editor’s note: The following text is the inaugural lecture given by Joost Emmerik when he assumed his position as Head of Landscape at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2022. The text particularly excels in embedding doubt into the teaching process. It is the doubt about nature, our entanglement with it, and the values and politics that drive the design process. It is about passing knowledge to others and questioning it meanwhile – a much more pertinent and productive teaching paradigm for times of uncertainties and change.
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Dear attendees,
There are beads of sweat on my brow; partly from the effort of thinking, but more so due to the persistent period of heat. For a week now, the temperature has been above 30 degrees Celsius every day. Verges are arid and yellow, bridges are being sprayed with water, nights are clammy.
I have read in the newspaper that the water of Elbe is so low that the stones on the bottom of the river bed have been uncovered. The water was also this low in 1904. A photo from that year shows an uncovered stone near the city Děčín in the present-day Czech Republic. A multitude of years are visible in the stone; markings from previous periods of drought. The oldest one dates all the way back to 1417. Harvests often failed in such a dry period, which led to the nickname Hungersteine (Hunger Stones). In the middle of the stone, there is the text: ‘Wenn Du mich siehst, dann weine’ – if you see me, then weep. 1
It is an ominous, but beautiful image. The stone has been there for centuries, mostly out of people’s sight. Day and night, the water of the Elbe flows and gushes along the stone and erodes it more and more. In the event of a prolonged drought, the stone surfaces and it shows us an otherwise hidden reality of the natural world. We are suddenly in contact with generations that came before us who experienced the same thing and we can see ourselves as part of a greater whole.
You can see the stone as a dry registration of data, a hydrological measuring instrument; at this time and that time, the water was this high and that high. However, just as the stripes on the doorpost tell you more than just the height of your child, the Hungerstein has a poetic value; the geological, natural world and the human imagination converge herein.2
The field of garden and landscape architecture works with these values on a daily basis; with the natural and the cultural, the tangible and the imaginary, the practical and the poetic. I view it as a duty of the discipline to develop this multifaceted interconnectedness between humans and nature: beyond the anthropocentric idea in which humans are above nature to a radically inclusive attitude in which humans are part of that nature. As head of Landscape Architecture, I want this idea, and the design practice that follows from such a radical principle of equality, to take root in the coming four years.
Curiositez de la Nature et de l’Art
In 1705, the book Curiositez de la nature et de l’art by the French physicist and writer Pierre Le Lorrain, better known as Abbé de Vallemont, was published.3 The frontispiece in this book has fascinated me since I first saw it. It shows a Western perspective on the relationship between human and nature at the time of the Renaissance, a time in which humanity was experiencing major developments in the fields of science and culture.
The drawing shows a landscape, divided into three ‘natures’. At the top, the wilderness, beneath that an agrarian landscape and then the garden. There are two figures in the foreground: on the right-side Natura, nature, depicted as Artemis of Ephesus and on the left side Ars, art, science and culture, depicted as humankind. All three ‘natures’ are combinations of Ars and Natura; in one Ars plays a bigger role, in the other Natura, but they always carry characteristics of both in them. These characteristics may be physical elements, but they may just as well be thoughts. We project thoughts, desires and fears onto the landscape around us. The landscape is therefore a mixture of the directly tangible reality and our imagination, a physical and a mental landscape in one, such as the Hungerstein in the Elbe.4
Four years ago, the artist Iwan Smit and I made a contemporary version of the frontispiece with the three natures for the exhibition Dissident Gardens in Het Nieuwe Instituut. Three hundred years after the original, we drew a mural six metres high and four metres wide that showed the current relationships between wilderness, agrarian landscape and garden.
For me, the two drawings together are like a thought model for interpreting the dizzying breadth of the field and the challenges it faces. On the basis of the historical and the updated image, I would like to take you through this thought model and use that to explain my vision on the field and the role of the Academy therein.
First Nature: An Immersion in Wilderness
In the first nature, the wilderness, we see a rugged landscape, with hills, trees, shrubs and a spring that flows into a lake via a waterfall. Several human figures are pictured on the mountain. However, these are not ‘normal’ people, these are gods. On top of the mountain, Apollo is playing his kithara. Around him, we see his nine sisters, the muses, goddesses of art and science. The mortal human has no place in this wilderness; it is the domain of the gods, outside time and reality.
There is also a mountainous landscape populated by imaginary figures in the reinterpretation. This wilderness is no longer the domain of gods; they have been ousted by science. It is the domain of nature itself. These are places where natural processes have free rein, and where there is space and time for ecosystems to develop.
Free states such as these can be found everywhere. In Lille, the French garden and landscape architect Gilles Clément designed the Parc Henri Matisse. The most striking thing about this park is a seven-metre-high island, made from material that became available during the construction of a station. The island is inaccessible to people. During the design process, there was resistance to this idea. Local residents feared there would be visual pollution and were scared they would be looking out on a building excavation. Today, the island is overgrown and it is – in my opinion – the most magical place in the park; an island of wilderness in an otherwise manicured environment, a refuge for natural development, a mental immersion into a type of nature that we may find messy or frightening, but with which we are closely intertwined.
Last summer, my husband and I were walking through the Scottish Highlands with our two dogs. Even though Apollo and the muses didn’t reveal themselves, it felt like a mythical place. The mountains, the lakes, the trees, the ferns, the moss, the sheep, the water and the sky hold sway here. The landscape is the inverse of my daily living environment. Humans are guests here in a world which they are part of, but outside of too.5
This split personality of humankind, which is part of nature and outside of it at the same time, may seem far removed from the everyday practice of the landscape architect. At the same time, this attitude is often unconsciously a starting point when drawing up a design, in which an attempt is made to bring humans and nature together in an ideal, paradisal situation. For the most part, however, this idea puts the human experience first. The aim is usually to design a landscape in which humans feel comfortable.
Can we instead make space for wilderness in our landscapes? Can we make the non-human equal to, or even more important than, the human? To enhance biodiversity, to stimulate all life and as a constant reminder of our natural roots.
Second Nature: Roots in Space and Time
The second nature shows a human who is ploughing the land with the aid of oxen, while another is sowing seeds in the field. Here, humankind has transformed the wilderness of the first nature into a second nature, a cultural landscape that is agreeable to us. This second nature, in contrast to the first one, is actually the domain of humankind, which is attempting to appease nature here, in harmony with the rhythm of the seasons, in order to harvest food and a home.
Three hundred years later, the cultural landscape, in addition to being the domain of agriculture, has also become the domain of, among other things, mobility, industry, recreation and energy generation. The urban landscape – the work area of many landscape architects – has also become an increasingly large part of this second nature.
The pressure on the cultural landscape is therefore great. A multitude of parties, each with their own interests, come together in a limited space. It is no longer about fitting in a single windmill or residential area; assignments are stacked, fields combined, projects tackled in interdisciplinary teams including architects, urban designers, cultural historians, ecologists and local residents. The role of the landscape architect within this is, in my opinion, about rooting the assignment in space and time.
The landscape that we see is composed of many layers, both natural and cultural. A landscape architect must be able to read this stratification, through the scales and across time, and then use this knowledge to create a design that does justice to the character of the place. This is by no means about preserving all that is, but this is about creating a design that is so tailored that it can only be there. By rooting the design in soil and use, planting appropriate species or allowing them to come up, incorporating room for the unexpected and thinking several generations ahead, we shape a great wealth of landscapes that contribute to the enhancement of biodiversity and that root human and other-than-human life to the place.’
In addition to this metaphorical meaning of rooting, I also mean this term very literally: does the design provide plants and animals with the space and time to develop optimally? In my opinion, the landscape architect has a ‘duty of care’ towards the living nature with which we work. It is up to us to create conditions within which the life, which we have plotted with the stroke of a pen, can establish itself optimally and in which natural processes can take place over a longer period than a councillor’s term.
Third Nature: A Life of Its Own
Back to the print from 1705. A low hedge, tightly trimmed, separates the cultural landscape from the third nature below: the garden. This is arranged in rectangular beds, with a leaf pattern therein. Shrubs mark the corners. At the centre of the garden, there is a fountain that spouts water high, after which it falls down and flows over into a basin via a bowl.
In the reinterpretation, we see a very different layout. The space within the high garden walls is laid out like a living room with a sofa, some plants in pots and a painting. Tiles cover the earth; the air is the only thing that brings life to the garden. This is the domain of the human, with plants and trees as sparse decoration. Above all, nature must be agreeable here, no alarms and no surprises please, even though the greatest quality of the garden lies in the fact that the garden is not the house.6 The garden has a life of its own. Even when we are not there, when nobody is looking, all kinds of things happen, perhaps more than when we are actually there. We can desperately try to hold this back, with tiles, pruning shears and RoundUp. Or we can embrace it and see the garden as a space behind, in front of or on top of our home that belongs primarily to the trees, the insects and the weather, which we sometimes visit. Can we be guests in our garden?
This does not mean that design no longer matters. It may actually matter even more. In my allotment, there is a water bowl. It is a simple round bowl, slightly raised on a foot. When it rains, the bowl fills with water. Birds come to wash themselves. Clouds drift by in it. In the winter, the water freezes. Through something as straightforward as this bowl, I see the surroundings better, I see elements that I wouldn’t otherwise see because they would be too commonplace, too ubiquitous. The ceramicist Cécile Daladier once said: ‘J’aimerais faire un vase pour y mettre des étoiles’ (I would like to make a vase to put stars in).7 The bowl in my garden is like a vase; it changes my view, not because of the shape of the bowl, but because of what this shape brings about.8
Within the garden walls, humankind shapes its relationship with the world outside those walls. The garden is therefore always a model, a microcosm that expresses how we see or would like to see our relationship to the macrocosm.9 In the reinterpretation, we see the exclusion of that larger world, in particular, the garden as an extension of the home. Can we instead see the garden as a place to experiment with different attitudes with regard to nature?10 Can the garden root us in the place and in the larger world outside of it? Can the seed for a different relationship to nature be sown in the garden, which will then grow further outside the garden walls?11
Ars and Natura: A Different Set of Values
In the foreground, seated in the first nature, the Ars and Natura look out over the landscape. Natura sits leaning back against a tree, her head resting on her hand, her gaze focused on infinity. Ars sits upright, alert, a measuring instrument in his hand. He has broken away from the natural world and sees it as a source of inspiration for the arts and science, Natura Artis Magistra (Nature is the teacher of the arts).
Three hundred years later, we see the same two human figures. But whereas Natura has the same pose, Ars has developed a very different focus; slumped on a plastic chair, he is immersed in a digital wilderness, no longer interested in the physical world around him. There is nothing for him to study and to learn. The world is no longer alive, but has degenerated into a place where it is a matter of course to extract its raw materials.12
This typical Western perspective has brought us immense riches and spectacular growth, largely at the cost of other humans, animals and landscapes. Today we are facing the downside of this also in landscapes closer to home; higher temperatures, forest fires, rising sea levels, excess nitrogen, sharply declining biodiversity. And this is no longer just an abstract story or a reality that solely exists in scientific publications. It can be experienced by anyone, as evidenced also by the beads of sweat on my brow.
The resulting challenges can no longer be masked with technical solutions aimed solely at maintaining the status quo. We cannot think our way out of the current crisis with the systems that got us into it. The problems require us to develop a different attitude towards the natural world and to reassess our place therein. Beyond the anthropocentric idea in which humans are above nature to a radically inclusive attitude in which humankind realises that it is one with nature. An attitude in which we form different relationships with the living world and become so intertwined that the term nature becomes superfluous.
‘Although it is essential to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to heed the warnings of scientists, we not only need to learn how we can act differently, but also we can think differently about the natural world,’ writes theologist Karen Armstrong. ‘We need to rediscover some of the reverence for nature that people have carefully cultivated for thousands of years; if we don’t do that, our concern for our natural environment will remain superficial.’13
The field of garden and landscape architecture constantly mediates between nature and culture; ‘every landscape that is guided, created or designed is a presentation and representation of nature and culture’.14 I am under no illusion that the field will single-handedly solve the climate crisis or save the world from ruin. On the other hand, I do believe that our field can make a major contribution towards developing a different attitude and can help to rediscover some of this reverence for nature.
The Multivoiced Landscape
‘Every landscape reflects the society that inhabits it,’ write philosopher Ton Lemaire and landscape archaeologist Jan Kolen.15 The landscape that we see when we look outside, however, seems to primarily reflect humankind, even though our society is made up of so much more than humans; there are so many more voices in the landscape. In the coming four years, I want to bring a multitude of voices into the Academy of Architecture; voices from other times, other cultures than just Western culture, other practices, other species than just the human one and other fields. By listening to all voices in the landscape, we can make the landscape reflect society as a whole, both human and other-than-human life.
The Western dualism between the human and natural world has not always existed. Up until the Middle Ages, the landscape was seen as something completely alive. The logical connection between humankind and nature was invoked in rituals that celebrated natural phenomena, such as the longest day or the arrival of spring. Shamans acted as interpreters of the natural world. Although remnants of this live on today, such as the celebration of the New Year, these are often so commercialised that the relationship with nature is far from obvious. New rituals can strengthen the bond between humans and nature, such as the Fête de la Nature, which hosts thousands of events each year throughout France to celebrate nature and our close connection with it. Can we make it tangible through new rituals that we are more intertwined with, than separated from, the natural world? Can we learn from an animistic attitude toward nature? Can we see the landscape architect as a shaman?
Non-Western and precolonial societies are dominated by very different models than those of Western dualism. Many attitudes are based on the idea of the world as ‘a continuum of time and space, where animals, plants and humans are all permeated by an immanent sacred force that draws them into a synthesised whole’.16 This attitude, where all living things are animated by one and the same force, leads to a greater degree of connectedness among all life forms that nature produces, regardless of species, gender, appearance or sexuality. Can we learn from this other thought models in order to experience the close interconnection between all life forms?
The self-proclaimed ‘ecotect’ Louis le Roy built eco-cathedrals, structures that wove city and landscape together, outside the capitalist system, over a long period of time. He viewed them not as gardens or as buildings, but as networks where humans, plants and animals could build an ever-growing superorganism together. It is a unique practice, in which the natural world is part of the construction team, in addition to humans. The Zoöp model is another example. This is an organisational model focused on cooperation between human and non-human life. It represents the interests of all zoe – Greek for ‘life’ – and makes all voices part of the decision-making process of organizations.17 Can we learn from other types of practices to include all voices of the landscape in a design and give them agency? Can we move towards a practice organised on the basis of a radical principle of equality, where the needs of other-than-human life are just as legitimate as those of human life?’
Also, or perhaps especially, outside the spatial domain, there are many voices worth listening to. Philosophy, theology, sociology, anthropology and linguistics can lead to other models, relationships, rituals that do more justice to our interconnectedness with nature. What can we learn from Donna Haraway’s naturecultures18, from Ton Lemaire’s ecological spirituality19, from David Abram’s life world20 or from Aldo Leopold’s land ethic21? How can we express these concepts in our landscapes? How could they change our attitude and our landscapes?
Image of Nature
‘Nature does not know itself as nature. We designate her as such. And an image is implicit in that designation: our image of nature. To a certain extent, this image says something about nature, but even more than that, it expresses how we see ourselves in relation to that nature,’ writes philosopher and ecologist Matthijs Schouten.22 I think it is beautifully formulated. It encapsulates the uniqueness of nature, and it accentuates humankind’s tendency to search for meaning and to interpret. It designates our image of nature as being cultural.
We have created this image of nature together. And we can therefore also dismantle this image of nature together and replace it with an alternative based on a radical principle of equality. Moving past the idea that human life is more important than other-than-human life. Moving past the idea that there is a separation between culture and nature. Moving past the entire designation of nature.
I look forward to enabling a very different image of nature to take root at the Academy of Architecture in the years to come.
Biography
Joost Emmerik is a garden and landscape architect. Joost searches for a serene simplicity, combining clear lines, robust materials and luscious planting into places that grow more exuberant over time.
In his design and research practice, based in Rotterdam, he is mainly concerned with the design of public spaces and gardens, always based on radical inclusivity; the garden not as an extension of the house but as a room of nature where we as humans are guests. Especially in the city, where the larger landscape is not always easy to reach for everyone, these ubiquitous spaces offer the opportunity to bring natural processes close to people and thus make a connection with something that transcends the everyday. Joost works on various research and publications, the common thread being the relationship between people and nature and the need to bring about change in this.
Joost is head of the Master’s programme in Landscape Architecture at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture, visiting lecturer at Technical University Delft and the Academy of Architecture Rotterdam and member of the advisory committee of Arcam.
Colophon
Text: Joost Emmerik
Art: Iwan Smit
Translation: Richard Glass / Alphabet Town
© Text Joost Emmerik
Footnotes
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:338_Hungerstein.jpg
[2] What we call a mountain is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans – a mountain of the mind.’ Robert MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (London: Granta Books, 2003).
[3] The frontispiece is based on the ideas of Italian humanists Bartolomeo Taeggio and Jacopo Bonfadio, who wrestled with the question of what exactly a garden is and how it relates to the wilderness and fields about a century earlier. In turn, they built on Cicero, who established a separation between the world of gods and the world of humans.
[4] ‘Landscape is simultaneously a geographical and geological, as well as a spiritual and poetic, reality.’ Ton Lemaire, Met Open Zinnen: Natuur, Landscape, EARTH (Amsterdam: Ambo, 2002).
[5] ‘The fascination of these mountains is, I think, the mystery of something which can be seen, approached, touched, but never understood. […] And we stand on them, climb them, and pretend that we have conquered them, knowing all the time that they are as remote from conquest or understanding as the mountains of the moon.’ H.V. Morton, In Search of Scotland (London: Methuen & Co, 1929) p. 209.
[6] Urban designer and garden enthusiast Pieter Verhagen described this aspect of the garden being different: ‘In our house we protect ourselves against nature and her angry moods, while in the garden we actually invite her in and try to put her in a friendly mood.’ He argued that this difference between home and garden should be encouraged as much as possible: ‘Let us therefore preserve, indeed, cultivate that contrast, and avoid all intermingling in an orderly fashion.’ Pieter Verhagen, Het Geluk van den Tuin (Amsterdam: G. W. Breughel, 1945).
[7] ‘I’d love to make a vase to hold stars’, Rakesprogress (November 2016-January 2017) no. 2.
[8] ‘Form is no longer an aim, but a means of communication to support life.’ Gilles Clément, Gardens, Landscape and Nature’s Genius (Copenhagen: Ikaros Press, 2020) p. 39.
[9] ‘It’s not nature that we see in the garden, but a reflection of how humans think about nature.’ Saskia de Wit, ‘De tuin als natuurembleem’, in: Hans Alma and Frank G. Bosman (ed.), Spiritualiteit van de tuin (Utrecht: May 2017, p. 23.
[10] In the essay ‘The Land Ethic’, included in his book A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wrote: ‘We can only be ethical in relation to something we can see, understand, feel, love, or otherwise have faith in.’ He believed that direct contact with the natural world was crucial to our ability to extend our ethics beyond self-interest. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1949).
[11] ‘ln the garden we learn how to deal with nature without having to deny the creative power within us. And thus, it becomes a model and a test case with regard to how we deal with the entire natural and built environment.’ Dieter Kienast, ‘Is Landscape Gardening?’, in: Gareth Doherty, Charles Waldheim (red.), Is Landscape…?: Essays on the Identity of Landscape (London: Routledge, 2016).
[12] ‘Those of us who live in capitalist societies today have been taught to believe that there is a fundamental distinction between humans and nature: humans are separate from and superior to nature; humans are subjects with spirit and mind and agency, whereas nature is an inert, mechanistic object.’ Jason Hickel, Less is More: How degrowth will save the world (London: William Heinemann, 2020).
[13] Karen Armstrong, De heilige natuur: Het herstel van de relatie met onze natuurlijke omgeving, Amsterdam: Querido, 2022) p. 30
[14] Erik de Jong, Natuurlijke verwantschap: Over tuin- en landschapsarchitectuur, inaugural lecture (Leiden: Leiden University, 2006).
[15] Jan Kolen and Tom Lemaire (ed.) Landschap in meervoud: perspectieven op het landschap in de 20ste/21ste eeuw (Utrecht: Uitgeverij Jan van Arkel, 1999) p. 20.
[16] Armstrong (note 13) p. 20.
[17] https://zoop.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/nl
[18] Natureculture is a synthesis of nature and culture that recognizes their inseparability in ecological relationships that are both biophysically and socially formed. See: Donna J. Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003) and:
Agustín Fuentes, ‘Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology’, Cultural Anthropology, Jg. 25 (2010) no. 4, pp. 600–624, DOI:10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01071.x.
[19] Lemaire (note 4): ‘In the version of ecological spirituality that I advocate, while the importance of intrinsic value and participation applies, it also applies to distance, to both connectedness and also separation. This distance is a prerequisite for critical thinking and can save us from an uncritical holism, while connectedness helps us avoid an objectifying instrumentalism. This ambiguity or duality is inevitably the fate of a being like the human who now stands in a special way in and against nature, thus in a certain brokenness.’
[20] ‘The life-world is the world of our immediately lived experience, as we live it, prior to all our thoughts about it.’ David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).
[21] Leopold (note 10): ‘All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. […] The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.’
[22] Matthijs G.C. Schouten, De natuur als beeld in religie, filosofie en kunst (Utrecht: KNNV Uitgeverij, 2001) p. 11.
Topics in this article
Aldo Leopold — Anthropocene — Care — Climate Change — Donna Haraway — Eco-Cathedral — Ethnobotany / Plant Knowledge — Gilles Clément — Joost Emmerik — Land Ethic — Landscape Architecture — Louis le Roy — Matthijs Schouten — Nature — Nature-Culture Dialectics — Natureculture — Plant Agency — Representation — Teaching / Pedagogy — Third Nature — World-Ecology —Search other topics:
