We read something about this early on the semester. This country was claimed by Europeans as their own, built with African slave labor, on land stolen from indigenous people. Is sad to realize that "you" and the "me" from "This land was made for you and me" excludes all BIPOC, whose right to this land is still questioned on a daily basis

Reminds me of the essay "Teaching on Stolen Ground" written by Deborah A. Miranda: "[...] everywhere we step, we walk on indigenous soil [...]".

Michael Perelman was an American economist and economic historian, former professor at California State University, Chico. In an article for the journal “Capitalism Nature Socialism”, he described how Karl Marx, is believed to have failed to understand the importance of natural resources. “He unambiguously defined the labor process as the transformation of nature into objects of utility. He denounced the German socialist movement for ignoring the role of nature. And he insisted that ‘labor is not the source of all wealth,’ arguing that ‘nature is just as much the source of use values” (Perelman, 1993). According to Perelman, Marx had belittled the importance of scarcity, predicting that society would easily master natural resource production. In Perlman’s book “The invention of capitalism”, he explains how the classic political economists developed the notion of scarcity to keep the lower classes poor. “The key to avoiding the curse of a comfortable life was to create artificial scarcity for the rural poor. […] Everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious. […] A few acres to the cottage would make the labourers too independent”. (Perelman, 2004)

This notion of scarcity is used as a tool to control population, examples such as scarcity of clean water, scarcity of clean air, and others are common in today’s conversation regarding environmental degradation. However, from a political and economic perspective, as stated by Perelman, this notion of scarcity is also used to disproportionally impact the poor. In McAfee’s he explains how this greatly affects communities located in materially poor regions. “It is decisions made by people in positions of power (and their deputies) who benefit from the current system of wasteful production and overconsumption […] Socioeconomic arrangement that produces scarcity and distributes surplus, creating obesity alongside hunger, gated ‘communities’ surrounded by homelessness, and carbon footprints thousands of times greater in materially rich regions than in poor ones” (McAfee, 2016).

Perelman, M. (1993). Marx and Resource Scarcity. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 4(2), 65-84.

Perelman, M. (2004). Model of Primitive Accumulation. In The invention of capitalism: Classical political economy and the secret history of primitive accumulation (pp. 98-99). Durham: Duke University Press.

“I was not born here, I chose this country to live in. This is the reason why Brazil is my country twice”. Lina Bo Bardi.

Lina Bo Bardi is an Italian architect whose most important architectural works are located in Brazil. After the end of WWII, she fled from Italy to Brazil and made permanent residence in this country. One of her first projects in Brazil was her own home, the Glass House. It is an insertion of a transparent box on stilts into lush Brazilian vegetation. It is both international and local, urban, and tropical. It incorporates elements of traditional Brazilian rural architecture, and it is delicately placed on a hillside surrounded by a native forest. Similar to Burle Marx, Bo Bardi was interested in the "movements of people through spaces, in the ways they reacted with each other and with nature, and in their desires and memories. Look, shape, external appearance, and the hard stuff of which buildings are made came second. Her works look distinctive, but their ultimate purpose is not to be striking. They are devices that make possible new experiences, or intensify existing ones or excavate or recover sensations. 'Until man enters the building,' she said, 'climbs steps, and takes possession of the space in a 'human adventure' which develops over time, architecture does not exist'". (Moore, 2014)

Bugaric, B. (2019, September 10). Lina Bo Bardi. Retrieved November 11, 2020, from http://architectuul.com/architect/lina-bo-bardi

Camacho, S. (2019). Retrospective Lina Bo Bardi. ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW, Dec-Jan 2019(245), 24-33.

Moore, R. (2014). Why we build: Power and desire in architecture. Harperdesign.

Marx employs the concept of pastoral to explain the primitivist and agrarian strain in American thought in the face of modern industrial technologies. He formulates that American pastoralism mediates the conflicting desires for technological progress and retreat. In this way pastoralism’s motivations are idyllicism and modern studies. “Pastoralism is foundational to ecological literary criticism not simply because it is a key trope of American dilemma faced by environmentalists in industrial societies who need to simplify their lives and reduce their consumption of resources but want to do so without giving up the pleasures and advantages of modern life”. (Sayre, 2013) In the midst of this dilemma the idea of pastoralism appears as a fantasy. Marx states that the yearning for an existence closer to nature is the root of all pastoralism, however “pastoral has never called for an actual return to the challenges of earning a subsistence form the natural world” (Sayre, 2013). This ideal of pastoralism promises a life of happiness without the effort of working to achieve that happiness. Yearning for a life outside the urbanized landscape, immerse in “nature” and “wilderness”, is nothing more than an “image of an undefiled, green republic, a quiet land of forests, villages, and farms […]” (Marx, 2000).

Sayre, G. M. (2013). The Oxymoron of American Pastoralism. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 69(4), 1-23. doi:10.1353/arq.2013.0028

“Instead of flexibility, thus we might now think, more precisely, in terms of undecidability. By this, I mean a landscape's capacity for the precision of form notwithstanding flexibility of program – for the precisely open rather than the vaguely loose. […] Instead, we can conceptualize landscapes where there is space and time for process to unfold and for stable meanings to come forth. […] Activating and articulating scales of undecidability could be the remedy for the formless, ambiguously naturalistic landscapes of conventional planning projects” (Berrizbeitia, 2001). What Berrizbeitia defines as "scales of undecidability", Mathur conceptualizes as "qualities of indeterminacy". Both seek to describe an approach to design that “[spurs] the creation of a new and vastly participatory public realm, one in which many unexpected juxtapositions would unfold, constantly forging new, and destroying unjustifiable,<br> modes of urban life” (Berrizbeitia, 2001). The Indian Maidan reflects a landscape embodied by colonial design, with several design purposes that changed across time and colony. It follows the influence of Islam. The military protection and urban patterns from the British. The nomadic camps from Persian origins. It was acknowledged as a place outside the royal center during the reign of the Muslim kings. It is a collective place for sports and a place for pilgrimage. It has adopted several definitions, and purposes, across time, across reigns, and different cities in India. It was not designed to fit a single purpose, to evolve in any particular way, it has no particular function, and it was not designed for a particular audience. It is a space that was created by the colony but embraced by the Indian community. Even though Berrizbetia might consider it too "vaguely loose" rather than being "precisely open”, in the Indian culture, it has acquired the identity of a place that activates and articulates scales of undecidability. As Mathur described, the Maidan is a landscape that resist s the over-determinism. It encourages "spontaneous appropriation and unplanned transformation”

Berrizbeitia, A. (2001). Scales of Undecidability. In J. Czerniak (Author), CASE: Downsview Park Toronto (pp. 124-125). New York: Harvard University1.

Besides being related to “Scales of Undecidability”, “Neither Wilderness nor Home” can also be related, in a contradictory way, to Olmsted’s design for Central Park. In several of Olmsted’s readings, he has stated his design intentions for Central Park making it a place about social transformation. He intended for his park to be a way for the upper classes to refine and display good behavior for lower classes to learn how to behave. This whole concept is the antithesis of the Maidan. The Maidan, as described by Mathur, is a place for commonness, a nomadic space, a no man’s land. A place for no one, yet everyone. It is a collective space. This collective space contradicts Olmsted design purpose-oriented towards elitism. This says a lot about the culture of both places, one is oriented towards segregation, and the other one towards inclusiveness.

The final relation I can make about this reading is with Crosby's "Ecological Imperialism". Mathur describes the Maidan as a tool for power, that was its original intention. Power for the military to be able to see in the distance any approach from the enemy, power for the colonies to use these spaces as a campsite, and several other reasons. Crosby describes how the Europeans brought their ideas about landscape and forced into the colonized territory. These landscapes were used as a tool to exercise power over the native landscape. Unlike the colonies in the Americas, the landscape of the Maidan was well received by the original inhabitants. People embraced this space as part of their city. It was, and it is seen as an open space for community, rather than a vestige from the colony. In these two readings we have two very different examples, geographically, culturally, socially, environmentally, of how a colonized landscape can transform the territory; and how these transformations can represent a communal, no man’s land, or it can represent a landscape that tells a story about exploitation and slavery.

“Wood finished in glistening black lacquer is the very best; but even unfinished wood, as it darkens and the grain grows more subtle with the years, acquires an inexplicable power to calm and soot” … “We find it hard to be really at home with things that shine and glitter. The Westerner uses silver and steel and nickel tableware, and polishes it to a fine brilliant, but we object to the practice. We begin to enjoy it only when the luster has worn off, when it has begun to take on a dark, smoky patina. Almost every householder has had to scold an insensitive maid who has polished away the tarnish so patiently awaited for”(Tanizaki, 2019). To understand the concept of “mono-no-aware”, which is the idea of the fragility of existence, the perishability of things and of life, one has to read “In Praise of Shadows”. The beauty of Japanese aesthetics lies in its sensibility to time and timing. As Kenkō described “it is infinitely more moving to see the moon near dawn and after long anticipation, tinged with most beautiful palest blue […]”. What Tanizaki and Kenkō are both talking about is this beauty of time, seasons, and the way our existence and the existence of everything that is on earth, is affected by this. Time transforms objects, described by Tanizaki using tableware. However, time also transforms landscapes, as Kenkō suggests the gazing of the moon among cedar branches in “the gathering clouds of an autumn shower”.

Tanizaki, J. (2019). In praise of shadows. London: Vintage Classics.

Terje Østigård is an archaeologist, researcher, and Docent at the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History at Uppsala University, Sweden. In his book "The Religious Nile" he talks about how Egypt was made up of the Nile: the silt created the land and the water gave it life – both qualities and outcomes of the flood, which created an extremely fertile environment. In this same book, just as Cunha did, he researches and analyzes different thinkers, philosophers, and scientists from different periods, who talk about the Nile. One of these philosophers is Seneca. In the book "The Religious Nile", Østigård explains how Seneca wanted to separate the Nile from ordinary rivers; it is unique and exceptional. He said: “There is another type of water which we Stoics like to think began with the universe. If the universe is eternal, this water, too, always existed. Or, if there was some beginning for the universe, this water also was set down along with everything else. You ask what water this is? The ocean and any sea from it that flows between the lands. Some judge that also the rivers whose nature is explicable take their beginning along with the universe itself; such as the Danube and the Nile, rivers so vast and so remarkable that they cannot be said to have the same origin as the other rivers.” (Østigård, 2018) The strong relationship between life and agriculture has been pointed out by many thinkers in ancient times. According to Østigård, there were at least 56 Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman authors who wrote about the grandiosity of the Nile and how its waters shaped human existence in Egypt. In "The Odyssey" Homer named the river Aigyptos. Hesiod writes a poem Theogony talking about a river Neilos. In Egyptian mythology, Egyptians believed Nylus (the Nile) to be a god, the greatest of all God. A god who watered their country and gave life to its soil. Heliodorus a Roman writer, wrote that the Nile is called “Horus”, “the giver of life”, “the savior of all Egypt”, “the father of Egypt”.

Østigård, T. (2018). Sources of Religion. In The religious Nile: Water and society since ancient Egypt (pp. 24-26). London; New York: I.B. Tauris.

Of all the different points of view both Cunha and Østigård mention in their texts, it is Seneca’s understanding of the Nile that I find the most fascinating. When Seneca states that “[…] the Danube and the Nile, rivers so vast and so remarkable that they cannot be said to have the same origin as the other rivers”, I can only imagine the grandiosity and momentum of such rivers that cannot be compared to any other rivers. As a Landscape Architect, it makes me think about what makes certain types of landscapes so memorable that they cannot be compared to another type of landscape because of how magnificent they are. This passage from Seneca, analyzed by Østigård, reveals the strong connection between these men/women, and their environmental context. It feels as if this connection is almost spiritual because they owe the existence of the land, and their existence to natural elements such as the water that flows in the river, and the river itself, the Nile. This connection makes them think of the river as a deity, giving properties and qualities of human nature, to a river. I wonder that is landscape architects, we will ever have the sensibility, and connection to nature the way Egyptians had. It is this connection, just like Seneca described, that separates average rivers, from extraordinary rivers. If we translate this understanding to our profession, this connection will separate our projects, deeply intertwined with nature in a respectful, almost spiritual type of way, to average projects.

In countries colonized by the Europeans, the manipulation and control over the landscape was part of the settlement agenda. In Crosby's reading form last week "Ecological Imperialism", he describes how the region of Argentina and Uruguay was radically altered by the coming of Europeans. "The ancient Indian practice, taken up immediately by the whites, of burning off the old grass of the pampa every year, as well as the trampling and cropping to the ground of indigenous grasses and forbs by the thousands of imported quadrupeds who also changed the nature of the soil with their droppings, opened the whole countryside to European plants." Imposing a foreign landscape in indigenous soil is part of conquering the land and not just its people. Pierre Bélanger, in his essay “No design on stolen land”, argues that the concept of conservation is used to deceive. It normalizes extinction and naturalizes domination. "For the naturalist junta – the generation of conservationists from Theodore Roosevelt to Henry David Thoreau – preservation of nature was the preservation of white supremacy. Naturalism of nationalism. Conservationism as heroism. The picturesque, an imperial gaze." When Ramachandra Guha, states that in South Asia, the forest department "quickly became a reviled arm of the colonial state", he is addressing the fact that "wilderness" is being weaponized as "the raw material out of which man hammered the artifact called civilization" (Bélanger, 2020). This is very particular in colonized countries. Examples of this are seen in several National Parks of the US, such as Yellowstone National Park, located on land that originally belonged to Native Americans.

Bélanger, P et al. (2020). No Design on Stolen Land: Dismantling Design’s Dehumanising White Supremacy. In Architectural Design. The Landscapists. Redefining Relations. 90:1. January/February 2020, (pp. 120-127). Doi.org/10.1002/ad.2535

Crosby, A. W. (1988). Ecological Imperialism: The Overseas Migration of Western Europeans as a Biological Phenomenon. In The ends of the earth: Perspectives on modern environmental history (pp. 103-117). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bogotá, Colombia´s capital, was founded on the hillside of the Andes mountain range that crosses South America on its western side. The Muiscas, where the indigenous group that inhabited this place. Even though their settlements were not located in the hills, they would constantly visit the place as part of religious ceremonies, sacred baths, and to extract healing plants. This indigenous group considered these Western Hills as sacred spaces. With the arrival of the Spanish, invaders founded the city on the hillside of the Andean mountain range. Trees such as the Cedar and Walnut, considered sacred by the Muiscas, were cut down and used for the construction of the newly founded city. With the growth of the Spanish population, the hillside of the Andes was harnessed. Clay, sand, gravel, and wood were extracted in a never-ending cycle of exploitation, completely fragmenting the greatest biological diversity that existed in the zone. As a way to remediate the deforestation, the western hills were planted with eucalyptus, pines, and acacias; foreign species that aggressively expanded to the rest of the western hills that surround Bogotá on its western side. Diana Wiesner, Landscape Architect together with the Mayor’s Office of Bogotá, and the Urban Planning district researched the native ecologies present in the Western Hills. The research is oriented towards the possible reforestation of native vegetation in the hills. Since the 90s there has been a great amount of effort from environmental agencies, both public and private, for reforestation the Western Hills. The species introduced by the Spanish, have diminished the soil from nutrients, what once was highly fertile land, no longer is. These non-native species require great amounts of water using the aquifers of the Western Hills and affecting small populations water sources.

Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá. (2007). Los Caminos de los Cerros. Retrieved October 01, 2020, from http://dianawiesner.com/publicaciones/delautor/Los-caminos-de-los-cerros.pdf

There is a deep connection between all humans and nature, however, there must exist a divine connection between man-made beauty and natural beauty, this is what La Alhambra complex represents to me. It is not only the axial gardens, with water as a defining element, the curation of gardens, the Mexuar, Nasrid palaces, Comares Palace, the Court of the Myrtles and the Palace of the Lions, but the craft and detailing in every inch of the whole complex that has the power to awe the millions of visitors it has every year. That is why the explanation of the chahar bagh as a designing strategy using water distribution for irrigation in the garden can only be a rational and practical explanation as Ruggles stated. Islamic gardens and the Muslim conception of paradise can only come from the detail in description from the Qur’an and the divine relationship between Islam as a religion and the Muslims as its followers who materialized such detailed descriptions from the Qur’an.

Even though Ruggles states that when it comes to the relationship between gardens and Islam, historians are “silent with respect to religious meaning”, I strongly belief that there must be a deep and rooted relationship, whether intentional or not, between Islam and the gardens as depictions of paradise in the Islamic landscape and architecture. La Alhambra is a complex that was originally designed as a military zone and later became the royal residence and court of Granada in the mid 13th century after the establishment of the Nasrid Kingdom. It consists of a series of built towers, palaces, residences and forts connected through a series of gardens. Even though Ruggles states that “there is no evidence in the first four centuries of Islam that gardens were consciously designed with four quadrants and four water channels in order to imitate paradise as the Qur’an described it”, there certainly must be a connection between the religion’s duty of pilgrimage and the procession and its religious representation in the gardens across La Alhambra complex, because these gardens are located before every entrance to every palace in the complex. According to professor Fernando Chueca Goitia, Spanish architect, historian and erudite of Spanish architecture, “the more you contemplate the Alhambra, the more you have the feeling that the ideal of the Arabs was to live on a garden.” The Arab garden expresses the longing for the mohammedan paradise. The life of the Muslims is religiously linked to the idea of paradise, imagined as a garden, a place of delights and pleasures where they can achieve the complete satisfaction of desires. In the Qur’an 61:12 “He will forgive you your guilty (deeds) and cause you to enter Gardens from beneath which rivers run and goodly dwellings in the Gardens of Adn; (Eden) that is the magnificent triumph.” As an architect who has personally visited the Alhambra, the explanation for water in every garden must have an explanation that goes beyond “rational and practical”. The relationship between gardens as the depiction of paradise, and water as the fundamental component in these gardens, one can infer that there must be a strong relationship with these gardens and the central axis of water that crosses them. In Islam, life and knowledge originated from water, it is seen as a divine gift of profound knowledge. In Qur’an 2.164 “and what Allah has sent down from the heavens of rain, giving life thereby to the earth after its lifelessness and dispersing therein every [kind of] moving creature, and [His] direction of the winds and the clouds controlled between the heaven and the earth are signs for a people who use reason”.

Since pre-Columbian times minerals have been extracted from the Bolivian plateau, an immense golden plain, located between the branches of the Andes mountain range. The hills are home to a large part of the raw material of the history of Bolivia: Silver, Tin, Lead, Zinc, etc. Nowadays, mining in Bolivia is done through mining cooperatives, each member is his employer and faces individually or with his work crew, the dangers of the mine, and the imperative of finding ore to earn a living. These workers have a strong connection and devotion with the deities that rule this subterranean world; “the miner has to accommodate himself with the subterranean forces, deities that make up the subsoil universe, while the Catholic god remains at the door of the mine”.

The first ritual that the workers do when they reached the level in depth to start mining is the pinjcheo (to chew coca leaves). The morning pinjcheo is also a ch'alla, an offering that serves to worship the main gods of the subsoil, identified by the miners as Tío of the mine and the Pachamama or mother earth. They serve coca and alcohol to the Pachamama, wetting the earth with a few drops of the liquid. Located inside the mine, there is a clay statue with a diabolical look: it is Tío, the god who accompanies the miner throughout the day who “sees everything” and “knows everything”. Between its red lips, a worker lights a cigar and places some coca leaves and alcohol at his feet. His silhouette of a seated man reigns over the fate of the miners. In the statue of Tío, the erect penis stands out, prepared to fertilize the Pachamama, that is, to produce mineral.

The gods: Pachamama and Tío, complement each other, and there is a continuity between mining cosmology and the beliefs of the field: both perceive the subsoil as a wild, dangerous, and rich world. These gestures remind that mineral production is the result of an exchange between men and gods. The contractual relationship between the miners and the subsoil deities is updated through daily, weekly and annual rituals to preserve both physical integrity and the source of work. It is an asymmetric economic relationship, maintained by obligation, in which the miners are always debtors of the deities. The relationship with the gods is a constant cycle of rituals where the miners through the ch'allas, offer alcohol, coca leaves, cigarettes, llama fetuses, and sweets to Tío. Through the sacrifices of llamas for Carnivals and July 31, the miners thank the gods for help and guidance when entering the mine and extracting its minerals.

Taken from a chronicle written by Thomas Prola, a French anthropologist and journalist, for Colombia’s newspaper Semana

Prola, T. (2010, September 14). Cultos mineros y rituales de producción en las minas bolivianas. Semana. Retrieved September 23, 2020, from https://www.semana.com/mundo/articulo/cultos-mineros-rituales-produccion-minas-bolivianas/121965-3/

The relationship between the gods Pachamama and Tío in the miner’s religious belief system is very similar to the many historical views of nature described in Merchant’s text Nature as Female. Earth is represented by the god Pachamama, which is the Andean deity for the goddess of the Earth. In many indigenous tribes across South America, Pachamama represents the relationship between humans and Nature. As a deity, she protects the Earth’s soil and ecosystem, she advocates for the wellbeing of the ecology where humans play a role in. Therefore, the god Tío, which in Spanish translates to “Uncle”, is the male figure who’s blessing, and help is needed to exploit and extract minerals from Pachamama. As Merchant said in her text “For most traditional cultures, minerals and metals ripened in the uterus of the Earth Mother, mines were compared to her vagina, and metallurgy was the human hastening of the birth of the living metal in the artificial womb of the furnace -an abortion of the metal’s natural growth cycle before its time”. The respect and devotion towards Tío is a sign of respect and devotion towards the god that rules over the soil and subterranean world and who’s blessing the miners need to ripen the minerals out of the Earth Mother.

There is a connection between female-male figures represented in nature across history, different schools of Philosophy, thinkers, and different periods represented in the arts, as Merchant stated in her text. This relationship between the landscape and the duality between female-male figures guides humans in the way they interact with the different forces that govern nature. The Andean experiences of the relationship between nature as Pachamama and miners who violate it with the help of Tío is another representation of “Nature as Female”. This example of the Bolivian traditions in the mining rituals is another depiction of the relationship between the feminine and the masculine in the human versus nature dichotomy.

In a more utilitarian, political, and economical context, mining in Bolivia is largely related to the understanding of the land’s capacity to provide for the thriving of the country. However, the extensive use of these resources can lead people to believe that the land is more capable of providing that it actually is. Our role as Landscape Architects is to identify this breaking point and work with it.

There is a deep connection between all humans and nature, however, there must exist a divine connection between man-made beauty and natural beauty, this is what La Alhambra complex represents to me. It is not only the axial gardens, with water as a defining element, the curation of gardens, the Mexuar, Nasrid palaces, Comares Palace, the Court of the Myrtles and the Palace of the Lions, but the craft and detailing in every inch of the whole complex that has the power to awe the millions of visitors it has every year. That is why the explanation of the chahar bagh as a designing strategy using water distribution for irrigation in the garden can only be a rational and practical explanation as Ruggles stated. Islamic gardens and the Muslim conception of paradise can only come from the detail in description from the Qur’an and the divine relationship between Islam as a religion and the Muslims as its followers who materialized such detailed descriptions from the Qur’an.

Even though Ruggles states that when it comes to the relationship between gardens and Islam, historians are “silent with respect to religious meaning”, I strongly belief that there must be a deep and rooted relationship, whether intentional or not, between Islam and the gardens as depictions of paradise in the Islamic landscape and architecture. La Alhambra is a complex that was originally designed as a military zone and later became the royal residence and court of Granada in the mid 13th century after the establishment of the Nasrid Kingdom. It consists of a series of built towers, palaces, residences and forts connected through a series of gardens. Even though Ruggles states that “there is no evidence in the first four centuries of Islam that gardens were consciously designed with four quadrants and four water channels in order to imitate paradise as the Qur’an described it”, there certainly must be a connection between the religion’s duty of pilgrimage and the procession and its religious representation in the gardens across La Alhambra complex, because these gardens are located before every entrance to every palace in the complex. According to professor Fernando Chueca Goitia, Spanish architect, historian and erudite of Spanish architecture, “the more you contemplate the Alhambra, the more you have the feeling that the ideal of the Arabs was to live on a garden.” The Arab garden expresses the longing for the mohammedan paradise. The life of the Muslims is religiously linked to the idea of paradise, imagined as a garden, a place of delights and pleasures where they can achieve the complete satisfaction of desires. In the Qur’an 61:12 “He will forgive you your guilty (deeds) and cause you to enter Gardens from beneath which rivers run and goodly dwellings in the Gardens of Adn; (Eden) that is the magnificent triumph.” As an architect who has personally visited the Alhambra, the explanation for water in every garden must have an explanation that goes beyond “rational and practical”. The relationship between gardens as the depiction of paradise, and water as the fundamental component in these gardens, one can infer that there must be a strong relationship with these gardens and the central axis of water that crosses them. In Islam, life and knowledge originated from water, it is seen as a divine gift of profound knowledge. In Qur’an 2.164 “and what Allah has sent down from the heavens of rain, giving life thereby to the earth after its lifelessness and dispersing therein every [kind of] moving creature, and [His] direction of the winds and the clouds controlled between the heaven and the earth are signs for a people who use reason”.

The idea of a utopian garden has had a long representation across multiple religions and cultures in history, such as the Royal Gardens, Kew, the Palace of Versailles, and much older representation such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon in the sixth century B.C. However, this reading, focuses only on the cosmological vision of the Chinese dynasties and their reason for the utopic idea of gardens. These gardens are far different from the ones we can read about and understand from other parts of the world, such as monarchies in European countries in the 15th and 16th century. In the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, by André Le Notre, the intention was not to build a sacred park such as Xuanpu, but to create an exhibition that would follow classical architectural principles of symmetry, to show French people the power and magnificence of the royal monarchy. This way of thinking was very common in this type of monarchies, the performative way of communicating power, strength and abundance was through architecture and landscape architecture, which is significantly different to the Chinese intentions for garden design.

However, the reading shows us a different way the Chinese dynasties thought about gardens. These places where used to blur the line between the earthly world and the heavenly one. They were places to get in touch with the sublime. Xuanpu, was a utopian landscape that existed in the collective imaginary of the Chinese. This place had different levels that would allow people to climb from level to level in order to become immortal, acquire magical powers and ultimately become a deity. Even though this place only exists in the imagination and in the oral and written tradition of the Chinese, it could still help to inspire gardens to be designed and built using this one as a reference. This is a way to admire different perspectives other than Eurocentric ideals. By using the inspiration from Xuanpu, designers have the potential to create deeper relationship and emotion with a garden to contemplate beauty in a heavenly place.

Xuanpu as a place defined to be paradise and the entrance to heaven, can also be a perfect precedent to analyze in the study of Landscape Architecture: “There must have been a highly developed tradition of garden design to serve as the source of his inspiration”, therefore, studying these types of gardens, even if they are utopias, can teach us a lot about Landscape Architecture, how it was done back then, and how it can be done now a days. The fact that it is a physical place that exists in the imaginary of ancient Chinese culture, has the strength to inspire designers to create projects that create emotion and different experiences, such as the ones that Xuanpu creates in the Chinese culture. Studying utopias also helps us understand ancient cultures, what were their concerns, their vision of the world, which ultimately gives us a better understanding of the future, oriented in the study of landscape architecture its history, theory and practice.

Contextualize:

This passage from Reinventing Eden that explains the narrative of the fall from Eden according to Christianity, creates an interesting relationship between humans and the landscape, particularly the desert. From several other readings in the Bible, the desert has two connotations, a bad one and a good one. The bad one reflects a place where people go to receive a punishment such as the one described above. This responds to the desert as an archetype of a hell on Earth due to its extreme climate, lack of water sources and harsh conditions for humans to be able to survive, it is the place where one would go to make amends for some wrong doing. In the book of Leviticus and Exodus, Israelites where punished by God and forced to wander in the wilderness of the Sinai desert for 40 years. However, it is also the place for meditations, it is also the archetype of the place where historically people would go in order to look for answers, particularly from God, described in several books from the old testament, like the story of Elijah who found God after wandering in the desert for 40 days. This creates an interesting relationship between religion and landscape that goes far beyond Christianity and can be found in other western and eastern religions.

Relate:

As a geographic place, the relationship humans have historically built with the desert is an interesting one. As a landscape, the desert is everything the garden is not: “[…] the decline from garden to desert [..]”. In the Christian story of Fall and Recovery, the garden has everything to offer to Adam and Eve, and the desert has nothing but misery to live in. As landscape architects this distinction is very interesting to reflect upon. How can we intervene an arid, xeric landscape if according to this reading there is nothing to find there? Or better yet, what are the opportunities of transformation through design that the desert has? The view of nature through Christianity offers an interesting lens to study landscapes. Christianity has shaped a lot of cultures across the world, and culture ultimately shapes who we are. So, if the lens of Christianity is that of using landscapes such as the desert, to punish or reward, what does it say about the landscapes we manipulate, create and ultimately are hoping to design one day?

Contextualize: Visiting the Roman Forum in the summer of 2018, I remember being completely fascinated by what the author describes as the forest reclaiming its grounds: “The work of history fell to the ground it had tried to surmount under the auspices of god”. The fall of the Roman Empire is a way to contextualize this passage because it is an example about the openness of time and the “[…] defiance of the oblivion of nature […]”. Beyond the historical reasons for its demise, the architectural remains of what once was a powerful, wealthy and prosperous empire, that seek to emphasize its influence through the construction of monumental architecture and landscapes, what remains today is just a glimpse of this grandiosity. Today, its architecture, in places where it’s not properly preserved, has been taken away by nature, by its unstoppable growth, where it will eventually fall into oblivion. In the reading, this passage is an introduction to an analysis about “The Epic of Gilgamesh” which is a historical story in the form of poetry that talks about the obsession of humanity to be remembered, the historic quest for immortality, and the human rage against nature for its monumental and infinite power, topics that can be related to the Roman Empire and its desire for dominion and influence across its territory.

Harrison, R. P. (1992). The Demon of Gilgamesh. In Forests: The shadow of civilization (p. 13). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

George, A. R. (1999). The epic of Gilgamesh. New York: Penguin Books.

Relate: History, Theory, and Practice of Landscape Architecture is a course that among several other reasons, seeks to contextualize Landscape Architecture across multiple time periods, cultures, and through the lens of several different landscape architects. This passage from Forests: The shadow of civilization is relevant to the course because it talks about a fundamental concept of a project when designing a landscape: “oblivion”. What is going to happen to the project when maintenance can no longer take care of the design of the landscape? What can we do as landscape architects, when nature claims its room and takes the project away from us? The Roman Forum, in Rome, is an example of this paradox: no matter how hard we try to tame nature, it finds its way back to where it belongs. Floodings, are another example of this. When cities are built too close to the floodplain of a river, the river eventually finds its way back to its territory. The relevance in studying oblivion and the openness of time, is about understanding the temporality and seasonality of projects, ideas, landscapes, constructions, and whatever we, as designers, decide to put out into the world.