Temporality in Designed Landscapes: the theory and its practice in works of some major landscape designers 1945-2005 A Thesis submitted to the University of Sheffield for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Social Science by LEE HEYKOOP DEPARTMENT of LANDSCAPE University of Sheffield June 2015 i | P a g e ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Most importantly I would like to thank my supervisor Anna Jorgensen who has guided, restrained and encouraged at appropriate times. Her reminders about not assuming that others see as I do enabled improved articulation of key ideas. I would also like to thank my second supervisor, Cathy Dee, for her rigorous critiquing, and her important contribution to the structure of this research. And, a huge thank you to my wonderful children, Judi, Laura and Laurence, who, in their teen years, in the early years of my research, tolerated the impact of my temporal squeeze, and who have been so supportive throughout all the happenings over subsequent years. Personal thanks aside, a number of writers in this thesis have fired my thinking, and to them I am extremely grateful: Arnold Berleant, Edmund Husserl, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Conan, Stephen Bann, Anita Berrizbeitia, Elizabeth Grosz, Elizabeth Meyer, Ian Thompson, and Marc Treib. ii | P a g e ABSTRACT This study analyses temporality in designed landscapes. The meaning of temporality is explored, taking us beyond common conceptualisations of time. Temporality, invariably poorly understood in a landscape context, and previously acknowledged as being important, but with only limited explicit discourse, is examined through the lens of a fresh theoretical articulation of temporality pertaining to designed landscapes. A phenomenological approach becomes imperative; and is employed in probing the work, through writing, of several eminent landscape designers between 1945 and 2005. These designers’ works are analysed through the texts, and with support from images of the works, for characteristics of temporality. Textual material offered a broad range of verbal articulation of these characteristics. Some designed landscapes are described with explicit verbalisation of their temporal qualities: others require analysis to discover their temporal qualities from text that is only mildly suggestive. The heterochronous characteristics of temporality expressed in these designers’ works are named and ordered within five themes: tempo, process, duration, imagination and layers. Theoretical understanding of temporality builds with identification of its applications in designed landscapes. iii | P a g e TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract pIII Chapter 1. Introduction Definition of temporality p1 Context to the study p2 Temporality in landscape – the gaps p4 Effects of over-valuing the visual p6 Aims of the research p11 Research methods o The form of investigation: choice of o data: advantages and disadvantages o and limitations p12 o The choice of period and designers p13 o Method of data analysis p15 o The searches for sources and how o selections have been made p17 o Theoretical approach p17 Structure of the thesis p17 Chapter 2. Literature Review Literature Review p20 o Hints and limited references to temporality p20 o Phenomenological time in designed p22 landscapes o Temporality as process p26 o Temporality in motion and tempo p32 o Imagination in heritage and living p37 o Temporality in narrative and memories p40 o The literature and the research areas of the thesis p41 o Philosophical grounding p45 o Temporality, Meaning and Aesthetics p50 Chapter 3. Theoretical Framework Theoretical framework p52 Research Questions p53 Five ordering themes o Tempo p55 o Process p56 o Duration p58 iv | P a g e o Imagination p58 o Layers p60 Chapter 4. Preamble to 1945 The context of Modernism in landscape design pre-1945 p62 Chapter 5. Decade 1945-1955 Contextual background for the decade1945-1955 p70 Thomas Church p72 Carl Theodor Sorensen p77 Luis Barragan p83 Roberto Burle Marx p88 Chapter 6. Decade 1955-1965 Contextual background for the decade 1955-1965 p93 Ernst Cramer p94 Dan Kiley p99 Chapter 7. Decade 1965-1975 Contextual background for the decade 1965-1975 p110 Lawrence Halprin p112 Geoffrey Jellicoe p122 Sven Ingvar Andersson p128 Chapter 8. Decade 1975-1985 Contextual background for the decade 1975-1985 p133 Richard Haag p135 Ed Bye p144 Ian Hamilton Finlay p149 Chapter 9. Decade 1985-1995 Contextual background for the decade 1985-1995 p155 Peter Walker p158 Gilles Clement p164 Bernard Lassus p170 Dieter Keinast p179 v | P a g e Chapter 10. Decade 1995-2005 Contextual background for the decade 1995-2005 p185 Peter Latz p186 Adriaan Geuze p193 George Descombes p202 Chapter 11. Heterochronicities Assembled p208 Tempo p208 o Somatic immersion p208 o Dynamic tempo p209 o Stillness p211 o Series – juxtaposing rhythms p211 o Unregulated tempo p212 Process p212 o Natural processes of changes within p213 human users o Process and planting design p215 o Processes of journeys p216 o Process of involvement p217 Duration p219 o Ephemera in light, weather and plants p219 o Temporary use p220 o Longevity p221 Imagination p222 o Imagined relationships of landscape p222 and user o Metaphors and allusions – Imagination p226 Guided Layers p228 o Layers in juxtapositions and contrast p228 o Layers in thresholds and transitions p230 o Layers in collage p231 Aesthetic values p234 Chapter 12. In Conclusion Development of the work p236 Outset p236 Time and Temporality: a Phenomenological p237 Approach Theory of temporality in a landscape context p237 Themes of temporality in landscape p237 Temporality in designed landscapes: meaning p239 vi | P a g e and significance o Original contribution p239 o Implications p240 Limitations of the thesis p242 Possibilities for further research p242 References p243 vii | P a g e CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION DEFINITION OF TEMPORALITY The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) gives a definition of temporality as, “something existing in a condition relating to time”. For the purposes of this study a closer definition is needed, one less broadly all-encompassing, that can be brought to bear on some important aspects of landscape experience. Landscape architecture is concerned with design interventions in outdoor areas to make improvements related to environmental, social and aesthetic outcomes. The focus of this study though will turn towards human users (as sentient recipients, differentiated from other living organisms). More precisely human users feature as it is they whom landscape practitioners and theorists think of and empathise with. This then entails a phenomenological approach with the investigation looking at temporality as it is sensed (by people). My working definition of temporality, then, will be: a sense of time. This simple sounding invocation, a sense of time, entails the reader’s effort to mentally disengage from measured time and universal time; engaging instead with time, temporality, as we experience it and as it is meaningful to ourselves. In some respects it is useful to hold on to the OED meaning, since phenomenology and temporality are intertwined to the extent that the question could be asked whether what the sensing person senses is necessarily temporal. How is a person able to sense something that is not temporal, since not only does everything in this world have a temporal nature, but a person’s act of sensing is in itself a temporal process? Phenomenology in this work is understood as not having its references restricted to the study of sensations of phenomena; as having the ‘much wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience’ (Smith 2013, p1). The study of phenomenology includes the structure of internal experiences that ‘rang(e) from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity’; which all 1 | P a g e involve Husserl’s "intentionality" (ibid p2). Smith (ibid p4) expands on this characteristic in our interaction with the world: awareness-of-experience is a defining trait of conscious experience, the trait that gives experience a first-person, lived character. It is that lived character of experience that allows a first-person perspective on the object of study, namely, experience, and that perspective is characteristic of the methodology of phenomenology. Throughout the study there will be references to landscape designers giving clear consideration to ‘that lived character of experience’ (ibid) and it is this that is intended when a phenomenological approach is called upon. Following Husserl, phenomenological responses enlisted in the study are a combination of the objective and subjective (logical and psychological) (ibid p7). CONTEXT TO THE STUDY In Modern Park Design: recent trends, the book from papers of the 1992 Rotterdam landscape symposium, ‘The Park', one of the editorial comments states that the ‘acknowledgement of time’ is the main distinguishing feature between architects and landscape architects; but that ‘the exact definition of time and its role in park design has not become clear' (Knuijt et al 1993, p82). This comment followed Norfried Pohl’s contributing paper, in which he made considerable mention of time in landscape design, yet found that: 'Time is a difficult idea. And I don't know if I have a concept of time’ (Pohl 1993, p82, italics added). This confusion about time within the profession of landscape architecture, a kind of sense of its importance accompanied by