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Modernity Community and The Landscape Idea Denis Cosgrove
Modernity Community and The Landscape Idea Denis Cosgrove
Abstract
theoretical concept across the arts humanities, and social sciences. Its
complex roots and meanings are scrutinized with particular attention given
to the pictorial and scenic aspects of landscape, which are here historicized
California suggests that they are being recovered in certain respects in the
context of hypermodernity.
would astonish most visitors, towards open upper slopes covered by the
my hike, depending on the clarity of the Los Angeles basin’ infamous air, I
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gaze across high-rise offices, commercial boulevards, palm-lined residential
streets, billboards and red tiled roofs that stretch to the horizon. My view
from the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills sweeps from the snow-covered
night, when city lights pick out the grid of streets that structures this vast
1992)
capture this famous view. One of the most quoted examples of mid-century
less than a kilometer away from where I stand. Cantilevered over the steep
over the city into an aerial field of twinkling lights.(Fig.1) The plate-glass
walls that frame its picture view and erase the boundaries of internal and
outdoor living offer just one example of the unique blend of cultural
of an increasingly global popular culture. Not only is this true in the obvious
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case of ‘Hollywood’ with its constellation of cultural phenomena – movies,
speech -- but of the city’s diverse ethnic groups, languages and lifestyles, its
cultural politics, its cult of the automobile, its suburban ‘edge cities,’ and its
and thus have a complex poetics and politics. These characteristics make
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technical scientific term, adumbrating its long abandonment within his
Corner: 1999, Smith: 2003, Hirsch and O’Hanlon: 1995, Bender: 1993,
Casey: 2002,)
framed views of specific sites and the scenic character of whole regions; it
Chris Tilley (1994), Ken Olwig (2002) and others have insisted, is the sense
reference.
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From a critical perspective, the pictorial dimension of landscape has
from the landlord’s view and relocated in ‘model’ villages. In his ironically
titled Lie of the Land, Don Mitchell (1996), has also used landscape
tool in the cultural politics of land in order to recognize that its semantic
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evolution has been a linguistic expression of the complex cultural processes
that mark the social evolution of the modern world. I refer to this as the
encountering and representing the external world: in its pictorial and graphic
photographs, and movies. Some twenty years ago I began exploring the
explore why landscape remains potent enough today to shape not only the
Los Angeles, but to help account for many of the forms and patterns that
spatial expression, and seek to show how this constituted the original
synthesis of the territorial and the pictorial. I then examine ways that
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landscape’s moral authority, articulated through landscape representations,
and has thus come full circle, generating social spaces that bear intriguing
similarities in structure and process, if not in form, to the original and pre-
nature and culture, land and life. Landscape conveys the idea that their
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moral authority has been applied to both wholly human and purely natural
spaces. Frederick LePlay’s triad of place, work and folk was graphically
1978) In the USA, landscape has more often been applied to ‘wilderness’
all these diverse spaces is the idea that their qualities as dwelling places
The immediate question that arises from this is precisely how the
human community. Kenneth Olwig (2002) has recently argued that the
North Sea and Western Baltic regions. Landschaft and its cognates in the
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Scandinavian languages are still used as a descriptor for administrative
aristocrats, more concerned to control, own, and tax more fertile and
the Danish kingdom and the German states reinforced the opportunities for
considerable local autonomy, and Olwig (2002: 16) points out that their
was that these were regions in which customary law, determined by those
living and working in an area, extended over and defined the territorial limits
of the Land. ‘Custom and culture defined a Land, not physical geographical
characteristics [nor fixed territorial scale]—it was a social entity that found
physical expression in the area under its law.’ (Olwig 2002: 17) The unity of
fellowship and collective rights, and the physical area over which these held
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A space is something that has been made room for, something that is
not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the
boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding. That
is why the concept is that of horismos, that is the horizon, the boundary.
Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let
into its bounds. That for which room is made is always granted and hence
receive their being from locations and not from “space”. (Heidegger 1978:
In this respect, the root sense of Landschaft finds parallels in most European
languages, although the precise legal situation may vary from that to be
found along the North Sea coasts. The English word countryside, the French
payage, the Italian paesaggio and the Spanish paisaje are similarly social,
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modern world such practices were dominated by production, whether
Flemish and Italian cultural influences met and mixed most fully, and where
north east Italy and southern Germany - that schools of landscape paintings
first become distinguished. (Gibson 1989, Alpers 1983) In Venice, the taste
crops and new labour practices. Newly constructed villas were decorated
ancient Roman villa life with views of the rustic world surrounding them.
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Nuremburg, landscape paintings and engravings reflected rather different
commercial and political realities. On the one hand, appropriately in the city
the city. Referring to these images, Albrecht Dürer claimed that 'the
measurement of the earth, the waters, and the stars has come to be
dwelling and ‘pagan’ attachment to land, but earth, sea and stars
of daily life, but ‘nature’ measured across the surface of paintings and maps.
Olwig (2002) has charted the political process whereby the early 17th
century Stuart court sought to unify its new national territory – the ‘country’
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scenic landscape: apparent in courtly theater and masque, in ‘prospect’
applied to the estate, the city region or the national state, landscape was
swains and their animals, quaintly rustic cottages and ancient ruins,
commonly placed ‘the dark side of the landscape,’ and harmonized the
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composition, color and shadowing. Nor was Landschaft’s spatial flexibility
lost, indeed through a scale jump landscape came to accommodate the newly
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than oaks that would provide naval timber generations hence, and even on
colonial slavery, the debate over the look of the land involved “the
the period when the modern British state was being imagined and
constructed.
roughening through age, longevity and decay; a sentiment that we can easily
Greek neologism that combines the sense of bodily pain (algia) and
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visible in the historical depth of dwelling, but consistently threatened by, if
not already lost to, the past. Positioned outside the pictorial landscape,
Study within geography, art and cultural history has demonstrated the
Europe and colonial settler states. (Daniels: 1993, Mitchell: 2002, Schama:
1995) The process is a complex one, and it continues today. In every modern
often through the medium of art itself, as iconic of the whole nation. Thus in
with distant views of sea cliffs and bays, leaps scale through the popularity
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The appeal of such iconic landscapes is overwhelmingly conservative,
seeking to fix their origins and preserve and protect them from change.
and historical sites, ever threatened by the progress and modernization that
emphaisizes the bittersweet pain of longing and loss (algia) and dwells upon
ruins, on the patina of time and history, on uncanny silences and absences,
rebuilding the lost home and patching the memory gaps). Of course,
landscape conservation today can take both forms. Indeed, It is not therefore
to maintaining not only the physical morphology but also the social form
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Preservation, protection, conservation, sustainability: while each of
intention of sustaining values inherited from the past, they all reflect the
from our approach to the ‘threatened’ flora and fauna of the natural world,
earth, sky, the divinities (in the pagan sense of the life-sustaining natural
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hypermodern urbanization, and unprecedented topographic, hydrographic
desert zone, represents for many observers the very antithesis of landscape
Evelyn Waugh and Gertrude Stein through Jean Baudrillard and Umberto
placeless space. The region’s historic and geographic reality is, predictably,
exactly similar, to the premodern experience from which the landscape idea
diverged.
in permanent agriculture, and their impacts on the land were ecological more
cadastral patterns of the rancho system, and in the spine of mission, presidio
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leave a lasting landscape impression. Indeed it endured principally in the
three decades of having erased the Californio’s world. Warm climate, balmy
Sierras. Competitively cheap rail fares and exotic landscape images on rail
posters and orange boxes played no small role in bringing large numbers of
these people and their capital into Southern California. The region was from
during its first period of rapid urbanization between 1880 and 1920. Former
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Pasadena a wealthy health and retirement resort, Venice a bohemian seaside
actions bear some resemblance to the customary practices that once defined
them into a loose regional settlement pattern. (Banham: 1971, Hise: 1999,
McLung: 2000)
open space, boulevards, zoned land uses and residences individually set in
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‘arts and crafts’ movement, reworking the form of the bungalow adopted
from colonial India.(King: 1984) The impact of these ideas on the generally
communities to expand well beyond the constraints of the light rail system,
and by the 1940s had lined the boulevards with the gas stations, motels,
drive-in gas stations, restaurants and movie houses, and billboards of the
growth of the Fordist 1950s would see the orange groves, nut orchards and
bean fields that surrounded the original settlements subdivided for new
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suburbs of standardized, mid-century ‘modern’ bungalows, on restricted
garden lots to be sure, but with picture windows designed to bring the
the urban field, except by their signed designation on the roadside or on the
political map, and overlain with the markers of very different ethnic and
retain traces of the social and scenic ideals that the modern suburb owes to
desert and oasis settlements of the Coachella Valley, that the landscape idea
club, and initiated a novel way of financing their venture. (Culver: 2004)
The golf course at the core of the development would be financed by the sale
of residential lots marked out along its fairways and around the
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rambling ‘ranch houses’, while a homeowners’ association enforced deed
of the community, both private and ‘public.’ The entire development was
gated to exclude all but residents and guests, while the golf course, green
with imported fescue and watered from deep desert wells, was the focus of
its ‘civic’ life.(Fig.6) Air conditioning and fast freeways to Los Angeles
residence. Partly through the national televising of its ‘Bob Hope’ golf
lifestyle option promoted and desired across America, beatified when Ford
Motor Company’s chose ‘Thunderbird’ as the name for its 1955 sports car.
defining feature of the covenant, gated, golf-course suburb that, from its
Palm Springs origins has now evolved into the dominant form of exurban
community in North America and across many parts of Asia and the Pacific
Rim. In the pictorial and picturesque sense of landscape, the golf course
whose form controls the overall settlement plan, and whose originating
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parkland, with its combination of gentle grassy slopes, serpentine pathways,
copses and ‘rough’ land edges. The house style of the golf-course suburb is
determined by its views over the greens or ‘natural’ scenery beyond. The
of nature and culture shapes the settlement’s design language, if not its
and ‘rough’ of the golf course are almost always engineered spaces, often
resources for maintenance, and while the residential architecture has become
Conclusion
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contingent connections with the history and physical geography of its
landscape that utterly fails to pull together earth, sky, the divinities and other
expresses the restorative nostos - return to home - rather than the reflective
algia, the bittersweet pain of loss and ruin. And a more measured look at
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state has eroded, and its public revenues and moral authority weakened, and
society”. (Lefebvre: 1970) But in many parts of the world this process has
since the early 19th century as the authentic spatial expression of modern
obscuring the realities of production, for these have been globally displaced,
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extended evolution of cultural transformation in which visions of social
order and homeliness, and ideals of harmony between land and human life
discover ways of understanding and engaging with its varied and always rich
meanings.
Alpers, Svetlana (1983) The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth
Barrell, John (1980) The Dark Side of the Landscape. The Rural Poor in
Berg.
28
Bender, Barbara (1998) Stonehenge: Making Space, London: Berg.
Press.
Boym, Svetlana (2002) The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books.
Culver, Lawrence (2004) ‘The Island, the Oasis, and the City: Santa
29
Daniels, Stephen (1999) Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the
Press.
Press.
Gombrich, E.H. (1966) ‘The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of
Landscape’ in Gombrich, E.H. Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the
California Press.
Norton.
30
Heidegger, Martin (1978) ‘Building, dwelling, thinking’ in David Farrell
Krell ed: Martin Heidegger: Basic writings from ‘Being and Time’ (1927) to
Hise, Greg (1997) Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth Century
Krim, Arthur (1992) ‘Los Angeles and the anti-tradition of the suburban
California Press.
31
Meyerson, Harvey (2001) Nature’s Army: When Soldiers Fought for
Mitchell, Don (1996) The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the
Mitchell, W.J.T. (2002) Landscape and Power 2nd ed., Chicago and London:
Olwig, Kenneth (2002) Landscape, Nature and the Body Politic: From
Wisconsin Press.
Ilene Susan Fort (eds) Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-
Press.
Knopf.
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in Early Complex Polities, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of
California Press.
Steele, Tom (2003) ‘Patrick Geddes: Geographies of the Mind, the Regional
montp3.fr/ra_forum/en/people/steele_t/steele.html#Anchor-35882>
Figure captions
Fig.1 Case Study House #22 by Pierre Koenig. (Photo by Julius Schulman;
Getty Research Institute; Reproduced with permission)
Fig.2 View East along 3rd Street at Fairfax Avenue in 1921. The La Brea
oilfield occupies lands formerly occupied by bean fields and pasture.
(Spence Air Photo collection; Courtesy: Department of Geography, UCLA)
Fig.3 View East along 3rd Street at Fairfax Avenue in 1954. Within thirty
years both agricultural and oil fields have been replaced by an auto
landscape. The city’s first drive-in gas station may be seen to the bottom
left, and a drive in movie centre right. (Spence Air Photo collection;
Courtesy: Department of Geography, UCLA)
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Fig.4 Post-war suburban development in the Los Angeles basin. Tract
houses at Lakewood 1950. (Spence Air Photo collection. Courtesy:
Department of Geography, UCLA)
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