Environmental ideals

Architectural Review, The, Oct, 1994 by Elsa Leviseur

The drawings are seductive, with a focus and intensity which is rarely realised in real life. They act like a magnifying glass. Perhaps, of built landscapes, George Hargreaves' SWA design, Harlequin Plaza, comes closest to being able to capture the intensifications of dissonant pattern and perspectives that Sullivan's drawings achieve.

In his own garden, one of his few built designs, the translation into a living landscape diffuses the intensity of colour and focus of the design drawing. This raises the question of whether the landscape 'icon', which is presented as a fixed viewpoint, is always more seductive than the landscape itself. And, if and when more of Sullivan's icons are realised into landscapes -- in the light of growth, change and people being able to move about within them -- will they lose their strength, and will they beread as social commentary? Some of Sullivan's drawn landscapes have the flavour of the cubist and surrealist gardens of the 1930s. Sullivan admires the European gardens of Gabriel Guvrekian and Andre Vera, as well as the later influential American works of Thomas Church and Garrett Eckbo. These pioneers of modernist landscape design transposed painting on to the land to bring new perceptions of design.

Is Sullivan's work a continuation of this movement, and in his later landscapes, is climate moderation still apparent? Can his message about ecological design be read in his landscapes or is it confined to the installations? Sullivan is an artist who came out of a 1970s ecological background. Will his merging of art, myth and climate moderation be an influence in the emerging American typology of twentieth-century landscape?

1 Eds Francis, Mark and Randolph T. Hester Jr. The Meaning of Gardens. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1990.

2 Landscape Architecture, March'77.

3 The Meaning of Gardens, idem.