A new way of thinking is emerging. It does not seek nature in remote mountain tops, but finds it instead in the midst of our cities and suburbs. It looks at our degraded built landscapes with unjaded eyes, seeing the archipelago of leftover land—suburban yards, utility easements, parking lots, road right of ways, and municipal drainage channels—not as useless remnants, but as territories of vast potential. We pass them every day; their ordinariness is what makes them special. As such, they are embedded in the fabric of lives, shaping our most recurring image of nature. French landscape architect Gilles Clément calls these fragments the Third Landscape, the sum of all the human-disturbed land through which natural processes still occur. For designers, the loss of nature is a starting point. It helps us to look at our cities with fresh eyes, giving us a sort of x-ray vision that cuts through the layers of concrete and asphalt to see new hybrids—of natural and man-made, of horticulture and ecology, of plant roots and computer chips. It allows us to imagine meadows growing on skyscrapers, elevated roads covered with connected forests, and vast constructed wetlands that purify our drinking water. But this future will not be driven by the assumption that what is natural is only that which is separate from human activity. Instead, it begins with the conviction that all naturalism is really humanism. Only when we clear our heads of the rose-tinted idealism of the past can we really embrace the full potential of the future.
To get to that future requires serious work, serious engineering, and serious science. But it does not require our plantings to be so serious. In an era of climate change and species invasions, the only certainty is a whole lot more uncertainty. The high-maintenance lawns and clipped shrubbery of office parks and suburban yards will seem increasingly odd with every large-scale natural disaster or water shortage. Since we will not have absolute control, planting in the future will become more playful. More whimsical. Faced with a landscape of increasing instability, planting no longer has to be so solemn. It can loosen up. Be more frivolous. The uncertainty of the future will provide an incredible gift: it will liberate planting from all those forces that try to tame it—the real estate industry, “good taste,” designers’ egos, eco-evangelism, and the horticultural industry. It frees us to take risks, act foolishly, and embrace failure. After all, no designed planting ever lasts. Its main purpose is not to endure but to enchant.
So what exactly is the planting of the future? Look no farther than just outside your front door. Go find a patch of weeds in your neighborhood. Notice the variety of species and how they interweave to form a dense carpet. Or better yet, take a hike in a nearby natural area. Look closely at how plants grow in a meadow or a forest’s edge. Observe the lack of bare soil and the variety of ways plants adapt to their site. Then when you get back to your neighborhood, compare those wild communities to the plantings in landscape or garden beds. There is a difference between the way plants grow in the wild and the way they grow in our gardens. Understanding this difference is the key to transforming your planting. The good news is that it is entirely possible to design plantings that look and function more like they do in the wild: more robust, more diverse, and more visually harmonious, with less maintenance. The solution lies in understanding plantings as communities of compatible species that cover the ground in interlocking layers.
Tag: Gilles Clément
(1943 – ) French Landscape Architect, Theorist and Writer.
Reservoir
The Third Landscape – an undetermined fragment of the Planetary Garden -designates the sum of the space left over by man to landscape evolution – to nature alone. Included in this category are left behind urban or rural sites, transitional spaces, neglected land, swamps, moors, peat bogs, but also roadsides, shores, railroad embankments, etc. To these unattended areas can be added space set aside, reserves in themselves: inaccessible places, mountain summits, non-cultivatable areas, deserts; institutional reserves: national parks, regional parks, nature reserves.
Compared to the territories submitted to the control and exploitation by man, the Third Landscape forms a privileged area of receptivity to biological diversity. Cities, farms and forestry holdings, sites devoted to industry, tourism, human activity, areas of control and decision permit diversity and, at times, totally exclude it. The variety of species in a field, cultivated land, or managed forest is low in comparison to that of a neighboring «unattended» space.
From this point of view, the Third Landscape can be considered as the genetic reservoir of the planet, the space of the future…
Gilles Clément, The Third Landscape Manifesto (2003)
Gilles Clément + Coloco, Third Landscape Garden at St. Nazaire (2009)
FIND it on the map
Messy Ecosystems
Ecological quality tends to look messy, and this poses problems for those who imagine and construct new landscapes to enhance ecological quality. What is good may not look good, and what looks good may not be good. The distinction between function and appearance may distress idealists who regard presentation as dissembling, but it is intrinsic to the concept of design, in which each landscape is recognized as one of any number of possible designs for a particular place. Landscape architects may consult the genius of the place, but they do not expect the genius of the place to design it.
However, even designers may become strangely submissive in the face of nature’s genius, sharing in a common popular delusion that nature will speak for itself——-if only human beings will quit interrupting. A belief that nature needs no presentation and that presentation is essentially sinister in its intent leaves ecosystems highly susceptible to misunderstanding. Decades ago, Lowenthal and Prince (1965) instructed that people “see their terrain through preferred and accustomed spectacles.” As much as our affection for the cultural concept of nature would lead us to believe otherwise, people do not know how to see ecological quality directly. We know how to see ecological quality only through our cultural lenses, and through those lenses, it may or may not look like nature. Nature has come to be identified with pictorial conventions of the picturesque, a cultural, not ecological concept. More significantly, picturesque conventions have become so integral to landscape perception that we no longer are able to accept their origin in culture. Picturesque conventions seem so intrinsic to nature that they are mistaken for ecological quality.
The difference between the scientific concept of ecology and the cultural concept of nature, the difference between function and appearance, demonstrates that applied landscape ecology is essentially a design problem. It is not a straightforward problem of attending to scientific knowledge of ecosystem relationships or an artistic problem of expressing ecological function, but a public landscape problem of addressing cultural expectations that only tangentially relate to ecological function or high art. It requires the translation of ecological patterns into cultural language. It requires placing unfamiliar and frequently undesirable forms inside familiar, attractive packages. It requires designing orderly frames for messy ecosystems.
Joan Iverson Nassauer, Messy ecosystems, orderly frames (1995)
also see: Obscure the Human Act
Gilles Clément, Matisse Park (1990-1997)
FIND IT ON THE MAP
Derborence Island, an inaccessible concrete structure set in the middle of Lille’s Parc Henri Matisse, is an intriguing example of recent landscape design. The park, which was completed in 1995 as part of the vast Euralille development, was designed by the French landscape architect Gilles Clément. The idea for the park is derived from several sources, including the aesthetic characteristics of uncultivated ground, the symbolic reconstruction of a fragment of primary forest and the enhancement of urban biodiversity. It is suggested that Clément’s novel synthesis of nature and culture is significantly different from prevailing discourses of landscape design and is best interpreted as a form of site-specific art. Clément’s project reveals tensions between the aesthetic and scientific significance of so-called ‘waste spaces’ in contemporary cities and the widening scope of utilitarian approaches to landscape design.
Mathematical Ideas
Gilles Clément, Garden in movement
For there is in mankind an unfortunate propensity to make themselves, their views, and their works, the measure of excellence in everything whatsoever. Therefore, having observed that their dwellings were most commodious and firm when they were thrown into regular figures, with parts answerable to each other; they transferred these ideas to their gardens; they turned their trees into pillars, pyramids, and obelisks; they formed their hedges into so many green walls, and fashioned their walks into squares, triangles, and other mathematical figures, with exactness and symmetry; and they thought, if they were not imitating, they were at least improving nature, and teaching her to know her business. But nature has at last escaped from their discipline and their fetters; and our gardens, if nothing else, declare we begin to feel that mathematical ideas are not the true measures of beauty.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757)
The building of a definition of the intrinsic beauty of nature and landscape beyond the shaping tendencies of its architecture is not just a very contemporary issue as we can see in Joan Iverson Nassauer’s text, but it also a long-term philosophical construct.
landscape theory 