On The Nature Of Things: Contemporary American Landscape Architecture - Gavin Keeney - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, June, 2001 by Elizabeth Young

By Gavin Keeney. Basel: Birkhauser, 2000. DM118

In the first of two forewords to this hook John Dixon Hunt writes 'Contemporary landscape architecture is concerned, with good reason, to defend itself against charges of anti or un-intellectualism'. In the second foreword Alan Weiss quotes a critic of his own work, 'who bemoaned the abyss between practice and academia'.

Gavin Keeney has attempted to bridge this 'abyss' by including a section of his own theoretical essays linking his detailed critical descriptions of the work of some 13 American practices whose work illustrates many of the issues he discusses.

The 13 practices chosen are not all household names and the variety of projects illustrated ranges from a remote viewing centre for the St Helen's volcano, to a glowing topiary garden for Liberty Plaza, from the regeneration of a decommissioned nuclear power station (with an asphalt sea and a cooling tower salmon hatchery in its new parkland) to designs for the San Francisco MUNI trackway. There are projects and planning studies for France, Israel and Japan. Serious issues of sustainability and environmental mitigation are addressed by a number of projects, while a fun project for a SoHo bar included towering topiary hair styles and a chest wig maze. Sadly the quality of illustrations is equally varied and several are frustratingly small and too grainy to read easily. Each practice section includes useful cvs, project lists and bibliographies.

Gavin Keeney's theoretical section 'the language of the world' with chapter headings such as 'measuring the incommensurable', 'outside the paradigmatic' proved hard reading. It was not just that the print size diminished by several points but also there were sentences such as 'structural linguistics, structural anthropology, hermeneutics, and phenomenology mapped the topological nature of cultural systems but - tautologically - remained a closed system or a synthetic, often capricious analytical system consistent with subjectivity'. I am told by colleagues educated in American landscape schools that a suitable lexicon is provided before students are asked to confront their tutors with essays on landscape theory. (Available on the Internet?) Without this aide my translation was rewarded with several new insights, but my conviction that we are divided by a common language remains.