THIS PAST WEEKEND, I TRAVELED to New York City to see an exhibition of landscape architecture at the Museum of Modern Art. Well, okay, the MoMA exhibit was not the main reason I went to New York — enjoying the last gasp of summer with a little vacation time in the Big Apple was my primary objective. But while I was there, I stumbled upon this interesting exhibit, and so I took the time to check it out and to document it. So I’m uploading some of the photos that I took at the gallery, complete with the original texts that accompanied the drawings and models. And I’ll add just a few short words of my own by way of introduction: More often than not, art installations and academic articles about architecture are incomprehensible and irrelevant. But occasionally it is a valuable exercise to see what so-called institutions of higher learning and haughty-totty art snobs are saying about our industry, because some of these ideas can lead to new ways of understanding the landscape and how we might better transform it…
IN RECENT DECADES, LANDSCAPE has taken on an expanded definition in architecture. In the first half of the twentieth century, the architectural avant-garde celebrated autonomy from nature, and architects devised utopian schemes for creating urban realms from scratch. More recently, however, the challenges of a threatened environment and rapidly expanding cities have fostered a revised understanding of landscape. Harmony between the spatial, social, and environmental aspects of human life has become a priority in political thought, and this has had profound reverberations in both architecture and landscape design. Landscape — no longer understood merely as nature untouched — now encompasses complex interventions by architects and landscape architects in urban and rural surroundings. In Situ: Architecture and Landscape draws from the rich collection of The Museum of Modern Art to examine the diverse attitudes towards landscape over the last hundred years.
SUPERSTUDIO
Superstudio, founded by five architects in Florence, Italy in 1966, developed The Continuous Monument, their utopian design for putting “cosmic order on earth,” as a single structure extended over the entire surface of the globe. Conceived as a response to the chaotic growth of cities at the time, the proposed megastructures are simple and minimal but monumental in scale. As seen in this rendering, landscape and architecture are treated as strictly separate and opposing forces.
ROBERTO BURLE MARX
Roberto Burle Marx was the most influential landscape designer in Latin America — and, arguably, the world — during the vibrant period of artistic interaction following World War II. Composing plant material according to contemporary artistic aesthetics, he developed a unique, painterly style of landscape architecture. These vibrant gouaches are abstract schematics of his planting patterns in amoebic colour fields. The conflation of biomorphic abstraction with tropical planting created a playful new geometric language for urban parks and gardens.
Garden Design, Saenz Peña Square, Rio de Janeiro, 1948
Garden Design, Duque de Caxias Square, Rio de Janeiro, 1948
YONA FRIEDMAN
Adapted here for two undeveloped landscapes, Spatial City is based on a structural framework system suitable for urban and rural applications alike. This lightweight, flexible structure is designed to accommodate what Friedman saw as inevitable changes in society. Influenced by the French housing shortage of the 1950s, he created an adaptable, minimally invasive system that privileges the user’s interests and does not displace or interrupt the landscape.
EMILIO AMBASZ
Set on a six-hundred-hectare estate in the Sierra Morena mountains near Seville, in Spain, Ambasz’s Casa de Retiro Espiritual (House of Spiritual Retreat) is a minimalist sculpture in a nearly untouched landscape. In contrast to the straight, monumental walls, a meandering line in the front lawn alludes to the subterranean rooms oriented around a central square patio. Mysterious in character and function, the Casa de Retiro Espiritual reveals its and its strong relationship to its surroundings most easily through firsthand experience. It is an ideal place of spiritual retreat, of contemplation of the relationship between nature and humans, architecture and landscape.
Tags: architecture, art, landscape design, modern, museum, New York City
