Landscaping Ecosystems or the Taste for a Nature in Ruins

by
Smaranda Todoran

Keywords

attachment
garden
pleasure
care
order
sense of time
With Karl Foerster, Piet Oudolf, Alain Provost or Gilles Clément, to name a few of today’s renowned landscape designers, a sensibility towards fragile plants and ecosystems has taken over urban environments. A calm wilderness of a somewhat ruined nature often counterbalances geometry, inviting a possible question, in proximity of Bernard Tschumi’s remark on how garden models have preceded architectural models, that is, whether and how this taste for a seemingly spontaneous vegetation might influence or illustrate the built world.
The paper tries to see the underlying motivation for the appearance of these urban landscapes, around several concepts, borrowed from the writings of Tschumi, Ruskin, Jean Baudrillard and Marc Augé. Pleasure and delight, as described by Ruskin, and now Tschumi, are emotions closely linked to the nineteenth century romantic `mood of ruins`, bringing forward a notion of usefulness and uselessness that Baudrillard develops around the fascination for the old object. Whereas the objectual world illuminates a time that passes progressively, assuring a sense of origin and purpose, being reminded of the cycles of nature bypassing completely the man-made ruin, instead soothes our need of meaningful time passing, in a contemporary world that might not be able to produce ruins, as Augé puts it.
How can then this preference for fragile ecosystems be interpreted? The paper proposes hypotheses on the kind of sensibility concerning time, pleasure, rationality and a sense of meaning for contemporary western societies that these tendencies in landscape design hint to, and on how they might influence architecture.
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Chicago citation style
Todoran, Smaranda. “Landscaping Ecosystems or the Taste for a Nature in Ruins.” studies in History and Theory of Architecture, no. 11 (2023): 247-256. https://sita.uauim.ro/article/11_15_Todoran