Hutton Material Culture

Assembling and Disassembling Landscapes
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-3-86859-919-0
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, Band 5, 240 Seiten

Reihe: Landscript

Landscript 5 untersucht die Theorie und Gestaltung der Landschaftsarchitektur vom Standpunkt einer Material Culture. Die Beiträge des Buches verstehen Landschaften als zeitweilige Ansammlungen lokal vorhandener sowie herbeigeschaffter Stoffe. Sie werden zwar durch die Arbeitskraft und gestalterische Intelligenz des Menschen errichtet und erhalten, zugleich aber durch ständig sich wandelnde kulturelle Gegebenheiten und bedingt kontrollierbare Naturkräfte beeinflusst. Bauplätze etwa mögen begrenzte Areale sein, ihre „materialen Beziehungen“ – vom Transport der Rohstoffe und Konstruktionsgüter bis hin zu globalen Wasserkreisläufen – kennen jedoch keine Grenzen. Landschaften werden so zu einem eindrücklichen Modell der Beziehung Mensch-Natur. Zugleich sind sie selbst Mensch-Natur-Beziehungen, da sie die Gestaltung der Welt repräsentieren und ermöglichen. Die Publikation beschäftigt sich mit der ästhetischen Bedeutung und den entwerferischen Möglichkeiten einer Material Culture für die Landschaftsarchitektur.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hutton, Jane

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Garten- und Landschaftsarchitektur

Leseproben

Material as Method Jane Hutton In the text that follows, Nancy Takahashi and Garth Anderson trace the material flows between Thomas Jefferson’s famed Academical Village at the University of Virginia and its little known “mountain” backdrop. The backdrop is, not surprisingly, more than that. It provides the essential material resources of wood, stone, and water for the construction and evolution of the university; later, it absorbs the university’s contaminated refuse, risks, and controversies into its wooded slopes. The authors chronicle two centuries of material exchange between the designed landscape, where significant attention is concentrated and meaning is constructed, and the material source landscape, obscured from view yet intrinsic to the former. While the Academical Village, a model of societal and pedagogical ideals, is iconic for its symbolic gravitas, Takahashi and Anderson’s material account offers alternative ways of seeing this well-trodden landscape. By tracing the reciprocal movement of materials between these two parcels of land, much is illuminated: the transformation of bedrock and forest into construction materials; the enslaved and contracted persons who shaped them; the ambiguous boundary between valued resource and dump; and the conflicts between what a designer wants a landscape to mean and the real conditions of its making. Within just acres of land, this case encapsulates material relations of designed landscapes at large. Sites are bounded by property lines, yet their material relationships—from the transport of construction commodities to water cycles—extend to untold limits. And while criticism tends to focus on the discrete form, performance, and meaning of specific projects, the people and processes associated with their construction and demolition are often overlooked. Designed landscapes are models of human-nature relationships, and at the same time they are human-nature relationships, simultaneously representing and co-producing the world. These relationships are typically beyond design’s scope, yet are constitutive of landscape’s material culture—its entanglement of materials, effects, and affects. This issue of Landscript proposes these relationships as pressing subjects of inquiry for landscape criticism and design. If postmodernism saw the separation of meaning from material in favor of semiotic readings and social constructions of the world, today we see movements to “re-materialize” scholarship (often through engagements with science and technology studies) from cultural geography to feminist theory to political science, and in the formalization of material culture as a concentration within anthropology and archaeology.—1 Material culture approaches, often narrowly understood as the study of human artifacts and their cultural meanings, in contrast, offer significantly more.—2 They can open stubborn apertures for how landscapes are analyzed and understood: to see beyond the site boundary towards the hidden constellation of material (and political) relations that constitute it; to examine a project beyond meaning and probe instead its myriad effects in the world and the affects it engenders in different people; to move beyond anthropocentric, social-construction-of-nature paradigms and begin to understand how the non-human world pushes back. One could argue that the discipline of landscape architecture, whose concerns inherently engage human and non-human worlds, never succeeded in fully dematerializing, despite its best intentions. It is nearly impossible to sever the idea of landscape from land’s staunch materiality; the heft of the ground is too great, the decay of plants too pungent to disregard. And while designed objects are assumed to be entirely cultural products, designed landscapes, in contrast, are never seen as entirely cultural.—3 Postmodern landscape architects resisted this association head on, swapping mass-produced plastic plants and rocks for authentic ones, shedding the weight of nature’s authority and instead insisting on nature as a socially constructed phenomenon.—4 More recently however, landscape theory and practice has re-engaged with material concerns shifting away from symbolic representation and towards the sites and conditions of post-Fordism. Focusing on logistics facilities, dredging operations, and military sites as subjects for practice and inquiry, they foreground the material flows, processes, and contingencies of late capitalism. At the same time, contemporary landscape thinkers have embraced and appropriated concepts from the ecological sciences, designing in consort with nonhuman forces. Engaging both the ecological and capital flows of landscape production, contemporary landscape research and practice has just begun to explore how material analysis might impact the discipline. At the same time, this work has remained largely human-centric, often instrumentalizing non-human entities as services or strategies. And even though the focus is on humans, few authors have focused on the uneven social dimensions behind landscape production. The contributors to this volume explore these very potentials, offering generative methods and models for landscape architecture. Their texts swarm around and between three themes. The first focuses on specific material trajectories as authors trace materials through the sites of landscape production to unearth their myriad effects. The second focuses on human labor and participation in constructing and imagining future landscapes, including the risks, experiences, and affects associated with doing so. And the third theme examines material-human interactions, and the implications for reconsidering how we work with, live with, and understand matter itself.—5 Material Trajectories Today, we view landscape architecture projects as dynamic and ever changing unto themselves. But to also consider a project’s assembly and disassembly is to acknowledge a longer scale of temporality, its infinite mutability, and its physical connections to the world. By expanding the conception of a landscape to include the materials, beings, and efforts that conspire to form and un-form it, we explode the notion of a fixed landscape and see instead a cacophonous network of material relations. The texts in this first theme expand on contemporary interests in charting material flows. They elaborate on how these flows—not neutral vectors on a map—reveal instead the broader mechanisms of globalized capitalism, the so-called externalities of material extraction, and the mutable boundaries between what we understand as “production” and “consumption.” Just as Takahashi and Anderson traced materials between two sites to chart an alternative history of the University of Virginia campus, Jennifer Foster and Heidy Schopf look at material accumulations on the Leslie Street Spit in Toronto to render a different narrative of urban ecological transformation of the past 150 years. The Leslie Street Spit—an uncanny landscape of demolition materials—registers the migration of minerals from Ontario aggregate and clay pits, through brick and processing facilities, through different building typologies, and their eventual demolition and subsumption into the Spit’s naturalistic landform. Sifting through this material repository, Foster and Schopf articulate how cycles of construction and destruction have solidified social difference whether through colonial land grabs or urban renewal. As Alessandra Ponte and Stephan Kowal point out in “Making the North,” examining even a single case of material production (in their text, steel-making in northern Quebec) can enable an understanding of the global distribution and dynamics of matter. Disparate landscapes are intricately linked: the speed and depth of Quebec mines reflect the rapid vertical growth of Asian cities, for example. Ponte and Kowal chronicle how the exploitation of the Labrador Trough—a formidable 1,600-km iron ore deposit—not only supplied urbanizing centers with structural materials, but also urbanized a region, laying out a complex network of infrastructure, new towns, and troubling ecological and human consequences. Here, the authors shed light on the layers of “externalities” which are, in fact, intrinsic to material practice. While material production is often assumed to take place in ex-urban areas and material consumption is aligned with the city, Sonja Dümpelmann’s text complicates this assumption. Chronicling the changing status of street trees in Chicago during the twentieth century, Dümpelmann marks changes in the way that the urban street tree canopy was conceived, managed, and ultimately utilized. As Chicago formalized and standardized its canopy into an “urban forest” through developments in arboriculture and management, the trees shifted from aesthetic transplants from nature into productive crops and as fuel to address the late twentieth-century oil crisis. Dümpelmann’s case demonstrates how mutable the perception and use of materials can be—particularly when they are alive. Labor and Affect Intrinsic to the flow of construction materials are the people who extract, assemble, interact with, maintain, and (in so doing) experience them. Contemporary emphasis on material agency has the potential to erase, trivialize, or make equivalent people’s differentiated roles and experiences in construction. Probing the uneven social realities of landscape making does more than simply acknowledge what would otherwise be invisible; it can fundamentally...

Über Autor(innen)

Jane Hutton (Hg.)

Jane Hutton (ed.)