Landscape in 20th-Century Architecture and Land Art

The Notion of Landscape in 20th-Century Architecture

• The landscape is constantly changing. From one decade to another, it can completely transform.
• Places that were once offices may become houses ten years later.
• Formerly, home was the idea of protection, using nature. A surge of nature. Man turns nature into landscape.
• Landscape construction involves looking and recognizing values. What are the main virtues of nature? What are its qualities? The landscape is associated with nature, geographical qualities, and the downspouts to the hills. There is a look at the territory. That look is loaded by a particular condition. These are places where man finds himself, where the relationship between man and place is so strong that the artist can be filled with energy. There is a strong recognition in the 19th century with the idea of landscape; man has to be immersed in it.
• In the 19th century, architecture blends with nature from the material. Here's an inspiration.
• With the advent of modern times, principles begin to emerge, and a more streamlined look appears. More materials appear. Le Corbusier's scheme is key at this time; the house leaves the ground, creating an artificial nature on the ceiling. The house has no direct engagement with the ground.
• Currently, architecture also creates landscapes.
• La Ville Savoye represents Le Corbusier's thought. There is a merger between the floor and the house; the house is suspended.
• Wright merges nature with architecture, for example, in Fallingwater. There, the landscape is neither the house nor the cascade; they are two things merged.
• Mies' Farnsworth House merges with nature, creating a transparent house.
• There are landscape architects who make gardens on rooftops, such as Roberto Burle Marx. He is one of the pioneers in the idea of a roof garden. The vegetation is like a painting; the garden is as if it were a painting. The relationship between plants and color makes his paintings gardens. The native species occupy because they grow better. Nature has no geometry; its laws are irregular. His job is to recreate nature, but in no case submit to geometrical cases.

Land Art

New Sensitivities to the Problem of the Landscape

• Artists opened up new readings of the landscape in the 1960s.
• American artists began to create spaces in lost places, in deserts, forests, etc. Qualities of geographies, wind, and nature emerge. In the 1960s, there was a large degree of contamination, so artists took nature as a new space for art.
• One of the first characters is Christo, a character who wraps things, like buildings, but in a unique way to create landscape paintings. One of his creations is a fabric wall that begins in the hills and ends at sea. He thinks like an architect, makes plans, and proposes materials, space, etc. All his facilities are momentary. He brings value to the territory and topography. If we were there, we would feel the wind because it would move the fabric. He funds his work by showing the plans to museums. He chooses the color of the fabric to show that his works are artificial. A tree wrapped with a porous material allows the passage of air, showing a tree with a certain volume. His project was to create on a larger scale and surround islands with fabric paint to create spots on the sea. He also worked with umbrellas, 6 meters in diameter, in Belgium and Japan, simulating trees, with large tracts of land.
• Another artist is Walter de Maria. His major work is in a desert, placing iron rods in a regular pattern, with a strategic location. These irons are lightning rods; then, during an electrical storm, the whole field lights up, and at that moment, the image is captured.
• Richard Long is a character who has traveled extensively. What he does is intervene in places on his scale; he creates lines or surfaces with stones, and these lines are addressed to certain places. He cleans the soil and creates paths, but also on a small scale. He generates his own maps. It's a return to something primal, between man and nature. There is an obsession with the arrangement of stones. It looks very precarious. All his figures are artificial, such as lines and circles, figures that are not found in nature.
• Robert Smithson. His works are about the garbage man produces and nature. He works with earthmoving. How to make that journalism become art, that is the key to Smithson. He goes beyond the trash photograph, capturing colors, the contrasts between the ground and the color of toxic material.