Hybrid Realities - Raxworthy's Entropic Landscape

The constant movement of energy surrounds our practice. Death, decay, growth, change are the only constant states of being. The shifting of forms, the coalescing of materials, their rise and eventual decline. Things emerge without our gaze, they grow by their own internal ethics and then slowly break apart, shifting their energy into monstrous new entities. These are hybrid realities where the organic-inorganic, the subject-object, the creator-created, the view-viewed all collapse in on one another, mutating into weird quasi-objects, self-autonomous and chimeric, completely as they appear but never as they seem.

A text that I keep coming back to is Julian Raxworthy’s PHD thesis, Novelty in the Entropic Landscape. I’ve found myself, over the past 5 years, diving into it for inspiration and being constantly surprised, finding new things every time I revisit. 

The primary question of the thesis is deceptively simple:

'How can landscape architecture be practiced to allow it to best manipulate its materials’ inherent capacity for change?'

With this, Raxworthy starts a conversation dramatically different to  landscape architecture's contemporary preoccupations. Currently, popular debate focuses on sustainability, resilience and the ecological apocalypse in a near hysterical din. Instead, Raxworthy looks at the understated beauty of growth in gardening, engaging with the secret lives of plants and building deep relationships with the non-sentient. It is almost serenely Taoist in its approach. This is radical thinking; that change is the underlying philosophy of landscape architecture rather than 'sustained-ability'.

The thesis is thick, brimming with a whole world of ideas. I will outline just few key points that keep me coming back.

This is radical thinking; that change is the underlying philosophy of landscape architecture rather than 'sustained-ability'.

Making Stuff - Representation vs The 'Real'

Raxworthy's works though the idea that in landscape architecture there is an unresolved tension between representation and the 'real'. For Raxworthy, the professionalisation of landscape architecture, out of the garden and into the office, has moved practices almost exclusively to representational ways of engaging with the 'real'.

'This change moved both architecture and gardening from a hands-on activity to be one that is primarily based on planning. This primacy of planning elevated the role of drawing, of representation, which became the main production of the discipline.'

The 'real' for Raxworthy is the messy stuff outside, dirt, pruning, gardening, moving earth, sweeping leaves. This is clearly a deeply personal engagement with the practice of landscape architecture, gardening and the world.

Raxworthy states;

'As a landscaper, I made things, but as a landscape architect all I made was documents. '

This reminds me of the widely quoted quip that;

'Architects do not make buildings; they make drawings of buildings.' (1)

For architects and landscape architects there is a profession wide anxiety about not engaging with 'real' things, and that we are restricted only to making representational drawings. This tension frames Raxworthy's thesis, and he sets up gardening as a direct engagement with the 'real', emergence, change as well as avoiding mere representation of these things.

You may have noticed that I've been out to the word 'real' in inverted commas. This is because Raxworthy's definition of representation is a little too clear cut for me. i.e. pen to paper is representation, pruning topiary is not. I would more lean towards the idea of a 'phenomenological daisy chain'. (2)  That instead we build our understanding of the world on a fragile and delicate lattice of representation upon representation.  A fancy way of saying that we cannot avoid seeing or making things imperfectly no matter what we do. Having said that, Raxworthy does further this critical debate in landscape architecture. I agree that a profession almost solely based in offices, drawing pictures of things has a particular and potentially myopic view of those things that are drawn.

We build our understanding of the world on a fragile and delicate lattice of representation upon representation. 

Changing Stuff - From Static to Dynamic

In regards to effectively engaging with process and change Raxworthy's thesis implies that there is static architecture on one end of the spectrum, dynamic gardening sitting on the other and landscape architecture oscillating between the two. Raxworthy believes that landscape architecture's recent  interest in process stems from  architecture's aspiration to 'overcome the inherent static nature of the building' (Raxworthy). This has seen the profession haphazardly uptake a variety of architectural practices such as parametrics, layering, aspects of landscape urbanism,  that Raxworthy sees as leading the profession down the garden path, pun intended. Raxworthy is essentially saying that if we really want to engage with change it is crazy for us to turn to an inherently static discipline such as architecture. We already have the rich lineage of a tried and tested dynamic profession such as gardening, so deep within landscape architecture's lineage. Quoting a well-known architectural adage, that,  'Architecture is situated between the biological and the geological - slower than living but faster than underlying geology', (3) Raxworthy is drawing our attention to different timescales we deal with while working as architects and landscape architecture. 

As landscape architects we are dealing with change at dramatically different timescale; from the fleeting changes in the wind to the slow march of geology. Entropic change, be it organic or inorganic, is inevitable and by engaging with the particular timescales relevant to landscape architecture,  is fruitful ground for new innovations.

Raxworthy's intentional materialistic, form based approach is important.  As he put simply;

After a certain period of time, designed landscapes inevitably change from what was initially installed, regardless of the designer’s intentions.

It is the engagement with the fact that material things break down, change and grow into different things entirely that is significant.  Rather than rejecting this, it is more constructive to embrace entropy and that things will look different over time. 

This reminds me of the theory of anti-fragility (4), that there are things that are beyond resilient, and in fact, grow stronger from disturbance and change.  For example eucalyptus forests in Australia propagate and regrow from the disturbance of bushfires.  It is this idea, anti-fragility, that is more suited to a landscape architecture practice that embraces change. 

Raxworthy states;

To facilitate change is to leave opportunities for physical divergence from what is originally installed or proposed, which will ultimately happen anyway. To have material change in a project there must be a physical “gap” that can accommodate change and this gap must encourage a process of growth or decay.

This "gap" is the is the anti-fragility of an object. The fact that, from the beginning things are designed to change,  and the more they do so, the greater their anti-fragility and their success.

As landscape architects we are dealing with change at dramatically different timescale; from the fleeting changes in the wind to the slow march of geology.

Seeing Stuff - A Return to the Specificity of Aesthetics

Since the advent of post modernism and the wide spread uptake of deconstructivism by architecture there has been little other philosophical influence entering the discourse.  Highly influential landscape architects and seminal texts such as Recovering Landscapes were deeply embedded in a post-modern way of thinking. But in the past 5 years or so, we've seen the nascent beginnings of architecture and landscape architecture actively re-engaging with a contemporary philosophy, social studies and geography that is starting to challenge modern and post-modern methodologies (5) . Much of this zeitgeist focused around objects, things or entities and is referred to in a multitude of different ways such as; thing-theory, object oriented ontology, actor networks or unit operations, just to name a few.

From this contemporary malaise there are two philosophical theories are of importance to note in Raxworthy's thesis.

Being non-modern is an attempt to transcend the anthropocentrism of modernism and post modernism. Non-modern is arguably the next phase in the development of society where things, objects and beasts sit in line with human beings as being ontologically equal. Modernism separated the world into different spheres of naturalisation, socialisation and deconstruction (6) . Raxworthy's approach is to bring together these spheres, or as he puts it attempting to 'retie the Gordian knot'. What this means is that Raxworthy is attempting to not fall into an unreflective anthropocentrism in his analysis and look at all elements of a project as significant.

Raxworthy also has assimilated an object oriented philosophy or object oriented ontology in his practice. This put most simply is a philosophy that things, be they people, dogs, paperclips, global warming, or London plane-trees are ultimately unknowable and we can only ever gain partial understandings of these things. For philosophers that follow this line of thought aesthetics is extremely, or even ultimately important, as it is only through aesthetics that we encounter other things (7). Raxworthy has taken this as an interest in specificity and materiality, i.e. how things look, feel and form at a particular point in time. This is significant as currently in landscape architecture debate on aesthetics, form, composition, materiality is seen as antiquated and backward.

Raxworthy states;

A material account of landscape architecture offers a vital counterpoint in contrast to the sometimes vague and abstract focus on processes..

Raxworthy's materialist approach to landscape architecture is out of step with most of the professional and academic environment. With general practitioners only just assimilating landscape urbanism widely and its interest in flows, processes, data, measurements, algorithms and networks, a formalist approach is clearly off the menu. Regardless, Raxworthy, and I for that matter, are revisiting specificity and materiality as a kind of lost art. This mirrors current frustrations of a select few architects that have seen the architectural object lost and dissolved under a sea of external factors (8). For Raxworthy a return real things such as plants, topology and land is a way to truly engage with the specificity, change in the materiality that is unique to landscape architecture

Though, in my opinion, the current professional climate is still playing out post modernism, deconstructivism and landscape urbanism, I see the beginnings of a mindset change. Most significantly and symbolically has been the handing over of the Chair of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard GSD. Taking over from landscape urbanist Charles Waldheim, Anita Berrizbeitia's lineage is dramatically different from her predecessor. Charles Waldheim has been responsible in really ushering in landscape urbanism as the primary modus operandi in North American landscape architectural education. As chair for more than 6 years we will see his influence play out in the professional world as his students now take up positions in landscape architecture offices and institutions. Anita on the other hand is not a landscape urbanist, by that I mean she is not beholden to an all-encompassing process, operational, de-objectified methodology that so clearly drove Waldheim. From what I can see, and similar with Raxworthy, Berrizbeita embraces a materialistic approach to landscape architecture that is skeptical of the current 'process-discourse'(9). Anita's introductory lecture as Chair titles On the Limits of Process: The Case for Precision in Landscape really is a call for a more measured design response that re-introduces aesthetics, specificity and formalism into course that had been saturated out during Waldheim's time(10). Signs like these are, for me, the beginning of a new way of thinking in landscape architecture.

(1) Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays - Robin Evans

(2) Alien Phenomenology - Ian Bogost. Bogost outlines his idea that a phenenomenal daisy chain in more detail explaining that we can only build our conception of the world on partial, incomplete information upon information. I take this to mean that 'real' things are blurry and unclear. Graham Harman would mention that we do not have any access to 'real' things entirely. This dramatically challenges Raxworthy's thesis that some things are representations and some are not.

(3) Geological Form: Towards a Vital Materialism in Architecture - Stan Allen

(4) Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

(5) From my readings I've seen the likes of Brian Davis and Karl Kullmann being influenced by speculative realism, OOO, and thing theory.

(6) We Have Never Been Modern - Bruno Latour

(7) Object Oriented Ontology - Graham Harman outlines in this book that Aesthetics are the most important area of study in philosophy

(7) See In Defense of Design - Mark Foster Gage or Returning to (Strange) Objects - David Ruy

(9) The 'Process Discourse' is coined by Raxworthy in this Thesis and pertains to the current debate that surrounds process and change in Architecture and Landscape Architecture

(10) Anita's first lecture as Chair of Landscape Architecture at the GSD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbXd1iznH7I