Trees-in-the-way
These trees, each with its own mound of earth, form an open, airy grove, in contradistinction to the terraced topography. Fragmentation creates an equivalent between architecture and nature. University of Technology in Otaniemi, Alvar Aalto, 1949-66. Photo by Linda Pollak.
Below is an excerpt from a piece I wrote called “Pieces of the World: Nature-Object/Nature-Space,” published in Daidalos (n.65. 9).
While there is a history (albeit a somewh at confused one) of picturesque attempts to create spaces representing nature, the anomalous, alien, rebel trees that follow do not belong to any discourse. Each exists as an isolat ed event. Their potency as displaced fragments of nature lies in their capacity t o amplify instabilities that exist in everyday space, in order to construct an "other" space. In these trees, nature becomes figure without relying on geometry, and signifies something that is neither pure nor whole. The meaning of these trees is inseparable from their uncanny materiality, making explicit the fact that architecture and landscape architecture share the operation of reconfiguring matter by moving it around. The examples that follow initiate a mapping of this territory, challenging the separation of these two disciplines,by indicating this conceptual and physical thr eshold of encounter.
Nature out-of-place usually connotes something poor or ugly, beyond control, and therefore troublesome and disturbing. In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas connects the dread of dirt with the fear of disorder, defining the concept of dirt as "matter out of place."20 The tree growing in the middle of the stairway at the garden of Les Colombieres (Ferdinand Bae, 1920) is an archetype of transgressive nature invading architecture. However, this misbehaving, obviously out-of-place tree challenges this percep tion, betraying at least a quasiintentional caprice. It is so unlikely, that, in spite of its persistence over the years, it retains a specific temporality, the status of an event.
At Alvar Aalto's studio-house in Helsinki, (1955-56) a small tree disrupts the continuity of the white wooden fence that borders the property. Rather than a "common sense" solution of removing the tree or running the fence around it , the architect represented the tree's presence as being important enough to alter the architecture: generating an opening in the fence, as well as a spatial arrangement. This displacement overcomes the notion of an essential identity that is tied to a single physical body, framing an approach to difference wherein identity of both tree and fence is constructed through relation rather than being dependent on properties of either thing-in-itself.
Displacement also plays a primary role in constituting identity in Herzog & de Meuron's Plywood House (1984- 85) which joins architecture and nature in a field of operations, creating a dynamic relation that exposes unexpected qualities of each. A tree visibly alters and makes specific the form of a building, asserting its identity as central to the architecture, as it causes the building to fold inward along an unexpected axis. This deflection celebrates the tree both as object and agent of architectural form. If it dies the building will continu e to register the trace of its presence.
"Miro' s Labyrinth," the sculpture garden of the Maeght Foundation (Sert/ Miro, 1960) is the scene of multiple displacements. In this case, displacement supports narratives of transformation, in which landscape, art, and architecture shift places with each other, in categorical as well as physical terms. Trees are brought in from the surrounding woods, beyond the garden wall, to be displayed and encountered as if they were sculptures, while sculptures installed in their place in the forest are visible beyond the garden wall. This mutual displacement, and the fact of the trees' unnaturalness alongside of their "intact" material, calls into question our ways of looking at nature as well as art, producing an abstraction that is opposed to the ideal.
The distancing of artifacts from preconceived categories of identity also happens at the Villa Cec ilia (Torres/ Lapefia, 1983), where a large plane tree occupying the middle of the entry path is one of numerous surreal events that a visitor encounters along a folding corridor of cypress hedge. These events index a world where transformation has begun to take place, an artifactual realm where everything is a fragment displaced from anot her time or space. In this case, the Ovidian narrative sets up an oscillating field of past, present, and future relationships that supports the garden's programmatic shift from a private to public use. The tree's incongruous position is a clue to an older order, within a general strategy of fragmentation th at obscures the axial symmetry of the original Rena issance garden,enabling the architects to use its materials to make new sense.
Each of these displacements operates through metonymy and synecdoche-modes of representation concerned with the part- to acknowledge a nature that is not (an unbreakable) whole. As such, they offer a positive key to the representation of nature in the visibly unnatural context of everyday urban sites, where it is by definition out of place. A natural artifact within a constructed setting operates in metonymic terms, to "convey some incorporeal or intangible state in terms of the corporeal or intangible,"21 going beyond metaphor to draw the site into a virtual relation with this other reality, that the observer must construct on his or her own.
Footnotes
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, London 1966, S. 36.
21. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, Berkeley 1969, S. 506.
Trees are displayed as sculpture, while sculptures are distributed in nature. The exchange is part of various narratives of transformation. Maeght Foundation, Josep Lluís Sert, Joan Miró, 1960. Photo by Linda Pollak.
A rebel tree standing in the way: A displaced object strengthens an unstable situation. Ferdinand Bac, Les Colombières, 1920. Photo by Linda Pollak.