When environment is something more than a group of factors and parameters, when we sometimes enjoy the landscape or the nature just as a merchandise, when we talk about tourism or about natural parks as theme parks, when we talk about the forgotten landscapes of the outskirts…has not the ideas changed enough in its use, the values and management of the ground so that have to give a new name to the elements of the landscape, the tools to contemplate it, or to make it? (…)
It is an ethic for the landscape necessary?
What “makes up” the landscape, what defines this presence that insists on appearing? In the Great Wall of China separates territories so far away from each other that what it does is to define them. In the definition of the hermeneutics as “understanding” of the text to make possible the human participation in the construction of the world. In the construction of the human landscape.
Talking about transgressions, I was reading the quote of Adorno in a short story of Kafka. The story of the man that waits in front of a door: the law has a door and the door a doorman. A man arrives and asks him to let him go in. The doorman answers that at the moment he cannot let him go in. The man waits and when he was very old and almost blind, he asks again why is the door open or why it is open when nobody has crossed in all that time. The answer is that the door is just for him and, indeed, the doorman thinks he will have to close it soon.
I think about the definition of this other world that was born separated from the architecture – the vacuum full of meanings and the other things that make up the environment: trees, plants, animals, wind, the sun… that contrasts it because of the construction of the city or of the strip surrounding the buildings, gardens, roofs… I think about streets, roads and motorways. We should study how its “nature” as a constructing way and after that, explore the nature of the transgressions that take place between both worlds to create complicities, to accept each other. Is not that sustainability?
Rosa Barba i Casanovas, Designing…In which Landscape? (2000)
Jacques Simon + JNC INTERNATIONAL et alt., River Deule Park, (1996-)
landscape theory 