McHarg’s Entropy, Halprin’s Chance: Representations of Cybernetic Change in 1960s Landscape Architecture

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Notes

1. To illustrate changes that took place in the 1960s, I investigate both writings and drawings as evidence regarding how McHarg and Halprin perceived and cultivated their relationships with the landscapes they engaged. To achieve this, it will be necessary to jettison familiar distinctions between drawings, such as between sketches and site analyses, or between different scales. Indeed, the following inquiry is not about built projects, but rather about the conceptualizations and enactments of landscape that underpin those projects. This somewhat abstracted approach is used in order to articulate how drawings operate as working documents — sites through which landscape architects explore, negotiate, and define their embodied, practicing roles relative to complex, shifting landscapes. Approaching material in this manner enables us to consider certain base assumptions about the roles of humans relative to stochastic natures — assumptions that underpin how landscapes are designed, and therefore how they are built.

2. Both McHarg’s and Halprin’s approaches have, in fact, cast long shadows on more recent decades of landscape architecture practice and pedagogy. See Elizabeth Meyer, ‘The Post-Earth Day Conundrum: Translating Environmental Values into Landscape Design’, in Michel Conan (ed.), Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2006), pp. 187–244; and Catherine Howett, ‘Ecological Values in Twentieth-century Landscape Design: A History and Hermeneutics’, Landscape Journal, 80, 1998, pp. 80–98.

3. A now familiar rift between ecological and spatial approaches to design had not yet formed in the early 1960s. At that time, many landscape architecture programs integrated environmental design experimentation into their curricula, teaching landscape analysis and spatial design methods side by side. By 1970, however, a highly public debate between Garrett Eckbo and Neil Porterfield took place in the pages of Landscape Architecture, illustrating that a rift was beginning to form. Eckbo feared that environmental design approaches suffered from ‘analysis paralysis’, and that ‘the design process is being rationalized out’, while Porterfield accused spatial designers of ‘fantasy fatigue’, warning that they evoked ‘mystical, indefinable talents … to rearrange large land areas under the title of “artistic license”’. Garrett Eckbo and Neil Porterfield, ‘Too Much Analysis or Designers’ Fantasy? An Eckbo–Porterfield Exchange’, Landscape Architecture, 60/3, 1970, pp. 201–202. The debate took place over several issues: Neil Porterfield, ‘Ecological Basis for Planning a New Campus’, Landscape Architecture, 60/1, 1969, pp. 31–33; Garrett Eckbo, ‘The Designer as Anonymous Transformer’, Landscape Architecture, 61/1, 1970, p. 16; Peter Walker and Melanie L. Simo, Invisible Gardens: The Search for Modernism in the American Landscape (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), pp. 305–308.

4. The terms ‘drawing’ and ‘drawing practices’ are used with specific intent here, despite the fact that many would consider ‘mapping’ to be a more appropriate term with which to describe McHarg’s work. ‘Drawing’ and ‘drawing practices’ hone in on the particular set of relationships that take place when the designer produces representational imagery by hand. Indeed, this investigation rests on underlying assumptions that (1) drawings can be read as evidence of the practices that created them, (2) drawing practices enact and reinforce conceptual frameworks, and (3) through drawing practices, designers enact specific forms of relationship between themselves and the landscapes they draw. For more on this topic, see, for example, Paul Emmons, ‘Embodying Networks: Bubble Diagrams and the Image of Modern Organicism’, The Journal of Architecture, 11/4, 2006, pp. 441–461; Bruno Latour, ‘Drawing Things Together’, in Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990); or James Corner, ‘Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes’, in James Corner (ed.), Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999). A summary of this issue is also provided by the author, ‘Between Making and Seeing: Overlay Drawing Practices in 1960s–70s Environmental Design’, Thesis, Cornell University, 2012.

5. Charles Killpack, ‘Computer Mapping, Spatial Analysis, and Landscape Architecture’, Landscape Journal, 1/1, 1982, pp. 41–42; Carl Steinitz, ‘Landscape Resource Analysis: The State of the Art’, Landscape Architecture, 60/1, 1970, pp. 101–105.

6. Perusing the 1960s issues of Landscape Architecture Magazine illustrates these trends towards environmental design and community design. Published projects notably increased in scale during this period, and public projects were increasingly represented. By the late 1960s, such shifts were discussed at length in various magazine editorials. See, for example, Grady Clay, ‘Still Gouging Away: That Old Cut and Fill Gang’, Landscape Architecture Magazine, 59/1, 1968, pp. 20–22; Donald Appleyard, ‘Elitists Versus the Public’s Cry for Help’, Landscape Architecture Magazine, 60/1, 1970, pp. 24–25, p. 55. For further discussion of government’s influence on 1960s–70s landscape design and planning, see Frederick Steiner, Gerald Young, and Ervin Zube, ‘Ecological Planning: Retrospect and Prospect’, Landscape Journal, 7/1, 1998, pp. 35–36.

7. Peter Galison, ‘The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision’, Critical Inquiry, 21/1, 1994, pp. 254–255.

8. Peter Taylor has identified H. T. Odum’s philosophy as a sort of ‘technocratic optimism’, noting that ‘the new theorists of feedback systems conceived of nature as a machine and, at the same time, acknowledged the purposive and regulatory character of that nature-machine’. Peter J. Taylor, ‘Technocratic Optimism, H. T. Odum and the Partial Transformation of Ecological Metaphor after World War II’, Journal of the History of Biology, 21, 1988, p. 221. For more on the influences of cybernetics on ecology, see J. B. Hagen, An Entangled Bank: the Origins of Ecosystem Ecology (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

9. Hagen, An Entangled Bank, pp. 109–112.

10. By depicting ecosystems as predictable and therefore controllable, the Odums’ models enabled environmental designers to point to scientific causality as a basis for design decisions. Through the 1960s and ’70s these models became increasingly problematic for scientific ecologists, whose research increasingly revealed that the very notion of an ecosystem as stable, manipulable, and controllable inaccurately depicted the enormous complexity of ecosystem function. But the evolution of scientific thinking did not stop environmental designers from continuing to adopt and adapt Odum-based ecosystem models for landscape management purposes. On the contrary, even once H. T. Odum’s modeling approaches had fallen out of favor with ecologists, environmental designers continued to lean on his texts and models. Taylor, ‘Technocratic Optimism, H. T. Odum and the Partial Transformation of Ecological Metaphor after World War II’, pp. 242–244. In fact, these models were useful to environmental designers for many of the same reasons that they were deemed inaccurate by ecologists: their inaccuracy was intrinsically tied to their ability to predict, and prediction — however uncertain — was essential to practicing landscape management.

11. Environmental design innovators included Christopher Alexander, McHarg, Carl Steinitz, and the researchers at the Laboratory for Computer Graphics at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Carl Steinitz, Paul Parker, and Lawrie Jordan, ‘Hand-Drawn Overlays: Their History and Prospective Uses’, Landscape Architecture, 66/5, 1976, p. 448; Nicholas R. Chrisman, Charting the Unknown: How Computer Mapping at Harvard Became GIS (Redlands, CA: ESRI Press, 2006). See also Margot Lystra, ‘Between Making and Seeing’.

12. McHarg in particular has recognized Charles Eliot as an inspiration for the environmental design approach. Ian L. McHarg, A Quest for Life: An Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), pp. 358–360.

13. During this period landscape architects explored a wide range of modeling techniques, including matrices, graphs, sectional charts, and plan-view overlay-based land classification. The development of these drawings is summarized by Anne Whiston Spirn, ‘Ian McHarg, Landscape Architecture, and Environmentalism: Ideas and Methods in Context’, in Michel Conan (ed.), Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2000), pp. 97–114. See also Susan Herrington, ‘The Nature of Ian McHarg’s Science’, Landscape Journal, 29/1, 2010, pp. 1–10.

14. The priority of management greatly skewed environmental designers’ approaches to ecology — away from engaging the scientific field’s practices, and towards internalizing its ideals. Indeed, most environmental designers did not embrace ecology as conducted by scientists — an experimental, deliberative, often inconclusive endeavor. Rather, with management as their goal, they saw in ecological concepts a means to bring new levels of objectivity and authority into their field. The mantle of science was embraced, not in connection with scientific method, but as a way to support environmental priorities — and as a means for bringing new legitimacy to the landscape architectural profession.

15. Ian L. McHarg, ‘An Ecological Method for Landscape Architecture’, Landscape Architecture, 57/2, 1967, p. 105.

16. Ian L. McHarg, ‘An Ecological Method for Landscape Architecture’, p. 106.

17. See syllabi, Ian L. McHarg Collection, Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

18. Susan Herrington, ‘The Nature of Ian McHarg Science’.

19. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings; Cybernetics and Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950), p. 17.

20. Howard T. Odum, ‘Ecological Potential and Analog Circuits for the Ecosystem’, American Scientist, 48, 1960, p. 1.

21. Ian L. McHarg and Frederick R. Steiner, To Heal the Earth: Selected Writings of Ian L. McHarg (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1998), p. 64.

22. Studio Drawings, Delaware River Basin Study II, 1967, Ian L. McHarg Collection, Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.

23. Ibid.

24. Ian L. McHarg, ‘An Ecological Method for Landscape Architecture’, p. 106.

25. For an example of earlier, looser environmental design overlay work, see Christopher Alexander and Marvin L. Manheim, The Use of Diagrams in Highway Route Location: An Experiment (Cambridge, MA: School of Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1962).

26. McHarg’s focus on objective seeing was not his alone — similar attitudes can be found in the work of other cybernetics-influenced designers. Two such individuals are the MIT-based Gyorgy Kepes and Kevin Lynch, who in their 1954–59 Rockefeller-funded research project ‘Perceptual Form of the City’ proposed to analyze the health of the urban environment through visual analysis. For Kepes and Lynch, the eye and the computer were understood to be closely interrelated, in part because new developing technologies invited, and often required, new ways of seeing. Christine Boyer describes how Kepes applied cybernetic ideas in the development of computational notions of vision and the human mind, noting: ‘it was Kepes’ pedagogical aim to train the artist and the scientist to become sensitive decoders of messages sent and received from a variety of sources in the modern world’. M. Christine Boyer, ‘The Two Orders of Cybernetics in Urban Form and Design’, in Tridib Banerjee and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris (eds), Companion to Urban Design (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011), p. 71. The drawing practices espoused by McHarg, though different in many ways from Kepes and Lynch’s work, were nonetheless resonant with their characterization of vision.

27. http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=572

28. Christina Dunbar-Hester, ‘Listening to Cybernetics: Music, Machines, and Nervous Systems, 1950–1980’, Science Technology and Human Values, 35/1, 2010, p. 128.

29. Manipulating the structural frameworks of performance pieces, East and West coast musicians and artists such as John Cage, La Monte Young, Tony Martin, Fluxus, Judson Dance Theater, and the Halprins all worked extensively with scores. Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater, 1962–1964 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1983), pp. 1–33; David Nicholls, ‘Getting Rid of the Glue: The Music of the New York School’, Journal of American Studies, 27/3, 1993, pp. 335–353.

30. Janice Ross, Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 146–152.

31. Halprin had experienced this need first-hand when working on the redesign of the Panhandle Freeway in San Francisco. This highly contentious project, generally recognized as the first ‘freeway revolt’ in the country, centered on conflicts between local citizenry and state government regarding the location of urban freeways. Halprin’s attempt to propose a more acceptable design for the freeway failed. Not long after, he began exploring methods for community design workshops. Alison Bick Hirsch, ‘Lawrence Halprin: Choreographing Urban Experience’, Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, p. 231.

32. Martin was a member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which shared studio space and occasionally collaborated with Anna Halprin. David W. Bernstein, The San Francisco Tape Music Center, p. 154.

33. Lawrence Halprin, Notebooks 1959–1971 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972), p. 31.

34. Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (New York: G. Braziller, 1970), p. 19.

35. Eva Jessica Friedberg, ‘Action Architecture: Lawrence Halprin’s Experiments in Landscape Design, Urbanism, and the Creative Process’, Dissertation, University of California, Irvine, 2009, p. 66.

36. Alison B. Hirsch, ‘Scoring the Participatory City: Lawrence (& Anna) Halprin’s Take Part Process’, Journal of Architectural Education, 64/2, 2011, p. 139.

37. Ibid.

38. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), pp. 201–202. Though it is not the focus of this particular discussion, it should be recognized that there are Buddhist evocations in this quote, as in much of Cage’s work.

39. Halprin, The RSVP Cycles, p. 4.

40. McHarg, To Heal the Earth, p. 147.

41. Halprin, The RSVP Cycles, p. 10.