Anyone who has ever set out on the trail of Andrea Palladio in Veneto or Friuli,
travelling lightly but well-informed, may well have consulted the
By no means can her essays be said to be outdated. The interested reader, if he only realises what this book is, must therefore be grateful to have these essays now collected and in some cases revised in these three hundred-odd pages. Constant examines in meticulous detail various architectural projects, located in Europe and North America except for Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh, not only going into the history of a particular project to fathom the impetus underlying the design, but also, in most cases, classifying it in terms of the overall work. In so doing, she relies on a similar text structure — a brief exposition and conclusion, often accompanied by a pithy final statement that adds the final spice to the complex, expansive body of text. In this process, she occasionally unearths surprising photos of models, historical photos or sketches of projects that are essentially familiar, which pleases the expert, even if the emphasis is not on ‘pretty pictures’. Constant only includes them as part of her reasoning. The design of the book goes along with this intention and presumably aims to ensure readability, which is, for instance, why the illustrations are always placed correctly in relation to the text. The margin column, however, only provides space for the captions. The density of cross-references is accordingly high. Constant not only wants to examine the project history behind the design analysis, but also, by means of cross-references, to take into account theoretical background information from various discourses conducted in the fields of architecture and landscape architecture. The result is that in places the comments section takes on a life of its own; its references quite comprehensively span the theoretical history of landscape architecture of recent decades, a side benefit for anyone wanting to fill gaps in knowledge of this area. One also learns the occasional historical detail, for example, how landscape design was established at Harvard, or biographical notes on various architects, which, while detracting from the thread of the main text, nevertheless satisfy the readers’ need for thoroughness. It may therefore not be advisable to read the book in one go, from the first essay to the last; nor does the author recommend this kind of reading. Nor, perhaps, may everyone be as interested in Mies van der Rohe’s ‘Barcelona Pavilion as Landscape Garden’, the second essay in the book, as in the fifth exposition entitled ‘A Landscape “Fit for a Democracy”’, in which she focuses on Jože Plečnik’s modifications of Prague Castle, a symbolic part of the formation of democratic Czechoslovakia between 1920 and 1935.
That such choice is available, however, demonstrates the broad field of historical
topics covered by the essays. It might be likened to drilling down into specific
sites in modernism — regarded as a long twentieth century — in the form
of selected projects. In addition to those authors of projects already mentioned,
the authors of selected projects include, in the order of their appearance in the
book, Erik Gunnar Asplund, Sigurd Lewerentz, Garret Eckbo, Ludwig Hilberseimer with
Alfred Caldwell, and finally Rem Koolhaas/OMA. On the whole, the choice of projects
appears to be due to the fact that this is in a sense Caroline Constant’s
‘collected essays’, obviously written for particular occasions. Anyone
who hasn’t read the preface religiously might be tempted to ask what happened
to Richard Neutra or Alvar Aalto, among others, whose position is commonly seen as
exemplary of the unity of the building and its natural setting. An initial glimpse
at the table of contents, however, reveals an astonishing, if not complete, list of
dramatis personae. Plečnik is a figure of the nineteenth-century Wagnerian
school who does not seem to fit in quite as seamlessly with the others. Garret Eckbo
appears in this succession of ‘big’ names, too. Although a student of
Walter Gropius when Gropius was chair of the architecture department in Harvard in
1937, Eckbo is traditionally counted among the great American landscape architects
of the twentieth century. Once again, one might ask, what about the other three in
this eminent foursome: Daniel Kiley, James C. Rose and Thomas Church? However, the
book does not defer to this kind of classification, and so it is not worthwhile to
judge it by this. After all, it’s no secret how such promising book titles of
‘panoramic’ ambition come about; on the other hand, how could a single
person manage the encyclopaedic treatment of a ‘modern architectural
landscape’ as a single connected book? Such comparable publications as
Constant essentially writes about architects and their architecture, even if she goes so far as to encompass a detailed description of the plants used, their impression, their scent, their seasonal dynamics. She thus develops her expositions of landscape architecture — never of the garden — consecutively, based on the logic of what one might designate a contextual architectural design. The incipient academic entrenchment of architects and landscape architects at the end of the nineteenth century is not expounded in any greater depth but instead forms the starting point of her deliberations when she writes: ‘In the best of these projects, the architectural concept derives in significant ways from that for the landscape, despite any difference in authorship that this might entail’ (Introduction, p. 22). The often tense relationship between these two professions today, in which the landscape architect tends to feel that he has been consulted too late, cannot, of course, be appeased by a design practice, which Constant sees as a necessary unity. In fact, it is precisely this kind of capacity to unify design tasks that she is willing to consider. As a consequence the book tells stories of exceptional figures in architectural history.
One of the most accomplished expositions deals with Lafayette Park in Detroit. Here
the author examines the relationship between the architect (Mies van der Rohe), the
urban planner (Ludwig Hilberseimer), and the landscape architect (Alfred Caldwell)
in connection with the quality of the project as it was finally built. Constant
derives her criticism above all from the failure to respect outside space, which
Hilberseimer had intended to be a contiguous area. According to Constant’s
interpretation, the separation of private spaces was to take second place to the
sense of community, which was thwarted by the building typologies and landscape
interventions carried out by Mies and Caldwell. She even comes to a final negative
judgement of this pioneering urban development project in post-War America:
‘It lacks the type of synesthetic, cognitive experiences that would enable
residents to interrelate and forge a collective sense of place through active
engagement’ (p. 189). The title of this penultimate essay, ‘Intersecting
Ideologies in Lafayette Park’, however, refers to a more pressing issue than
the division of professions, which cannot be historically undone. Once again, she
assiduously develops the background of the urban development, Hilberseimer’s
idea of a ‘Settlement Unit’, Alfred Caldwell’s origins in the
Prairie School, and his closeness to the project partners as student, book
illustrator for Hilberseimer’s
According to this interpretation, in which the author places the main emphasis on the political agenda of ‘landscape’, this is more than a remarkable compilation of sundry essays. After expounding the design idea with the aid of ample compiled material, the author arrives at interesting conclusions in each essay. For example, in the case of Lewerentz, who Constant attests to having increased ‘the spiritual essence of daily life’ (p. 92) when his Memorial Ground at Stockholm´s Woodland Cemetery — where the ashes of the deceased are spread upon a forest field without discrimination — transforms traditional religious symbols and rituals into an immediate ‘experience of nature’; or when she observes of Asplund’s library building, whose outdoor areas he refined for another competition, that he positions ‘architecture as a middle ground between “nature” and the city’ (p. 76). But what, then, is the other, synthesising theme of the book?
Three of the nine expositions and the lavish introduction were written specially for
the book. These appear to bookend the other texts to such an extent that Constant
seems to be taking up a ‘position’ as if retrospectively, albeit on the
basis of many years of experience. And this is perhaps where she writes
Constant’s exposition of ‘La Villette’, which she situates in the
Experimental Architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, does not follow the other project
descriptions in chronological order; rather, with it she seeks to reconcile theory
and landscape. This also explains why the book concludes with the unbuilt runner-up
project from the 1982–83 competition. With logical consistency, she takes
something that was not built — which may appear paradoxical for the book as a
whole – to illustrate how the difference between building and
‘context’ could be nullified, with architecture and landscape entering
into a process of questioning these ‘modern dichotomies’. Constant thus
interprets Parc de La Villette as the attempt to achieve a ‘democratic
landscape’ and, at the same time, as the conclusion of a development lasting
more than a hundred years, culminating in earlier projects such as Olmsted and
Vaux’s Central Park (1857–61) or the neighbouring Parc des Buttes
Chaumont by Adolphe Alphand (1861–67). She maintains, however, that in these
projects is manifested the paternalistic treatment of park users, the perpetuation
of class differences even in park design, with these parks being the expression of
an ‘ethics of social betterment’ (p. 219). Constant observes that
Koolhaas, in contrast, by projecting his ‘social condenser’ from