small acts of landscape a history of large intentions
landscape | pathways by jon piasecki
practice meditation detai ls history handwork
Stone construction is one of the most enduring traces of human activity. Stone is hard and heavy. Any effort to quarry, cut and stack it is one that requires a powerful incentive, extensive planning and specialised skill. This work has often been done in the service of empire to advertise power. Masons shape and arrange stone and in so doing express cultural attitudes toward the land. This expression takes place on a range of scales, from a single shaped stone all the way up to a landscape fully occupied by people. The ancient walls and boundary stones of Rome are perhaps the best-studied examples of historical stonework. These stone remnants betray an attitude toward the land that continues to be important to this day. These walls were the places where culture met the raw matrix of what we consider the natural and the ancients saw as a supernatural world. Around the Mediterranean, physical boundaries of stone were also ritual boundaries. According to Varro, Cicero, Plutarch and Pliny these walls were made sacred by complex and ancient rites. At the boundary wall, culture distinguished itself from nature. Passage was strictly regulated through the city gates. Climbing over the wall was taboo and punishable by death. On the Servian Wall in Rome, or on the various cyclopean city walls around the Mediterranean Sea, power was expressed by the degree of separation afforded between the safety inside the wall and the danger outside.
Once, I was asked to bury a cat by the elderly woman who lived next to a job I was working on. She saw me digging holes for some plants and thought I could tuck her dead pet in. I did it. I have planted hundreds of trees, laid sod and ground-covers. I have raked and graded the land. For the last eight years I have mostly joined stone in walls and walkways and I have become good at it. Small jobs have been my career. How well I can pull off the little things determines whether I am asked back and whether I get the next job; my creativity shapes what those jobs become. My design/build firm has shrunk from eight employees to one. Me. For years I assumed that this shrinking was the trajectory of failure. I was wrong. My work has never been better and it is at its most lucrative. I don’t want a big office. I really never want to make a park, a corporate headquarters or a university master plan. I make treasures that touch people and that people touch. I think my stonework is a model for the power of small. It is additive sculpture. One piece gets joined to another small piece. I sweat the little details of this union. No two stones are the same. After a year my project might weigh 100 tonnes and be 100 metres long – I do it a little at a time. People often ask me if I get bored breaking, stacking and moving rocks. It is a reasonable question. To answer, I will share one large issue I explore while working small.
46
On Site review 23 Small Things
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator