1 N ature is the secret order of things, which requires only the essence of our pure and rational thought to make itself truly understood. We believe our survival depends on the success of this search for order. However, every supposed revelation of pattern has become for us, in turn, a compelling pattern for remaking the world around us. In the end we have been conditioned by the conditions we have created. Our cities and buildings have come to reflect a perception of nature, as it should be — symmetrical, inflexible, ordered, and predictable. To be uncivilized is to live illegibly in the cluttered wilderness of nature, dressed in the skins of animals, the ragged remnants of manmade cloth hanging like the tattered ends of rationality. Against this, the vast cities we have created cover the earth like a fabric, an unwavering, unending fabrication. It is an intelligence of hard, opaque disjunctive pieces in tight, complex displays of designs and motifs, encased in grids. The metaphor is obvious. The manmade environment is a Cartesian quilt of surfaces. Upon it, the scissored, precise, regulated landscape (no longer nature) is serrated to the geometries of architecture and artifact.Trees are the green’pieces’ of landscape sewn between the grey and blue ’pieces’ of concrete and asphalt. Any foundation planting, including the largest - city
parks - are sentimental appliques of pastoral art, neatly stitched into the grid of the city. Like the scenic curtains from which our current view of landscape is taken, the grass is never long, the trees never too large, and the shrubs always clean, tight and numerical. Maintenance-free and as real as the flowers of the city which are never picked, but purchased — the urban landscape is scentless, nameless and ultimately rootless. There is no here, no site specificity in the landscape of the city. We stand in the snow and stare through the glass at the pieces of gigantic palm trees sewn (at great environmental cost) into a mid Atlantic skyline and never say,’Isn’t that sad.’ We hurry by oaks buttonholed into tiny concrete boxes and never cry bitter tears. There are no roots in the urban landscape because there is no origination. Like fabric, the landscape exists on the surface, gridded, denatured, sterile. Seeding, fruiting, growth and decay all denied, the urban landscape takes on the properties of a commemorative urn, a sputtering eternal flame kind of presence, fed by petroleum, more’4ever green’ than green, more funereal than real. In the city, landscape is the death of nature, and the death of our perception of it. Save for one spark of beauty.
Sewing the landscape Christina Maile
Mugwort (Artemesia vulgaris) at a hydrant on Kings Plaza Station.
Rapiéçage du paysage N os villes et nos immeubles sont devenus le reflet d’une perception de la nature comme étant symétrique, inflexible, ordonnée et prévisible. Le fait d’être non civilisé est de vivre de façon incompréhensible dans l’amas du fouillis de la nature. En guise de contradiction, les vastes
villes ont été créées pour couvrir la terre comme un tissu, notam- ment une fabrication inébranlable sans fin. Il s’agit d’un concept organisé de pièces dures, opaques et serrées, au milieu de démon- strations de conceptions et de motifs, encapsulés dans des grilles. La métaphore est évidente. L’environnement fabriqué par l’homme est un piquer cartésien
de surfaces.
« Que c’est triste ». Nous défilons à grande vitesse à prox - imité des chênes cramponnés dans des boîtes de béton et nous ne versons jamais une seule larme amère à leur sujet. Comme le tissu urbain, le paysage urbain existe en surface, quadrillé, dén- aturé et stérile. Dans la ville, le paysage représente la mort de la nature, à l’exception d’une
Il n’existe aucune spécificité au paysage d’une ville. Nous nous tenons debouts dans la neige et voyons au-delà du verre pour regarder les pièces d’énormes palmiers cousues (à un énorme prix environnemental) au profil d’une ville du Moyen-Atlantique et nous ne nous disons jamais:
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O n S ite review
S ewing
I ssue 8 2002
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