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Spring 2016: Landscapes of Ruin A Publication of the Foundation for Landscape Studies A Journal of Place Volume xı | Number ıı | Spring 2016 Essays: Evoking the Past: The Landscapes of Ruins 3 John A. Pinto: Speaking Ruins: Travelers’ Perceptions of Ancient Rome Frederic C. Rich: The Neander Valley: The Place Where We Learned We Were Not Alone Laurie Olin: Algerian Journal: Among the Ruins of Provincial Rome Baker H. Morrow: Quarai: Notes on the Landscape of an Ancient Native American Pueblo Erin Addison: The Nature of Culture: In Search of the “Real” Landscape of Petra Kathryn Gleason: The Landscape as Ruin: The Resiliency of Design Place Maker 19 Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: John Fairey of Peckerwood Garden Book Review 20 Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: Olmsted: Writings on Landscape, Culture, and Society Ed. Charles E. Beveridge Awards 23 Contributors 23 Letter from the Editor escribing antique and mud from the base cal architects, and a source the stalls and counters of to persistent drought. The a path, hedgerow, road, and landscapes is akin of the small Feldhof Cave of pleasurable melancholy merchants, the drains and landscape remained too dry bikeway. More recently, she to reading books at a limestone mining for travelers contemplating seats of the public toilets. and inhospitable for subse- has made several trips to backwards. We site in the Neander Valley the poetics of mortality and In “The Nature of Cul- quent development, which Caesarea Maritima on the start with their unearthed a cache of the beauty-laden ravages of ture,” Erin Addison takes us accounts for the fact that eastern coast of the Mediter- Dcurrent appearance and then unusual bones that were not, time. But it wasn’t only the to Jordan, another Mediter- Quarai’s agrarian past can ranean, the most important move in reverse chrono- as they originally thought, architectural remains of clas- ranean outpost of imperial still be discerned in a series city of Roman Judea and logical order, searching for those of a bear. As it turned sical Rome that stirred the Rome. Thousands of tour- of shrub-hollow gardens. Palestine. Here she found legibility in a palimpsest out, they had inadvertently imagination of the painters, ists are familiar with Petra, Their exploration is an that the neat grid plan laid bearing the marks and era- brought to light evidence of writers, and Grand Tourists the famous Nabataean- unusual and fascinating out by Herod the Great in 30 sures of time. Their stories humanity’s nearest evolu- who flocked to the city from Roman metropolis that endeavor for archaeologists, BCE remained visible in the are historical narratives of tionary relative. Unfortu- the seventeenth century became a UNESCO World going beyond their primary city’s streets and blocks, in natural and human inter- nately, this important event onward. The pastoral land- Heritage Site in 1985, but interest in a community’s spite of the later Byzantine, vention: of transformation did not encourage a search scape of the Roman Cam- it is not the temple-tombs structural footprint as Muslim, Crusader, Bos- by geologic, botanic, and for other cave-dwelling pagna was equally a locus with their stunning Helle- found in the remains of nian, and Israeli layers that climatic forces on one hand representatives of Homo of aesthetic inspiration and nistic architectural facades ancient Puebloan plazas. covered it. and by population growth, neanderthalensis in the spiritual sensibility. carved into cistern-pocked Kathryn Gleason, a In these times in which war, technology, and icono- vicinity, although the valley, In his essay “Algerian cliffs of red sandstone that landscape architect and both the planet and the clasm on the other. In this which had long attracted Journal,” Laurie Olin docu- she discusses. Rather, she landscape historian, also traces of previous civili- issue of Site/Lines, our focus tourists in search of the ments through recent travel wishes the reader to con- has a background in archae- zations are in jeopardy, is rediscovered historic Romantic Sublime, contin- notes and sketches one sider the surrounding des- ology. In “The Landscape I would like to stress the landscapes and the knowl- ued to lure visitors. By con- ancient city after another ert landscape occupied by as Ruin: The Resiliency of importance of the mission edge and emotion they elicit trast, the chief draw today in that southern Mediter- bedouins that is now under Design,” she poses a ques- statement of the Foundation with regard to past lives and can be found in the on-site ranean country – Timgad, unrelenting pressure from tion: “Might we expand for Landscape Studies: “To civilizations. museum’s focus on the Djemila, Tiddis, Tipasa, unplanned development and the scope of archaeological promote an active under- Often serendipity plays fact that the first evidence Madauros – and places in the combined processes of investigations to include standing of the meaning of a role in the resurrection of for human evolution was between. In the process, he overgrazing, vegetation and not only architectural ruins place in human life.” Such is an important piece of the found here. is able to reanimate ancient topsoil loss, and diminish- in a landscape but also the the hope our authors project past. In his essay “The Place In “Speaking Ruins,” streets, curbs, drains, foun- ing water resources. landscape itself as a ruin?” in this issue of Site/Lines. We Learned We Were Not John Pinto elucidates how tains, basins, gates, stairs, Another ancient civiliza- She then goes on to recount Alone,” Frederic Rich tells “ruins are what make Rome and plazas, along with the tion in a desert landscape, some of her experiences in With gratitude and good how in early August 1856, Rome; their ubiquity, scale, remains of civic buildings this one in the American the field, beginning with green wishes, three years before Darwin’s and resonance combine to such as libraries, theaters, Southwest, is the subject of her discovery at the site of a publication of On the give the city its identity.” and markets. With him, we “Quarai: Notes on the Land- Roman villa in Britain that a Origin of Species, two Italian Moldering over the centu- can make out not only the scape of an Ancient Native boundary line could become workmen shoveling loam ries into Romantic pictur- sites of vanished monu- American Pueblo,” by Baker esqueness, they have been ments and statuary but also Morrow. This settlement of Elizabeth Barlow Rogers the subject of countless five or six hundred people, President paintings, a treasure trove which was formed sometime of inspiration for neoclassi- in the eleventh century, was deserted around 1674 due On the Cover: Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View of the Roman Forum, etching, 1772. 2 Evoking the Past: The Landscapes of Ruins Speaking Ruins: Travelers’ Perceptions of Ancient Rome illustrates his sensitivity to ruins in stimulating his he Italophile writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, ruins. Mistakenly believed own imagination and, 1856–1935) declared, “Poets really make places.” The in Piranesi’s day to have been by extension, those of oth- opposite is also true, however: places make poets dedicated to Jupiter Tonans, or ers. In the course of his and artists. For many visitors – and this was cer- Thundering Jove, this temple career, through his virtuoso tainly the case for artists and writers in the period is situated on the slope of the use of the etching needle, Tof Romanticism – ruins are what make Rome Rome; their Capitoline Hill, overlooking Piranesi would translate the ubiquity, scale, and resonance combine to give the city its the remains of the ancient famous vistas of the Eternal identity. Majestic, they also give rise to melancholy. They are Roman forum. Edward Gib- City into well over a thou- both evidence of astonishing human achievement and bon, standing near this site sand plates. The cumulative a reminder of the impermanence of our accomplishments.1 in 1764, found himself moved result constituted nothing For centuries, Rome had served as the preeminent cul- to begin writing The Decline less than a virtual Rome tural reservoir of classicism, the font of order and reason. and Fall of the Roman Empire. on paper – one that was From Petrarch on, the fact that the artistic and architectural Piranesi, however, was inter- diffused throughout Europe heritage of classical antiquity survived only in bits and pieces ested in the manner in which and abroad, prompting prompted repeated laments over what had been lost. Many the past was enfolded in the a new wave of artistic Renaissance artists, Raphael among them, considered the present and what could be pilgrimages. remains of ancient architecture to embody perfection and set created from that tension. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, View of Much as the direct experience of the ruins spoke to Pira- about measuring and documenting them with a view towards Over the course of cen- the Temple of the Divine Vespasian, nesi in ways that their abstraction, in the form of measured extracting lost secrets – the keys to ideal harmony and beauty. turies, the temple’s three etching, 1753–54. drawings, did not, so visitors found that the academic study When, for example, late in the seventeenth century, the remaining standing col- of the past paled before the impressions produced by frag- French Academy sought to clarify and codify the rules gov- umns had been buried in accumulated debris. In Piranesi’s ments of antiquity. Madame de Staël, who first visited Italy in erning classical architecture, they sent Antoine Desgodetz to print they seem to thrust up through the earth, the richly 1804, set her 1807 romance Corinne there. As her male pro- Rome to measure – yet again, and with greater precision – its carved foliage of their Corinthian capitals juxtaposed with tagonist, a Scottish aristocrat, looks out over the forum in the ruined monuments and buildings.
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