
51Maas, W (1999) Datascape: The Final Extravaganza, Daidalos: Architecture, Art, Cultme, v 69/70, p
48-49, p 49.
54 Kwinter, S cited in Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, above n 2, p 166.
50 Synthetic Regionalization: the Dutch L'lndscape Toward a Second Modernity, above n 48, p 264.
58 Confurius, G (1999) Editorial, Daiclalos: Architecture, Art, O!lt1O'e, v 69/70, p 6-7.

50 Corner, J (1999) Field Operations, Architecture of the Borderlands, AD, \'0169,7-8/1999.
RICHARD WELLER 43

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Between hermeneutics and datascapes: a critical

appreciation of emergent landscape design theory

LANDSCAPE REVIEW 2001:7(1) PAGES 3-24 3

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Figme 3: Photomontage by Richard Weller and Tom

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constructions".3o Here, Corner's deconstruction opens the door to creation and

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Figllre 5: Photomonwge by Ric/wrd Weller

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Figttre 7: Photomontage by Richard \Veller and Tom

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5Corner, J (1999) Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice in Recovering

H A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7, p 132, fn 21.

11 A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7, p 129.

15 A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7, p 116.

16 A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7.

17 Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, above n 5, p 12.

18 A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7, p 132, fn 29.

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22 Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, above n 5, p 9.

23 A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7, p 131.

2+ Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 24, p 83.

25 Ecology and landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21, p 97.

26 Corner's wariness of neo-conservative postmodernity as one form of aesthetic and intellectual

27 A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7, p 124.

28 A Discourse on Theory II, above n 7, p 128.

20 Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, above n 5.

J+ Four Trace Concepts in Landscape Architecture, above n 33, p 66.

35 Bowring, J (2000) The Extra In Ordinary, Cross Section, October, pp 10-13.

37 Ecology and landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21, pp 81-108, p 88.

38 Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21.

39 Ecolo,gy and Landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21, p 100.

40 Ecology and landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21, pp 82.

41 Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21.

,) Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, above n 5, p 9.

50 Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, above n 5.

II Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, above n 48, pp 153-170, p 158.

12 Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, above n 48.

11 Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity, above n 21.

5, Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, above n 48, p 159.

56 Introduction: Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural Practice, above n 5, p 4.

5) Eidetic Operations and New L'lndscapes, above n 48, p 160.

58 Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, above n 48, p 155.

New Landscapes Corner, J (ed), above n 48, piSS.

60 Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, above n 48, p 161.

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LANDSCAPE REVIEW 2001:7(1) PAGES 25-43 25

26 LANDSCAPE REVIEW 2001 :7( I)

Figttre 9: Photomontage by Richard Weller

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