One and Many: The Recovery of Nature in Landscape Architecture

Abstract

This project effects a re-positioning of the role of nature in landscape architectural thinking and practice. It examines the relationship of landscape architectural discourse to philosophies of nature that have developed and changed from the time of the Greek polis to the current era. By means of a series of analyses of historical gardens and landscape texts, it demonstrates that designed landscapes have enshrined specific ideas about nature. It shows that notions of difference, emergence and transgression - contemporary characterizations of nature - have set gardens and designed landscapes apart from other design disciplines. The project uncovers a complex, poetic tradition which sees humans as part of nature, and nature as a complex set of ideas which conditions what it is to be human. Present-day landscape architecture has not been attentive to this tradition. While contemporary landscape design works within a paradigm of the world as a web of interactive systems - a collocation of ecologies - it has not developed a thorough-going realization of the conditions of transformation that connect and disconnect these systems with human consciousness. Specifically, it has not made human nature a subject of its operational concerns. Landscape architecture has therefore only partially realized the possibilities that the concept of nature-in-the-city can contribute in the creation of lively, intriguing and lyrical urban environments. The project demonstrates how some of the canonical sites of landscape theory - historical gardens and texts - are in fact material confrontations with the problematic of an unpredictable, ever-changing Nature. It shows how contemporary landscape architecture can draw on this legacy in its turn to the city as a site of the recovery of nature in the lives of human beings. he primary thesis is that both the natural world and the cities that interact with it are nonlinear systems: unpredictable, open-ended and self-organising. It suggests that urban landscape architecture should be based on an understanding of nature that aligns these qualities with human consciousness and privileges disturbance and turbulence in the imaginative re-ordering of the urban field. From its adaptation of nonlinear dynamics, and poetic readings of historical landscapes and texts, the project derives a contemporary philosophy of nature for landscape architecture, and develops a set of design techniques on the basis of this philosophy. This requires a reversal: multiplicity, rather than the unitary ideal of the One, becomes the subject of design. And multiplicity, always an affective entanglement of one and many, necessarily invokes the complicity of the human subject.