Text by FOA

The opposition between the rational and the organic that structures the history of landscape has also characterised the history of several disciplines, from philosophy to urbanism. The conflict between a rational, artificial, linear geometry and a picturesque reproduction of nature through less determined geometry has structured the history of landscape. It is through overcoming this opposition that we think the possibility of an emerging landscape, and city, and architecture may exist. The emerging landscape will be characterised by developments that are already happening in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, design and lifestyle, where the natural and the artificial have become virtually indistinguishable. The mutant, the hybrid, and the morphed are more likely to become the stereotypes of the next century than the machine or Frankenstein.
The first attempts to manipulate and artificially organise the land arose either from the need to physically and culturally exploit the land or to appropriate the land. Both the utilitarian patterns of farming, irrigation and land ownership, and the more cultural and symbolic patterns appearing in monuments and gardens bear extraordinary similarities across the globe. They are characterised by the deployment of linear, simple geometries, lines, circles, squares, and triangles, in stark opposition to “chaotic” natural organisations. (We prefer to say “complex” organisations, generated through negotiation of multiple orders: the geological, the biological, and climatic, in a morphogenetic process). These simple geometries are the outcome of primitive techniques of land measurement, and are similar across virtually all cultures, from China to Islam and Pre-Columbian America. These types of geometry prevailed basically until the 18th Century, with very few exceptions, when English gardeners began using “natural” complex geometries as a source of spatial effects and narratives. However, picturesque gardens generated their geometries through imitation rather than through construction, and in that sense, they only looked as if they were geometrically complex.
Olmsted invested natural geometry with function, but his geometrical techniques remained basically reproductive and picturesque rather than constructed. Burle Marx invested complex geometries with meaning… Modern parks returned to “natural” landscaped forms, but the discipline never developed a way of producing complexity out of imitation and never grew beyond the picturesque. The difficulty of designing complex form was too much of a disciplinary barrier. In ‘68 the modern world order collapsed and a general interest in artificial complexity arose. In architecture, “chaos” was modelled as a “collage”, a non-mediated relationship between elements and orders that interfere with each other without eroding their identity, but construct a new identity through opposition. Post-modernism and deconstruction explored the capacity of this contradictory juxtaposition as the generator of a new order. Simple, artificial orders, such as circles, lines, and grids were inconsistently deployed on a field, remaining unaffected, and un-mediated. The collage techniques that characterise the landscape of the late 20th Century were the inconsistent deployment of regular forms or regular programs deployed in contradiction with each other were The geometries of pure indeterminacy or pure linearity are a trace of the past, rather than a possibility for the future. The opportunity that lies ahead of us is to also overcome the disciplinary barrier that resorts to contradiction as a form of complexity (like in “Complexity and Contradiction”), and rather to exploit complexity through coherence and through consistency: to learn to produce forms and topographies that are entirely artificial and yet complex. To generate them through a mediated, integrated addition of rigorous orders.