Stone River

Topos: The International Review of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design Volume 79, 2012 Pages 54-58

by Jon Piasecki

We touch a stone wall. In the heat we feel the shade of a newly plant- ed tree and smell the fragrance of the flowers specified in a plant- ing plan. In the landscape it is often small things that tangibly affect

us, yet the translation from a design drawing into reality, where a concept is solidified, is a difficult one. It is a translation we as professionals need to get right if we are to engender a love of landscape in the people who use our creations and if we are to honor our media, which in the end is not paper, but earth, water, stone, concrete, plastic, steel, asphalt, glass, wood or plants.

In part our work is to be viewed, but it is also to be touched, smelled, heard and as food production becomes part of designed landscapes, tasted. This is a huge challenge on a small scale but it is nearly invisible on a large scale. I am afraid that our training as professionals has left us lacking. Plans, sections or models may explore the visual and spatial qualities of our work but the experiential and phenomenological qualities reside more closely in materials themselves and how well they are crafted. How can designers do service to this craftsmanship if they have not mastered building and do not understand the limitations and possibilities of the materials at hand?

My firm is small. I am the principal designer and the principal wheel- barrow operator. I present ideas to my clients and work the hammer and chisel on the stones. This is in part due to the realities of the economy and the opportunities have been afforded in my career, but it is also a reflec- tion of my commitment to building the best work I am capable of. To do this I have had to master the materials and processes of my designs and the specifics of the stone, native plants and sites where I work. This re- quires an in-depth engagement that comes from time spent on site build- ing, failing, fixing, learning and finally succeeding.

STONERIVER

My project Stone River just won an ASLA honor award. This is a rare achievement for a solo design/build firm. The jury referred to my project as “timeless” and as a “religious experience “. To achieve work of with these qualities has required years of practice physically building with stone and working in the woods. I am of the opinion that aspiring to this kind of spiritual quality through construction gives us a sense of awe for the work we are capable of doing in the landscape. This inspires respect for the landscape as a medium for design, artistic expression and cultural production.

The reason I could conceive of this project was that I had been work- ing stone for so long. I built this project by myself. I felt I could hammer each joint tightly and I was willing to move each stone down the path on my wooden cart.

Today, design and fabrication are generally distinct entities. Labor is devalued. Unknown people toil to make our things. Machines spew out the stuff of our needs and desires and the making of them dehumanizes the production class and despoils the land. Of course the machines are essential, and some disconnect between design and fabrication is inevitable, but this essay and my project openly question if our fascination with the virtual over the actual, with design over build has gone too far. I would suggest that it has and that this disconnect certainly harms nature and endangers our humanity even more.

I am a stoneworker and a landscape architect. As such I can fuse design and construction. In my Stone River path, I applied great effort to join stones together, to join the path itself to the existing stone wall and woods. I offered the visitor the opportunity to experience a sense of fusion with nature. The goal of this project was to join culture to nature.

As a student of the history of using stone to mark territory, I am convinced that the sense of fusion that I learned joining rock, offers important lessons related to our conceptualization of nature. On the Servian wall in Rome, stone was used to mark the ancient and sacred boundary between culture, inside the wall, and chaos and danger outside. The stony legacy of the city-state is a dualism. Inside the wall lives the familiar “us“ and outside the foreign “other“. This “other” could be a human enemy or menacing nature herself. This dualism has shaped our concept of nature at its core and in my opinion, maintaining this intellectual divide between culture and nature puts culture at risk. Archaeology has shown us that all walls and empires fail. Geology and evolution have shown us that nature will radically change but it will also endure.

In this instance, by joining my project into the surrounding woods with great sensitivity, I am working to heal, in a small way, the rift between culture and nature that is intrinsic to our modern relationship to the land.

Joining culture to nature has consumed me and considering it while I work on my modest projects has led me to some larger scale thinking.

To join stone one uses force to smooth the rough edges between the rocks so that they might fit together. In a homologous manner I would apply the force of a critique launched by Gilbert Ryle on the Cartesian mind/body dualism in philosophy to the culture/nature dualism that pervades ideas of landscape.

Descartes’ statement cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) used cognition to justify the concept of the soul and to privilege human thought as the basis of existence. This soul or “ghost” was deployed

to differentiate our species from the myriad other species and inanimate objects in nature. Ryle suggested that Descartes’ distinction between the mind and the body was in error. With his mind/body dualism Descartes individualized the nature/culture divide in which nature and culture are separate entities and where, at its best, an enlightened culture uses scientific “stewardship” to bring nature under our dominion to apply our order.

Nature’s death, diminishment and subservience are central features to the nature/culture dialog in our profession and the ascendance of culture is a preposition on many of our most lauded urban interventions and perhaps to urbanity itself. Culture becomes the privileged entity above nature, as Descartes privileged the mind over the body.

In his book Concept of Mind, Ryle suggested that the mind/body dualism is categorically mistaken. Ryle’s critique made room for the mind and the body to begin to unify their former philosophical schism. In a similar manner, if culture and nature could be released from their culturally imposed restraints they could fuse and become one. Nature would cease to be an object with humanity as the subject. The figure and the ground could become one. Here our compromised environment trans- forms from an external threat to a direct personal threat. As is clear to any ecologist, our destruction of what we consider to be an externalized nature shows itself for what it is: an exercise in self-mutilation.

The goal of this thinking, as with my Stone River project, is to join culture to nature. I hope to help readers here and the visitors to my project feel enmeshed in the natural world of which we all are unquestionably a part. In a fused nature and culture we lose our privileged status and be- come essential participants in a larger nature. If we learn to accept our reduced status as a part of, rather than as the apex of, a larger Nature we have a chance to become less destructive and more respectful of the natural system that created us, that sustains us and that encompasses us. Our culture will experience the humility of the participant, as opposed to the hubris of the steward. In this seeming diminishment, humanity might find a way to carry on.