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141 Chapter 3 EFFECTS work. These visual, spatial, and material characteristics are essential to how we experience and understand the landscape, yet, as one critic recently notes, we do not discuss them; rather, we describe frameworks , emergence, and the performative aspects of landscape.1 This dichotomy evokes the double meaning of effect: on the one hand, it concerns appearance or outward sign, and on the other, it means to influence or bring about. The relationship between these two definitions is far from agreed upon in terms of what, if anything, the perceptual aspects of landscape can convey: some believe that there is a close relationship between appearance and influence, and hold to the idea that experience can produce effects that are understood as ethical or didactic in nature; others presume that there is an intractable gap between the physical form of the design and how people will experience, use, and interpret such forms and, for that reason, see little reason to examine the particulars of a design or designer’s intent. Though these two views are ideologically contrasting, they both conflate perception and A park is a work of art, designed to produce certain effects upon the mind of men. —Frederick Law Olmsted The different effects which art is able to produce, however various and incommensurable they may radically be, are commensurable at least in this: that each in some degree makes a demand on our attention. —Geoffrey Scott CAREFULLY SCULPTED GROUND—CHARACTERIZED BY STEEP SLOPES, ANGULAR EMBANKMENTS , AND SHARP RIDGE LINES—TOGETHER WITH STARK CONTRASTS AMONG VEGETATION, TEXTURES, AND COLORS, DISTINGUISHES HARGREAVES ASSOCIATES’ 142 chapter 3 communication, where communication is presumed to correspond to specific meanings. This chapter charts a middle-ground; one that does not define communication as explicit meaning or knowledge, but nevertheless trusts in the efficacy of design to make relationships legible. The correlation between appearance and influence is not as transparent as it was once believed to be. For instance, Olmsted believed that psychological effects could be directed toward particular ends. In eighteenth-century aesthetic theory, on which he based much of his inspiration, the premise of associationism “held that certain experiences evoke specific corresponding emotions, which in turn elicit effects that are at once sensuous and of ethical and didactic significance.”2 To speak of a work producing such directed responses seems untenable today, yet there are attempts to do so. For example, even though the “problem” of subjective interpretation was already identified by the end of the eighteenth century, a fact Elizabeth Meyer notes at the beginning of a recent essay on beauty and sustainability, she asserts that “immersive, aesthetic experience can lead to recognition, empathy, love, respect and care for the environment.”3 Though Meyer “do[es] not believe that design can change society,” she does “believe it can alter an individual’s consciousness and perhaps assist in restructuring her priorities and values.”4 However, the fact that different values are projected onto, not inherent in, landscapes, is clear in the fight over Guadalupe River Park. People looking at the same landscape will never see the same landscape because what we see is as much in our minds as before our eyes.5 Though it is not contentious to maintain that immersive experience produces ways of knowing that cannot be accessed through other means, or that an experience can be transformative, if aesthetic responses are to be directed toward particular ends (such as restructuring priorities and values), this cannot be based on sensory qualities alone but must be informed by knowledge. For example, familiarizing and educating people about biodiversity might make them more prone to accepting “messier” landscapes and eventually replacing lawns with meadow, thereby increasing habitat and minimizing chemicals and water use. This can ultimately change landscape preferences as meadow, not lawn, becomes the new norm;6 however, this gradual societal change in landscape preference is brought about by a myriad of influences (media, education, legislation) and is quite distinct from a phenomenological approach where it is presumed that individual responses to individual landscapes can produce a directed consequence . In other words, experience alone is not effective in the way Meyer hopes. A position that is more aligned with the definition of effects employed here is that of Nicklas Luhmann , who argues that what is at stake in art is “the provocation of a search for meaning that is constrained by the work of art without necessarily being determined in its results.”7 Notwithstanding that landscape cannot be confined to the...

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