Journal of Landscape Architecture

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Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material

Movements
Jane Hutton, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, ISBN
978 1 138 83068 4, London and New York: Routledge, 2020, 232 pp., 124
illustrations, € 40 (paper)/€ 40 (ePub)

Charlotte Leib

To cite this article: Charlotte Leib (2020) Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements,
Journal of Landscape Architecture, 15:2, 86-87, DOI: 10.1080/18626033.2020.1852723

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2020.1852723

Published online: 16 Dec 2020.

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BOOK REVIEWS
Jane Hutton
Reciprocal Landscapes:
Stories of Material Movements
ISBN 978 1 138 83068 4
London and New York: Routledge, 2020
232 pp., 124 illustrations
€ 40 (paper) / € 40 (ePub)
Review by Charlotte Leib, Yale University
In the field of landscape architecture and across
the design professions, it is common practice to
dedicate a significant amount of time and effort
to researching and visualizing material relation-
ships. Over the course of any given project, a
design team will typically produce dozens if not
hundreds of drawings, models and mock-ups_all
in an effort to understand how different materials
will look, feel and function in relation to one
another, at different times of day, and in different
physical and climatic conditions. Less common is
the practice of considering a material’s past life:
its source landscape, its formation and the labour
involved in its production. Jane Hutton’s work
over the past decade has consistently addressed
this epistemic gap. Through published articles
and exhibitions focused on the historical and
often inequitable links between landscapes of
production and consumption, Hutton repeatedly
has asked readers and viewers to critically reassess
their relationship with the material world and
landscape architecture’s role in it.1
86 Journal of Landscape Architecture / 2-2020
In many ways, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of
Material Movements marks a culmination of Hut-
ton’s decade-long quest to prompt such critical
material reassessments. Based on several of her
previously published articles, the book elegantly
combines the narrative arcs first laid out in these
texts with new insights gleaned from further
research.2 Yet the book is also much more than
a culmination. The theoretical framework it
advances also marks a new beginning_if not for
Hutton, then for the field of landscape architec-
ture, which has yet to seriously grapple with
the ecologically unequal exchanges that under-
gird and propel the design and construction
industries.
Taking Robert Smithson’s 1968 sculpture Non-
site (Slate from Bangor, Pa) as a structural prompt,
Reciprocal Landscapes follows five materials used
in the construction of five well-known New York
City landscapes back to their source landscapes
in coastal Peru, along the American East Coast,
and in northern Brazil. Like the sites of material
production that Hutton seeks to foreground, the
materials she follows_fertilizer, stone, steel, trees,
and wood_are treated throughout the book as
dynamic protagonists with an agentic capacity of
their own. Guano excreted by birds in the South
Pacific, mined by indentured labourers, later
nourishing soils in Central Park; trees grown by
inmates serving time on Rikers Island, later filter-
ing the air and serving as symbols of neighbour-
hood transformation in Harlem: these are just
some of the complex material movements that
Reciprocal Landscapes traces.
Yet as Hutton notes, the combination of mate-
rials and landscapes explored in the book might as
well have been any (p. 218). According to Hutton,
the book ‘is above all a thought experiment’ (p. 17).
Beyond telling the stories of specific material
movements, its purpose is to inspire us to change
how we interact with the material world writ
large. She asks: ‘What if we looked at materials
not simply as single-purpose products or com-
modities, but instead as continually changing
matter that takes different forms, and is shaped
by_but also shapes_others? And more broadly,
how might understanding these so-called
externalities of development inflect new forms of
material practice in solidarity with people, other
species, and landscapes elsewhere?’ (p. 17). In
their straightforward recognition of the fact that
design in one place often means destruction in
another, the questions Hutton raises in Reciprocal
Landscapes strike at the heart of one of landscape
architecture’s most pressing conundrums.
To characterize the book as merely ‘a thought
experiment’, however, would be inapt. For it is
also a work of deep scholarship. Each chapter is
based on extensive research into the place of a
material’s origin; the specific political, social and
ecological circumstances that propelled its dis-
placement; and the consequences of that displace-
ment. Newspaper articles, industrial archives,
design documents and material order forms serve
as launching points for Hutton’s forensic quests.
Site visits to each of the source landscapes in
question serve as crucial hinge points, providing
Hutton with a basis for further dialectical trac-
ings. Complementing this original research are
insights culled from an array of secondary sources,
including works by geographers and historians,
and studies by conservation biologists and envi-
ronmental scientists.
Besides its impressive synthesis of such a wide
range of sources, one of greatest strengths of
the book is its dynamic structure. Some chapters
begin by describing how a particular material
forms, or transforms, while others start by
narrating a human-material relationship.
All include some combination of historical
analysis and first-person narration. Well aware of
the limits of post-human theory and its tendency
to reproduce colonial relationships by asserting
totalizing narratives, Hutton is careful to fore-
ground not just the materials she traces, but also
her own interactions: with the people she meets,
with the sources she grapples with, and with
the more-than-human world she encounters.
When Hutton reaches an impasse in her research,
she tells you. Then she continues to narrate with
the evidence she has. The candour, rhythm and
immersive quality of each chapter is compelling,
and Hutton’s prose is a pleasure to read.
Another strength of the book is the way it
highlights the social dimensions of so-called
‘material flows’. Unlike some social theorists,
anthropologists and geographers who often write
in abstract and anonymous terms when using
this concept to study social-ecological processes,
Hutton reframes the notion of ‘flows’ by focus-
ing on the ‘movements’ of people, animals and
things_an important intervention that is also
subtly invoked in the book’s title, and that
reflects Hutton’s commitment to applying a
feminist, materialist approach to the study of
landscapes and commodity chains.

Through careful use of language and attention
to the movements of materials and the stories
we tell about them, Hutton makes an important
theoretical contribution with Reciprocal Land-
scapes that has implications not only for the way
we think about and interact with constructed
landscapes, but also for the way we interpret their
pasts and shape their futures. In this sense, the
book is a testament to the merits of a hybrid, his-
torically situated and sited approach to landscape
research and thinking. Bridging landscape history
and theory, and integrating insights from the
fields of geography, political ecology, anthropol-
ogy, environmental history and material culture
studies, the book not only grounds landscape
architecture within an expanded field_building
upon the work of Elizabeth Meyer and others_
but also answers to calls from within the field
of landscape history for more rigorous, cross-
disciplinary analyses of the relationships between
individual, designed sites and their environs.3
For all the book’s successes, however, it is
worth noting that Hutton’s methodological
approach works better when there is ample,
available evidence of the dynamics and conse-
quences of specific human-material relationships.
The chapters where Hutton most effectively
traces these relationships_Chapter 2, ‘Range of
Motions’, focused on the movement of granite
from Vinalhaven, Maine, to New York City; and
Chapter 3, ‘Rivers of Steel’, focused on the move-
ment of structural steel from the banks of Pitts-
burgh’s Monongahela River to the banks of the
Hudson River on New York City’s West Side_just
so happen to be focused on materials that were
contentious and valuable enough to cause organ-
ized labourers to either strike or bargain. Because
these events are amply documented in various
physical archives, the experiences of the workers
involved are more easily traced. When Hutton
discusses the experiences of the Chinese migrants
who laboured under harsh conditions to extract
guano from the Chincha Islands in Chapter 1, and
when she discusses the experiences of incarcer-
ated people growing trees on Riker’s Island for the
New York City Parks Department in Chapter 4,
she has less documentary evidence to draw from.
The result is that not every human story is as well
told as the story of each material’s trajectory.
In spite of this minor shortcoming, the book
still presents many new perspectives for readers
to consider. One such perspective, not fully
articulated in the book but implied, concerns
the status of historical knowledge and the role of
material study in design education. While many
landscape studio courses in recent years have
explored the sites and conditions of post-Fordism,
only a few have taken a particular material or
assemblage of materials as a starting point. Like
the teaching of history, the importance of mate-
rial research, exploration and study has gener-
ally been deemphasized or neglected in design
school curricula in favour of pedagogic models
premised on the use of computational tools and
parametric approaches. Several historians and
design practitioners have recently called attention
to the limitations of such an approach, arguing
that such a heavy emphasis on representation and
form-making has left students ill-equipped to
think through the ecological and social implica-
tions of their design proposals.4 Some have gone so
far as to claim that the evacuation of history from
studio curricula has contributed to the depolitici-
zation of design itself.5 Others have pointed to
the fact that design schools rarely hire trained his-
torians to teach history courses in the first place.6
In light of these concerns, faculty at various
institutions have begun to creatively rethink how
opportunities for historical inquiry, fieldwork
and material practice could be integrated into
studio courses and into design curricula more
broadly. Yet there has been little discussion of
what texts could inform this pedagogic shift.
Hutton’s Reciprocal Landscapes certainly deserves
consideration. In exposing the historically
inequitable and far-from-reciprocal processes of
landscape design and construction through spe-
cific case studies, the book will prompt students,
and indeed all readers, to rethink the purpose and
practice of landscape architecture past, present
and future.
One can only hope that in ten or fifteen years
from now, Reciprocal Landscapes will have influ-
enced design practice to the extent that there will
be reason for Hutton to write a sequel: one that
tells the stories of places shaped by people who
have taken the book’s message to heart, and who
have begun to live by an ethic of reciprocity to
the best of their abilities.
N OT E S
1 Hutton has participated in and curated several exhibitions
focused on the intersections between landscape design,
construction, and material culture. Two of the most relevant
to the volume reviewed herein are: ‘A Surface Describing
a Volume of Earth Displaced for Redevelopment on this
Building’s Original Site’, with Adrian Blackwell in: ‘Land/
Slide: Possible Futures’, Markham Museum, Markham, ON,
September 21–October 13, 2013, 2013; and ‘Erratics: A Genea-
logy of Rock Landscape, Featuring the Work of Claude Cormier
Architectes Paysagistes’, Harvard Graduate School of Design,
Cambridge, MA, March 22 –May 12, 2010.
2 These articles include: Jane Hutton, ‘Reciprocal Landscapes:
Material Portraits in New York City and Elsewhere’, Journal
of Landscape Architecture 8/1 (2013), 40–47; ‘Trail of Stumps’,
Landscape Architecture Magazine (May 2013), 116–126; ‘Range of
Motions: Granite Flow from Vinalhaven to New York City’,
Harvard Design Magazine 38 (Spring/Summer 2014), 33–38;
‘On Fertility: Night Soil, Street Sweepings, and Guano in
Central Park’, Journal of Architectural Education 68/1 (2014),
43–45; and ‘Inexhaustible Terrain’, CCA 24 (February 2017),
www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/issues/24/into-the-material-world.
3 For Meyer’s original call, see: Elizabeth K. Meyer,
‘The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture', in: George F.
Thompson and Frederick R. Steiner (eds.), Ecological Design
and Planning (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 45–79.
For a synopsis of recent scholarship that has built upon
Meyer’s theoretical contribution, see: Bernadette Blanchon-
Caillot et al., ‘Editorial: Landscape Architecture in an Expanded
Field’, Journal of Landscape Architecture 8/1 (2013), 4–5. On the
need for more cross-disciplinary and multi-scalar analyses of
designed sites and their environs, see: Sonja Dümpelmann,
‘Taking Turns: Landscape History and Environmental History
at the Crossroads’, Landscape Research 36/6 (2011), 625–640.
4 See, for example, Catherine Dee, ‘Form, Utility, and the
Aesthetics of Thrift in Design Education’, Landscape Journal 29/1
(2010), 21–35; and Katherine Jenkins, ‘Field exercises’,
Journal of Landscape Architecture 13/1 (2018), 6–21; and the
works cited in notes 5 and 6.
5 Jessica Ellen Sewell and Andrew Scott Johnston, ‘Rethinking
History in Design Education through the History of Materials
(Parts 1 and 2)’, PLATFORM, 18 November and 25 November,
2019, www.platformspace.net/home/rethinking-history-in-
design-education-through-the-history-of-materials-part-1,
accessed 1 April 2020.
6 Thaïsa Way, ‘Why History for Designers? (Part 1)’ and
‘Why History for Designers? (Part 2)’, PLATFORM, 2 March
and 9 March, 2020, www.platformspace.net/home/
why-history-for-designers-part-1, accessed 1 April 2020.
Journal of Landscape Architecture / 2-2020 87