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Ideal landscapes – landscape design between beauty and meaning

Carola Wingren

[Insert Illustration 1 here – landscape]

Caption illustration 1: A so called No man’s land encircled by the same road system as the Parc Trinita
in Barcelona

The traces of modernistic planning, with its peak in the 1960s, has left a landscape where
people’s lives are separated in spaces for work, dwelling, travelling, or dying. In between
these areas especially along big roads there is often a gap or an undefined space that we do not
know what it is, often called a no man’s land or non-places. Opening up for more dirt, more
refuse or even vandalism, these untidy areas introduce anxiety for decline and decreased real
estate prizes. These areas often are regarded as places of loss or lost space by planners as well
as by the citizens. Many are the commands from the public asking for a better, a more useful
and especially a more beautiful landscape here. But is beauty always the right answer to this
quest? In my practical work as a landscape architect I have often found that it is not the
ugliness of spaces that is in most cases the problem. Instead it is the meaninglessness.

In this article I deal with the quest for beauty that I have found has very much to do with
meaning. Instead of using the concept of beauty I introduce a concept that I call ideal
landscape. This concept stands for what my clients often call beauty but that I through practice
have found is about something else. The ideal landscape responds to a quest for the best
solution for a space, and is completely related to the person that thinks of it, the client, the user
or the architect. In the best of situations these visions of the ideal landscape for a certain space
coincide, and then all of the participants in the process will feel satisfaction. This is seldom the
case and therefore It is interesting to reflect and discuss on beauty, meaning and ideal
landscape, what it is in every situation for the persons involved.

My way of dealing with this subject here is to present a chronological story about experiences
made and knowledge gained in a cumulative process in my own practice as landscape
architect. This cumulative knowledge process starts in the lost landscapes in the buffer zones
of the road environment in the mid 1990s. It continues with an example of a landscape
architect’s work to find a solution to this loss and the quest for meaning. And it ends up in a
new project dealing with memory and meaning as such, drawing in the experiences from the
road environment projects. This last project, Designing Places for Memory and Meaning in
Contemporary Urban Landscapes, is a three year Swedish research project financed by
FORMAS. In this project with inspiration from private ways of mourning relatives and
landscapes, we try to find new ways for dealing with memorial sites in a contemporary and
secularised society, corresponding to needs of today’s urbanised citizens. Even if spirituality in
the traditional and religious way has lost importance in today’s society, many people search
for new and private ways of involving things such as contemplation or the sacred in their lives,
especially in times of loss. And initially we have found indications pointing at the importance
of nature, the natural, the landscape and the environment to people in daily life and especially
in a moment of loss and sorrow.

So this story takes place in landscapes of loss of different kinds but with similarities; the
motorway landscape and the memorial site. What they have in common that may be a
prerequisite for its becoming a place of loss, is their character of spaces to pass through. The
very meaning of these landscapes is the rite or action of passage. This is also the reason why I
call them landscapes of passage, both comprising different worlds with different velocities. In
the passage landscape of road environment very little is done to symbolise this passage,
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instead the road environment is often characterised by its untidiness and lack of symbols and
meaning. In the burial or memorial site on the opposite it is common to introduce objects or
symbols, to give meaning to this place of passage. In this article I let different projects tell the
story about introducing or not introducing symbols and making meaningful actions as a
planner and architect. And even if the passage landscape is not the principal issue for this
article, it is the place where everything happens; the lack of maintain, the absence of place
feeling, the felt need to change this and to fill the landscape with meaning especially by the
architect. That is why this story has two lines. One is that of beauty, meaning and ideal
landscape where I involve the subconscious, the unknown, the dark and the contradictory. The
other is that of the undefined in between landscape: landscape-as-passage, as a spatial
phenomenon.

Reflective attitudes towards the commissioning of beautiful landscapes

As a practising landscape architect, my task is often to respond to a quest for ideals such as
beauty, harmony and comfort. In dwelling areas, schoolyards, city places, museum yards etc, I
have tried to deal with these kinds of commission in a reflective way. Getting input and
inspiration from the users as well as from historical and contemporary design of similar
projects, I have developed a repertoire to pick from when forming new solutions that could
suit clients, users and me as the architect. Starting with road planning and design in the city
areas in the beginning of the 1990ies, in a time when beauty became almost like a mantra for
the Swedish Road Administration, I needed to ask myself what this concept of beauty
represented. My repertoire in this field was very small, and when I looked around for more, it
was difficult to find good examples. Mostly the roadside areas were left over land where
nothing was really taken care of. And if it was taken care of I mostly found small decorations
of plants that were not at all adjusted to the scale and the character of the road. Why couldn’t
road landscape design and planning be good landscape architecture like for other areas in the
city? Was it a problem with the commission for beautiful road that was never really defined or
equipped with a precise budget, or was it the lack of knowledge in this new field among
architects?

I started to work from my position first by observing and trying to understand, and then by
changing my way of working. The lack of best practice was obvious and a problem in this
process. Best practice could be described as the fore front in a field, like the most important
research articles. These articles or projects contain new knowledge that will be used and
reused in the profession to make new knowledge in the field. In architecture the most
important exploration and development of the core of the field are still done in practice and not
in academia, and this is the reason why it is important to develop this common best-practice
front line architecture. I would say that it is an expression, or a product, of accepted expertise
in the field of practitioners.

The lack of best practice in the field of road landscape planning and design turned it into an
experimental studio for design methods for many architects and especially artists. Artists for
whom the road landscape was of course a tempting place to be exposed to many people.
Landscape architects that more often have an idea of being in service of nature happened
instead to often be very defensive or passive to a possible change of the existing landscape.
Their addition could be some tending of bushes or fields or making small additions such as
tree rows along the road. A result of these attitude towards a change in the landscape more
based on other kind of projects than of knowledge in the field, has often been that the road was
left as a strange 40 meter wide alien band running through the existing structures. In what was
defined as a beautiful rural or urban landscape it became a strange and disturbing element. It
could also become an element that diminished natural and historical structures and that
removed the understanding of the place, as well as the meaning of the landscape itself. I was
not happy with this, so my attitude when trying to find good answers to the beauty commission
without limits or definition, was to look behind the commission of beauty, to try to understand
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what people really asked for and how it would be possible to fulfil this need - to operationalize
the request for beautiful roads. To do this, I reflected on my own practice.

Starting in the mid 90s, a set of different city access road projects, where I have taken part as a
project leader, as a designer, and as an exhibitor has become my empirical base to develop
knowledge and writing about road and landscape. First came some city access road projects
ordered as beauty commissions by municipalities. In cities like Norrköping and Skövde, with
inspiration from a project in Helsingborg, we worked with sequences of characteristic
landscape types along the road, influenced by the city areas close to it (Wingren, 1998). These
where projects dealing with cleaning up among signs and poles in the roadscape itself together
with reinforcing different characters along the road. This was made both by introducing a kind
of grammar in the use of road equipment as well as reinforcing interesting or nice characters in
the landscape along the road. The commission for beauty became in many ways an answer of
beauty but also of meaning. These projects where very important to me and the base for my
future projects. Almost at the same time I got the possibility to work, still as consultant with a
project called Trafikantupplevelse på väg (i.e. motorists’ experiences as road users), that
resulted in a book defining parts of the concept of landscape scenery - an important issue in
environmental impact assessments (Bucht et al, 1996). In this work we found concepts such as
practicability, understanding and orientation, variation and rhythm behind the quest for beauty.
In the documents and literature we saw how aspects in the landscape such as rivers, fences,
stone walls, houses etc were put forward to tell something about the landscape and to give an
experience of interest to the road user. Of course the beauty was there, but the meaning of
things seemed to us to be even more important.

[Insert illustration 2 here – landscape]

Caption illustration 2: Photo collage showing how a baled silage landscape can influence the visual
experience in the monastery garden of Varnhem, Sweden

My thought about beauty and landscape and meaning had of course started earlier than with
these projects. One way of approaching the subject of people’s experiences of the landscape
from the road went through an architecture criticism competition by ARKUs, where I dealt
with the white baled silages then entering the landscape (Wingren, 1993, 1994). Not only
writing about agricultural expressions and change in a rural landscape as a phenomenon of
architecture and art, but also winning the first prize with the essay showed me that the white
baled silages in the landscape was an issue affecting everybody, even the urbanised Swedish
people living far from the countryside. The discussion among people had at this time very
much to do with the ugliness of those baled silages, and especially with their influence on a
well known and loved agricultural landscape. Even if the function to do silage as food for the
animals was not new, and even if the pattern made in a practice oriented way by the machines
dropping them all over the field in what I called a starry sky was similar to the old fashioned
ways of putting hay on poles, this new addition in the landscape seemed strange to people. The
shape of the bales, their plastic material as well as their colour, may have been the reasons
why many Swedish people could still not accept them. Probably it confronted their idea of an
agricultural landscape based on memories, traditions and culture.

In my essay, I tried to see the landscape and the work of the farmer from another view than
that of a cultural landscape to problematise the change of it. I proposed that the farmer didn’t
only have practical reasons for his disposition of the baled silages in a special pattern, but also
an artistic one. This minimalist way that I proposed as strategy for the farmer could be
compared to activities by land artists such as Cristo and Jeanne Claude, Walter de Maria etc.
This opened for a discussion about who has the right to design the landscape and with which
incitements. It also opened for a discussion about where such changes are allowed to take
place and where they can not, according to the visual or to precious and common landscape
memories. The minimalist addition of baled silages to the landscape made by the farmer was
for me positive as a road-user experience on road 49 between the cities of Skara and Skövde in
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Sweden. It told something about what was happening in the landscape, and that we as citizens
needed to know and understand. By a photo montage I also put forward how this installation
by the farmer could influence in a different way in another field closer to the monastery ruins
of Varnhem, a cultural heritage of this area. With its pattern of white plastic balls spread over
a field it would be competitive to the architectural pattern of columns in the monastery ruin
itself. In the article I gave no answer about what should be permitted or not. But I gave an
indication about the need to go behind the discussion of beauty, to see what it stands for.

Working with the article about the baled silage landscape opened my eyes widely towards two
things. One was the importance of the road landscape experience, for the connection with our
history as well as for our knowledge about a contemporary use of the landscape as productive
area. The other was the importance of people’s own memories from earlier experiences of
landscapes, and its influence on the idea of beauty when making decisions about landscape
changes. The baled silage landscape essay shows in a way the importance of the rural for the
urban mind, and the intertwining between them even very far from the city itself. This
landscape is a place where life is going on beside the road as well as on it in two different
velocities. It is two different worlds or spaces, that can be compared or described by the words
of Manuel Castells as the space of place and the space of flow (Castells, 1999). People look at
each other and comtemplate the other world. Castells describes how it is important in
architecture to create a strong feeling for place for the people in the space of flow.

A landscape architect that has tried to do so is Bernard Lassus (Lassus, 1998). He has in
resting-areas along big roads exaggerated and reformulated the history of the place to an extent
where the roadside has become an interesting garden and not only a practicability. Instead of
being satisfied with the excavation of the site the Quarries at Crazannes on a highway in
France, he goes further and create more of and elaborate the already existing relicts, to make
the already interesting landscape even better. Lassus landscape design has been debated and
not always loved in a France influenced by modernity as much as Sweden. I believe that
Lassus according to this aspect of introducing a more elaborated language in architecture filled
with symbols, memories, stories and otherness may have been a trend setter in landscape
architecture.

From beauty to the sublime

[Insert illustration 3 here – landscape]

Caption illustration 3: Photo collage showing the idea of the Filter project

In a project called the Filter my engagement and preoccupation with city access road projects
and the difficulty to find solutions for the landscape part, was given a new turn in the direction
of Lassus ideas. After several years of working with city access road projects principally
cleaning up the road environment and using the existing landscape for road user experiences in
nice sequences I found that this was not enough. The landscape stayed rather uninteresting and
undefined. The strength of the road, its size, its noise and its importance made it difficult for
me to make the landscape become important enough. Thinking, writing and applying for
research money to study the subject I finally got the possibility to show my raw ideas in an
exhibition at the Architecture Museum in Stockholm in 1998. I made a proposal for the
undefined prototype city access road or the city’s threshold as I called it.

The new and raw idea was to let the landscape around the road be a world, different from the
road as well as from the city itself. A world that was strong and wide enough to become a
place of its own. It should be of a long distance to give the people time to be adapted to the
city or to the rural landscape while travelling from one world to the other. It should be wide to
let it influence the flow of people travelling on the road and to give place for the people living
beside it to use these areas for recreation of another kind than in the well planned city park, so
that humans interested in wilderness could feel at home as well as frogs and birds of different
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kinds. In the exhibition I presented the project The Filter as a multi-dimensional installation of
an imagined future city access road situation where the road user were framed by large and
wild wetlands, ordered up only by some tree rows like an orientation and velocity adjuster for
the road user. With images, sound, smell and tactile feeling from humans, water, plants and
earth the visitor could pass on a metallic grid floor through a semi-transparent box to get the
feeling of the difference between a wet surrounding land – an otherness, and the structured and
almost sterile road. This wild and “unplanned” should be something of its own, contrasting
with the rest of the city and the road. Through this contrasting landscape the road-user should
filter into the city or out from it, washed from impressions from the other side and helped to
take in new.

When looking back to the Filter project I can detect two lines of inspirations. One is dealing
with a pattern describing the surface and the extension of the Filter land. This formal or
structural line is an inspiration more linked to professional knowledge caught through my own
education in the early 80th where form and pattern where dominant as design strategies. The
second has more to do with the meaning of the place, and what I have found lacking in many
projects through my own practice experience. This line of inspiration has more to do with a
suppressed need of personal expression that goes deeper and that I have not been aware of in
the beginning of my career as it was not taught or articulated during my early years of study
and professional practice.

Most directly the structural inspiration came from a project in Barcelona called Fossar de la
Pedrera, which is a burial place in a former quarry from the time of Franco’s dictatorship.
Redesigned by the well known landscape architect Beth Gali when making it a memorial site
in the 1980th, it became a sacred place with a very simple design of a mostly modernist kind.
What I found especially interesting when visiting the place the first time in 1989 was the
entrance to it. When arriving to the cemetery, there was an open wall or filter zone composed
by high and thin cypresses and stone pillars with all the names of the dead written on them.
The idea of the composition was to let people filter in from the world outside to have the time
to acclimatize and get an understanding of another world, that of the burial site.

This influenced me when making a filter area around the road, between rural and urban.
Similar between cemetery and road situation was the meeting or confrontation of two
velocities or states, where one is slow compared to the other. In the cemetery the slow ones are
the dead whose names are put on the pillars and the fast ones are the visitors passing through
the filter area in and out from the cemetery. In the road the people living beside the road using
the wet lands for recreation, are the slow ones or the dwellers. And it is the people driving in
cars who are the fast ones or passers by. They can observe but never really be part of the place
around the road as they are moving to fast. And the dwellers can not be part of the space on
the road as they are moving to slowly. And even if they are very close in location, these places
are far away from each other because of their contrast in state, quality, velocity and character.
Again it is possible to use the terminology of space of flow and space of place from Castells.
This lack of contact between spaces needs to be elaborated through architecture, Castells says.
Beth Gali tries to do so by a landscape design filled with pillars and cypresses, and not only by
a real distance. The road department and the cities has to often used only a noise barrier or
some left over areas instead of designing this landscape with architecture.

In the Filter project, its extension and its patterns of tree lines or axes in the form of a folding
fan is one of the answers to this need for design. This answer is very formal, related to the
change of velocity that I as designer wanted to introduce in the road user’s behaviour, from
fast to slow and opposite when coming to or leaving the city. The other answer has more to do
with the unknown, the unconscious, or the dark. What I am doing when introducing the wild in
the Filter project within its limits and together with a formal design, is to introduce the idea of
real nature, or with J D Hunts words the first nature along the road. But I do it as a kind of
garden or with Hunts words a third nature (Hunt, 2000). It is a play in contemporary time with
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the lack of contact with first nature, the unknown, the secret, the sublime and maybe even the
sacred. It can be compared to the planning of national parks where authorities from a certain
time decide to keep the place as a relic or as a garden as close as possible to the idea of a first
nature. What differ with the Filter is that it would be totally new and created by human hand.
The Filter project was very different from my earlier works in Norrköping or Skövde where
we had stuck to the place and the existing landscape instead of creating a new.

In the Filter project, I took my inspiration from fantastic landscapes met in literature and
reality, having less to do with my practice as landscape architect than with my own process of
knowing landscapes different from each other, that goes on through a whole lifetime. There
where the inspiration from wetlands close to my home town Skövde in southern Sweden as
well as from my hiking in the north of Sweden as a young person. The most important
inspiration came from a book written by Birgitta Trotzig, with a story about a girl and her life
in the wetlands outside the city of Kristianstad in the south-east of Sweden (Trotzig1994). The
feeling of fear, tension and disgust that I felt when reading this book, together with the
understanding for the importance of those wetlands to people living there has made those
impressions staying in my mind as a discussion about meaning and beauty. In the same way as
the novel of Trotzig was very physical the Filter project also involved inspirations from
experiences of secret places, as the sacredness of the living body or organism. In the proposal
at the museum the filter zone became an elongated threshold of the city, a limit composed as a
whole world to pass, when coming into the city or leaving it. Instead of letting order and
orientation, understanding, functionality and rhythm take the principal place like in the former
works of Skövde and Norrköping, I let the disorder invade the place when reintegrating an
uncontrolled nature into the city.

So what did this introducing of the wild and wet into the city represent? Why was it so
important to me? Firstly it was an ecological action to keep the water in the city in a time
where the groundwater level is threatened. Secondly I wanted to introduce another kind of
world that corresponded to the darker side of the human or of the landscape, something that
was described by Birgitta Trotzig and that I knew in my mind was important to human beings.
Many are those philosophers, among others Burke, writing about these darker sides that we
often avoid or put away but that we seem to need. In the book Landscape and memory by
Simon Schama we can also read about these darker sides especially in the last chapter Arcadia
redesigned (Schama 1996) where he wants to put forward that Arcadia can both be the
harmonius and the dark and the sublime and that we as humans need both sides:

“The urban context of this little drama is important. Arguably, ‘both’ kinds of arcadia,
the idyllic as well as the wild, are landscapes of the urban imagination, though clearly
answering to different needs. … civility and harmony or integrity and unruliness?...”
(Schama, 1996)

Schama describes Burke as the godfather of the aesthetics of awefulness, and writes that
according to him anything that threaten self-preservation is a source of the sublime.
Comparing with my inspirations for the Filter project and the wild, unknown and the otherness
that I am introducing for the first time in my road planning and design at that time, I would say
that this action is an action guided by the sublime. Inside the frame of the city, close to
civilisation and close to security these kinds of challenges are possible or maybe even
necessary. In the interrelation between structure and non-structure, between harmony and
disorder and between light and grassy and dark and wet, people can be given experiences to
fulfil the need for an Arcadia redesigned as described by Schama. It is interesting to see in the
description in this book of the architect Annette Homann how she chooses a passage landscape
as well, this time between park and city in Ottawa, to try to introduce otherness beside form in
architecture. As an inescapable shadow the concept of beauty remains she says, even when she
introduces the task of using Joseph Beuys as a shepherd in the students work. When
introducing fat as material she forces her students to get into the world of Joseph Beuys, filled
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with other questions and concepts than those mostly used in a clean and beautiful architecture.
Homanns working methods opens up for an architectural discussion where the body together
with the erotic, the sacred, and the subconscious has a definitive and important place in the
creation of architecture, and where symbolic orders and imaginary processes are related
comparatively to those in art such as in the work of Joseph Beuys.

The Filter project was a raw idea, never prepared to be a real physical outdoor environment
but an argument debating the idea of what a city access road landscape could and should be,
and not accepting the unbalanced commission for beauty alone. My idea was to turn the
disadvantage of the buffer zone for noise and polluted air into an advantage, and to use the
precious land along the roads in the city to give an answer to the ecological lack of wild and
wet as well as the experiential lack of the unplanned and the sublime. What I did was to leave
the commission for beauty behind, and instead give other answers to a commission that I was
not ready to define at that time. Now after years of practice and collaboration with clients,
planners, designers and even users I would describe this commission that I have tried to give
an answer to as a commission for meaning that was hidden behind the unarticulated
commission for beauty.

Design attitudes towards the commission for beauty: Borås project

If the Filter project was a starter to a serious redesign of my professional approach to road
landscape planning and design, several projects followed in the years coming and in all of
these, one of the most important issues when giving a solution to a client’s quest for beauty
was the concept of meaning. This meaning was often expressed through what my colleagues
and I felt natural for the site and what architects usually call the genius loci (Norberg Schultz,
1980, 1999). What we usually picked up was the places natural or human history, or even its
actual human activities. Sometimes we just revealed the values, as is the most common way of
dealing with landscapes in road planning and design in Sweden. But sometimes we gave a
more elaborated answer by creating a new or different genius loci on the site.

That was the case for a project in the city of Borås in Sweden organised by the municipality
together with the National Art Council, where I have taken part as a landscape architect
working close together with an artist in a project. Our work was to beautify the landscape of a
roundabout in a commercial area in the periphery of the city of Borås. It was in all parts an
artistic work where design principles had to be elaborated in agreement between the two
involved professionals - landscape architect and artist, and where the landscape and art
contributions had to be totally integrated and inseparable. Looking for inspiration in the place
itself, the working methods of the landscape architect and the artist was not very different from
each other. The need to hook on to something when acting with creativity seemed to be a
common matter of course. We looked for inspiration in symbols of the city of Borås like the
textile industry together with its well known post-order companies rooted in the old tradition
of travellers in fabric. We remembered the zoological garden that we visited as children. And
we searched for natural hidden values in the landscape. One was the forest that we could see
on the hills to the west and that may have covered the area a long time ago. Another was the
river Viskan floating by only ten meters from the roundabout, but hidden under lots of
infrastructural installations. The city itself with its beautiful red brick industrial architecture
was hidden behind all those new commercial barns in steel and without windows. And finally
another important hidden value of these extern commercial areas was the people in there,
buying and selling, communicating life and messages to each other. The only sign of them
being there were all the cars on the big parking plots outside and around the buildings.

[Insert illustration 4 here – landscape]

Caption illustration 4: The architectural illustration of the project in Borås commercial area by C
Wingren Landskap in collaboration with O. Bergman
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The roundabout was in the commission supposed to be the gateway or the front door to this
world, but we wanted it to be part of the landscape. We gave different colours to the hidden
values that we had decided to work with. We used Green for the Forest, Blue for the River
Viskan, Red for the Brick industry buildings and Yellow for the commercial activity and its
messages of publicity representing the Communication between people. Then we started our
sketching process, each of us with our own sketching procedures. I used the plan, the section,
with defined spatial scales but also manipulated pictures. The artist Robert Moreau used
especially the model and always without a spatial, real scale. Instead he used scale based on
meaning. This seemed to me at that time as something new and different that I wanted to try in
future. Today I can see a correspondence to today’s architects ways to describe architecture
also by diagrams and other means, to get in touch with the meaning behind architecture.
Finally all these hidden values took place in our proposal. It was composed by standing firs
and whortleberry wire on the ground, invading all possible spots of the area as far as one could
see. The river was represented by wooden planks placed in the asphalt to make this dunk-dunk
that you can hear when you drive on a wooden bridge. The bricks where proposed as a minor
part of the installation. And finally the communication and messages between people and
commercials marketing the textile inside these commercial barns, where arranged as
advertisements on boards also invading the place. On the boards it was possible to read
messages or discussions, made in a humoristic way telling stories that may make you smile,
laugh or when at its best could make the smile get caught in the throat and become something
serious.

It was a way of dealing with meaning and permanence, in a place where the elusive or fugitive
seemed to rule. We wanted to compete with the lightness and superficial of the publicity
messages, but at the same time deal with deeper values. Robert’s skill to make these messages
placed on boards, almost like publicity, was immense. Placing them close to groups of firs
made them function as balloons in a cartoon and made these firs almost human. The most
special relation in this proposal was maybe between the male fir situated in the roundabout
itself, turning like a bear in cage, and longing for a small lady fir making a small mourning
sound, on a podium of brick beside a bench outside the roundabout. This was inspired by the
well known poet Edith Södergran (gran means fir in Swedish). This kind of playing with the
place itself, and with meaning and memory took the client by storm. Unfortunately it has still
not come to fulfilment due to financial problems.

[Insert illustration 5 here – landscape]

Caption illustration 5: The artist Robert Moreau’s illustration with meaningful messages between spruce
trees almost acting as individuals

According to the possibilities and preferences used by us, the architect and artist working with
this project, I would like to put forward how nature, history but also human activity has
become important to give meaning to a place where the city architect and planners are asking
for beauty. In the commission we where asked to put something in the roundabout itself. We
went far away from the commission and proposed something different, filled with meaning
and associations, taking in the whole space as far as we could see. It was again a spatial
answer to a commission for an object. And the answer was not a making of new houses or
walls to encircle the place or giving it a central force by putting in an object in the middle.
Instead it was an act of place- or garden-making described with Hunts words:

“The garden will thus be distinguished in various ways from the adjacent territories in
which it is set. Either it will have some precise boundary, or it will be set apart by the
greater extent, scope, and variety of its design and internal organization: more usually
both will serve to designate its space and its actual or implied enclosure.”
(Hunt, 2000)
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The boundary was in this case the horizon as well as the facades and the design was
formulated and inspired by the hidden natural landscape of the place itself. And with the
boards of messages this commercial park design was especially inspired by peoples actions in
the area, moving back and forth in the buildings, buying and communicating. It was an
expression for the architect’s and artist’s interest in the private expressions in space. Michel de
Certeau stresses the importance of private people’s actions to create place (de Certeau, 1990),
(de Certeau, 1984, 2002). He says that the planner can only make space. It is people that by
their moves and actions make a living place out of this space. The project in Borås bringing
the idea of people’s moves, action and communication to the forefront of the project could be
seen as a step towards another understanding of the personal or vernacular and a homage to de
Certeau and his ideas.

Ideal landscapes, artifice and the natural

In the road project described above that from the beginning had its departure points in a
command for beauty, I found meaning to be more important. Meaning that is totally depending
on individual experiences and expectations of the person asking for it as well as the person
designing a landscape or using it. What I try to say is that this meaning is changing according
to different factors such as personal experience, place, time etc. The decision about which
meanings should be ruling a certain landscape architectural action is therefore situationistically
decided, and needs to be processed in every project in a different way. I have earlier in this
article introduced the concept of ideal landscapes as something that in a specific situation is
found to be the best solution for the change of a place. The reason why introducing it is to
avoid the concept of beauty that regulate too much and too early the answer to a question that
seems to be more open, about meaning as well as about other ideals.

As a landscape architect I try during my work in every situation to define the ideal landscape
to respond to this quest for the best. In the project of Borås we proposed an ideal landscape
that had very much to do with nature, but a nature gone. It also had to do with the moves and
actions of people in the place. Both parts where created artefacts but only the second stands
for the artificial, as the first was about reintegrating a lost nature in the place. It seems that
what we as human beings recognize as natural is often regarded as beautiful in a landscape.
Either nature or old cultural landscapes are often chosen as ideal landscapes in proposals for
changes in the landscape for example along roads. But what is natural can differ from person
to person especially when coming from different cultural backgrounds. In the middle of the
90ies an outer ring road was built in Malmö in Southern Sweden. This ring road was placed not
very far from the multi-storey housing areas where mostly people with origins from foreign
countries are living. When the road was almost finished the Road Administration and the
municipalities along the road made a design program for the surrounding landscape to prevent
free establishment of petrol stations, publicity boards etc (Vägverket, 2000). In this design
program they did not only forbid these kind of things on the outside of the ring road, but also
proposed an harmonious, hilly, pastoral landscape with grazing sheep. This proposal had very
much to do with the actual landscape but also with the image of an arcadian landscape based
in the a Swedish traditions of landscape scenery as well as landscapes used in the 18th century
landscape parks especially in England.

In this artificial ideal landscape on the outer side of the ring road only the “natural” has been
permitted. And the natural in this case is not the 1st nature of John Dixon Hunt, neither the 2nd
nature that Hunt describes as the landscape representing what is necessary, like agricultural
land or cityscape. It is a 3d nature that is based on these planners and decision makers own
idea of beauty or what is natural; a todays agricultural Swedish landscape that will be old
fashioned tomorrow. In an article written about beauty and road planning I call this landscape
a cultural landscape park, because the agricultural landscape or the second nature is gone at
the same time as the land use is decided from an idea of a visual landscape instead from its
practical use (Wingren, 2004). If the command in this project would have been a question not
about ugliness or beauty but of meaning and use, maybe the discussion could have been more
 10

open minded. If the command would have been for an ideal landscape, it would have been
necessary to ask for which. This could have made it possible to take in a situation in the
beginning of the 21st century where the population in Malmö consist of more that 25% of
people coming from other countries, and a situation where nature is almost absent. Several
different answers would have been possible, to articulate the discussion about an ideal
landscape in this actual situation on the outer ring road of Malmö. Maybe even controlling the
uncontrolled would be a possibility for the common idea of an ideal landscape and where the
other, shaggier, darker and uncontrolled side of the beautiful Arcadian landscape described by
Schama could take place and give the possibility for private additions without disturbing a too
harmonious composition.

Public and private expressions of meaning

If artificial landscapes are difficult to accept, minor additions or objects can be accepted more
easily. Art objects in a roundabout, rock cuttings and its facade lighting can be seen as tools to
contribute meaning to a landscape. It is often a matter of taste when and which artificial
elements are allowed to take place. This taste is related to people’s cultural, professional and
personal background. Again it is a question of experiences and expectations. And architect’s
ideas of taste differ very often from vernacular ones. So how could we find the ideal
landscape?

The big road is one of the most organised areas in the city, principally because of security but
also because the big road is a result of the modernist movement. In the close environment of
the road good taste often means straight lines of steel, thin glass and white well shaped
concrete walls. No private expression is normally permitted. Exceptions can be personal
memorials after a car accident where crosses, stones, and flowers represent a totally different
aesthetic than that of the road equipment. Anna Petersson describes how private road
memorials can be kept by the road for long time, even if they are formally forbidden as such
(Petersson, 2005, 2006). This probably has to do with the meaning of these objects even to
persons and authorities forbidding them. Other artificial objects taking place in the road
environment in Sweden are the roundabout dogs. This is a phenomenon similar to that of the
garden goblins. Put up by unknown persons, in the same way as the goblins are moved around
the world. These dogs seem to represent a loss of vernacular elements in road environment and
are introducing an idea of other ideals than the established one.

[Insert illustration 6 here – portrait]

Caption illustration 6: This roundabout dog in Malmö made by an unknown, may represent a change of
expression for a meaningful environment in the city

We can find other examples of a similar search towards vernacular ways of expression in art,
literature etc. One example is the contemporary Swedish artist and art professor Ernst Billgren
who investigates the idea of nature and the vernacular in his art, producing paintings with
nature features like firs, foxes etc in his pieces of art. The landscape architect Ann Whiston
Spirn compares different ways of making memorials (Spirn, 1998). She points out how
amateurs use more of local materials and folk tradition for personal memorials compared to
memorials by trained professionals that involve more of formal language drawn from
precedents or models of the past. But if I look upon my own work for road landscapes, I can
see a change in my way of dealing with meaning. New tools other than form are used. There
might be a change going on with a breaking up from former architectural cultures of taste, and
expressions of vernacular kinds such as the roundabout dog or other expressions may be part
even of the professional repertoire in landscape architecture in future. A landscape architect
that has been working in this direction since long is Bernard Lassus already mentioned, who
since many years has looked for inspiration in vernacular expressions such as the stone garden
of Facteur Cheval or the gardens of Charles Pecqueur. In these gardens personal narratives are
concise part of the project. In projects by Bernard Lassus we can find the usual architectural
 11

search for a genius loci of the site, but fantasy and dramatisation plays in his project a more
important role with inspiration from private expressions.

From one landscape to another

The profession of landscape architect is a profession where exploration and imagination are
two important ingredients in the work. New knowledge in the field of practise are mostly
found through project making and drawing. This article is a description of an explorative
process about beauty, meaning and ideal landscape, in the field of two types of passage
landscapes, both with an history within modernity. There is this interplay between the
extremely designed and planned space and its main activity of uncontrolled processes,
disobedience in the case of the road and decomposition in the case of the memorial site
(Klintborg Ahlklo, 2001). And even if memories in the road projects have more to do with loss
of landscapes, and for the cemetery more with loss of humans, the landscape and especially
the landscape that we feel as natural seems to be a common issue to use in a kind of healing
process.

One example of a healing action could be when a dead person’s ashes are brought to the most
loved place during her life time, or that a memorial ceremony takes place there. Another
example is when putting things from the home landscape on a grave. It can be a stone, some
flowers or something else. Often the thing used has to do with nature, or what we feel is
nature. It could also be something that we feel is natural, memories of things we are used to. In
the same way as an object can help to memorize a loved landscape that has been changed or
destroyed by a road, or a wind mill park, a stone from the summer house’s beach can be kept
at home during winter to hold an image of last summer or make a hint of the next. Different
kinds of dealing with loss are important knowledge that can probably be used also for other
kinds of loss. Such as the feeling of loss that can be felt by people moving away from the place
where they lived and where their relatives and friends are still living or parents are buried or
spread, and away from the landscape that they feel as their own. To deal with this loss in the
secular society where people are moving far away from their roots is an important issue both
for the road environment projects and those of memorial sites.

In the transdisciplinary project Designing Places for Memory and Meaning in Contemporary
Urban Landscapes four researchers - sociologists, designer and landscape architect, during
three years will search for new ways of dealing with memory, meaning and loss in the fast
changing urban landscape. My part in this work will among others be to use my findings from
the road projects in this new context in a cumulative design knowledge process. In the project
we suggest that a process of normalization is noticeable in memorial places that somewhat
goes opposite to the modernistic and still current demand for rational and efficient public
environments, free from religious, political, and persona-oriented symbols (Petersson, 2005).
In the road planning field described above, indications can be found for a need to make
individual imprints in the public common space of the road, but also a need from professionals
to search for inspiration in these individual expressions. One reason is to get new tools for
giving a sense of place and a genius loci to an environment in collaboration with individuals.
In the project of places for memory and meaning one idea is to investigate the mutual use of
the urban landscapes and the possibility to make places for memory to be part of the city life in
housing areas, parks etc. This may serve as a link to form new landscapes comprising places
for simultaneous contemplation of outer and inner worlds, and new situations for grief
expressions, private as well as public. This can of course also include the city access road. In
future we may again see burial places along the city access roads as in the ancient Rome, but
in a new form elaborated by interdisciplinary teams, dealing with mobility, nature as well as
the sacred. Maybe these areas could be used as passage landscapes for mobility of different
kinds, wetland resources for ecological reasons as well as recreational. Places where the
inhabitants of the city can experience nature, wilderness as well as the sacred or the sublime,
in a redesigned Arcadian landscape between the urban life and the rural.
 12

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