Category Archives: context-sensitive design

London with a green roof

Thank you to Allen & Overy for opening their offices under the Open House scheme – and congratulations to them for having an office with genuinely green credentials. Roof space is used for solar panels, roof gardens or wildlife habitats (brown roofs). As the office brochure remarks ‘One of the best features of Bishops Square is the ability to hold barbecues in the summer or evening drinks on the terrace’. For me, it was a pleasure to see the City taking a small step towards the London equivalent of New York As it Should Be.

The City should designate its Square Mile as a Green Roof Zone.

Roberto Burle Marx as a context-sensitive designer

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As a painter, Roberto Burle Marx was an international abstract expressionist. But as a garden designer and landscape architect he showed a high degree of sensitivity to context – I say ‘surprising’ only because I was so slow to appreciate the complexity of this point. His planting was voluptuously Brazilian, like his mother, and Marx could see no reason for using European plants. Nor did he see any reason for the hard detailing to draw inspiration from the land of his father: Germany. Instead, he drew upon the country whose language is spoken in Brazil. The accompanying photograph is of Copacabana Beach – but could just as well have been taken in Portugal. Until I went to Portugal, I thought this amazing design was an example of Burle Marx inventiveness as an abstract painter. I was very wrong.

Did Morel, Meason or Olmsted invent the term 'landscape architecture'?

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A reader makes the following point: ‘On your site you stated that: “The name “landscape architecture” was invented by a Scotsman in 1828’ but, landscape architecture actually originated in France. There, in the year 1804 Jean-Marie Morel introduced; ‘architecte-paysagiste’ in order to distinguish (his profession) garden architecture from landscape architecture.’ There are in fact 3 candidates for the questionable credit of having invented the term landscape architecture: Morel, Meason and Olmsted.

Jean-Marie Morel (1728 — 1810) published a book on the Théorie des Jardins (Paris 1776). He had trained as an architect and became an advocate of the ‘natural style of landscape gardening’. He worked for Girardin at Ermenonville and, in 1804, coined the term architecte-paysagiste, for which ‘landscape architect’ is a fair translation.

Gilbert Laing Meason, a Scotsman, wrote the world’s first book using the English term ‘landscape architecture’. It was published in 1828 and Meason had little interest in gardens. His inspiration came from the great landscape paintings of Italy and the writings of Vitruvius. In combining the nouns landscape and architecture, his concern was for what architects could learn from landscape paintings. The difference between Meason’s and Morel’s terms equates to that between a fish box and a box of fish. Buildings contribute to containing space; landscapes are the spaces contained by buildings, landform and vegetation. It is a fundamental distinction.

Frederick Law Olmsted was the first man to use ‘landscape architect’ as a professional title and one cannot doubt that he learned of the term from his partner, Calvert Vaux, who learned of it from Andrew Jackson Downing, who learned of it from Loudon who learned of it from Meason. I therefore regard Meason as the man who invented the term ‘landscape architecture’ and, despite other respectable claims, Alexander Graham Bell as the man who intented the telephone.

It is regrettable that Olmsted did not, so far as I know, read either Meason or Vitruvius. They could have provided a firmer theoretical base for the new profession than Downing or Vaux. John Dixon Hunt comments that ‘there was never a body of specialists to compose treatises specifically for what we have come to call landscape architecture, as Vitruvius did for architecture’. But if, like me, you take Meason as the inventor of landscape architecture then the necessary base can be uncovered by pushing aside a few leaves. To help with this task, we have published the most relevant chapter from Meason as an eBook. Please see: http://www.gardenvisit.com/ebooks

Contextual design and sculpture in Castleford

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Our guest contributor, Christine Storry writes that ‘Intuitively, I think the place to start thinking about the issues of identity for the area is with arguably Castleford’s most famous son, sculptor Henry Moore.’

Moore had a deep interest in the siting of his work and often makes me feel a little guilty about reading on trains: he said it was a waste of a wonderful opportunity to observe the landscape. The photograph is of Moore’s bronze “Die Liegende” in Stuttgart (image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore).

If my memory serves me correctly, I think I heard the architect of a dull paving design for Castleford Town Center say that there were patches of black paving to reflect the underlying coal seam. This would count as a response to context but I doubt if it would command as much support as giving Moore an honoured place in Castleford’s urban landscape.

Architecture in context

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Following our discussion of Design Theory, Christine Storry has prepared these interesting collages of a building in different landscape contexts. She asks: ‘What do they illustrate? That there is a symbiotic relationship between a locale and architecture. Even great architecture. Architects might draw buildings on white or yellow paper or in model or paper space but buildings are built on a site and in a location with all that that means!’

Design theory in architecture and landscape

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An email arrived today with the comment that ‘My primary interest is in design excellence (aesthetics) & I have been writing about how architecture is an art, and unlike other fine arts it is a practical art: a public art.’ But that ‘… because of the demands of sustainability there needs to be a way of re-thinking how we do architecture, privileging design. Central to this idea is that architecture is functional (modernist programme), sceniographic (post-modernist) and meaningful (post-postmodernist agenda)!?’

I agree that architecture and landscape architecture are applied arts. But in this, they do not differ from garment design, furniture design, etc. All should be functional and are best when they have high aesthetic quality. Sustainability considerations apply to each of these arts: if the world is running out of resources then we need to be more economical. This is, amongst other things, an argument for using lime mortar instead of cement mortar. Lime bonded brickwork and stonework can be disassembled, allowing design changes the the reuse of materials.

The public aspect of some applied arts raises other issues. The furniture in my home would seem to be entirely my own concern. But if I want to build a tall modern building in a medieval village then this becomes a matter of legitimate public concern. Ditto for the Martha Schwarz post-modern amhphitheatre in Castleford, especially because a bunch of idiots dipped their hands into the public purse to fund the park.

‘Meaning’ is another issue. A modernist approach to the Castleford Park would have been to discover what people wanted for the space and then make provision for their activities. The postmodern approach, as used by Schwarz, was to give the space a ‘meaning’. I do not know what words she used – could it have been to ‘echo a Roman approach to open space design, as exemplified by the Colisseum’ – but they must have been something inappropriate. A post-Postmodern approach to the Castleford park would have involved recognition of the multifarious interests of local people combined with intelligent design leadership. Beliefs shared between the public and the designer would have facilitated their combination. Flying in a US Design Queen might have worked in the context of shared beliefs.

Garden Design and Landscape Architecture

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