Reflections : the Journal of the School of Architecture, University of Illinois

Reflections The Journal of the School of Architecture University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Landscapes Townscapes Memorials No. 6 Spring 1989 Board of Editors Reflections is a journal dedicated to theory (1987-88 Academic Year) and criticism. The Board of Editors of Reflections welcomes unsolicited contribu- R. Alan Forrester, Director tions. All submissions will be reviewed by the School of Architecture Board of Editors. Authors take full responsi- bility for securing required consents and Johann Albrecht, Chairman releases and for the authenticity of their Ronald Schmitt, Acting Chairman articles. Paul J. Armstrong, Managing Editor Address all correspondence to: Botond Bognar Reflections Vladimir Krstic The Journal of the School of Architecture Henry S. Plummer University of Illinois Robert I. Selby at Urbana-Champaign 608 E. Lorado Taft Drive Champaign, IL 61820 (1988-89 Academic Year) R. Alan Forrester, Director Ingvar Schousboe, Acting Director School of Architecture Ronald Schmitt, Chairman Paul J. Armstrong, Managing Editor Robert I. Selby Copy Editor Carol Betts Layout and Graphic Design School of Architecture Publications Office D.C. Trevarrow, Art Director Craig Seipka © 1989 by Reflection (ri flek shen) n. 1.) The act of casting back from a surface. 2) To happen as The Board of Trustees of the a result of something. 3.) Something that University of Illinois exists dependently of all other things and Printed in the United States of America from which all other things derive. 4.) To look at something carefully so as to understand ISSN: 07399448 the meaning. Contents Lance M. Neckar The Park: 4 Prospect and Refuge Paul J. Armstrong The Allegory of the Garden: 14 The Garden as Symbol in the Art and Architecture in the Age of Humanism Julia W. Robinson Architecture as Cultural Artifact: 26 Conception, Perception (Deception?) Dragos Patrascu Urban Proportions 32 Michael Brill Transformation, Nostalgia 48 and Illusion About Public Life and Public Environments James W. Shields The Building as VUlage Wojciech Lesnikowski On Sjrmbolism of Memories and Ruins Farouk Self Monuments in the Realm Folke Nyberg of Memory Wayne M. Chamey Et in Arcadia Ego: The Place of Memorials in Contemporary America The School of Architecture would like to thank Richard R. Knorr for the contribution of his drawings to this issue of Reflections. — The Park: Prospect and Refuge Lance M. Neckar Even today, Webster's first definition of park prospect for the hunter than refuge for the University of Minnesota refers to an "enclosed piece of ground." prey, is a forerunner of the contemporary stocked with animals and used at the or, at least, the nineteenth-century—park. pleasure of the monarch for recreation in the form of hunting. Geographer Jay Appleton In baroque France the design and notes that there are many kinds of development of the great hunting chateaux recreational activity or sport which bring us added another component characteristic of close "to the primitive habitat situation—the park, namely, enclosure. The chateau at world of pursuing, of escaping, of hiding, and Chambord comprised 13,600 acres of wood seeking."' As Appleton demonstrates, the through which were cut linear rides or drives. vocabulary of the hunt is replete with Even this very large space was enclosed by a allusions to prospect and refuge symbolism; twenty-mile-long wall at the perimeter, the for example, "view," "covert," "going to longest wall of its sort in France. Chambord ground." Hunting is an activity of was built for Francois 1 in 1519 and remained apprehending without being apprehended. the favored hunting retreat of the French Both hunter and quarry are engaged in the kings through the reign of Louis XIII, who activity to varying degrees and the landscape also enjoyed hunting there and at another must be specifically responsive to the royal hunting estate, Versailles. Versailles requirements of prospect and refuge. It must had been reconstructed from a castellated open and close: either the topography must manor in the 1630s under the direction of vary, or there must be "structure" which LouisXIll. Hisson, Louis XIV, began in 1661 provides a view from above or below. the immense reconstruction and additions to the site which we see in part today and which The iconography of hunting and hunting originally included more than 35,000 acres. grounds is as ancient as Lascaux, but for There is a dramatic scale even to what purposes of a description of the form of the scholars have called the Petit Pare. These park, a pragmatic beginning might be made incredibly grandiose gardens that lie near the with a rather well-known painting from about main palace and the Trianons, combined 1420 which depicts The Hunt in the Wood. with the forests, cut-through by allees which Painted by Uccello, the image is one of radiate from the Etoile Royale. give a reduced wealthy, young Florentines on horseback sense of the original hunting park. This near and their servants on foot following dogs and approximation of infinity may have been so deer into an incredible landscape where all of large that a continuous fence was the trees, regardless of their position in the unnecessary. scene, are nearly equally illuminated and where the ground below the canopy is nearly Survival and hazard are explicit, perhaps, in open. This civilized forest, which offers more hunting. The penalties for ignoring hazard Thomas Cole's "Valley qfVaucluse" (1841) depicts a ruined castle high above the habitable landscape below. This Picturesque landscape and others of the Hudson River School became iconographic sources for American Landscape landscape designers. A literal interpretation is seen in the tower at Mount Auburji Cemetery in Cambridge. Massachusetts. (Metropolitan Museum of Art) This ambivalence possibly was a foreshadow- ing of the widespread use of the fosse, the ha- ha. and other variations on the sunken fence. As LeNotre had created for Louis XTV the illusion of an infinite hegemony, the English landscape designers of the eighteenth century created, or attempted to create, the illusion of nature unbounded, an earthly paradise very much enclosed. Burke's in- quiry into the oppositional concepts of the Sublime and the Beautiful established the One of the great drives that departs from an etoile spectrum of landscape expression available at Versailles, typical of the stellate schemes of to the painter and designer. The Sublime FYench hunting parks, (author) denoted the contrast of dark and light and are great. As Appleton has suggested, emotional aspects of terror and escape asso- recreational activities and their hazards ciated with the landscape of wild nature, of derived from hunting become abstracted, as the hunt. The dual quality of dark and light in the playing of golf, or vicarious, as in the was explicit: bosques, groves, grottoes—dark attribution to a landscape of prospect and spaces—must be balanced by the light. The refuge the characteristics of wild nature. It light entered when wall and canopy opened. was the character of the abstraction—its One could see in the meadow, but one was depth and form—which occupied the minds also vulnerable to being seen. Topography in of the eighteenth-century theorists and the form of great cataracts from which fell creators of the English park. Alexander cascading volumes of water offered prospect Pope's Essay On Criticism (1711) is widely and refuge by the difficulty of their cited as an early inspiration because of the attainment, by their defiance of gravity, and homage it paid to "Nature, at once the source by the noise which erased all other noises and and end and test of Art." While Joseph impaired the other senses. Gravity was both Addison seemed to encourage the notion of a friend and foe. The view to the space below larger garden estate of park-like proportions, afforded advantages. Yet even here, at this it was left to Stephen Switzer to attempt to prospect, there was hazard. One may fall delineate the further aspects of its layout in from a great height. The precipice becomes a The Nobleman's Gentleman's and Gardener's cul-de-sac should the quarry surprise the Recreation (1715), which was later expanded hunter and propel him to certain death. For under the title Ichnographia Rustica. Switzer Burke and his contemporaries one appre- himself was ambivalent about the purposes hends that such spaces were not desirable as of this garden in the grand manner, and his places of dwelling. Frederick Law Olmsted, in text was littered with what Hussey calls his Walks and Talks ofan American Farmer in "polarities" expressive of both pleasure and England (1859), confirmed this supposition utility.^ As Hussey notes, Switzer never used in a comparison he drew to American land- the term "landscape garden." His work was scape: 'The sublime ... in nature is much best represented by the sort of larger- scale more rare in England, except on the sea scheme seen at Castle Howard, c. 1701. coast, than in America. But there is every- wherein lay the Wraywood, possibly of where a great deal of quiet, graceful beauty ."^ Switzer's design. The question of enclosure which the works of man have added to. was even less directly addressed: How could Nature, writ large, be enclosed? Switzer Beauty, the Beautiful, was indeed at the confused the issue with suggestions of other end of the spectrum. A highly incorporating the larger landscape in the abstracted imitation of nature, the Beautiful distance without actually resolving the issue presented an entirely vicarious manner of of enclosure necessary to maintain the park recreation. The English landscape was more as the place of either agriculture or hunting. rugged than that of the great allee-lined hunting parks of baroque France, but the premises of the Beautiful in the English landscape nonetheless dictated a softening and control of the landscape, an improvement of nature.

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