Criticism

Criticism is a vital part of design. It happens at every stage of the design process, from the response to a site and a brief, through to ongoing critique of the design’s evolution, and ultimately to the critique of a built work. Sometimes the most unequivocal critique of a work happens when a built work of landscape architecture is demolished and rebuilt to a different design. Designers critique their own work and the work of others. An active critical discourse underpins a healthy discipline and profession.

Design criticism often suffers from being seen as a negative voice, and a destructive part of the design process. But critique is a creative practice in its own right. As Bernadette Blanchon states, “criticism is fully part of the creative process itself,” echoing John Hopkins’s observation that, “If it is done thoughtfully, criticism can be as much a creative act as design itself.” Kongjian Yu reiterates this sentiment in his belief that “Landscape criticism is in many ways more challenging than creating a landscape itself.” There is a lack of books on design critique in landscape architecture. For many years the lack of theory in the discipline was cause for concern, but the steady flow of books on theory in landscape architecture signals that this dimension of the discipline is maturing. It is useful to consider neighbouring disciplines, such as art and architectural criticism, and consider what can be gleaned from them.

Jacky Bowring, Landscape Architecture Criticism (2020)

ASPECT Studio, The Goods Line (2015)

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The Significance of Indeterminacy

Inevitably, many community-based initiatives tend to be framed in conventional terms—a “wished-for world” based on familiar ideals from the past. What is most challenging under such dislocated conditions is to envisage new strategic possibilities that can deliver long-term “necessities of landscape performance.” Brett Milligan’s concept of “corporate ecologies” envisages strategic action being implemented through organizational networks, rather than by top-down policy or single site intervention. In Christchurch, it is not corporations, but non-governmental organizations and not-for-profits such as Gap Filler, Greening the Rubble, and the Student Volunteer Army that have emerged as key agents in bottom-up recovery actions. They prefigure a significant extension of landscape architectural activity from specific sites, to multiple spaces and places of engagement with landscapes—where human relationships with landscape are “designed” through manipulating the tools and practices of everyday life.

Perhaps the problem is that, as designers, we mis­understand the significance of indeterminacy. The contemporary world is in thrall to the paradigm of choice and open-ended possibilities—What would you like to buy? Which scene do you prefer? Which design should we select and how many different ways might it turn out? Sudden, unpredictable, and traumatic landscape transformations challenge the presumption of ever-expanding choice and the excitement of uncertainty, and instead focus attention upon how to make decisions over those things that are vital to life and which we can have some hope of influencing.

Jacky Bowring, Simon Swaffield, Shifting Landscapes In-Between Times (2013)

Thierry Kandjee + Taktyk, Alive Architecture, Parkfarm (2014-2015)

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Hapticity

Visual culture is the primary conduit for globalization, with ideas travelling with ease across the Internet, on television, films and in print media. Inevitably, this leads to a reduction in the range of sensory experience to almost a single sense, where sight and sometimes sound become the sole means of relating to landscape. The focus on the visual – or ocularcentrism – is one of the threads of research that informs the tension between the global and landscape. Ocularcentrism is not a recent practice, but has influenced the landscape for centuries, with the overemphasis on the visual gaining ground through theories like perspective and the picturesque, and the rise of viewing-based practices such as museums, zoos and tourism. Reclaiming the landscape from an ocularcentrist perspective is one of the imperatives for those seeking to resist the homogenising influence of globalization. 

Jacky Bowring, Navigating the global, the regional and the local: researching globalization and landscape (2013)

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Germán del Sol, Termas Geométricas (2009)

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Placeless design

One of the challenges of contemporary landscape architecture is the globalization of place. Nowhere is the threat of homogenization more apparent than in places vulnerable to change, where the potential loss of heritage fabric rings alarm bells. St. Petersburg is one such place, a UNESCO World Heritage site and a city which had existed outside of the excesses of late 20th-century Westernisation owing to its sequestration inside the Soviet Union. The city is changing in response to exposure to the West, and this could be a cause for concern, a worry that the city will become just another ‘placeless’ place. However, we argue that this is a superficial reading and that in looking more deeply into the history and culture of St. Petersburg, a legacy of borrowing from elsewhere is revealed. Moreover, the aspirations for global ideals are not necessarily ‘placeless’, as we illustrate through the ways in which St. Petersburg has made the landscapes its own through the invention of tradition and a persistent sense of ‘the local’ which is indelible to change.  (…)

The emblematic view of the effects of globalization on landscape architecture is often abbreviated to discussions of the homogenizing influence of ‘placeless’ design. This ‘McDonalds’ brand of landscape design is one of the profession’s key concerns, because with the homogenization and universalization of landscape comes the loss of one of our key sources of identity as individuals and as cultures: the uniqueness of place. However, while the standardizing influence of globalization on the landscape is of great concern, it is only one aspect of a very complex issue.

Jacky Bowring et alt., ‘As good as the West’: two paradoxes of globalization and landscape architecture in St. Petersburg. (2009)

Maybe one of the most common landscapes of consumerism is the beach. You can find in all over the world, and indeed, in the populous Toronto waterfront. This globalized panorama, is not related to the site’s culture, because all in it is an ironic image of global consumerism. Everything is fake: you can’t even jump into the water, because you are on a pier, so you’ll use an urban fountain if you want to refresh yourself. Besides this, of course, after the short Summer, the image of the beach will become a kind of “détournement”: a consumerism image out of its context. 

Just beside this sharp exercise on globalized, Comier shows the radical opposition of real landscapes, transporting in pieces a huge rock from the Canadian ranges in an exercise that somehow, equals the surrealist effect of the pink umbrellas because at last we still are in an urban pier. This time we would be speaking about an “objet trouvé”.

The ensemble appears as a provocative reflection on identity that is pointing to the risks of essentialisms around the site.

Claude Cormier, Canada’s Sugar Beach (2010)

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