Meaning, mapping and making of landscape

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 2004 by Jeremy Melvin

'Robinson in Space, a film (35mm colour 82mins UK 1997), was photographed between March and November 1995. It documents the explorations of an unseen fictional character called Robinson, who was the protagonist of the earlier London, which was a re-imagination of its subject suggested by the Surrealist literature of Paris. Robinson in Space is a similar study of the look of present-day England in 1995, and was suggested to some extent by Defoe's Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Among its subjects are many new spaces, particularly the sites where manufactured products are produced, imported and distributed. Robinson has been commissioned by 'a well-known international advertising agency' to undertake a study of the 'problem' of England. It is not stated in the film what this problem is, but there are images of Eton, Oxford and Cambridge, a Rover car plant, the inward investment sites of Toyota and Samsung, a lot of ports, supermarkets, a shopping mall and other subjects which evoke the by now familiar critique of 'gentlemanly capitalism', which sees the UK's economic weakness as a result of the City of London's long term [English] neglect of the [UK's] industrial economy, particularly its manufacturing base.

'Early in the film, its narrator quotes from Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray: "It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible ..." The appearances by which the viewer is invited to judge are initially the dilapidation of public space, the extent of visible poverty, the absence of UK branded products in the shops and on the roads, and England's cultural conservatism. Robinson's image of the UK's industry is based on his memories of the collapse of the early Thatcher years. He has assumed that poverty and dilapidation are the result of economic failure, and that economic failure is a result of the inability of UK industry to produce desirable consumer products. He believes, moreover, that this has something to do with the feel of "Middle England" which he sees as a landscape increasingly characterized by sexual repression, homophobia and the frequent advocacy of child beating.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

'At the same time, he is dimly aware that the UK is still the fifth largest trading economy in the world and that British, even English people, particularly women and the young, are probably neither as sexually unemancipated, as sadistic or as miserable as he thinks the look of the UK suggests. The film's narrative is based on a series of journeys in which his prejudices are examined, and some of them are disposed of.'

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

FOREIGN OFFICE ARCHITECTS: FARSHID MOUSSAVI

At the Yokohama Ferry Terminal, Foreign Office Architects proposed a new synthesis between landscape and architectural form. Instead of the old distinction between figure and ground, which often translated into artifice--architecture--and nature, or the landscape, Farshid Moussavi explained, they see the relationship as a series of networks combining social, political and geological influences. Consequently, 'the vocabulary of landscape is replaced by a network of systems, connections and interferences', and architecture becomes a strategy for 'trying to negotiate a way across them'.