Comment: Bad role models for landscape architecture Part II
In the second of our series looking at how bad design concepts can get projects off to a false start, Tim Waterman explores the shortcomings of the 'Slippery Abstraction'...
Many a landscape student's bête noire is the concept - the 'big idea' that drives the design. Ultimately, any site's big idea is its context and how that fits with its possible programme. Many design concepts actually prevent landscapes from functioning, and this series of short articles looks at a few of the ways projects can get off to false starts or come to bad ends.
Bad Concept No. 2 – All Soaped Up
Sometimes the conceptual weakness in a design originates in the brief issued by the client, often when the goal is a "Garden of Something-or-other". This could be 'fellowship' perhaps, or 'remembrance', or 'earthly delights'. These are all meaningful appellations. They resonate with the public and the symbolic function of the language is fairly clear. They celebrate human ideals or human existence and they make these ideas tangible in a physical space that people can inhabit. These types of spaces have an important civic and cultural function for identity and belonging.
It can be difficult, though, to take such a far-reaching abstraction and apply it to generate form or to manipulate material on an actual site. These abstractions are as slippery as bars of soap. They just don't afford any opportunities to get a grip
A spectacular example is Daniel Libeskind's Ground Zero Master Plan for the World Trade Center site in Manhattan, the language of which is at once a haunted house of the ethereal and sacred, and a roundhouse punch of macho patriotic swagger. There are two key themes: one, 'Reflecting Absence', the twin fountains within the twin tower footprints and the 'Freedom Tower', the symbolic replacement for Minoru Yamasaki's World Trade Center towers.
'Reflecting Absence', Michael Arad and Peter Walker's fountains falter because they, in the manner of so many contemporary memorials, are immensely land-hungry. Since Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial, every memorial must be narrative and immersive and big. Thus it gobbles up a lot of sacred land that could be used more usefully and very symbolically for the public exercise of democracy. Further, its fountains gobble up fossil fuels by pumping water at the rate of 98,000 litres a minute. This conspicuous waste combined with global tensions over fuel do nothing to improve the image of Americans in the world at large.
The pinnacle of the master plan is the 'Freedom Tower' (now the design of David Childs) and ‘freedom’ is used as both the conceptual and symbolic driver for the design. That anyone would want to utter the term 'freedom' after it was so wilfully perverted during the Bush years is remarkable, but Libeskind has given that perversion a patriotic erection 1,776 feet high (1776 being the year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence). For those many international dead from the twin towers, it is no comfort that this is, in metric, 541.3248 metres. Numerology is just another soapy, slippery notion.
Perhaps the important point for design, though, is that the concept of 'freedom' has burdened the world with yet another anodyne, air-conditioned, glassy, soap-slick stack.
Tim Waterman is honorary editor of Landscape and is a lecturer in landscape architecture and urban design at Writtle School of Design
*Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the contributor and not necessarily those of the Landscape Institute.
Latest headlines
- Deadline to register for LI Awards 2012 is 10pm on Tuesday 15 May
- The long view: Spring issue of Landscape out next week
- Next Olympic Learning Legacy event to be held in Birmingham
- LI practices chosen for Legacy Committee
- World’s first online flora database
- Obituary: Jack Lowe OBE
- Sheffield-based practice designing interior planting for Qingdao’s Plant Pavillion
- West 8 to restore Korea’s Yongsan Park
- Provisional planning agreed for Broadmoor Hospital redevelopment
- Enter the Student Design & Build Award 2012
- Thinking of applying for fellowship? You still have time
- Members subscriptions due for 2012/13
- Salary survey findings published…
- Celebrating 300 years of Capability Brown
- Battersea ‘Park’ Power Station
I agree very much with these sentiments, which leaves us with the question of what a design concept is for - they are all over the place,so why exactly do we have them?
the fuel use I’ll grant you. but there was a specific reason for the size of the WTC memorial.
There seem to be some rather strange targets for criticism in this article. From what I’ve seen (but not as yet visited), Peter Walker and Michael Arad’s memorial appears well judged. I suspect anything less than monumental in this location, would run the risk of repeating the problems of the Diana fountain; which I’d suggest is a nice idea, but one which doesn’t quite meet the expectations of such a monument.
Similarly, I’m a little confused how the unsustainable water use demonstrates, “slippery abstraction”.
Anyway, I expect you’ll get a few more lively comments once America wakes up!
I have to say, I agree with everything you’ve said, Jonathan!
The reason design concepts are rife in Landscape Architecture is because they are a useful (or lazy) mechanism to assuage commissioning clients fear of the new. But in the case of memorials, it’s surely driven by social fear of “not doing things properly”. I am visiting New York in March and looking forward to seeing this place for myself. Or rather “experiencing the concept”. Reading this excellent piece, I can’t help thinking of Baker, Blomfield and Lutyens’ Great War memorials in France and Belgium. While there are many admirable aspects to the Commonwealth War Graves landscapes, they did create a fashion for blunt messages on a monumental scale. Perhaps the design is quite clever after all. Is it better for a “world leader” to risk seeming pompous in the face of tragedy by employing a design that bludgeons individual emotion, than to share the grief of ordinary Americans and appear weak?
Good to see the discussion rolling on. But a concept is ‘something conceived in the mind’ (Merriam-Webster). So where would design be without concepts? Nowhere, though of course there are ‘good concepts’ and ‘bad concepts’. I would not say that ‘big concepts are bad concepts’ and I think the landscape profession has been weak in developing and deploying big concepts. As for ‘slippery concepts’, I think they have a certain charm!
Writer and Lecturer, please add Critic. The only slippery or “soapy” abstraction I can find is in your review of a place which is still under construction and far from mature.
The concepts are sound: that of void, loss, remembrance and life that begins again. Maybe one day you will experience these for yourself and understand clearly after the film has lifted.
A good (and enjoyable) exercise in the perils of landscape architecture in memorial sites is the novel published last year ‘The Submission’ by Amy Waldman. Takes the premise of an anonymous competition for the Ground Zero memorial space - judging between the bleak monumental sculptural and the intimate enchanting garden. The prize is awarded to a American born Muslim and hence onwards into controversy. Though mostly about identity politics is a good critique of the tangled web of design concepts, competitions and the meanings invested in public spaces. (Frustratingly though, the ‘winner’ is an architect and Landscape Architecture is mentioned once in the whole book. Grrr).
Possibly the problem with ‘concept’ is that it can seem to be a thing in isolation, divorced from site and from appropriate cultural references. Maybe ‘ideology’ would be a stronger driver for design?
Well, flying two passenger aircraft into two towers with such force and precision that both collapse, plate upon plate onto a city below is certainly an abstract - of life and death.
The fact that every stage of this horrendous event was covered by some form of visual media to probably billions of people worldwide is the concept, right there.
The scale of this atrocity must not be forgotten and New York has earnestly commissioned a project for the suitably long game.
Nothing slippery here – wrong to include the scheme in this strand or even series. Reflecting absence is a truth, not a concept.
I’m not sure whether you are against the use of concepts or the use of bad concepts: and the reason I’m not sure is your suggestion that the big idea for a design lies in the context of a site.
Were that true, there would be no reason for endowing place with meaning. Spaces would be functional and little more. Yet the history of urban and garden design shown time and again the need to express ideas by what we build. I think as a profession we generally fail to rise to the this conceptually rich heritage. There is a link here with your first polemic.
I have not visited the Ground Zero site and only seen television coverage of the construction and opening of the “Reflecting Absence” garden. What I saw impressed and moved me. Perhaps you have actually seen the site and can tell us otherwise. But I cannot help but note that your criticism is itself a pretty airy abstraction that involves the idea of wasting “sacred land” and an (unspecified) public exercise of democracy. Isn’t the point of the piece just that: to give over a large area to a visually arresting non commercial use in the heart of the most commercially driven city on earth? You clearly do not like it (and especially the tower), but I think it’s a weak case for making your point.
BTW, I think this series you are undertaking is excellent. Keep it up
good on Tim using eloquent words and questioning the icons. But, good on anyone else pointing out that actually he may have chosen the wrong targets.
Jencks for all his pomp and late wife’s family financed publicism (Tim’s target before Ground Zero) is forging a more creative and uplifting path (albeit mostly in his own back yard) than most LA’s and he isn’t even one.
The holes in the ground at Ground zero are cliches but f…... powerful. But P Walker didn’t do them; he did the ‘decoration’ around them in the square.
Long live discussion and controversy…and strong concepts of any texture.