THE BOUNDARIES OF THE FIELD

Interview with James Corner.

By Eduardo Cadaval

You play an important role in the Landscape Architecture Field: as an educator, you lead one of the top academic programs in the world, as a theorist or critic your writings have been influential in shaping the new discipline, and you also have a successful professional practice. Because of this, I would like to start with some simple questions that can help us to revisit the definitions and boundaries of the Field.

THE FIELD
-What would be the contemporary definition of landscape?
The word “landscape” is extremely complex. Deconstructed at length by scholars such as J.B. Jackson, Max Oelschlager, John Stilgoe, John Dixon Hunt, Augustin Berque and others, the word comprises many layers of meaning. At root, though, is the notion that landscape is cultural – not natural (even though nature is heavily implicated) and not neutral (even though it often appears benign and soft). Landscape is essentially a way of seeing, framing or picturing, and it is inevitably aesthetic and ideological. This was certainly the basis of the 17th Century Dutch “landshap”, and later the old English “landskip” – landscape as picture, informed and inspired through painting. But landscape is also a way of relating to the land, and is not merely optical or formal. The 16th century German “landschaft” described a milieu in which form, function and social values were all integral to the shaping of land and settlement.

Today, “landscape” invokes many shades of meaning and interpretation. For me, and based upon both a historical and contemporary reading of the term, landscape is a cultural representation of a culture’s relationship to site, ground, environment, horizon, sky and the passages of time. As such, landscape can be shaped as much through discourse, text and images as it can be physically (re)constructed through design. Thus, meaningfully engaging with landscape (through landscape architecture) is not a formal or technical practice alone, but also a representational art – an art of constructing alternative experiences, alternative modes of being and alternative relationships. Consequently, imaging and imagining are reciprocally linked to the continual production of landscapes.

– Then, what would be the meaning of landscape architecture?
As described above, landscape architecture is the physical re-shaping of people’s relationship to space and environment. Powerful physical examples of landscape architecture literally shake you up and re-set your whole way of seeing, thinking and experiencing. One of the difficulties of the landscape medium, however, is that it so very quickly naturalizes, masking artifice and construction. If Walter Benjamin once described architecture as the “art of aesthetic experience for a collectivity in a state of distraction,” then multiply this tenfold for landscape, which is often overlooked as either background or natural setting. And yet, at the same time, people have very powerful and deep emotional experiences with landscape; it is just that these experiences are ingested slowly, accrued over time. One of the difficult things in landscape architecture is to produce a work that disorients and re-frames experience through slowness, distraction and layered accruals of reception. It is very subtle.

Of course, landscape architecture is gaining more and more credibility these days because of the urgency surrounding ecology and environment. This interest combined that with the surfacing of huge post-industrial sites that demand innovative landscape techniques of reclamation has allowed the professional field to find significant new roles and vitality. Landscape architecture is becoming very interesting today because it seems relevant to the issues of our time, advancing new techniques of cultivation, management and ecology alongside the creation of totally new forms of environment and space. And all at a large scale.

-As you know, visions of Nature have been changing throughout history. In recent times the trend was to establish a dichotomy between “Natural and Artificial Nature”. Lately you have established a new definition that blurs the boundary between natural and artificial. Could you please elaborate more on your view of this discussion?
I think it is very difficult today to continue to separate “nature” from “culture”, or the “natural” from the “artificial.” Humans are a part of “nature,” and “nature” is a cultural idea – a circular situation. Humans are now “breeding” new forms using both natural and synthetic (even virtual) processes, sometimes channeling and mixing these processes to such a degree that they can’t be called natural any more. Consequently, it is important to understand how humans are simply agents in a larger world of change and mutation. Landscapes too have the capacity to mutate into new forms and species, new genres and new bases of being. This is where design understood as a material practice is central – using geometry, ecology and program as material amalgams, as layered complexes that breed newness – literally growing new natures, new cultures.

-From your point of view what would be the best way to define the term “City”? Also I would like to ask you about what is your view of the role that Public Spaces should play in the configuration of the urban environment.
Well, for me, the City is a landscape – a mostly geological landscape of built mass and network corridors, and an evolving ecology of systems, flows and interactions. In this sense, the City is not unlike a forest – it is a machinic assemblage, growing and changing in time. But it is also primarily a horizontal phenomenon – like a field, a table or a plan. And, like all plans, this is the primary format of organization and relationship. Cities are amazing complexes of organization, structure and interactivity.

You ask about public spaces in this context, and yes, of course, public spaces are the primary conduits and rooms for collective participation in the fabric of the City. A City without varied and exciting public spaces would be little more than an automated fabric of individual cells and private lives. The challenge today is to keep public space integral to the very structuring and use of the City – to avoid commercialization, surveillance and bland tokenism.

-It seems that recently landscape architecture has been finally recognized as one of the most powerful tools for urban redevelopment. What is for you the full potential role of landscape architecture in the construction of the city?
Landscape architecture could drive the spatial formation of the contemporary City in some extraordinary ways. In one sense, landscape architecture has informed the historical formation of cities – the garden orchard grid preceding the Roman town grid; axial allees and paths preceding the Baroque city, etc. Today, ecological concepts prevalent in landscape are beginning to inform urbanism – patches, corridors, matrices and edges as significant formations in the contemporary city. These techniques allow the City not to be understood as a collection of objects and artifacts, but as a living system of flows and forces – a tissue-like field or fabric that supports movement, event, program and change.

In this sense, landscape is useful for understanding the city, because landscapes essentially support – they are never themselves finished nor are they object-of-attention. Instead, they are the groundworks, Koolhaas’s “fields of potential”, that enable, support and grow new conditions. Understood in this way, landscape urbanism is an art of time, an art of seeding potential, an art of construction that starts but never finishes.

-As you know, now all the architectural bookstores are packed with books that have fancy titles that always include the term “landscape”. This situation in some way is the evidence of a new relationship between architecture and Landscape. What are for you the real possibilities and limits of this relationship?
It is gratifying to see landscape so popular. Some of the books you might see help to thicken the landscape plot, adding layers of meaning and interpretation to landscape themes, ideas and practices. Unfortunately, there are many others that simply co-opt the term landscape to refer primarily to topographic surfaces – a fairly limited notion, albeit a very seductive one especially given the surface modeling sophistication of computers, and the interest in architecture of single-surface formations. But this remains of limited interest, mostly restricted to formal issues and limited with regard to process, multiplicity and loose forms of organization. Landscape gets much more interesting when understood ecologically, performatively and culturally.

THE PRACTICE
-Related with the previous question but also talking about the type of work that you are producing at Field Operations, I would like to talk about your praxis:

Your practice has been able to invert the role of the landscape architect from a consultant for an architectural firm into main designer of large scale projects. In most of your major commissions, Field Operations is the one in-charge of project. In these cases, urban design and landscape architecture represent the core elements in the development of the general scheme; the architectural pieces play an important role but are, in reality, only one of the components of a larger strategy. What is the real potential of this system of work? What changes when you privilege landscape strategies instead of architectural objects? What kind of city does landscape architecture build?
Good questions, and difficult to fully answer in the short time and space that we have. But the praxis, or working method of field Operations, seems to work because it is relevant to the complexities of the specific projects. In other words, by not limiting our practice to a particular material medium (landscape or building in the traditional sense), and by avoiding any predisposition to form or style, we are liberated to approach a project in the most comprehensive manner. We can embrace as much the programmatic, economic and technical issues of a project as much as we can delve into the geometrical and material issues of design. This inclusive and comprehensive view allows us to synthesize all of the issues central to any given project into an intelligent design formulation that is responsive to multiple issues and multiple constituencies. The design is not merely formal or representational, but more performance driven and specific to the various aspects of the project at hand. Consequently, we see infrastructures, open spaces, buildings, programs and operations as one synthetic field.

You ask what kind of city this practice of landscape architecture might build, and I answer that these forms are limitless and multiple, for the specific circumstances surrounding each project are always so radically different. I can only answer then in very general terms – and that is that such cities might be more field-like than object, more multiple than singular, more connected than separate, more loose than fixed, and more hybridized than pure.

-On the other hand Field Operations has been able to have successful collaborations with some of the most influential architects including Renzo Piano, Peter Eisenman, Tom Mayne, Steven Holl, Enrique Norten and others. What is the nature of these collaborations? Are your designs influenced by their architectures or are they in reality autonomic design units that interact with the architectural designs?
These collaborations are productive, largely because they keep us on our toes. Each collaborator is very different from the others, which means that we need to be both consistent (in terms of what we bring to the table) and flexible (in terms of responding to their voices and ways of thinking). I like the process of engagement, of working with different points of view, and working to produce something neither one could have produced without the other.

-Within the projects currently being developed at Field Operations, there are two of the largest Botanical Gardens in the World –one in Puerto Rico and another one in Taiwan-, the largest park of New York City and the iconic Highline that would create a different type of public space for Manhattan. How your work does react to all these different conditions? What new design opportunities rise from these different situations?
We are lucky to have the projects we do right now – although all of them are fragile and may never materialize in the way we would hope. Again, as with the collaborative comments above, these projects require constant engagement and nurturing, and each is unique with its own set of challenges. But while they may be different in scale, form and content, the day-to-day operation of keeping them moving forward requires the same sort of intelligence one applies to the world-at-large – listening well, reacting intelligently and creating solutions to remove obstacles. This process is design-in-practice, not simply design as form, but more formation and emergence.

-Parks and public spaces represent a significant part of the work that is being developed by FO. In general the design of these type of spaces have been evolving to accommodate the necessities of contemporary society. In your view what should be the configuration of the contemporary park? What new programs and activities can be incorporated into the city? What opportunities should be generated?
Parks are fantastic spaces. They are often big, other worldly and provide a powerful contrast to the heat and routine of the City. And yet, if you think about it, the capacity to do so much more in terms of greenery, ecology and public space programming in the contemporary city is so much greater than we have yet been able to realize. There are so many more ways we can work with the landscape medium to create unusual spaces, surreal affects and new social and ecological conditions. As cities densify, populations expand and stress on resources increase, city parks and open space will become even more significant, not only as green spaces for relaxation but also as ecological machines, social condensers and even economic drivers, creating unique identity and value.

THE PROJECTS
Fresh Kills will be 2.5 times bigger than Central Park, it will provide New York City a metropolitan scale park with a full range of new activities for the City: Mountain biking, rowing, cross country trekking, fishing, camping will be able to be practiced. Concert halls, Golf courses, baseball and Tennis fields, swimming pools along with auditoriums, community centers, and many other components will be added to the amenities of the city.
For these reasons, Fresh kills will be a new type of space in a new scale of work.

As we speak, mega-metropolis are rising all over the world especially in developing countries in Asia, Latin America & Africa. Do you think that metropolitan parks represent a new scale in thinking for these new urban conditions? What benefits and problems can bring these scales? What does it mean to design a metropolitan park?
Again, the scale of these sorts of territory is fantastic. For people to be able to go to such a large expanse for half-or day or longer, to run or cycle for hours, to hike and camp with vistas across City horizons is just extraordinary. And, form an ecological perspective, these spaces need to be big, as they are huge sinks for processing water, cooling air and retaining sufficient biomass to support diverse life-forms in sustainable ways. As cities continue to grow, their reserves of green space will need to exist in larger and more inert-connected chunks. Ecology at this scale demands a bigger, dynamic picture of systems and relationships than typical spatial scale parks and squares allow. We have projects for metropolitan parks that are thousands of hectares in scale, many kilometers long and involving long timelines for transformation – and all around the world (in Europe, Latin America and Asia).

– After winning the Highline’s international competition, you have been developing the project that would transform this abandoned elevated rail track into a new kind of public space for Manhattan. What have been the design strategies for this project? How does one work in such contested space? Is it possible to add a new type of space to the exuberance of NYC?
The High Line is already unique and remarkable. The trick is not to mess it up through design. For example, one of the powerful attributes of the High Line is its autonomy and indifference to the city that surrounds it. The temptation to create more dialog and connectivity between the High Line and adjacent development sites is pervasive, and yet we believe that the High line must continue to be brutally indifferent. Consequently, how it is paved, planted, accessed, furnished and lit at night demands a tough, simple, consistent and autonomous approach. If we can keep it simple, we will be successful.

-Fresh Kills is a huge open space in a suburban condition, the Highline is a contested floating strip squished in Manhattan’s urban density. The two of them have enormous challenges but also the represent amazing design opportunities. How does the landscape react to these two different conditions?
Both are post-industrial sites, with all of the aesthetic beauty and technical challenges that typically come with such sites. And yet their scale, environmental conditions and ecologies are quite different. They require different technical approaches, and different landscape regimes. This is one of the interesting things about landscape for me, and that is that you can not simply apply design or stylistic formulae to every project – you have to invent new solutions each time because the sites and issues are so complicated and unique.

Finally I would like to ask you about the future. You are a young landscape architect already working with huge and important projects all over the world, how do you envision the future of your practice? What are the new challenges? How do you envision the future of landscape architecture as a field?
I view the future as one might look at an agricultural field. One year, the crop is especially good; another the crop could fail miserably. To succeed, the field must be continually cultivated, updated, adapted and steered. This requires an unusual amount of energy and commitment, and one can not predict too far ahead. Instead, one has to operate quickly, in response to changing conditions. Like the agricultural field, the broader landscape is neither static nor given – it must be made, produced, and this production is what we try to do in the office through inventive design. The future of the field is bright given the demands for new approaches to landscape because of population growth, stress on natural resources, urban sprawl and demands for new lifestyles. In this regard, ecology has become a hugely important subject – less because of its nature ideology and more for how it constructs the world. Ecology constructs the world as a milieu that is always becoming — as a dynamic medium of multiple interacting parts and processes. This is quite the opposite of fixity and closure. Challenges for the field will be how to effectively draw from and expand upon the principles of ecology to create new forms of space – forms of space that are themselves fluid and adaptive. A related challenge will be the necessary deconstruction of traditional disciplinary boundaries between landscape, architecture, planning and engineering. The sorts of projects we are faced with today demands a whole new kind of mindset – a much broader and more inclusive mind, one that thinks across disciplines and establishes new genres of practice. These are as much imaginative challenges as they are technical, and will require a whole new generation of designers committed to the construction of new ecologies – new mixtures and amalgams of possibility in response to an always shifting ground.

James Corner is principal of Field Operations, an international landscape architecture and urban design practice based in New York City. He is also professor and chair of landscape and urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. He is author of Recovering Landscape and Taking Measures Across the American Landscape, and has written extensively on landscape urbanism, theory and criticism, and representation.