I want to be a Landscape Architect...

Below describes how and why I decided to become a Landscape Architect. (1) is a personal statement in application for a Masters that I was about to do before deciding to embark upon Landscape Architecture. (2) is why I changed my mind about the first Masters; and (3) is my personal statement in application of why I want to be a Landscape Architect.

(1)

Upon Completing My Undergraduate Degree

Summer 2011

It would be impossible to sum up everything I feel about architecture in a page, let alone an opening sentence and in addition to not make it sound clichéd. I feel passionate about the role of context in architecture, I feel fearful of the seemingly bland technological direction architecture is heading, I get excited as I walk around buildings, I am interested in the texts of great and modern authors, I am annoyed with the modern condition, I am stimulated by a desire to find solutions and I am hopeful that this will happen. I simply want to continue to explore these reactions and views, to learn more about architecture.

Through my university career we have learnt and studied ancient, renaissance, enlightenment, and modernist texts, which has been exhilarating. Yet rarely is any of it applied to the present state of the western world. I hope to learn how to do this in a more profound, mature and academic manner.  As I have studied architectural history I am now motivated by a desire to study architectural modernity. Particularly how we can learn from our mistakes and reclaim meaning in architecture and use architecture as a keyhole to regain meaning and culture in the larger world. To focus on the paradigm of today’s society, that is to say a sort of cultural fragmentation, with reference to architecture.

Our cities are now seen as a vehicle for individual pursuit. As Richard Sennett has pointed out ‘to know one’s self has become an end; instead of a means through which one knows the world’. The city is thus based on individual pursuits, with an isolation of interests and not, for the most part, public cultural displays. Although my dissertation  (Fashioning Modern Identities: The Bourgeoisie and Architecture in fin de siècle Barcelona and Glasgow) is not about this in particular it is interesting to note how Art Nouveau phenomena can be seen as a spring board for today’s culture and society.

 In addition to this the current debate of styles is also an attempt to regain meaning in culture. However, to achieve a genuine meaning in contemporary architecture it should not be about the traditional v.s the modern, but a symbiosis of both. It is completely anachronistic to recreate a Georgian house but to create a blank glass box is to deny any cultural empathy. Inspired by recent historians like Tafuri, I am also starting to believe that architecture should not be about creating a final situation but should be a process by which we work our way through a situation and learn things along the way, developing more skills. It is hubristic to imagine that there can ever be a perfect end. Society and culture will always have its positives and its pitfalls, it is all we can do learn from our old mistakes and try to solve the new ones that arise. 

I hope to conduct whatever experiments or thesis I engage upon through design and making. With one exception my degree has been entirely text based. The specialisation of disciplines has become so regimented that rarely are alternative methods of learning experienced. Professor Timothy Ingold in a recent lecture on his course in anthropology (The 4 A’s: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture) examines the boundaries between disciplines. By bringing the academic and the practical together one establishes a new way of observing a topic. I believe, fundamentally, this is what the study of architecture should be. When I read about a building I try to visit it, I try to make my own opinions about it, but a more hands on method of learning would only serve to increase my appreciation and understanding of that building. 

(2)

"Now"

In September last year I began a Masters at Kingston University entitled MA Thinking Building; named after the brilliant essay (and focusing on the brilliant cultural sproutings it produced) by Martin Heidegger. The last post is the main thrust of my personal statement in application to the course. This course was everything I believed in - in terms of establishing critical thinking towards architecture today in order to step away from the starchitect - iconic builds that were becoming prevalent across the global skyline and instead preserve some semblance of reason and resonance in the discipline. I had done my reading for the course the summer ahead, I was interested in all the modules, had picked out my first essay topic and been thinking about my masters thesis months before even starting the course. Yet, I was not happy. Within 2 weeks I dropped out.

It became apparent to me that although I had all these things to say; all these ideals and beliefs, I did not have the grounding or the training to be heard - and to be taken seriously. Or so I felt. Of course architecture, urban planning and landscape architecture are wonderfully diverse professions and the interdisciplinary nature of them is what makes it so fascinating. More than ever now we have artists that become community champions, designers that become architects and so on…so perhaps being heard would have happened for me eventually. Yet it was more than that. It wasn’t that I wanted to be heard in a hubristic or prideful way – I didn’t want to shout at the top of my voice in order for my ideas to be at the forefront; I just wanted to help. In a way I felt powerless. I want to do. Not just say.

I am interested by life, society and how we, as communities; or a civilisation, engage in that life...and how we move through the space we inhabit as a part of that life. I am interested by how we, as a social species survive ...no, how we live, and continue to evolve. I believe in many different ways how public space, art, architecture and landscape can influence, shape, help and effect the comings and goings of humanity and I believe in those institutions as redemptive catalysts for good.

I wanted to act practically as well as consider theoretically. I believe to be a truly good designer you must have a balance of these two things; (Theory) knowledge of history and philosophy to make intelligent judgments and importantly to understand the foundations upon which we build and (Praxis) the willingness/ability to go out into the world, commit to the practical and embrace the empirical. Theory is important but context is everything; ultimately architecture is made by, and importantly made for, man.

(3)
Personal Statement

Winter 2011

In order to write this personal statement I have purposely avoided reading too many books on landscape architecture. I do however, have a grasp of landscape architecture’s fundamentals and will pursue the discipline after this application, but in the interim I have generally avoided reading and instead spent time thinking, observing, researching and reflecting upon what I believe landscape architecture is. Moreover, what it can be, what I believe it to be and what I can both gain from and contribute to it. I do not want to fill this application with quotes from noted scholars. I wish to convey to you my raw ambition, belief and passion for landscape architecture.

I believe I hold ample knowledge of the history of landscape architecture and some theory already, having studied Architectural History (with a minor in History of Art for three years out of my four year undergraduate degree) at Edinburgh University. I have studied ancient panoramas with pyramids; Capability Brown, Humphrey Repton and the Picturesque, seminal Baroque approaches; the advent of the Garden City movement and the majority of its descendants. I have read Georg Simmel’s arresting take on the metropolis. My work has been influenced by post-modernists such as Jane Jacobs, as well as Richard Sennett’s views on public space. I hold a passion for history and enjoyed my undergraduate degree enormously. It is with great anticipation that I await further learning about the history of landscape architecture in a more specific sense - that is to say, without a bias towards architecture as my undergraduate degree inevitably held. It is, however, the consideration of contemporary practice that truly excites me; the development of the present and how I can achieve my place in it.

Castle Howard, Yorkshire

So why landscape architecture? Throughout my undergraduate career different strands grasped my attention and yet, somehow they were all interconnected. My dissertation, Fashioning Modern Identities; Architecture and the Bourgeoisie in Fin de Siècle Glasgow and Barcelona, deals explicitly with the bourgeoisie’s withdrawal into private space and the development of the home as an aesthetic refuge. Yet the other side to the very same coin is the development of the outside world, the industrial revolution and its reverberating effects: factories, shopping arcades, a loss of interest in or fear of the outside world, the advance of megapolis and its highways – the transformation of the landscape. This historical development is of special resonance today, in an era where the lines between public and private space are often ambiguous to say the least. For instance the recent Occupy movement in London has revealed the somewhat unbalanced relationship between capitalism, the city and the rights we have as a population to our ‘public domain.’ Landscape architecture is a discipline that can actively help solve these issues in the contemporary city, as it is these very issues that give landscape architecture its raison d’être.

My other interests lie in the matters of sustainability and community. In my ‘Urban Tool box’ are the fun activities of Jane's Walks, Geocaching and PARK(ing) Day. The workshops I took part in during my time at the 2011 Riga Technical University Summer School - "Entering the Void" - helped to reinforce my belief that difference does start locally and a bottom-up management system is preferable one that is dogmatically top-down. Through organising local bike rides, asking locals their opinions and thinking outside of the box, the summer school was a catalyst in my thought process towards deciding to become a landscape architect. It is these ideas that I wish to explore throughout my career as a landscape architect and to also eventually perform a practical based PhD project. Somewhat nearer in terms of the future are my ideas for my MA thesis. I am aware how all my beliefs, the hope of success for all these sustainable community ventures may be perceived as naive by some. In the same sense they may be said to be idealistic or utopian. At a basic level I am thinking about landscape architecture’s contribution to both imaginary and attempted utopian cities.

Leamington Walk, Edinburgh

Billboards above Cowgate, Edinburgh

Grassmarket, Edinburgh

Landscapes that inspire me in particular are the ones I have visited and the ones I have lived in. As my online portfolio shows one of the places that has had the most significant influence on me is the city of Edinburgh. It is a place where calm and quiet can be found in Princes Street Gardens, the Botanical Gardens or the meadows. It can be a series of interesting spaces made possible by the various wynds and alleys of Old Town. It is also a city of transformations as the public space takes on new dimensions in August during the festival or December and January during the Christmas festivities and Hogmanay. My travels to Europe have inspired my desire to learn more about gardening landscapes, especially having seen the ostentatious Borromeo Islands and the elegance of the gardens at the Alhambra. In the running for my favourite public space in the world has to be Piazza del Pubblico in Sienna, for many reasons but not least of all for the reason that when one first sees it there is a realisation that it actually dips in the centre! These landscapes inspire me but so does the park next to my house and so do the views from a window on a train.

Alhambra, Granada, Spain

Human geography, sociology, culture, society, life, architecture, landscape, art - all of these things are landscape architecture. It is this interdisciplinary nature of landscape architecture that appeals to me so. Not just that my passions for art, nature and history, amongst others accumulate here, but because the subject embraces all ranges of society, as well as the issues at stake for defining and protecting that society

Naive or idealistic, I have the desire and the passion to at least try, if not succeed, in making a better order.  I don’t want to however, achieve this solely from a desk typing out reports or plainly researching. I want to visit sites, design, implement change pro-actively, as I did in the recent summer school, or through my volunteer projects - such as that which hoped to save an original 1930s Art Deco cinema in Edinburgh. I believe landscape architecture provides this path for me, because of the reasons mentioned above and because landscapes are the world. It is quid pro quo. We both define and are defined by our surroundings and in this sense landscape architecture is unique, because - allowing myself one quote - as Geoffrey Jellicoe comments, “landscape architecture...cannot be wholly internationalised.” (The Landscape of Man by Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe) This is vital in an era where globalisation holds us in a stringent grip. All roads for me lead towards landscape architecture.

I want to be a landscape architect because I want to contribute my beliefs and ideas to design, communities and social space and to not just make empty theories and suggestions.  In a way I have written this personal statement also for myself. It is a manifesto of the beliefs I hope to explore and confirm as I embark on an MA Landscape Architecture degree. Furthermore it is a nascent form of a manifesto I hope to develop for my career and thus my life.

Sonia Jackett

December 2011