24 HISTORIC STYLES DÉTOURNED: PART II of XXIV

An occasional series playing with historic garden plans taken from Turner's 24 Historic Styles of Garden Design, published by Gardenvisit.com.

What we might be looking at:

Bam. Circles, lines and a grid. This is clearly a constructivist painting! Except it isn't, it's a garden plan. So we have a wild outer edge- we can assume it's vegetation, but there's something spiky about the scheme which suggests that they could just as well be stalagmites.

The combination of spikes and the garden geometry conjures images of a violent sport, something like Speedball 2 or Salute of the Jugger. Actually, it's far more likely that the giant circle in the centre inspired that particular interpretation. It's now getting harder and harder to imagine how a game might be played here. Where's the goal? Where would the teams muster?

That said, there's something of a bowling green to the central rectangle. If this were a postmodern garden plan (which it is) then an ironic anachronism would be entirely in-keeping with that particular school of design. But by now I've revealed that I'm already familiar with the plan. This clearly references Tschumi's famous Parc de la Villette

What we are actually looking at:
Yes, this is a postmodern garden. Turner has a lot to say about postmodernism in City as Landscape, but in 24 Styles... he is more generous, noting the inventive use of geometry and materials that characterise postmodernism in landscape design:

"Geometrically, postmodernism is associated with a layered and deconstructive geometry. Rectangles clash with circles and are interscected by hapazard diagonals, as in a Russian constructivist painting. Steel and concrete structures are painted in bright col ours. Glass and other reflective surfaces help create illusions and startling visual effects."

-Twenty Four Historic Styles of Garden Design , page 71

24 HISTORIC STYLES DÉTOURNED: PART I of XXIV

I recently downloaded a copy of Tom Turner's 24 Historic Styles of Garden Design, published by Gardenvisit.com. Tom Turner was one of my teachers at Greenwich, on both the BA and MA programmes. In this book, Tom aims to provide  "a short illustrated history of western garden design from 2000 BC to 2000 AD". "Western", in this context, includes Egypt, the middle east and northern India. If, like me, this subject is of particular interest to you then I recommend it: the text may be brief (and there are one or two typographic errors) but the accompanying illustrations- especially the style diagrams- are incredibly useful. 

Cover of Twenty Four Historic Styles... via www.gardenvisit.com

The style diagrams (illustrated on the cover, above) are part of a larger series that Tom Turner has been developing over many years. Clearly delineating how the elements of buildings, paving, vegetation and water are organised within each historic garden, they also imply, with a little bit of imagination, how these gardens may have been used. It occurred to me that they were also ripe for a bit of détournement- all in the best possible taste, of course.

So: every so often, I will select one of the twenty four diagrams at random, re-arrange it a little, then attempt to ascribe it to a time period or cultural movement.

GARDEN ONE:

What we might be looking at:

An irregular shape in light green, surrounded by a lighter colour. There is  a suggestion of a perimeter wall. the irregular shape may be a consequence of landform- perhaps it is erected on top of a hill. Small dark green circles, most likely trees, are scattered across the plan.They seem able to cross the barrier between the light green and yellow areas- perhaps there is no wall at all, just a loosely defined fence.

A circular water feature sits at the centre of the plan, with other structures radiating out from this point. Closest to the fountain or poo are three small buildings, the largest of which is orientated on a north-south axis, adjacent to a wide avenue. This avenue connects two large, walled gardens: one running west-east, the other at slightly tilted to the north-west from the main axis.

The east-west walled garden contains a pool, and terminates in the east at a larger building, also facing east. No trees stand in front of this structure, perhaps giving it a commanding view from the top of the hill. This is most likely the main house.

The designer of this plan wants to invite the wild in from the outside, allowing it to run across the site (the trees), but is also keen to demarcate formal areas and keep them enclosed.

What we are actually looking at:

A classical villa, c100 AD. In the words of Tom Turner:

"Buildings and gardens were grouped together within a bounded enclosure. The spaces adjoining individual buildings were axially planned but, by the standards of renais sance villas, the lack of an axial relationship between buildings is surprising. Structures were scattered like parcels on a table. Either there was no overall plan or it was asymmetrical."

-Twenty Four Historic Styles of Garden Design , page 14

Twenty Four Historic Styles of Garden Design by Tom Turner can be downloaded at Google Play Books

49 WALTZES FOR THE FIVE BOROUGHS

There must be something magical about the number forty nine. Barely with the digital ink dry on the previous post- Dérive 49 - when this beautiful image appeared on one of the feeds to which I subscribe. The original impression of this image, pinned from cosmopolis49waltzesfortheworld.com, was a little small, but was annotated with this explanation:

John Cage's Graphic Score The innovative and influential American composer John Cage created a graphic score called “49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs” as a tribute to the ever- changing city of New York. He superimposed 49 triangles on a map of New York City, using chance means to determine the locations of each angle. The listener or recorder was invited go to the apex of each angle and listen to or record the sounds of the city in that place. *Rolling Stone Magazine, 1977.

There have been many iterations and interpretations of this score since its inception in the 1970s, and it presents an inspiring approach to urban exploration as both a productive and receptive exercise. The website http://49waltzes.com/ features an archive of geo-referenced waltzes as uploaded audio/video footage.

Presumably, the use of triangles corresponds to the time signature of the waltz, 3/4. It's strange though, that the pieces are not combined, that they can only be listened to sequentially. Surely the pieces should bounce around one another, perhaps an excerpt from each on every beat?

I was also remound (I know, I know, reminded, but this is a pet grammar project of a former mentor, Madamoiselle X) of the wonderful Vi Hart who has produced (amongst other things) a fantastic video about twelve tone composition. I've provided a link to the video which begins at the most relevant point, though if you have time I recommend enjoying the full thirty minutes https://youtu.be/4niz8TfY794?t=24m46s

Apparently Cage's vision was of other performers, listeners or or record makers to make transcriptions for other cities, simply by as"assembling through chance operations a list of 147 addresses and then, also through chance arranging these in 49 groups of three". It seems auspicious that this piece came to my attention as I begn to explore Huế's forty-ninth borough.

Some final words:

"Wherever we are,

what we hear is

mostly noise.

When we ignore it,

it disturbs us.

When we listen to it,

we find it fascinating."

-John Cage, The Future Of Music: Credo (1937)

A SERENDIPITOUS FIND: SYNECDOCHE HUẾ

Sometimes, the internet is a wonderful place. Whilst running a google image search for french map hue vietnam I came across this beautiful rendering of the citadel. In true psychogeographic fashion, one random derive led to another fortuitous stumble as I attempted to trace its provenance. 

The map was posted on a now archived reddit by FelixNguyen, but of greater interest to me was the first comment made in the thread. I've cut and pasted the comment by AnathemaMaranatha below:

Nice map. I’m gonna swipe a copy. I’ll tell you why:

In mid-summer 1968 I went on an operation (Lam son) with 2nd Bn, 1st ARVN, 1st Brigade, 1st ARVN Division out of Hué. We were to cover for two other battalions by providing fire support with an ARVN artillery LZ on the mountaintops over the Song Bo valley west of Hué. Our battalion was perimeter security.

Instead, the battalions operating along the river valley came up empty, and we hit the mother-lode. There was an NVA (North Vietnamese Army) division-size (or bigger) base-camp under the triple canopy jungle on every side of our firebase. It was well organized, with paths and signs, barracks, mess halls, supply drops, HQ briefing rooms. The streams were marked upstream-to-downstream for drinking, bathing and laundry. It was a little city of jungle hooches-over-bunkers, uniformly constructed from local wood and foliage. Pretty nice, actually.

The base had belonged to one of the NVA divisions that had gone into Hué on Tet 1968. Two or three had gone in, killed about 3000 civilians in a dress-rehearsal for 1975, and then died themselves when the city was retaken over the next couple of months after Tet.

Good thing for us, too, because we landed right in the middle of their camp. They had left a ton of supplies and whatnot behind (and a small cadre who kept sniping at us), but the best thing was found in what was obviously a briefing hooch for senior officers.

In that hooch, on the dirt floor was a scale model of the Citadel at Hue. It was about 2.5 x 3 meters and three dimensional. They had dug little ditches were the canals were, and put blue-colored paper in the ditches to simulate water. The Citadel walls were done with cardboard, colored to look like walls. The interior Citadel likewise, and all the houses and buildings inside were also recreated in cardboard, and actually colored individually to match the actual houses in the city. Outside the walls, they had dug the moat, and showed Highway 1, the railroad and the Hué and Perfume River bridges.

It was quite a find. All the MACV advisors were put on rotating (pun intended) helicopter-landing duty during the day, me included, while every general officer in Vietnam came to see this model. Fortunately, it was only about 200 meters downhill from the ARVN firebase. I think the max count of stars on our little LZ was fourteen one day. That’s a lot of generals, plus they all have aides and goon squads accompanying them.

Our battalion commander, Thièu tá, was puffed up with satisfaction at hobnobbing with so many important people. Even so, he seemed far more cheerful than that. When finally all the generals departed, we were getting ready to leave ourselves. The Thièu tá invited all his officers to a dinner party (the battalion had cooks) in the former NVA command hooch. We all got a beer and a pretty good meal.

Our senior advisor, a Marine 1st LT, finally poked the commander. “Thièu tá, you seem mighty happy. Is there something you’re not telling us?”

The Thièu tá smiled, walked over to the model of the Hué Imperial Citadel. He stood over it like an ARVN Godzilla, staring down. Finally he reached down and picked up one of the carefully-wrought cardboard houses. He held it up for us, and smiled.

“My house,” said the Thièu tá. Then he folded the cardboard house and put it in his pocket.

Never let distaste for western imperialism get in the way of a good story.

detournement Tschumi

Text manipulated: Pleasure of Architecture in Tschumi (1994), Architecture and Disjunction, Cambridge: MIT Press

There are numerous ways to equate landscape with language. Yet such equations often amount to a reduction and an exclusion. A reduction, insofar as these equations usually become distorted as soon as landscape tries to produce meaning (which meaning? whose meaning?), and thus end up reducing language to its mere combinatory logic. An exclusion, in sofar as these equations generallty omit some of the important findings made in Vienna at the beginning of the century, where language was first seen as a condition of the unconscious. Here, dreams were analysed as language as well as through language; language was called 'the main street of the unconscious'. Generally speaking, it appeared as a series of fragments (the Freudian notion of fragments does not presuppose the breaking of an image, or of a totality, but the dialectical multiplicity of a process).

So, too, landscape when equated with language can only be read as a series of fragements that make up the reality of a landscape.

simulacrum - a collaboration- Le cadavre exquis

A lot of our studio exercises involve collaborative group work. Sometimes, work from one table is passed to another and augmented, as with the previous session's mind-mapping exercises.

All of which put me in mind of the surrealist game, Le cadavre exquis [exquisite corpse], an exercise in creativity similar to consequences. I embarked on a similar exercise this summer whilst a member of a short story group, write club

Each week members were given titles and were tasked with the production of 1000 new words corrresponding to said title. I have posted quite a few of mine on this site (you'll have to go back to July, or have a look at the write club website). As the weeks progressed, some of the members began to experiment with other formats, with a friend of mine (who- until she decides to make her public entrance- shall remain anonymous) producing a collage, pictured below, for the title "simulacrum".

(hopefully my friend won't be annoyed about me putting it here because it is already published on the write club page)

I produced a fairly standard sub sci-fi romance which you can read here

She played with the idea of the copy of a copy (simulacrum, simulacra...) equisitely, so decided to spontaneously produce my own simulacrum...

I then scanned- lo res , grayscale [sic]- and returned to my collaborator to deconstruct and reassemble, only to be rescanned and sent back to me...

copy

of a copy

...

... a copy

*

Without permission from my anonymous collaborator I cannot yet publish the full extent of the project, but hopefully that will soon be forthcoming and I'll be able to share them here.