A Tour of the Monuments of Paterson, New Jersey

Paterson, New Jersey sits just west of Yonkers across the Hudson River. In 1967 Robert Smithson toured Passiac, the next city south along the much smaller Passaic River, visiting the monumental "ruins in reverse", the growing suburbs and infrastructure lines that surrounded the river.  Today Paterson houses equally monumental ruins in the form of decaying textile and paper mills which to this day push and pull the river through meandering raceways and dams, manipulating its truly monumental force, stretching it like taffy into the the city.  Paterson is home to a massive dam built through the pushing and pulling of glacial ice throughout millions years of geologic history.

The Great Falls, a roughly 70 foot tall basalt formation rushes with water that powered the growth of the city and its mills in the 19th century.

A couple of days ago I drove with a friend 2 hours north of Philadelphia to tour the ruins and geologic rearrangements.  Just south of the Great Falls, now a National Historic Park, lie the ruins of the Colt Mill complex.  Once the economic base for the city, the mill now stands as a wild collection of brick and basalt ruins scattered around the river, raceways weaving in and out of the old buildings. Constructed from the vertical walls of the carved rock, the buildings tell their own geologic history. The line between building and ground is so blurred that it's next to impossible to distinguish the two, particularly along the edge of the water.

 

  Were these great walls formed by the  scraping of glacial till over millions of years, were they carved by our hands in the making of now forgotten industries?  Piles of building rubble lay scattered throughout the site, ruins in reverse; built and then fallen, now waiting a future rearrangement.  This material is a glacial drift of its own right, deposits from a new geologic era.

 It's possible (inevitable?) the park will expand into the mill, which in its current state offers an amazing potential to the imagination of any curious trespasser.  In the face of such sublime, exposed and manipulated geology, I fear any design would miss the mark, even though it would be a huge asset to the community and improvement in the context of public safety.  The rawness of the material of the ground is so profound, and even more pronounced in the presence of a crumbling architecture made from the very material it stands upon. While the place now provokes feelings of danger, it also carries its own charm and abounds with the nature of successional growth (aspen, ailanthus, knotweed).  As you move to the edges, the vegetation is taller, more diverse (maple, locust, sycamore), and even further out to the edges of the urban-domestic cherrys, japanese maples and crabapples. This site is a vault of memories for Paterson, now remaking itself with multi-ethnic restaurants, artist lofts and historical centers.  The industrial and geologic relics, the gradient of growth throughout it, and the new home it supplies to the wild (we saw groundhogs on 3 separate occasions) of post industrial habitat and creative potentials for public space, are powerful agents in the evolution of this riparian edge.

I anticipate that this territory will continue its evolution for the next decade or so, awaiting the funds for redevelopment.  I expect the industrial pollutants are now trapped underground, beneath the cracking pavement and crumbling buildings, slowly seeping into the river. I hope this condition will hinder or delay the complete removal of material from the ground so as not to rapidly expose hazardous elements, but to also allow for the memory of this place to evolve with it.

Proposal Update

    As a student of landscape architecture, the Wild pervades the development of my work.  Embedded in the creative process is a wild sensibility, one of divergent and experimental means coupled with a discrete, narrowing precision.  The unrestrained design practice rejects preconcieved outcomes and provides the release for unexpected development through the agency of imagination and material engagement. Built landscape works designed for the unfolding of unrealizable wilds lend an analogous agency to the landscape and a potential imagination to the visitors and participants in its making.  Wildness exisits within us and we exist in the Wild.
    The Wild, a term so deeply embedded in the American imagination, owes its ideation to its European descendants, particularly in their conception and travel to the New World.  For centuries the European landscape has been defined by the taming and cultivation of the land, even in its most remote and pristine locations.  Europeans have been on the search for the unknowable Wild for centuries, visiting the New World and traveling their own continent in hopes of acquainting themselves with the images and profound experiences offered by the Romantic notions of nature: the Beautiful, the Picturesque and the Sublime.  While the Wild has been sought out in remote locations and designated to bounded wilderness entities, we have all too often forgotten the wild of our everyday lives.
    In the tradition of The Grand Tour and the European quest for Picturesque and Sublime natures, I propose to travel to Europe in search of a reconfiguration of the Wild, not one of separateness from the everyday, but one deeply embedded in the concept and construction of cities and familiar landscapes or territories. 
    The trip will be organized into journeys at three locations chosen by the range of wild they possess: the post-Franco wild of Barcelona’s abounding contemporary landscape architectural works, the post-industrial wild of Lille, France, and the archipelagic wild of the Inner Hebrides of the Scottish Isles.  One-two week stays will provide me with the opportunity for an American/ Thoreauvian experience of walking, exploring the Wild through the repeated wandering of an expressed homebase.  Starting each day with a walk, the journeys will be arranged on a gradient from the highly structured to the widely amorphous. 
    In Barcelona I will start with multiple destinations in mind, structuring my movement in an orderly manner from image to image, design to design, garden to garden.  Will the wild occur in the movement through the city, between destinations, or in the careful consideration of landscape interventions? 
    In Lille, my travel will be structured around a single destination, Parc Henri Matisse, where a 1 acre and 7 meter high section of the park is partitioned off from the public to the wild development of flora and fauna.  Everyday will start with a departure from my residence and an arrival at the park, providing an opportunity to wander the city in a different manner each day, revisiting and experiencing afresh the familiar and the new of the city. 
    In the Inner Hebrides my travel will be open-ended, based on word of mouth with travelers and residents, local maps, advertised destinations, and chance encounters with opportunities for movement.  The travel will be unrestrained and divergent, starting and ending in the same location, but completely open to the events of the day in its movements and chance destinations.
    Throughout the journey I will engage in a pre-plannned and consistent representational technique documenting the difference of each wild through a regular approach in imaging.  This technique will be based in photographic and written annotation which will be completed en route.  (see example)  Additionally, each location will call for its own unique response and representation, granting a material agency to the particularities of each landscape and city.  This work will at times be based on found material (sound, video, objects), temporary installation, collaging of maps and postcards, drawings and sketches, timelines and writings.  Through these documents, I will explore the range of possibilities the Wild has to offer in the logic and freedom of my movement, representational methodology and language, and landscape potentials.  With an eye to the Wild, I will propose a new definition, one based on a relationship to travel and habitation, moving and representing, a reconfiguration of wildness through its origins and its futures.

Travel Mode

Barcelona- Place to Place, Image to Image, Design to Design

Lille- Home to Park, Unknown or repeated way

Scottish Islands- Unknown Way, Unknown Destination, word of mouth

The Wild is Particularly So.... Photo Annotations/ Philly/Iteration1

Trying to find a semi-systematic approach to documentation-research-representation of wild in place.  This here is very anthropological in an experiential way.  Want to be able to do these in situ 1-4 a day.  Photograph and take notes, then translate that each night to these images.  May require a portable printer to print out photoworks and annotate on top by hand.  Because the hand work is better. Fact.  We will see if that is possible. Would be excellent.  Wednesday I will try a new approach- probably going to the same place.  Friday perhaps I will  take a different walk to school and try another approach.  Or Saturday or Sunday I will go on a no direction-no destination walk and try it out then.  Maybe all three.  We shall see. ... Just kidding, these are due on Friday.

Count down to submission:  4 days! Ack

An American Search for the European Wild

Updated writeup...

I've been thinking about the origins of the Wild from the perspective of an American visiting Europe.  While a term so deeply embedded in the American imagination, the Wild owes its ideation to its European descendants, particularly in their conception and travel to the New World.  Centuries have passed since the general conception of European nature has been tied to the taming and cultivation of the land, even in its remotest and pristine locations.  In the Swiss Alps, the last bear is recorded as having been killed in 1792 above Kleine Scheidegg by three hunters from Grindelwald.   Europeans have been on the search for the Wild for centuries, visiting the New World and traveling their own continent in hopes of experiencing the profound experiences offered by the Romantic notions of nature: the Beautiful, the Picturesque and the Sublime. “Among the first of these visitors was Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, who spent 5 months of the winter of 1791-92 in the US. Traveling in the wilderness of northern New York, he reported that ‘a sort of delirium’ seized him when, to his delight, he found an absence of roads, towns, laws, and kings... "in vain does the imagination try to roam at large midst [Europe’s] cultivated plains... but in this deserted region the soul delights to bury and lose itself amidst boundless forests... to mix and confound... with the wild sublimities of Nature''”.

In the tradition of The Grand Tour and European quests for Picturesque and Sublime natures, I propose to travel to Europe in search of a reconfiguration of the Wild.  The journey will be organized into a single transect moving through three urban to rural conditions: from the post-Franco wild of Barcelona’s contemporary architectural works, to the post-industrial wild of Lille, France, to the archipelagic wild of the Scottish islands.  The travel will be anchored in these three general locations, providing a temporary habitation for 1-2 weeks in order to provide me with the opportunity for Thoreauvian experience of walking and experiencing the wild through the ongoing process of open wandering from an anchored location.  Each day will start with a walk.  The destinations will be arranged on a gradient from the highly structured to the wonderously divergent wild.  In Barcelona I will start with multiple destinations in mind, structuring my movement in an orderly manner from image to image, design to design, garden to garden.  In Lille, my travel will be structured around a single destination, Parc Henri Matisse, (where a 4 acre section of the park is partitioned off from the public to the wild development of flora and fauna.  Everyday will start with a departure from my domus and an arrival at the park, providing me with the opportunity to wander the city in a different manner each day.  In the Scottish Isles my travel will be open-ended, based on word of mouth with travelers and residents, local maps and advertised destinations, and chance encounters with opportunities for movement.  The travel here will be open-ended and divergent, starting and ending in the same location, but completely open to the events of the day in its movements and destinations.

Throughout the journey I will be keeping a pre-plannned and consistent representational technique documenting the difference of each wild through a consistent approach in imaging.  This technique will be based in photographic collage and annotation which will be completed en route.  Additionally, each location will call for its own unique response and representation: this will at times be based on found material, temporary installation, collaging of maps and postcards, drawings and sketches, timelines and writings.

notes on conversation

New musings:

1. follow 2 transects, moving through 3 urban-to-rural conditions with different conceptions of wild (sublime wilderness, post-industrial wild, urban condition with wild contemporary projects). 3 countries each (see above) (for sake of the proposal- only 1 transect)

2. Each place gets it's own mode of transportation/ interaction/ representation/ experimentation

3. There is a consistent representational technique (pre-planned) that occurs through all places

4. Within each stopping point the movement will be unplanned.  I will go to places based on word of mouth with local maps/tools with a Thoreauvean walking sensibility. wandering, circling, revisiting places for 1 week.

5.  Locations for travel (transect 1)
Scottish Islands (to be determinded)
Lille, France
Barcelona, Spain

semi-updated ponderings on proposal

I'm thinking about the origins of the Wild from the perspective of an American visiting Europe.  While a term so deeply embedded in the American imagination, the Wild owes its ideation  to its European descendants, particularly in their conception of the New World.  “Among the first of these visitors was Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, who spent 5 months of the winter of 1791-92 in the US. Traveling in the wilderness of northern New York, he reported that ‘a sort of delirium’ seized him when, to his delight, he found an absence of roads, towns, laws, and kings... in vain does the imagination try to roam at large midst [Europe’s] cultivated plains... but in this deserted region the soul delights to bury and lose itself amidst boundless forests... to mix and confound... with the wild sublimities of Nature’” (Nash, 49). Centuries have past since the general conception of European nature has been tied to the taming and cultivation of the land.  In the Swiss alps, the last bear is recorded as having been killed in 1792 above Kleine Scheidegg by three hunters from Grindelwald (Shoumatoff, 101 via Wikipedia).

Europeans have been on the search for the Wild for centuries, visiting the New World and traveling their own continent in hopes of experiencing the profound experiences offered by the beautiful, the picturesque and the sublime.  In the tradition of The Grand Tour, with an American/ Thoreauvian walking twist, I propose to travel to Europe in search of the Wild.  What are the European intellectual precedents for the Wild.... there are of course the Romantic landscape ideals "The Beautiful"  "The Picturesque" and "The Sublime" lying on a linear continuum going somewhere from pastoral to craggy to awe-inspiring scenery.  The key here is the image, the imaging, and the viewing.  While these images all inspire a type of emotive reaction, they are constitutionally framed, visual experiences and representations.  However they require a movement, a travel, a change between places, views, and experiences.

What type of imaging might be inspired by a contemporary search for the European wild?  Moving from image to image, construct to construct, famous/influential/popular landscapes and gardens, historic landscapes that carry the Romantic notions of B, P+S (possibly those included on the traditional tours) as well as identified contemporary projects that hold the potential for a new reconfiguration of the Wild.  These landscapes have all been depicted and represented in some form, broadcast to a large public audience through photographs, written accounts and theoretical ponderings, drawings, etc. But I have never experienced them beyond the page or the screen or the explanation. I will visit these sites with an eye for the wild. (Wild keeping an open mind to what that may be).

The working idea is to travel to these places in a linear/circular sequence.  Image to image is planned: Bomarzo, Stowe, Igualada Cemetery, Parc Henri Matisse, etc. These projects will be documented, photographed, drawn, written, recorded, walked through, toured, possibly I will spend the day there.  Where are these projects positioned in regards to the wild, in regards to the garden?  How do they embody a European or Romantic notion of wild, of B, P+S?  The wandering, the Thoreauvian approach will take place in the journey to and between these places. The wild of this trip in the methodological sense will happen in the process of the journey: the walk, the train ride, the drive, the flight.  In plotting a route, where will I go, what will I find. Will the experience of the city, the suburbs, the rural be inflected with a sense of wander in the everyday, a de Certeau(ian) experience to be reproduced and mapped- collaged, drawn, annotated, instructed, photographed, written, intervened upon, as a means to open up the potentials and future for the exploration of the Wild, the unknowable, the designable. Keeping this in mind, I will move through the city, the country, the continent with an eye for the wild in the approach of the wild... ie: maintaining a divergent/ ecological unfolding and potentiality in my wandering and imaging.

How do I maintain an open mind in regards to searching for the wild.  Maybe I start with a preliminary definition gathered from the readings of great American and European landscape writers and designers: Thoreau, Cronon, Corner, Nash, Snyder, Clement etc.  This preliminary definition will hopefully evolve over the course of my travels in an attempt to experience, travel, and discover the unknowable of the wild.  This is were discoveries will be made in the everyday landscape and city.

Items to Bring to/ Complete for Interview

- Map/ Plot out travel transects and destinations- photos, drawings, collage, image transfer.  transect and plan map with locations pointed out and targeted

 -Really simple map of travel.

-Hand Drawing Examples- bring in portfolio, 501 drawings, summer institute, sketch books? sequential studies, photo collages, field ecology sketch books

-Portfolio- updated with 601(necessary), layout update (hopefully)

-copies of CV, application essays, itinerary/ budget(list and photographs of destinations), reading list, definitions of wild

-me! dressed nicely (preferable)

Transects

Thinking about how the transect can come into play here. Seeking an in-between in terms of a Geddes(Valley) and McHargian(ecological) approach.  Not only the ecosystems at play or the occupations/ labor associated with those, but the understanding of a transect as a journey from image to image to image.  What are the associated images in these movements, the milestones perhaps representative of the location, and what are the passages in between, places experienced in motion.

Humboldt

Geddes

 McHarg

mapping travel

Potentials for process and travel, imaging, mapping, tracing, drawing.  Will continue with this...
Goal: Have drawing/diagram/mapping for application.

-drawing/diagram/mapping
-hand drawings/collage/photoworks
-updated portfolio
-cv
-application essays

Biodiversity Hotspots

Another project I'm working on for the chair of the department, Richard Weller, is the mapping of biodiversity hotspots around the globe.  These 35 hotspots, primarily defined by Conservation International are supposed to contain 50% of the earths organisms, yet only cover about 2.6% of our planet's surface.  I believe this has decreased from 16%, but I'm not sure when those stats were measured.  Here's an interesting map, though I'm not really sure what these distortions are based on.

 Here is another more basic one.

The goal of this research is to develop a series of maps and info-graphics that start to pick up and compare the conditions of these demarcations in relation to development encroaching upon them... What we are calling "critical edge conditions".

I'm still in the process of discovering what these hotspots actually entail in terms of internal habitation/ development, and how they are demarcated, what the edges look like, and the forces working upon/ against them.  Wondering how these demarcations relate to the wild and perhaps wilderness, or as it seems, they seem to entail a larger region across the globe including entire countries, and hence cities and megalopoli.  While these regions, or certain parts of them, encompass notions of wild or areas of wilderness, the forces pushing on them seem to be another form of human/ developmental/capitalistic and expansionistic wild.  A lack of self-awareness , a self propagating expansion and reproductive madness.  The problem is, this reproduction is so strong, there is no balancing or push back. So one interest I have here is representing the wild nature of these pressures, not simply the demarcations of the hotspots themselves.  Where is the push and pull of these opposing expansions?  Might they be able to coincide?  Might we be able to have any control over these developmental sprawling forces beyond the simple conservationist outlining of sensitive biodiversity zones? Could we plan for patches and corridors of "nature" in the development of theses clashing edges?

Plans in Process, Between Discerning and Wandering/ Wondering, Reconfronting the European Wild, an Eye to the Wild

ode to Thoreau.....  In wildness is the preservation of the unknowable.

Thinking about the origins of Wild from the perspective of an American visiting Europe.  In the tradition of The Grand Tour with an America/Thoreauvian walking twist.  What are the European intellectual precedents for the Wild.... the Romantic landscape ideals "The Beautiful"  "The Picturesque" and "The Sublime" lying on a linear continuum going somewhere from pastoral to craggy to awe-inspiring scenery.  The key here is the image, the imaging, and the viewing.  While these images all inspire a type of emotive reaction, they are constitutionally framed, visual experiences and representations.  However they require a movement, a travel, a change between places, views, and experiences

What type of imaging might be inspired by a contemporary search for the European wild?  Moving from image to image, construct to construct, famous/influential/popular landscapes and gardens, historic landscapes that carry the Romantic notions of B, P+S (possibly those included on the traditional tours) as well as identified contemporary projects that hold the potential for a new reconfiguration of the Wild.  These landscapes have all been depicted and represented in some form, broadcast to a large public audience through photographs, written accounts and theoretical ponderings, drawings, etc. But I have never experienced them beyond the page or the screen or the explanation. I will visit these sites with an eye for the wild. (Wild keeping an open mind to what that may be).

The working idea is to travel to these places in a linear/circular sequence, most likely ending where I started with the potential idea of reviewing the original place in a new light.  Image to image is planned: Bomarzo, Stowe, Igualada Cemetery, Parc Henri Matisse, etc. These projects will be documented, photographed, drawn, written, recorded, walked through, toured, possibly I will spend the day there.  Where are these projects positioned in regards to the wild, in regards to the garden?  How do they embody a European or Romantic notion of wild, of B, P+S?  The wandering, the Thoreauvian approach will take place in the journey to and between these places. The wild of this trip in the methodological sense will happen in the process of the journey: the walk, the train ride, the drive, the flight.  In plotting a route, where will I go, what will I find. Will the experience of the city, the suburbs, the rural be inflected with a sense of wander in the everyday, a de Certeau(ian) experience to be reproduced and mapped- collaged, drawn, annotated, instructed, photographed, written, intervened upon, as a means to open up the potentials and future for the exploration of the Wild, the unknowable, the designable. Keeping this in mind, I will move through the city, the country, the continent with an eye for the wild in the approach of the wild... ie: maintaining a divergent/ ecological unfolding and potentiality in my wandering and imaging.

How do I maintain an open mind in regards to searching for the wild.  Maybe I start with a preliminary definition gathered from the readings of great American and European landscape writers and designers: Thoreau, Cronon, Corner, Nash, Snyder, Clement etc.  This preliminary definition will hopefully evolve over the course of my travels in an attempt to experience, travel, and discover the unknowable of the wild.  This is were discoveries will be made in the everyday landscape and city.

Wild Potentials

Modeling/ sculpting in studio...

Similar to the idea of annotations, this structure/spatial construct/model/time construct/armature/sculpture has set up a spatial scenario and instructional framework for an event to unfold.  This event will change the very nature of the space, first by laying it into time, but second by disrupting its molecular constitution.  The object/ space lives through the time it inhabits.  While highly controlled, the eventual outcome remains unknown, left to the chemical compounds of its materials, of the air it lives in, of the nature of the event.

We shall see... more photos to come.

Wild Within, Within Wild

Trying to formulate a stance on European wild.  Clearly the concept is heavily embedded and founded upon American soil, but to a certain extent, what I am seeing in cities like Rome is a much deeper engagement in wildness.  Note: not wilderness.  Not a large tract of land set aside for the protection of wildness, but instead, as depicted on the left, small patches of forgotten space, relics and space of the past, wild ruins open to the elements, wildness sprouting from architecture, much like the post industrial relics of the American rustbelt.  But these spaces are fully embedded in a dense urban fabric that (not so slowly) grew up around them.  

On the other side of the coin are the small insertions of garden patches existing within the greater historic or natural wild/ landscapes of cultivation or forest.  These places exist as small cultural hubs, precise paths spliced into a wild landscape or a landscape of production.  While the experience or view of the wild urban patches is inward, that of the latter is outward, focusing not so much on the occupied space, but its relationship to what is beyond.

Collage + Annotation

I wanted to get back to collage... I had a quote earlier from James Corner...

He mentions collage as a means to develop previously unrealizable connections.  His list of words associated with collage are also associated with nature, ecology, and wilderness...

"indeterminacy, inclusivity, overlay, rupture, simultaneity, stochastic event, instability, association, collusion"

Yves Brunier, the late French landscape architect, deserves mention here for his inventive use of collage and everyday material in constructing imaginative landscapes and gardens. Not only do the images provide luscious and evocative spaces, they leave a lot up to the imagination, trusting the material of landscape itself (the sun, wind, vegetation, soil, rocks, etc) to actualize the potential of his flexible vision.
There is a wildness to the images as well as the potentials they create.

 Also worth looking at are Julie Bargmann's (DIRT Studio)  drawings that rely primarily on annotations to describe landscape space and building process.  The annotations not only describe the process of construction, but also record the process of design.  Building process should be a physical manifestation of the design process. 

 If landscape architects played a larger role in the actual construction of their works, there might be a better understanding the stuff of landscape, not the spectacle of the image.  This is where I appreciate Gilles Clement's description of himself as a gardener not an architect.  For him there is no separation between the act of design and the act of construction, planting, and maintenance. The role of instruction is deeply embedded in landscape architecture, yet rarely discussed in the academic realm.  Most work is done in the conceptual design phase and rarely do students explore the possibilities of what happens to their work beyond the drawing table (I mean computer).  The material of landscape becomes the play of computer software.  What if we utilized the techniques of collage and annotation as a means to document process of design and construction.  What if we were to hand off our conceptual stage work; would written description and colliding images provide a better understanding?  Would poetry, appropriation, melange provide a medium for landscape production?

The work of artists in the 70's ( Yoko Ono, Alan Kaprow, Sol Lewitt, and many more) utilized instruction as a means to hand off work and extend it beyond themselves.  The idea that the process was the work itself, not the product, that the viewer/ participant/visitor and medium itself could create the work.  The stuff of landscape is the process, it is the wild that brings the reality to the design.  As designers of the landscape we should utilize techniques of collage and annotation as a means to engage the agency of the landscape in the production of cultural space.

This post needs further work in connecting collage and annotation, but I am primarily interested in how it provides the landscape with imaginative potential and agency.  The landscape is creative after all.

The Wild Grows out of the Past

Parc de Pedra Tosca
Designed by RCR Architectes
Located in Garrotxa Volcano Park in Les Preses, Spain

Not sure what to write about this project, but its material simplicity and geometric contrast is brilliant.

The piles of basalt are burial mounds which have been partitioned and balanced with a dividing pathway.

The project photographs wonderfully, and is especially provocative upon entry, where the contrasting steel and rock are most prominent.  I imagine walking through would be a bit frightening or imposing due to the highly restricted views and limited interior vegetative life.  Excited to visit and experience this garden in the surrounding landscape of the volcano park.  While incredibly architectonic, the designers certainly exercised restraint on the wild of the geologic formation and anthropogenic history of the site.

Wild is Constructed/ Conflation of the 3 Natures

"The removal of Indians to create an 'uninhabited wilderness'- uninhabited as never before in the human history of the place- reminds us just how invented, just how constructed, the American wilderness really is." -William Cronon

On the 'wild garden'.... "It is applied essentially to the placing of perfectly hardy exotic plants under conditions where they will thrive without further care.  It has nothing to do with the old idea of  the 'Wilderness.'  It does not mean the picturesque garden, for a garden may be highly picturesque, and yet in every part the result of ceaseless care."  -William Robinson (1870)

“The old farmhouse has to decay before we can restore it and lead an alternative life style in the country; the landscape has to be plundered and stripped before we can restore the natural ecosystem; the neighborhood has to be a slum before we can rediscover it and gentrify it.  That is how we reproduce the cosmic scheme and correct history.”  -J.B. Jackson

"The best thing I have learnt from my own wild gardening is that we may grow without care many lovely early bulbs in the turf of meadows, i.e. fields mown for hay, without in the least interfering with the use of the fields." -William Robinson

The Wild Everywhere

"What I celebrate most about such places is not just their wildness, though that certainly is among their most important qualities; what I celebrate even more is that they remind us of the wildness in our own backyards, of the nature that is all around us if only we have eyes to see it." -William Cronon

“Wildness (as opposed to wilderness) can be found anywhere: in the seemingly tame fields and woodlots of Massachusetts, in the cracks of a Manhatten sidewalk, even in the cells of our own bodies." -William Cronon

"To think ourselves capable of causing 'the end of nature' is an act of great hubris, for it means forgetting the wildness that dwells everywhere within and around us." -William Cronon

"Every tree sends it fibres forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price.  Men plough and sail for it.  From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind." -Henry David Thoreau

Wilderness as the Other/ Non-Human, all Matter is Wild

"People are material rearrangements unfathomable sensitive to an immense spectrum of eco-emanations, able to respond and reorganize with stunning fluidity and to rebroadcast feelings and new feelings through an amazing catalogue of sendings... The problem for the painter or the architect [or the gardener/ landscape architect], then is more to develop new techniques of sending than messages to send."  -Jeffrey Kipnis

"People are caught in this place between recognizing themselves as part of Nature and being separate from it.  This double sense arises through the acknowledging of 'otherness,' or the co-presence of what is not of culture and what will always exceed cultural definition.  This is the wild in its most autonomous and unmediated form.  As a radical 'other,' the wild is unrepresentable, unnameable; and although  it can never be captured as a presence, it is at the same time not exactly nothing."  -James Corner (1996)

"The non-absent absence of the 'other' escapes being seen or said, and yet it remains the original source or all saying, the first inspiration."  -James Corner

From Fear to Eden/ The Wilderness Dialectic

"In the wilderness the boundaries between human and nonhuman, between natural and supernatural, had always seemed less certain than elsewhere... One might meet devils and run the risk of losing one's soul in such a place, but one might also meet God."  -William Cronon

“Nature for the dialectitian is indifferent to any formal ideal.”  -Robert Smithson

"Wilderness was a place to which one came only against one's will, and always in fear and trembling.  Whatever value it might have arose solely from the possibility that it might be 'reclaimed' and turned toward human ends- planted as a garden, say, or a city upon a hill.  In its raw state, it had little or nothing to offer civilized men or women.... Wilderness had once been the antithesis of all that was orderly and good- it had been the darkness, one might say, on the far side of the garden wall- and yet now [Thoreau's era-1860's] it was frequently likened to Eden itself."   -William Cronon

The Wild of Consciousness/ the Consciousness of the Wild, Autonomy/ Agency/ Emergence of the Wild

“Unlike the term ‘wasteland’ - which predominates in the Anglo-American literature- the use of the [French] term friche [fallow or unused land] denotes a sense of connection between past use and possible productive use in the future: as land lies fallow it may recuperate and rebuild its soil structure, nutrient base and other features.  This is significant because the presence of so-called ‘weeds’ may, in fact, be reinterpreted as a specific ecological assemblage that performs tasks such as nitrogen-fixing so that the agency of nature is subtly highlighted through the choice of vocabulary.”  - Matthew Gandy (2012)

 "My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head in atmosphere unknown to my feet is perennial and constant.  The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.  I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,- a discovery that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy."  -Henry David Thoreau

"It is a certainty that consciousness evolved from primordial sensate materiality to awareness to consciousness to self-consciousness, to critical self-consciousness and beyond."  -Jeffrey Kipnis (1999)

"Consciousness itself is an emergent property not of an organ or an individual or a species or a community or a society, but of a complex ecology."  -Jeffrey Kipnis

after the Big Bang..."What there was and all that there was, i.e., what there is and all that there is, was and is lots of matter, always conscious of itself, always organizing itself into increasingly complex, intelligent arrangements, always performing new behaviors."  -Jeffrey Kipnis

"If we acknowledge the autonomy and otherness of the things and creatures around us- an autonomy our culture has taught us to label with the word "wild"- then we will at least think carefully about the uses to which we put them, and even ask if we should use them at all....”  -William Cronon

"Habitual modes of knowing and speaking, when hardened and blinkered, simply exclude the otherness that is internal to things, denying them the possibility of becoming, of further emerging and fulfilling their potential."  -James Corner

“Incompletion, along with distortion and excess are defining characteristics of the concept of monstrosity.  According to Canguilhem: ‘monstrosity is the accidental and conditional threat of incompletion or distortion in the formations of form’. In medieval and early Renaissance teratology, monsters generally appear as omens or portents, signs of forthcoming misfortune.” -Luke Morgan

“In his [Ambroise Pare (16th century Italy)] work, the monster becomes a sign of nature’s copiousness and variety, albeit not without a lingering sense of the monster as portentous.”  -Luke Morgan

According to today's ecologists... "Nature should be regarded as a landscape of patches, big and little, patches of all textures and colors, a patchwork quilt of living things, changing continually through time and space, responding to an unceasing barrage of perturbations.  The stitches in the quilt never hold for long."  -Donald Worster

"matter is the deposit of life, the static residues of actions done, choices made in the past.  Living memory is the past felt in the actualities of realities, of change."  -Henri Bergson (1944, from Corner)

.....Beth Meyer on contemporary sublime, change and imagination
.....Anita Berrezbeitia on unfolding

Imagination, Freedom and Access to the Mystery of the Infinite, to Wonder

"All other arts are founded on dead materials. In these materials there is no growth.  The thought they express may grow, but there is no freedom, nor the mystery of the infinite, to as great a degree in landscaping."   -Jens Jensen (1937)

"The romantic legacy means that wilderness is more a state of mind than a fact of nature, and the state of mind that today that today most defines wilderness is wonder.  The striking power of the wild is that wonder in the face of it requires no act of will, but forces itself upon us- as an expression of the nonhuman world experienced through the lens of our cultural history- as proof that ours is not the only presence in the universe." -William Cronon

"Bewilderment is simply a prerequisite for another form of seeing; it is an unsettled appearance that allows for the double presence of human and other.  That the poet or the artist are the seers and makers of such works derives from the traditions of mimesis and poesis, activities that entail the actualization of potential, the bringing forth of something previously unknown, or even nonexistent.  The development of techniques of collage and montage simply represents the deep (natural?) human desire to realize new latent visions- new connections and possibilities for relationship between things... indeterminacy, inclusivity, overlay, rupture, simultaneity, stochastic event, instability, association, collusion"  -James Corner

“The idea of ‘wildness’ in landscape design owes its historical origins to the eighteenth-century picturesque, in which the most prized vista appear to have been magically invoked by the powers of nature alone rather than human design.  Yet this idea of a view that artfully improves upon elements of nature does not readily applied to Clement’s Deborence Island [in Parc Henri Matisse], since the raised plateau cannot really be seen from the park apart from the overhanging branches and vegetation spilling down the concrete walls: this landscape within a landscape must be largely left to the imagination.”  -Matthew Gandy

Explorations of the Wild (which I will revise)

Musings thus far....

Imagination, Freedom and Access to the Mystery of the Infinite, to Wonder
The Wild of Consciousness/ the Consciousness of the Wild, Autonomy/ Agency/ Emergence of the Wild
From Fear to Eden, The Wilderness Dialectic
Wilderness as the Other/ Non-Human, All Matter is Wild
The Wild Everywhere
Wild is Constructed/ Conflation of the 3 Natures

Garden Planets, Gardener's Garden, Gardens in the Sky

"A great garden, a small planet... Can we see the earth as a single garden?"

"The design of the garden, which constantly changes, is the result of the work of the person who maintains it, not of an idea developed at the drawing board."

"Unthinkable landscapes are already being designed in the sky."

-Gilles Clement

Subterranean Material

The Bamboo Garden, Parc de la Villette, Paris
Designed by Alexandre Chemetoff

Anita Berrezbeitia and Linda Pollak write about this project in Inside Outside as a garden conceived out of material considerations as opposed to organizational form.  In this case, the material is water and soil (the entire garden is subterranean, with massive retaining walls carrying water through its highly visible weep holes), and pre-existing infrastructure, again, carrying water through the park.  I've never been, but I imagine the experience of this garden is incredibly visceral-- feeling the cool water weeping from the walls, ducking under concrete culverts and weaving in and out of dense bamboo clusters.

Weed Mania, Unearthing Ground

Valdefierro Park, Zaragoza, Spain
Design by Hector Hernandex Elora and Manuel Fernandez Ramirez

Not sure how this place will evolve, but the freshly tilled and expansive dirt ground suggests either the potential future for orderly planting or the colonization of millions of once dormant seeds pulled up from the ground.

While tilling provides a fresh and fluffy slate for easy planting, it also provides buried seeds with the opportunity for germination with very little competition.  According to North Caroline State University Cooperative Extension, up to 3,068 seeds may reside in 1 sq ft of the top 6 inches of soil.

While it seems unlikely that these architects will allow for the wild and unkempt colonization of this austere and structural landscape, I love to imagine the contrast of these materials.  Lest I forget to mention, the concrete walls were created from the previous substance of the site, a gravel pit and then landfill for the city's building rubble.  The project speaks to an unearthing of the earth, from the restructuring of the geologic to the unraveling of emergent vegetation of a decommissioned ground.  I wonder how much of the new landscape's soil was brought into the site.

Future Exploration.... Bill Morrish's Civilizing Terrains...on monuments as dug up and restructured geology... wonderful drawings

Botanic Garden, Extruded Wild

One of the major influences for this research is French landscape architect and gardener extraordinaire Gilles Clement.  Pictured above, Deborence Island is a massive concrete and rubble structure 7m high in Parc Henri Mattise in Lille, France.  The island is inaccessible to people, yet absurdly urban-- in the middle of a park in the city, created from the rubble of urban soils and deconstructed ground, filled with plants seeded by the wind, urban birds, possibly planted(?).  A model of constructed wild, the island appears to have extruded from the ground from the underworld or a chunk of the Garden of Eden plopped right into a crisply maintained public French park.   

A representation and growing model of wild.  I love the squareness of it, a collected sampling and redistribution of botanic diversity, a contemporary Padua.