christina maile
And so the transformative, generative powers of the earth’s surface are left outside our meta- phors for the built environment, little under- stood, and unreconciled. A French poet once asked of the earth’s sur- face,‘Where is the snow of yesteryear?:We no longer know this answer: It has dissolved to leaves. It has melted to blood.’
The end result is that we are surprised when these aspects of the earth’s surface we have so blithely incorporated without regard to its actual operation outgrow the surfaces we have pasted them onto. We are disheartened at the environmental cost of maintaining these pieces in their place. But we are not disheartened enough because our cosmological metaphors of dominance insist on broad swathes of rigid lawn and stiff evergreens as the pathetic, sterile gardens at the sky-end of glass towers.
Christina Maile is a landscape architect and artist living in New York City.
S urface
O n S ite review
37
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator