The Landscape of Time

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More than 1 million trees were planted on the site. A tree nursery was also located on the site; every year it produces 30 million trees that are then planted throughout Mexico City. Canals were cleared of harmful vegetation and rehabilitated for recreation as well as agriculture.

Today, pole barges ply the canals of Xochimilco, especially on weekends; gondolas and gondoliers are available for hire at embarcaderos built along the edge of the site. Out in the canals, you can collect sustenance for body and soul: At one edge of the chinampas landscape is a hectare park, whose different zones emphasize natural, recreational, and interpretive areas. Water again provides the basis for design: A visitor center completes the complex. From the entry, a meter pergola leads to an embarcadero, past an arboretum and flowerbeds representing the productive activities dispersed across the chinampas.

The remaining park area features playing fields and ball courts, wetlands to collect storm water runoff, and demonstration agricultural zones. To enhance economic activity on the site, the largest flower market in Mexico City was built adjacent to the main highway approach. Its 1, stalls are fully leased and very busy, especially on weekends.

In all, the park is a microcosm of the larger landscape, highlighting its ecological, historic, agricultural, and recreational attributes. More than something just to look at, this is a working landscape. Each uses the history of its site to create stirring places and compelling cultural narratives. Each envisions landscape as both natural and social space embodying the potential of design to enhance cultural and biophysical phenomena. Both reveal the capacity of landscape architecture to address the challenges of degraded landscapes and to achieve at least some level of sustainability.

And both are works of art; they attain a kind of iconic power in their revelation of the problems and the possibilities of the contemporary landscape. Entropy is disorder or randomness in a system. In thermodynamics, entropy measures the quantity of thermal energy, or heat, available for useful work: According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics—the law pertinent to my argument—the change in entropy of a system during any process is either zero or positive; that is to say, the amount of disorder in an isolated system is always stable or increasing.

Time Landscape

Shuffle a deck of cards, and the result will be as or more random than the initial sequence; the cards will not organize themselves into suits or into numerical order. Heat flows only from a hotter substance to a colder one, never the reverse. Gas expands to fill its container; it will not contract. As heat is dispersed or as gas expands, entropy increases. Natural processes result in a universe of greater entropy.

Those conversant with the language of contemporary art know that entropy was a particular preoccupation of Robert Smithson. Several of his earthworks can be interpreted as pedagogic exercises in entropy. Smithson dumped asphalt into a quarry and let it run randomly down a slope; he piled dirt on the roof of a woodshed until the supporting beams cracked. On a broadly theoretical level, Smithson recognized that patterns of human and natural disturbances in the landscape were undermining the reassuring conventions with which landscape has been represented.

To Smithson, the struggle against chaos was enormously intriguing. To organize this mess of corrosion into patterns, grids, and subdivisions is an esthetic process that has scarcely been touched. How is entropy relevant to landscape projects like Duisburg or Xochimilco?

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In each project, the designers addressed conditions that were highly entropic. At Xochimilco, the islands were sinking, the soil eroding. Water was polluted; the land was unproductive, the edges of the site compromised by chaotic urbanization. At Duisburg, the steel works had been demobilized, the energy removed from the site in a literal way; what remained was contaminated earth, polluted water, and abandoned infrastructure. Entropy still marks Xochimilco: All designed landscapes can be seen, in some ways, as expressions of the entropic passage of time.

Here too one can find resonances between landscape and contemporary sculpture.

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The work of Richard Serra, especially, has been studied for how it encourages, even impels, motion through space and over time as a condition of its perception. But the time of sculpture, usually, is limited to the perceptual experience. The time of landscape architecture is more complex. No place is a tabula rasa, without history; any intervention by any designer is part of a series of interventions, of marks already inscribed or yet to be inscribed on the site. Every design is subject to the actions of dynamic and unpredictable natural and cultural forces—the continual transformations produced by growth and decay, for example, or by changing patterns of social use and habitation.

Of course, entropy is only one of many forces at work in the world. Current scientific studies of complexity propose that there may be some counterforce to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, exemplified in the tendency of matter and biological life toward ever-greater levels of organization.

Many natural systems are aptly described as chaotic—the weather, the flow of turbulent fluids, the orbit of particles—and in such systems, small changes in initial circumstances can produce big differences in subsequent conditions. But complex systems seem to change within predictable limits and to exhibit tendencies toward self-similar patterns, or fractals.

Thus the temperatures at a given place on the globe will vary, but within predictable limits; clouds and waves will resemble each other but will not be exactly the same. Complexity science attempts to describe such patterns. It depicts a world that is dynamic and mutable but self-organizing at ever finer levels, for instance in the emergence of life from inert matter, in the evolution of more elaborate life forms from simpler ones, and in the increasingly intricate interdependencies within complex ecosystems like coral reefs and rain forests.

Complexity theory might serve as a useful metaphor for contemporary cultural practice. An appreciation of complexity might make cultural responses more discriminating, more robust. Landscape architecture is today exhibiting, in its own way, the tendency toward greater organization and complexity described by theorists and scientists, and in so doing it is endeavoring to keep at bay randomness and disorder.

And it is this tension—between order and disorder, between organization and entropy—that provides much of the narrative power of contemporary landscape architecture. Long overshadowed by architecture and the fine arts, landscape architecture is producing remarkable transformations in our public environments. The profession is maturing, conceptually it is more complex. It is developing the artistic and technical tools to address extraordinary social and environmental demands. The ways in which we understand and represent our relationship with nature are enormously important in the expression of culture.

The ways in which we meet the challenges of urban sprawl, open space preservation, resource consumption and waste, and environmental protection and restoration are crucial to the quality of our lives—maybe even to the survival of our species. It is landscape architecture that confronts these challenges. I wish to make an extreme statement, if only to make an emphatic one: Laurie Olin, letter to the Graham Foundation, August 3, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, , xxi.

Diana Balmori, in conversation with the author, January New York University Press, , General introductions to complexity science include M.

Simon and Schuster, and Roger Lewin, Complexity: Charles Jencks has begun to discern the relationship between complexity science and contemporary design. More Definitions for landscape. See the full definition for landscape in the English Language Learners Dictionary.

Words that rhyme with landscape. Translation of landscape for Spanish Speakers. Translation of landscape for Arabic Speakers.

What made you want to look up landscape? Please tell us where you read or heard it including the quote, if possible. Test Your Knowledge - and learn some interesting things along the way. Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! What origins we bring to you and your kin. A word with surprisingly literal origins. Do you feel lucky? How we chose 'justice'. And is one way more correct than the others? How to use a word that literally drives some people nuts. The awkward case of 'his or her'. Identify the word pairs with a common ancestor.

Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words? Other Words from landscape Verb landscaper noun. Synonyms for landscape Synonyms: Noun chorography , geography , geomorphology , terrain , topography Visit the Thesaurus for More. Examples of landscape in a Sentence Noun She likes to paint landscapes.

The farm is set in a landscape of rolling hills. He gazed out at the beautiful landscape.

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