Landscape As Monument

A Publication of the Foundation for Landscape Studies A Journal of Place Volume vı | Number ı | Fall 2010 Essays: Landscape as Monument, Monuments in the Landscape 2 David Sloane: Memory and Landscape: Nature and the History of the American Cemetery Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: An Island Named Roosevelt: Presidential Monument and Planned Community John H. Stubbs and Stefan Yarabek: Lednice-Valtice: A Monumental Liechtenstein Landscape within the Prague-Vienna Greenway Place Marker 16 Elizabeth Barlow Rogers: Theodore Roosevelt and the Native American Patrimony Book Reviews 17 Elihu Rubin: Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places By Sharon Zukin Cynthia Zaitzevsky: The Collected Writings of Beatrix Farrand: American Landscape Gardener, 1872–1959 Edited by Carmen Pearson Beatrix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes By Judith B. Tankard Tour 23 Contributors 23 Letter from the Editor n this issue of Site/Lines we mark places as monuments Here, however, is a pre- is fostering protection of an moving forward. My article dents to other important have chosen to focus on or place monuments in liminary exploration of a entire regional landscape as is based on conversations aspects of the nation’s archi- monuments – monuments landscapes. Indeed, it would special genre of place mak- a scenic monument with with proponents about its tectural and landscape patri- in landscape settings and take a book – and several ing. We begin with cemeter- recreational, cultural, and history, planning, and archi- mony. landscapes themselves as have in fact been written – to ies, monumental landscapes educational uses. Its crown tecture. I also interviewed We would like to draw Imonuments. The former describe the evolution that typically contain mau- jewel, the Lednice-Valtice some of the longtime resi- your attention to a include statues and memori- of a landscape such as the soleums, sculptures, or stone estates – a UNESCO World dents of the new town Foundation for Landscape als such as obelisks, columns, National Mall in Washing- markers to perpetuate the Heritage Site – will serve as a on Roosevelt Island – now a Studies-sponsored tour in and other symbolic forms, ton, DC, as a designed space memory of the deceased. In self-supporting enterprise mature community – who May 2011 of the Czech as well as commemorative or to discuss the form and “Memory and Landscape: perpetuating a large piece of describe what it has been Greenway, led by Stefan art and architecture in ceme- significance of its numerous Nature and the History of the cultural, architectural, like to live there over time. Yarabek, coauthor of the teries, parks or other pub- monuments and memorials. the American Cemetery,” and landscape patrimony of In previous issues of essay on this special land- licly accessible places. The Battlefields and national David Sloane traces practices the Czech Republic. Site/Lines we have included scape in the current issue of latter consists of the preser- cemeteries also deserve for burying the dead from In “An Island Named an essay on either a place Site/Lines. Further details can vation of particular land- essays in a future issue, as do the committal of remains Roosevelt: Presidential maker or a place keeper: a be found on page 23. We scapes because of their his- prison camps, Holocaust beside the community meet- Monument and Planned designer or steward of place. wish to remind you as well toric importance or scenic memorials, and monuments ing house to the new trend Community,” I have written In this issue we feature a that this journal is entirely and recreational values. It to the civil rights movement. of woodlands burial (featur- about the dual form of com- “place marker”: Theodore donor-supported. We urge also consists of the setting Spontaneous memorials, ing gravesites in a dedicated memoration embodied in Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth you therefore to help the aside of certain sites in such as roadside shrines natural landscape marked the Franklin Delano president of the United Foundation for Landscape honor of an individual or marking automobile deaths by GPS coordinates). In Roosevelt Memorial in New States. Roosevelt’s champi- Studies continue its publica- historical event, or the or offerings of flowers, can- “Lednice-Valtice: A Monu- York City and the “new town onship of the Antiquities Act tion by sending a contribu- sanctification of a place as dles, and mementoes mark- mental Liechtenstein within a city” that was con- of 1906 made it possible for tion in the envelope you a reminder of heroic death ing private losses, are Landscape within the structed forty years ago fol- the United State to designate will find in the centerfold of or acts too terrible to be another topic awaiting atten- Prague-Vienna Greenway,” lowing the honorific and thereby preserve a large these pages. forgotten. tion. In addition, we are John Stubbs and Stefan renaming of the island on number of Native American It would be impossible in postponing an article on the Yarabek describe the way the which it is sited. The con- sites as historical monu- With good green wishes, a single issue to explore all World Trade Center memor- World Monuments Fund struction of the monument, ments – a protection that of the ways in which people ial until an informed analy- which was sponsored by the was extended by later presi- sis can be made following Four Freedoms Foundation the long-awaited realization and designed by the late of its much-debated design. architect Louis I. Kahn, was Elizabeth Barlow Rogers long delayed but is at last President On the Cover: The National Cemetary, Santa Fe, NM. Photograph by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers. 2 Landscape as Monument, The idea of the woodlands cemetery emerged about twenty years ago in England Monuments in the Landscape but has only very recently found a place in America. To date, twenty-seven cemeteries Memory and Landscape: have been certified by the Green Burial Nature and the History of the American Cemetery Council, and only nine of those have received ncient cemeteries remind us that humans have designation as “conservation” or “natural” been constructing homes for the dead for thou- burial grounds; the first was Ramsey Creek sands of years – perhaps as long as we have been Cemetery in North Carolina, which opened in constructing houses for the living. Why do we care 1998. At Ramsey Creek, unlike Forever so deeply about the dead? They represent our past Fernwood, natural burial is the only disposi- Aand our future, our mortality and our morality. Over the last tion option. The landscape is disturbed as lit- two centuries, the cemetery has also come to exemplify our tle as possible, retaining its natural style need to maintain a relationship to nature within the context of rather than being reconstructed as a pic- large-scale industrial cities. It is a pastoral haven meant to turesque garden or a suburban lawn. In a provide respite from the frenetic routine of our daily lives. The profile published in Landscape Architecture in desire to have the cemetery express memory and spirituality – 2002, J. William Thompson reported that Billy to be both monument and landscape – creates a tension and Kimberly Campbell created the cemetery between nature and culture with which we continue to strug- as a way to conserve land from development gle today. and as a rejection of the modern way of death Forever Fernwood Cemetery, in Mill Valley, California, is an critiqued by Jessica Mitford a half-century indicator of America’s growing environmental sentiment and ago; the Campbells feel that contemporary reflects a potentially radical change in the nation’s burial prac- burial more closely resembles the disposal of toxic waste than density of towns and cities. Lowell’s Monument, Willow tices. While the cemetery still offers conventional burial plots a spiritual ritual. Although the new burying Avenue, Mount Auburn Cemetery. with modest monuments set on fairly steep lawns, its owners, The role of nature in the landscapes of the dead has always ground (later Grove Street Engraving by James Smillie, 1851. drawing upon the “woodlands burial” movement, have set reflected popular perceptions of the relationship between the Cemetery) in New Haven, aside part of their thirty-two acres for “natural burials.” In built environment and the natural landscape. Tracing the his- Connecticut, in 1797 provided sections for indigents, visitors to these sections, the hills are covered with tall grasses and a tory of its evolution helps us to understand the current trend New Haven, blacks, and members of the Yale community, it slightly ragged arrangement of trees and shrubs. The graves toward the growing practice of burial in unadorned nature. also marked the creation of the nation’s first chartered associa- are not marked by stones but by trees, whose positions are tion dedicated to preserving the graves of the city’s families. recorded by a Global Positioning System (GPS). Burials are Nature and Culture in the Cemetery Landscape John Brinckerhoff Jackson noted in Landscape in Sight that the made in unfinished pine boxes and families are discouraged The earliest American burial places were small spaces along “novelty” of the new cemetery was “the nonpublic, almost from embalming the body. the side of a pasture or adjacent to the town’s meeting house domestic quality” of the grounds, where people paid to own or church. These grounds reflected established European prac- family lots so they could inter family members next to each tices, and were as unplanned as the ones across the sea. And other in a “secluded place,” ensuring the privacy of the graves while the delicate carvings of East Coast gravestones poignant- and the survivors’ mourning. ly remind us of the constant presence of death in the early The establishment of Mount Auburn Cemetery outside colonists’ lives, these cemeteries display no corresponding Boston, Massachusetts, in 1831 forever altered the look and sentimentalism about the often inhospitable natural world the experience of the burial place in the United States.

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