Does landscape design have any real significance? We are constantly moving through the wider landscape, on our way to the shops, work, somewhere. We hardly notice our surroundings, especially when they are familiar to us and we do not tend to think of these spaces as “landscaped” or “designed”. Indeed, most such spaces have evolved over time through ad hoc addition, not from any grand design; landscaped areas are confined to gardens, parks and corporate frontage. All low key, barely acknowledged as a small part of the whole.
Yet landscape is what we are immersed in at all times when not actually indoors; it is usually experienced as a process of transition, for we are on our way somewhere. Seldom do we spend time in stasis in the outdoor environment (other than in traffic jams) and when we do, we might then choose an area of landscaped beauty; having lunch in a park, by a pond or watching the river flow by from a café table. That is perhaps the extent and certainly the limitation, of our thinking.
Why then, should we think beyond this - hasn't it served us adequately up until now? My answer would be a resounding “NO!” - this attitude has in fact failed us consistently for all this time and the result is such that even in the smarter places in town we experience a second rate environment. In workaday, mundane places we suffer from severe “S.O.S.” - Shriveling of Souls. Unfortunately, the places we cannot wait to get out of as we pass through, are someone else's daily existence. Such environments can only be survived by a “numbing down” of the senses, with all that that implies. And does that mean that people born and bred to such places never get to experience “numbing up”, if you know what I mean?
So if things aren't (by my reckoning) good enough, how could they be better? After all, it's no good moaning about something that cannot be changed. I guess we can't wipe everything out and start again - much that is good would be lost and it all might end up looking like Milton Keynes - no offence, if you live there. The worst - the absolute worst thing (war and famine aside) - you can apply to any problem is municipal blandness: concrete planters full of half dead shrubs, or rows of neat trees that will never look at home in stainless steel. Tidying up industrial mess, prettying of rundown tenancies and removal of misguided sixties concrete carbuncles should not, must not, mean replacement with, safe bland sterile puerile facades of tidy nothingness. What such areas need is liberating, not regenerating.
To liberate an area it needs to be free: free from encumbering bureaucracies, free from corporate indifference and greed, free from the distant rumours of unaccountable top-down regeneration. In this respect, landscape and architectural design competitions are the worst symptom of an illness that leads to the application of abstract egotistical intellectualism, which no local person can ever hope to comprehend, let alone appreciate.
The vibrancy of a place is generated by it's people but it is set against the cloth of the landscape and it's architecture. Some places may be vibrant despite the backdrop but they must have to work hard to maintain the vibe, like running to stand still. An easy test: some landscapes are beautiful when devoid of people - odd maybe, like a film frozen in midstream but somehow enchanting, whilst other places are depressing, if not downright scary.
Imagine where you would choose to live if you were the last person left alive on Earth (shortest story in the world, by a sci-fi author I can't remember - “The last man on earth sat at the table. There was a knock at the door.”).
So to get back to people - lots of people - we have the old chestnut of community design versus institutional: top down, or bottoms up, err, bottom up. There are, of course, glowing examples of successful environments created by both camps, although I can't think of any. Mostly, we just get the in-between stuff; safe, boring, bland. and anyway, there just isn't the money available.
The trouble is, that most, if not all places are tied up, bound and gagged, if you like, by their physical structures, rights of access, lines of movement, physical ownership, cultural ethos and conflicting interests. It's a tangle that's too exhausting to fight against and most people don't even try. On the other hand, you get insidious, creeping development, of innumerable incremental changes, that can gradually change an area for good or ill, without us even noticing. Somehow, no-one seems accountable for these things and too often these benefit the few at the expense of the many. Whilst this might be compared to natural, organic growth, it is unstructured, without holistic oversight - and remember, cancer is an organic growth, a development that has no regard for the whole.
Now there's a nice word - holistic (not cancer). It's just what we need to cut through the tangle of confusion and round out for us a balanced picture of benign harmony. Trouble is, you need an almost God-like stature to apply such a process and to be perceived as the ones with the right vision. Still, it's something we all could aspire towards - not God-like stature (there are enough big egos) - but holistic thinking should surely combine the best of all that is exciting and visionary, with all that is small, local, intimate and above all, necessary.
To my mind, there's something deeper hidden here among the folds of mother landscape's robes. For actually, in the wider landscape, when we have contact with nature, is where we all can be reminded of our inner connectedness to God, or whatever you call it. If architecture provides us with the churches and mosques (etc.) to which we go to worship, then in nature, in the wider landscapes of our towns and cities, when we pause from our incessant journeying, we can find glimpses in small places of our inner being.
For example, I was recently in Fulham Road looking for a client's penthouse apartment where I was designing a roof garden. I took a wrong turn down a little side street, to be confronted by the most amazing Indian Bean Tree (Catalpa bignonioides) that I had ever seen, in full bean and offering a half secret entrance to someone's house through wrought iron railings and gate. I stopped in glazed rapture and took the photo you see here. As a balance, the dustmen were collecting refuse, reminding me of the practical in all things...
If God exists and is omniscient and omnipresent, then he, it, has to express through us in our environments we make. The God of landscape surely knows of no creed or race or religion, just of soul and beauty, anguish and pain. But I don't reckon he hangs around in the dull places we create, 'cos there just ain't no Soul.
Somehow, we have to make a choice to create positive spaces everywhere we are. Not just in the best bits, the touristy areas or the bits where the money is, but in our industrial estates and factories, by our roads and airports, in our housing estates and high rises. But it has to be a fundamental thing, not just a cosmetic exercise and it should involved everyone who wants a say, yet also employ the best minds in all the professions.
And there's a thing. We all have to learn again how to think about the process of design, no, creation. We all need new ways of thinking and perhaps even a new language with which to express it all. A pattern language, such as that proposed by Christopher Alexander, would be a good place to start, except more up to date and relevant to today's world. For my sins, I am writing one relating to landscape, as a series of “design notes” but perhaps others, better qualified, will do so as well, or for other areas. Together, we might all just pull off an environmental revolution...