The psychic landscape

"...[H]umans are in a fundamental way place-making animals, revealing in this act their individual and collective dreams. The landscapes that we create are combinations of artifice and nature, and in designing them people of every period have revealed a great deal about their cultural values while demonstrating the perennial exigencies of life and our universal need for water, food, and shelter....As the 20th-century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard posited, when examine space in terms of psychology and phenomenology we find that we are still place-bound creatures, carrying in the recesses of our memories personal histories of spaces we have inhabited and imagined. Further, we carry "placeness" in our genes and in our sensory apparatus as human animals, and because biological nature is till the matrix of our existence we long to feel at one with the natural world."

Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History

"The landscape is alive, it is a text in itself, it is a living text... There is a dialogue between one's internal being, one's psyche, and the nature of place, the landscape. There has to be some connection, some sort of bridge, which allows one to sense all sorts of relationships which one tends to eclipse, which one tends not to see at all."

Wilson Harris, quoted by Michael Gilkes, "The Landscape of Dreams"

I have always been one of those place-bound creatures described by Bachelard, carrying within me all past and present landscapes, real and imagined. I think that I might be a different person if I were to live in a different landscape. Recently, I was introduced to a beautiful corner of Connecticut that is only 2 hours away from New York City, where one's view is of infinite hills and trees under an immense sky. I can imagine myself living here, being in this landscape, happy to watch the fog roll over the hills in the morning. There is silence, open space, and solitude, all of which I often crave.

Kent, Connecticut, November 16, 2010

But in reality, this is where I live. The landscape I know is ultra urban, with its own brand of beauty that never ceases to amaze me. I love the mix of natural wildness and urban architecture jostling for space on the High Line. On a sunny autumn morning like today, there are few better places to be in the city.

The High Line, November 24, 2010

The High Line

Almost a year since its opening, the High Line has proven to be ever more popular. I have found that the best time to visit the place is early in the morning. Unlike Central Park, which Olmstead designed to shut out the city, the High Line's greatest appeal is its engagement with the city. It is said that cultural landscapes are our unwitting autobiography, "reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form." So reading the High Line would tell us that we've moved away from the 19th century romantic idea of nature as something precious and separate from the industrialized cities. It's not that we yearn for nature any less, but we have come to enfold it into our urban space as a necessary part of our landscape. There is no more separation between culture and nature. In fact, both nature and culture are enhanced by their proximity to each other. From its elevated spot, the High Line opens up new vistas to the city below, and its wildness makes a forceful juxtaposition to the architecture around it. For all its high-concept design–and I have yet to see anything more meticulously designed, down to the elegant expansion joints on the paving– what I love best about the park is the way people have made it their own, improvising picnic tables from the long benches and turning the 10th Avenue Square into an outdoor classroom–a watercolor painting class was taking place as I walked it past this morning. And credit must be given to Piet Oudolf's planting design, which does a wonderful job of retaining the some of the wild and rambling atmosphere inherent in park's former iteration as an abandoned railway. Seeing the wondrous plantings–the mounds of grass waving gently in the wind, the bright patches of flowers blooming in between the rail tracks, and groves of amelanchiers laden with deliciously ripe berries–just makes me happy.

The High Line

The first part of the High Line opened officially yesterday.  I loved the lounge chairs on the rail track, positioned just so one can get a good view of the Hudson River. Elsewhere, there are  also nice views of old and new architecture of the city, as represented by the Empire State Building and the Frank Gehry-designed Barry Diller IAC Building. What I liked best of all, however, is the planting design by Piet Oudolf, which manages to retain a certain wildness that was so much a part of the original High Line. It will be even more interesting as the trees–mostly birch and a few oaks–mature in the years to come.