Unearthed. Karen M'Closkey
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FIGURE 1. A cut in the site makes it appear as if the ground has opened, exposing the subsurface clay and water. Fountain mock-up at Charleston Place, Mountain View, California (early 1990s).
But perhaps the most prevalent method of the geological approach is not an actual, physical cut in the ground but the idea of palimpsest or trace derived from mapping and the superimposition of distinct layers. This approach became prevalent in a wide array of practices in the 1980s as a means to question the presumed biases inherent in the act of mapping itself.18 The notion that maps are representations that construct and delimit our reading of site, rather than being an “accurate” depiction of it, dominated critiques at this time and is something taken for granted today. Even so, mapping topography, soil conditions, bathymetry, and so on, remain essential components of landscape architectural practice, as this information is used to understand the opportunities and constraints of a site’s physical characteristics. Thus, the notion of “site-specific” or “site-generated” work, terms that both Hargreaves and others have used to describe their work, is not straightforward as it refers to information that is considered both material and conceptual or abstract.19
FIGURE 2. Molded landforms with redwood trees and misters recall fog emerging from a valley. Prospect Green, sacramento, California (1990–93).
In order to clarify this point, discussion of two radically dissimilar practitioners representing radically different interpretations is useful to underscore the efficacy of a “geologic” approach to design: landscape architect Ian McHarg (1920–2001) and architect Peter Eisenman (b. 1932). McHarg and Eisenman, through their writing, design practices, and spirited personae, as well as their canonization by critics and theorists, emblematize a defining moment in their respective disciplines. Despite the limiting, and some would say incapacitating, effects of their design methods, their work continues to provide a baseline for subsequent reformulations of their respective disciplines.20 Both used working methods that utilize mapping to mine the substrate for clues. These clues are physical accretions that are brought to the “surface” (represented in their drawings) to materially and culturally ground their work. And though they were certainly not the first to use such methods, they popularized them by making their process legible and, therefore, usable and teachable, which is why each became so influential in his respective field.
When McHarg published his seminal book Design with Nature (1969), Eisenman had just finished the first of his series of “cardboard houses” (House I, 1968). Although they were ideologically at opposite ends of the spectrum, both claimed to remove the subjectivities of the designer via their methodology, which relates their work directly to the language of emergence and process used today (in which natural processes, or computer processes, “complete” the work). Furthermore, their opposing definitions of what constitutes “site” illustrate the impossibility of maintaining the claim that a design method can be authorless or value-free. A site’s value—what gets privileged and what gets suppressed—is itself a product of the author’s agenda and cannot sit outside it, even though the resultant work will be open to multiple interpretations, experiences, and transformations.
GEOMORPHIC MAPPINGS
MCHARG WORKED ON regional planning scales and was deeply committed to environmental health. He also recognized that any landscape is a value-laden territory, which is why he thought an objective method itself was value-free enough to “prove” how development should occur. For McHarg, understanding the existing natural and cultural patterns was essential to producing work considered in the best interest of the largest number of people. He believed the “given form” of the site provided the constraints for the work and that, subsequent to analysis of its natural and cultural patterns, there was an optimal answer to any problem: “There will be a form of fitting which is most fitting.”21 In order to derive the areas most fit for a particular type of development, he used a mapping method comprising a series of transparent overlays. This now well-known method, a precursor to digital geographic information systems, used each layer to represent a different value, indicating a limitation imposed on the site beginning with, for example, underlying bedrock, soil characteristics, hydrology, and places of cultural significance. He mapped each value independently as a tone or color. When the layers were superimposed, the gradient on the composite map “revealed” the area most suited for a particular type of development. In other words, the area with little or no tone had the fewest restrictions on it.22 McHarg saw these maps as an accurate depiction of the present condition of the site. He believed that a precise definition of context was possible and considered his methodology reproducible by anyone using the same procedure.
GEOMETRIC MAPPINGS
To privilege “the site” as the context is to repress other possible contexts, is to become fixated on the presences of “the site,” is to believe that “the site” exists as a permanent, knowable whole.23
—PETER EISENMAN
In contrast to the given form of the site, Eisenman refers to the imminent in every site. He is resolutely against the kind of positivism that characterized McHarg’s work. Thus, while McHarg looked for the most suitable fit, Eisenman is interested in misfits. Whether working typologically by dismantling platonic cubes (House Series, 1967–80) as a means to challenge such oversimplified notions as “form follows function,” or working contextually by overlaying multiple actual and fictional maps (Cities of Artificial Excavation, 1978–88), Eisenman wishes to destabilize the notion of a valued origin. He has described three fallacious “isms”: modernism’s nostalgia for the future, postmodernism’s nostalgia for the past, and contextualism’s nostalgia for the present.24 In the Cities work, Eisenman traced multiple urban grids that existed at various points in history, unbuilt designs by other architects slated for that particular site, and mappings of invisible characteristics such as noise patterns. He then arbitrarily scaled these geometric abstractions to various sizes and superimposed them in order to create the grounds for his designs. Because these new grounds cannot be traced back to any particular origin, they give no more or less credence to any one time; thus, artificial excavations focus on the elusiveness of the “real” site.
FIGURE 3. McHarg’s mapping of physiographic obstructions in order to determine road alignment. Reprinted from McHarg’s Design with Nature (New York: John Wiley & sons, 1992). Reprinted with permission of John Wiley & sons.
FIGURE 4. A site plan showing various layers superimposed. image by the office of Eisenman/robertson architects for Long Beach: university art Museum of the California state university at Long Beach, 1986. From Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1976–1988 (Montreal: Canadian Centre for architecture and Rizzoli international Publication, 1994). reprinted with permission of the Canadian Centre for architecture. Peter eisenman Fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/ Canadian Centre for architecture, Montreal.
While McHarg used mapping as a means to an end, a strategy of avoidance in order to determine where not to build, Eisenman’s mappings focus on the design process as endless means, a strategy of “voidance,” where, at least theoretically speaking, there is no identifiable beginning or end to the work.25 Though both extrapolate from the past, McHarg’s work operates primarily through tracing and cataloguing, a procedure based on what he believed to be the predictability and repeatability of the “real.” The importance of his work is the implication of every site in relation to its larger physiographic region. Eisenman, on the other hand, eschews any belief in mapping as a manifestation