El nuevo concepto estratégico de 2010: compromiso activo, defensa moderna

An argument can readily be sustained that the practice and teaching of landscape architecture is directed and led by design. For example teaching programmes11 _{and published monographs}12 _{emphasise the role of creative}

processes as the foundational method by which solutions are derived. Hence it is accepted that once a project brief is commenced the landscape architect should enlist design-orientated tools and strategies in order to bring together a productive and meaningful outcome. Yet the same approach is not the norm for landscape architecture’s programmes of academic research. Surprisingly (at least on the face of it), having settled on a research question, there is far less readiness to enlist those same design-led and creative strategies when pursuing academic inquiry.

While much research discusses landscape contexts, as well as physical productions of landscape architecture, there is a tendency in this work to enlist any number of approaches other than those that are reliant on design. Given landscape architecture’s dependence on its designerly attributes for its disciplinary distinctiveness this reticence is perplexing. Especially when creativity and design are often considered integral to research. For example

10 Or the similarly indistinct ‘architecture produces architecture by architecture’ 11 See, for example, descriptions of the programmes at Berkeley

http://laep.ced.berkeley.edu/programs/undergraduate; PSU http://www.larch.psu.edu/AcademicPrograms/bla.htm; and Lincoln University http://www.lincoln.ac.nz/story3112.html : all accessed 21st March 2008.

12 See, for example Bonet, 2007, Urban Landscape Architecture. Wolff, 2002, Review of Charles Waldheim's Constructed Ground.

Michael Crang, whose research is based in the humanities and not a design discipline, supports a designerly orientation to research. He states, “producing order out of our materials, of making sense … is a creative process”.13

Similarly Sarah Whatmore, a geographer, considers the research process relies on “the creative and sometimes contrary possibilities generated in and by exchanges between researcher and researched”.14

Paul Carter, an academic whose career has developed from fields in literature and history and now into urban design theory and practice, notes that “ ‘creative research’ [is] a phrase that ought to be an acknowledged tautology. If research implies finding something that was not there before, it ought to be obvious that it involves imagination … [Hence] as a method of materialising ideas, research is unavoidably creative. This is why, Michel Serres claims, ‘Invention is the only true intellectual act’ ”.15

However, as Carter continues, “while ‘creative research’ ought to be a tautology, in its present cultural climate it is in fact an oxymoron. A research paradigm prevails in which knowledge and creativity are conceived as mutually exclusive … A narrowly reductive empiricist notion of research, which, by insisting on describing the outcomes in advance, defines the new in terms of a ‘present more extreme’, now influences the framing of research questions across all disciplines. Interpretative sciences (traditionally the humanities), and even applied disciplines, architecture and design, find they can describe what they do only on condition that they leave out invention”.16

Arguably it is a lack of enthusiasm by design-led disciplines to use design as a method of inquiry that has limited their academic scope. The de facto outcomes are academic disciplines, such as landscape architecture, architecture, and design, are adept at providing distinctive contexts for research but do not provide distinctive methods for academic inquiry.17

Landscape architecture academic Catherin Bull notes this results in a situation where “scholarship and research in these fields, where it does occur,

13 Crang, 2003, Telling Materials, p117. 14 Whatmore, Ibid.Generating Materials, p103.

15 Carter, 2004a, Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research, p7. 16 Ibid, p7-8.

17 There are of course some obvious exceptions, though it must be noted they are exceptions rather than archetypes. Such work includes that by Halprin from the 1960’s and more recently Berger, Corner, Dee, Fine, and Getch-Clark. This work will be brought into the discussion in Chapter Six.

is “about” them, rather than “of” them”.18 _{In other words the discipline’s body}

of research, while concerning the context of landscape architecture, doesn’t depend on those design-focused methods developed within it and also practised and taught by it. Instead the research methods most commonly adopted, and the researcher expertise employed, are founded in the domains of the humanities and sciences: in logic and reasoning; criticism and interpretation; and qualitative and quantitative analysis. Absent in the methodological mix is the very characteristic that make the creative disciplines distinct – namely design. As a result there is a sheer paucity, in the field of landscape architecture, of scholarly research that attempts to use design as their primary research method: an absence that tends to be self-perpetuating.

Klaus Krippendorf notes “probably the most notable pathology of design discourses is its openness to colonisation by other discourses”.19 _Hence

historians, plant ecologists, social scientists, educators, geologists, planners, mathematicians and geographers while competently exploring topics of landscape architecture do so from a methodologically external position – where the corpus of landscape architecture is understood, and defined, from the outside looking in.20 _{While such a ecumenical approach can be considered}

a positive expression of multidisciplinarity less certain is the reception upon a reversal of roles: for example where methods particular to a design-led discipline like landscape architecture are applied to contexts of interest to academic approaches beyond landscape architecture, and other related design disciplines – such as, in the case of this research, wilderness and the New Zealand conservation estate.

It is a sense of landscape architecture’s insularity, coupled with a sentiment of being ignored by a wider world, that drives the tone of the edited papers included in Corner’s seminal text Recovering Landscape. Yet though such discussions argue for a landscape architecture embedded in creativity they struggle to be made in a way in which the instrumentality of design is enlisted and not just described. Weller, as previously noted, states for Corner’s theory to be relevant it must make sense in his designed outcomes. Yet perhaps the reverse could also be the case: would his theory be made more apt by the use

18 Carter, 2004a, Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research, p8.

19 Cited in Findeli, 2000, Some Tentative Epistemological and Methodological Guidelines for Design Research, p2. 20 See, for example, Foster and Lorimer, 2007, Cultural geographies in practice: Some reflections on art-geography as

collaboration. ; Housefield, 2007, Sites of time: organic and geologic time in the art of Robert Smithson and Roxy Paine.

of designing in its development and final formulation. As Nigel Cross writes, “we must concentrate on the ‘designerly’ ways of knowing, thinking and acting … Design practice does indeed have its own strong and appropriate intellectual culture, and … we must avoid swamping our own design research with different cultures imported either from the sciences or the arts”.21

If a major form of academic research in landscape architecture can be characterised as outside methods looking in, then, a second predominant approach attempts to explain specific processes and outcomes pertinent to the discipline. For example Mark Francis, in setting out a position for the use of ‘a case study method in landscape architecture’, argues for the case study as a means to “inform their colleagues and public about [the landscape architect’s] work”.22 _{Here he proposes a template of common critical}

dimensions should be used when discussing specific ‘best-case’ outcomes of the discipline, so that both individual and comparative analysis might be better undertaken. Hence, he states, North American projects as diverse as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, Central Park in New York and the Stanford Campus Plan in California should be analysed across common characteristics including site analysis, cost, and criticism for example. Shortly I will discuss the suitability of case studies as a framework for research directed by design, but the point to be stressed here is that in this form of approach the research occurs after designing is finished. In an emerging academic discipline like landscape architecture this can result in positivist articulations of the already resolved (and often already built). For example “Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape portrays the surge of creativity and critical commentary surrounding the contemporary created landscape”.23 _{Yet the conclusions in such reviews often elide the tensions,}

uncertainties, those aspects that couldn’t be cohesively resolved, and designerly explorations of the possibility such difficulties offer.Instead the outcomes are ‘spectacular’, ‘ingenious’, bold’, ‘radical’, and ‘dramatic’, and at least in creative if not ecological terms also complete.24

21 Cross, 2001, Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline Versus Design Science, p56. 22 Francis, 2001, A Case Study Method for Landscape Architecture, p15.

23 Reed, 2006, Groundswell : constructing the contemporary landscape, p15.

24 Nor is this tendency restricted to landscape architecture. By far the bulk of publications in architecture, industrial design, and communication design take a similar approach in which highly pictorial monographs (many self- authored) and reviews assert in a manifesto-like style an effusive commentary on the designs and designers under discussion. See, for example,: Mack, 1996, Herzog & de Meuron : das Gesamtwerk = The complete works. ; Rashid,

Likewise when discussing the process of learning and practising design a similar sense of containment is evident. In these studies themes extensively developed in other academic paradigms, like post-structural philosophy, and concepts of narrative and semiotics25_{, are each in turn explored so they can be}

incorporated into producing, either better formal and usually site-specific design solutions, or better processes to deliver such outcomes. However the specific intent of these studies is to bring these themes into the fold of landscape architecture, rather than look outwards and consider their application across other design-led disciplines and beyond.26 _{Hence it is}

neither surprising, nor unusual, that Francis’s argument for a case study approach ignores the possibility of linking his template with similar frameworks found in other design disciplines, or applying his concepts outside of landscape architecture productions. Is it possible such activity, by asserting the distinctive identity and value of each discipline, reinforces territorial disputes between architecture and landscape architecture? And why, for example, landscape architecture orientated conferences, are more likely to be attended by planners, ecologists and policy makers than architects, industrial designers, and communication designers – just as architecture and design conferences are similarly self-contained?27

These inward-looking attempts at disciplinary self-definition – whether derived from each design discipline marking out its territory, or the previously discussed efforts to examine design using methods that are founded elsewhere – can be characterised as research into the field of design. Following such an approach, in terms of this research, it might be possible to reintegrate wilderness as a theme into the discipline of landscape architecture. However such work, without an emphasis on designerly methods, is likely to interest only the field of landscape architecture and not

Antonelli, Olsen and Cohen, 2001, I want to change the world. ; Carson and Blackwell, 1995, The end of print : the graphic design of David Carson.

25 See, for example, Alon-Mozes, 2006, From 'Reading' the Landscape to 'Writing' a Garden: The Narrative Approach in the Design Studio.

26 The broad field of Urban Design could be considered an exception. For example the Urban Design Protocol Initiative by the New Zealand Government’s Ministry for the Environment has been widely engaged with across a diverse mix of stakeholders. For the diverse list of signatories see: http://mfe.govt.nz/issues/urban/design- protocol/signatories.html : accessed 20th March 2008

27 See, for example, the list of attendees at the Council of Landscape Educators 2007 Conference, while having a number of landscape related disciplines represented had few related design and architecture disciplines represented. Similarly the New Zealand Institute of Architects 2006 ‘Taking Stock’ Conference had very few related design disciplines represented. This insularity is also evident when reviewing the disciplinary backgrounds of contributors to academic publications in the different design disciplines.

wider audiences like, for example, the attendees of the previously mentioned George Wright Society Conference on protected areas.

Hence I consider that for the research in this dissertation to be both distinctive to the discipline, and also inform other academic disciplines then its research approach needs to be founded in landscape architecture. And for this to occur, for the discipline to be enabled to present innovative insights into wilderness and the New Zealand conservation estate to a wider academic audience, then design cannot merely be the context for this research but also a means of such an inquiry.