Ethics/Aesthetics

At 255 feet (78 metres) the Arts Tower of the University of Sheffield, one of the few tower buildings in the city, provided an amazing panoptic vista across the rolling landscape in which the city nestles. For landscape architects this sense of prospect was in itself one of the features of the conference, offering the possibility of reading the landscape, appreciating the topography, and discovering the city’s genius loci. The downside to the Arts Tower venue was that the renovations of this 1960s heritage building were running behind schedule and were not complete in time for the conference. Despite the evidence of workers, hoardings, and construction activity, the Department of Landscape was an excellent host.

The conference explored questions that are fundamental for the discipline. Introducing the first keynote speaker, Anna Jorgensen from the organizing committee voiced her hope that the conference would “increase our aesthetic and ethical literacy.” While these two elements might be taken for granted as foundations for landscape architecture, it is necessary to challenge and critique the ways in which they are played out. The first keynote speaker offered just such a challenge. Christina von Haaren, Professor of Landscape Planning and Nature Conservation, Leibniz University Hannover, Germany, presented the argument that there is a gap between landscape planning and landscape design. This dislocation, she suggested, is not simply one of scale, but also a philosophical one. At the broad scale of landscape planning the concern is primarily with ethics, and at the site scale the focus is on aesthetics. Through this bold statement the consequences of how we negotiate aesthetics and ethics in research and in practice were immediately evident.

The second keynote speaker, Ken Worpole, a writer, environmentalist, and Senior Professor at The Cities Institute, London Metropolitan University, addressed the ethics of “edgelands” or terrain vague that exist on the periphery of cities, in marginal places like coastal Essex, north and east of London. Worpole interprets these landscapes as challenges to aesthetic appreciation. Defying conventional ideas of beauty, they still provide a magnetic attraction. As in the title of a recent collection that includes an essay by Worpole, this is about the “re-enchantment of place” (Robson and Evans 2010)—a resuscitation of ideas on beauty and resistance to apathy toward ordinary landscapes.

As an adept re-enchanter of place, Georges Descombes presented his exquisite, poetic vision for the landscape of the River Aire near Geneva. Descombes, an architect, landscape architect, visual artist, and Professor of Architecture Emeritus at the University of Geneva, demonstrated the sense of divining beauty in a pleasant but otherwise unremarkable landscape. Following his principles of minimal insertion, identifiable intervention, and reversibility, Descombes’s design is redolent of his work on the Swiss Way, documented in Corner’s Recovering Landscape. Breathtaking in its understatement, Descombes’s work is an antidote to the excesses of conspicuously consumerist landscapes, and provides an undeniable sense of what it is to combine aesthetics and ethics in a meaningful way.

As is the case with large conferences, the other presentations were made in parallel sessions. The themes were Everyday Landscapes, Vegetation and Water, East West North South, Education, The Garden, and Wild Card. Not knowing then that I would be writing this review, my attention was focussed almost exclusively on the Wild Card theme, for which I had been invited to report back in the plenary session as a Scientific Advisor. That theme provided an array of presentations that circled the topic of aesthetics and ethics, with a tendency towards theory and critique. The challenges to the discipline were inspiring, and presented some sobering reflections on what we do. For example, Noel van Dooren’s study of digital imagery highlighted the seductive language that is used in the representation of landscape, begging the question of what we are saying and what we are selling—where are the ethics within this aesthetic practice? This was echoed in Katie Kingery-Page and Howard Hahn’s presentation exploring students’ use of a...