Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Melancholy and The Landscape Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in The Landscape
Melancholy and The Landscape Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in The Landscape
Melancholy and The Landscape Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in The Landscape
Immigrant Pastoral
Midwestern Landscapes and Mexican-American Neighborhoods
Susan L. Dieterlen
Jacky Bowring
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Jacqueline Bowring
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
List of figures ix
PART I
The place of melancholy 1
PART II
The places of melancholy 53
20 Camouflage 152
21 Monochrome 157
22 Intimate immensity 161
Conclusion 170
Index 174
Figures
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Part I
The place of melancholy
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
tends to be engaged with visual effects, and it lacks the tragic, the
melancholy, the nostalgic, as well as the ecstatic and transcendental
tones of the spectrum of emotions. In consequence our buildings tend to
leave us as outsiders and spectators without being able to pull us into
full emotional participation.
(Pallasmaa, 2001, p.91)
Nothing can convey the extent of the change that has taken place in the
meaning of experience so much as the resulting reversal of the status of
the imagination. For Antiquity, the imagination, which is now expunged
from knowledge as ‘unreal,’ was the supreme medium of knowledge.
(Agamben, 1993, p.11)
6 The place of melancholy
The loss of the rich realm of the imaginative, through its placement within
the subordinate category of subjectivity, is echoed in the words of geographer
Tim Edensor:
Related to this severance from the world of imagination is the loss of the
introspective dimension of life. Melancholy was not simply a heightened
awareness of the poignancy of existence, but the capacity for contemplation.
A productive solitude is afforded by melancholy, in distinction from an
imposed isolation, as in the ‘acedia’ or melancholy sloth of the monks in
devotional exile in the Desert of Cells in the Egypt of the Dark Ages. A
modern-day equivalent of acedia is found in the self-imposed exile within
the isolation of technology, where all manner of personal devices have
served to construct a virtual landscape of separation. As with the monks
suffering from sloth in their cells, these worlds of isolation lack the restorative
powers of melancholy solitude. The world of MP3 players and mobile
phones is filled with noise and constant stimulation, imparting a sense of
estrangement and ennui – a negative form of melancholy which is associated
with boredom and anomie. Ever more introspective modes of entertainment,
and the idea of communication-as-entertainment, challenge the authenticity
of interpersonal relationships – as when someone who is essentially a
stranger invites you to be a ‘friend’ on an internet social networking site.
The landscape has a role in proffering places of escape, of re-building the
capacity for contemplation. Pallasmaa states the house is a ‘metaphysical
instrument, a mythical tool with which we try to introduce a reflection of
eternity into our momentary existence’ (in MacKeith, 2005, p.95). Echoing
philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s conception of the house as ‘an instrument
with which to confront the cosmos’ (Bachelard, 1969, p.46), Pallasmaa
advocates that a house is more than simply shelter, but in the words of Karsten
Harries, it can create places of meaning, places which transform ‘chaos’ into
‘cosmos’ (in MacKeith, 2005, pp.59–60). This vision of the house as a place
in which to find one’s self in the world is also true of landscape architecture.
From the tradition of hermitages in Picturesque gardens to the practice of
seeking solace within wilderness, the landscape is the locus for contemplation,
for meaningful solitude and melancholy reflection.
However, despite landscape’s potential as a site of melancholy, the
embracing of sadness or contemplation is avoided in much contemporary
Placing melancholy in landscape architecture 7
design thinking. The single-minded pursuit of happiness and the avoidance
of places of solitude and contemplation are nowhere more evident than in
contemporary attitudes towards tragedy. James Steven Curl describes a
contemporary condition of ‘emotional anaemia’, a turn away from the
‘celebration of death’ (Curl, 1980, p.359). While ‘celebration’ might have
unfortunate connotations of festivity, Curl’s diagnosis highlights the
tendency to create diversions from the emotional depth of the tragic.
Many contemporary memorials are characterised by an overloading of
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
generate [...] affect, making the stranger into a melancholic griever. And
this as well is the social role of the memorial, and the social purpose
8 The place of melancholy
which melancholia serves; through the memorial, melancholia comes to
function as an agent of social binding.
(Franses, 2001, p.102)
Notes
1 See, for example, Milton Il Penseroso (1631), Coleridge The Nightingale (1798)
and Keats Ode on Melancholy (1819).
2 Melancholy art was the subject of a major exhibition, Mélancolie: Génie et Folie
en Occident – ‘Melancholy: Genius and Madness in the West’ – staged at the
Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, and then in the Neue Nationalgalerie
Placing melancholy in landscape architecture 9
in Berlin, in late 2005 and 2006. A catalogue, edited by the curator Jean Clair,
was published by Gallimard in 2005.
3 For an overview of the breadth of melancholy, see the precursor to this book
(Bowring, 2008).
4 For more on the etymology and development of the idea of ‘landscape’, see also
Jackson (1984) and Cosgrove (1985).
5 The conception of the landscape as a ‘reflection’ of culture is a pervasive one; for
example, as simply stated in the iconic essay by Lewis ‘Axioms for Reading the
Landscape (1979)’.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
6 As a theatre, landscape was seen as a setting for the playing out of culture, framed,
as Cosgrove (1993, p.1) put it, ‘a stage for human action’. See also Jackson (1980,
p.75).
7 The poststructuralist concern with text was applied to landscape most explicitly
by Barnes and Duncan’s Writing Worlds (1992).
8 For an overview of a phenomenological sense of landscape, see Wylie (2007).
9 For architecture and urbanism this is most evident in the development of the
theory of Landscape Urbanism – see Waldheim (2006) and Mostafavi and Najle
(2003). The concept of ‘landscape’ in geography is well-articulated in Wylie’s
Landscape (2007). In art, see Elkin and deLue’s Landscape Theory (2008), which
provides a useful investigation of the concept of ‘landscape’ within art.
10 Pattern books were produced during the Victorian and Edwardian eras as a
means of providing mass market access to design. The ‘patterns’ included in such
books included standard designs for houses and gardens, exemplified in the work
of Andrew Jackson Downing, including Treatise on the Theory and Practice of
Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America, 1841, and Cottage Residences:
or, A Series of Designs for Rural Cottages and Adapted to North America, 1842.
11 ‘Desert of the real’ is a phrase from the 1999 film by Larry and Andy Wachowski,
The Matrix. The phrase has been adopted as a commentary on contemporary life,
notably by Slavoj Žižek (2002).
12 Datascapes is a term coined by Winy Maas of Dutch architectural firm MVRDV,
and describes designs generated by information. See, for example, MVRDV
(1998). A critique of the dehumanising nature of datascapes follows in Chapter
7.
References
Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience.
London: Verso.
Bachelard, Gaston (1969). The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas, first published
1958). Boston: Beacon Press.
Barnes, T. and Duncan, J. (1992). Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor
in the Representation of Landscape. London: Routledge.
Bowring, J. (2008). A Field Guide to Melancholy. Harpenden: Oldcastle Books.
Bruno, Giuliana (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film.
New York: Verso.
Cosgrove, Denis (1985).‘The idea of landscape’, in Social Formation and Symbolic
Landscape, London: Croom Helm.
Cosgrove, Denis (1993) The Palladian Landscape: Geographical Change and its
Cultural Representations in Sixteenth Century Italy. Leicester: Leicester University
Press.
Crang, Mike and Thrift, Nigel (2000). Thinking Space. London: Routledge.
10 The place of melancholy
Crouch, David (2015). ‘Afterword: From Affect to Landscape and Back’, in Christine
Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds), Affective Landscapes in
Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, pp. 239–246.
Curl, James Steven (1980). A Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Some of the
Buildings, Monuments, and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western
European Tradition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Davidson, Joyce, Bondi, Liz and Smith, Mick (2005). Emotional Geographies.
Aldershot: Ashgate.
Davis, Shannon (2009). ‘Ma[r]king memory’. Unpublished PhD thesis, School of
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
a lid / On the groaning spirit, victim of long ennui, / And from the all-
encircling horizon / Spreads over us a day gloomier than the night’
(Baudelaire, 2015).
The early twentieth century brought another significant dimension to the
defining of melancholy, in Sigmund Freud’s 1917 essay, Mourning and
Melancholia. Freud related ‘normal’ grief to mourning, where loss is
processed by the individual and they gradually recover. ‘Abnormal’ grief is
the pathological condition he termed melancholia, where mourning is
arrested and the process of recovery fails to reach completion. In melancholia,
the individual, or ego, embeds their sense of loss within themselves, refusing
to recover, not willing to let go of the loss. Freud described how ‘[t]he
shadow of the object fell upon the ego’ and ‘the loss of the object had been
transformed into the loss of ego’, so that the loss of the object, whether it be
a person or an idea, becomes the same as the loss of the self, the ego (Freud,
2005, p. 209).
A further significant dimension of melancholy’s legacy in the twentieth
century was found in the work of philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and
Walter Benjamin, concerned with the cultural crises related to progress and
modernity. Rapid change and progress brought with it a sense of optimism,
but at the same time feelings of alienation and estrangement produced a
sense of ennui as the promises went so often unrealised. For Kierkegaard
this was, in the words of Ferguson, ‘the empty depth of modernity’ (Ferguson,
1995, p.35). Benjamin, too, theorised melancholy in the face of twentieth-
century culture, most extensively in his major work The Arcades Project.
Another kind of emptiness was recognised by Benjamin, that of ‘linke
Melancholie’, or ‘Left Melancholy’, which encapsulated melancholy as a
narcissistic self-obsession, which he cast as a form of criticism. The inertia
that comes with melancholy, the wanting to resist closure – as in Freud’s
‘open wound’ – is in political terms a type of inactivism: a ‘mournful,
conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or
relationship that has been rendered thinglike and frozen in the heart of the
putative leftist’ (Brown, 1999, p.22). Left Melancholy resulted in a state of
paralysis, as in the ‘German Autumn’ of 1977–1981, a time of terrorism,
murders and hijackings, where left-leaning intellectuals found themselves
unable to act. Consumed by cultural pessimism, an existential crisis of sorts,
a feeling of abandonment, they entered a state of melancholy detachment.
16 The place of melancholy
As well as this negative critique of melancholy, Benjamin contributed
significant layers to the aesthetic of melancholy, as in his writings on the
connection of melancholy and memory in photography. Here, Benjamin
divined the presence of aura as something that he believed was lost when
photographs moved from having value as part of the ‘cult of remembrance’
to succumbing to their ‘exhibition value’ (see Chapter 13). Aura inheres
within the connectivity to intimacy, to the notion of an original, authentic
presence, and Benjamin believed:
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography.
The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last
refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura
emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a
human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable
beauty.
(Benjamin, 1969, p.226)
Notes
1 The conference was held in 2002 at the University of Kent, England, and papers
were published in 2003 in the Journal of European Studies, 33 (3/4).
2 The conference was held in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006, with papers published
in a 2007 special issue of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 433. DSM is the
Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and is the American standard
reference book for the diagnosis of mental illnesses.
3 This constant shift in the development of concepts is well-illustrated by Umberto
Eco (2004).
4 The term ‘constellation’ is Giorgio Agamben’s, and captures the sense of
melancholy’s persistence as a collection of ideas, rather than one simple definition.
See Agamben (1993, p.19).
References
Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans.
Ronald L, Martinez). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Baudelaire, Charles (1970). Paris Spleen (trans. Louise Varèse; first published 1869).
New York: New Directions Books.
Defining melancholy 17
Baudelaire, Charles (2015). The Flowers of Evil/Les Fleurs du Mal (English and
French edition, trans. William Aggeler). Digireads.com Publishing, Kindle edition.
Benjamin, Walter (1969). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn). New
York: Schocken Books.
Brown, Wendy (1999). ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’. Boundary 2, 26(3): 19–27.
Burton, Robert (1821) An Anatomy of Melancholy (first published 1621). London:
J Cuthell.
Cheyne, George (1991). The English Malady (first published 1733). London:
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Routledge.
Coryell, W (2007). ‘The facets of melancholia’. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica,
115(Suppl. 433): 31–36.
Dillon, Brian (2003). ‘Introduction’. Journal of European Studies, 33 (3/4):
199–202.
Doughty, Oswald (1925). ‘The English malady of the eighteenth century’, The
Review of English Studies, 2(7): 257–269.
Eco, Umberto (ed.) (2004). History of Beauty. New York: Rizzoli,
Eco, Umberto (2007). On Ugliness. New York: Rizzoli.
Ferguson, Harvie (1995). Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Soren
Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology. London: Routledge.
Freud, Sigmund (2005) On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia (trans. Shaun
Whiteside; Mourning and Melancholia essay first published 1917). London:
Penguin Books.
Jimenez, Mary Ann (1986). ‘Madness in early American history: insanity in
Massachusetts from 1700–1830’, Journal of Social History, 20(1): 25–44.
Klibansky, Raymond, Panofsky, Erwin and Saxl, Fritz (1964). Saturn and
Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art.
London: Thomas Nelson and Sons.
Kristeva, Julia (1989). Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Parker, G. (2007). ‘Defining melancholia: the primacy of psychomotor disturbance’.
Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 115(Suppl. 433): 21–30.
Yates, Frances A. (1979). The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
3 The Sublime, the Beautiful,
the Picturesque … and the
melancholy
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
This melancholy sublime is vividly seen in James Corner and Alex MacLean’s
Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (Corner and MacLean,
1996). The book’s aerial photographs and montages give a distancing effect,
transforming the landscape into an abstract composition. There is a sense of
detachment, like the ocularcentrist, or eye-centred, aesthetic conventions of
the Picturesque. Just as followers of the Picturesque enlisted optical devices
as part of their aestheticising, Corner and MacLean have been described as
resembling ‘Claude-glass-toting eighteenth-century visitors to the English
Countryside’ (Herrington, 2006, p.33). Yet, these images are not picturesque,
but they are Sublime in their melancholy, as Susan Herrington puts it: ‘The
cultivation of melancholy is stimulated by the insignificance of the human
figure in contrast to the significant scale of the human drama portrayed’
(Herrington, 2006, pp.33–34). Kant, however, believed that for a genuinely
virtuous melancholy, this sense of solitude in the vastness should not be
inhospitable. A Kantian melancholy of the sublime might be called a ‘spirited
sadness’, grounded in a moral frame. Kant strives to distinguish this aesthetic
pleasure from the ‘languid emotions’ and also from the perversity of the
grotesque.1 The third aesthetic convention, the Picturesque, was also
complex and extensively theorised. The underpinning for the Picturesque
was its aspiration towards being picture-like, of achieving the effects of the
works of seventeenth-century artists Salvator Rosa, Nicholas Poussin and
Claude Lorrain – who gave his name to the ‘Claude Glass’ for its evocation
of his works.2 Rosa, Poussin and Claude painted landscapes that were
culturally rich, with historical narratives, where ruins and dead trees
reflected the passage of time. As one of the aesthetic ideals of the wealthy
young men on the Grand Tour of Europe, the Picturesque became embedded
in the practice of travelling to look at scenery, and in turn of making gardens
that looked like these scenes.
20 The place of melancholy
But just as Kant grappled with elevating the melancholy of the Sublime
above being languid or immoral, the Picturesque was confounded with
ethical dilemmas. The Picturesque’s love of ruins and dead trees – even to
the extent of building ruins and planting dead trees – treads a fine line in the
context of ethics. The late eighteenth-century theorists, including Richard
Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, could defend the melancholy attraction of
picturesque ruins, but the perversity of such an aesthetic became apparent
when applied to people, where it might be called grotesque.3 Could those
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Ruins were also Sublime, where pictorial effects of light and shade, and
other attributes of scale and proportion, were exceeded, becoming instead
an image of awe and even fear. Diderot’s critique of the paintings of Hubert
Robert’s Salon of 1767, for example, evaluated them as being too picturesque.
Diderot’s ideal of ruins was one informed by the aesthetic of the Sublime,
Sublime, beautiful, picturesque, melancholy 21
and in this context he found Robert’s paintings to be overpopulated, and
advised him to remove three-quarters of the figures, such that
Diderot goes on to expand on how his conception of ruins is allied with the
Sublime, as ‘The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to
nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains,
only time endures’ (in Thomas, 2008, p.81).
While ‘the Melancholy’ was never elevated to the level of the Beautiful,
the Sublime and the Picturesque, it was an integral part of the theorising and
debates. From Kant’s admission of melancholy as a ‘vigorous affection’ to
its appearance in discussions of landscapes and particularly ruins, it was
recognised as a critical yet complex element of aesthetic appreciation.
Melancholy’s potency within an aesthetics of landscape is underlined by
these debates, and demands an expanded understanding of the very idea of
‘aesthetics’.
Notes
1 The grotesque in the writings of Kant remained, like melancholy, a minor
category, and a qualification used to express the limits of aesthetics. Tracing a
range of reactions to literature, religious practices, and relationships with others,
Kant used the terms sublime, noble, adventurous, trifling and grotesque. See Kant
(1960, pp.56–57).
2 The Claude Glass is described further in the following chapter.
3 As with Kantian aesthetics, the grotesque remained a minor element in the
theories of the Picturesque, and Richard Payne Knight listed ‘grottesque’ alongside
‘sculpturesque’ as some of the many adjectives which could extend Uvedale
Price’s descriptions of the Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque. Knight
suggested that ‘grottesque is certainly a degree or two at least, further removed
from the insipid smoothness and regularity of beauty, than [Price] supposes the
picturesque to be’. See Knight (1806).
References
Corner, James and MacLean, Alex (1996). Taking Measures Across the American
Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Herrington, Susan (2006). ‘Framed again: the picturesque aesthetics of contemporary
landscapes’. Landscape Journal, 25(1): 22–37.
Hunt, John Dixon and Willis, Peter (1988). The Genius of the Place: The English
Landscape Garden 1620–1820. Boston: MIT Press.
22 The place of melancholy
Kant, Immanuel (1960). Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
(trans. John T. Goldthwait; originally published 1764). Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Knight, Richard Payne (1806) An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste.
London: T. Payne.
Lowenthal, David (2003) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Price, Uvedale (1810) Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and
the Beautiful. London: J. Mawman.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
a discipline whose method of design has in large part been mired in the
safety and preservation of visual representation since the late eighteenth-
century advent of the Picturesque. Symptomatic of this quandary is the
condition that too many projects are designed to be seen, to be
24 The place of melancholy
photographed and published as pictorial works in glossy magazines,
and not to be experienced in any way that transcends visual stimulation
and elicits subjectively perceived emotional content.
(Haddad, 1996, p.48)
Kant had thought he was doing an honor to art when, among the
predicates of beauty, he gave prominence to those which flatter the
intellect, i.e., impersonality and universality…. Kant, like all
philosophers, instead of viewing the esthetic issue from the side of the
artist, envisaged art and beauty solely from the ‘spectator’s’ point of
view, and so, without himself realizing it, smuggled the ‘spectator’ into
the concept of beauty…. [W]e have got from these philosophers of
beauty definitions which, like Kant’s famous definition of beauty, are
marred by a complete lack of esthetic sensibility. ‘That is beautiful’,
Kant proclaims, ‘which gives us disinterested pleasure.’ Disinterested!
(Berleant, 1994, p.15).
that the main socially acceptable arts are based on the senses at a distance,
and that those that depend on the senses of contact are often regarded as
“minor” arts (= culinary arts, arts of perfume, etc)’ (Metz, 1982, pp.59–60).
The elevation of sight over the other senses is most marked in contrast to
smell. Kant dismissed smell as the sense which is least important and not
worthy of cultivation, and Horkheimer and Adorno warned that ‘When we
see we remain what we are; but when we smell we are taken over by
otherness. Hence the sense of smell is considered a disgrace in civilization,
the sign of a lower social strata, lesser races and base animals’ (Classen,
1998, p.58).
An aesthetics of melancholy is therefore a problematic endeavour. As a
concept strongly associated with the emotions, sensation and experience,
melancholy exceeds the visual. And, how might an aesthetic so enmeshed
with emotion relate to a system which privileges the intellect? At this point
a renovation of the original concept of aesthetics as that which is at the very
root of the experience of the world is timely. Aesthetics was not always
simply a concern with appearance, but was more intricately related to the
entire sensory realm. Literary theorist Terry Eagleton states that ‘Aesthetics
is born as a discourse of the body.’ The alignment of aesthetics and the body
places it firmly within the experiential realm, rather than the purely
intellectual or theoretical. Eagleton draws out the way that ‘The aesthetic
concerns this most gross and palpable dimension of the human, which post-
Cartesian philosophy, in some curious lapse of attention, has somehow
managed to overlook’, and emphasises the distinction between ‘our
creaturely life of perception as opposed to what belongs in the mind’
(Eagleton, 1990, p.13). For philosophy, then, the construction of a
theoretical and disinterested aesthetics led to a schism between ideas and
sensations. This rift meant the ‘overlooking’, as Eagleton ironically puts it,
of an entire domain:
References
Berleant, Arnold (1994). Re-thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the
Arts. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Burke, Edmund (1764). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Recent work on emotion in geography and architecture primes the fuse for
an emotional landscape architecture. Avril Maddrell writes of emotional
geographies, how they are ‘particular spaces [which] become emotion-laden
places, both those which we choose to identify and those affective spaces
which can unexpectedly interpolate us’ (Maddrell, 2009, p.38). Emotion
and affect are intertwined, and can be related to the individual and the
social, respectively, and closely associated with feeling and phenomena.
Brian Massumi indicates emotion and affect can also be correspondingly
linked with the mind and body (in Price, 2015), but as Stephanie Clare
cautions, this can reintroduce ‘a reductive distinction between mind and
body’ (in Price, 2015, p.162). Bearing this caution in mind, and the various
definitions of and distinctions between emotion and affect, the significant
point is the shift towards acknowledging the subjective dimension of place,
a counter to the objectivity which has prevailed in attempts to design and
plan the landscape. This subjective connection can also be considered a
dwelling perspective, a means of offsetting the distancing of objectivity, and
engaging emotion and affect. Dwelling engenders proximity and temporality
and connects us with place.
Emotion, mood, temperament and disposition are intertwined in the
nature of melancholy, and register in both the somatic and the psychic
domains. The body and mind dimensions of melancholy were originally set
out in the ancient notion of humours, as outlined in Chapter 2. The four-
sided humoral framework was based on the need for balance between
complementary pairs, so that the choleric and the phlegmatic were balanced,
as well as the sanguine and the melancholy. In contemporary society this
concept of balance has been lost, and the emphasis is firmly upon the
so-called positive emotions such as happiness and joy, while sadness and
melancholy become marginalised.
The necessity of experiencing a full range of emotions underpins
melancholy’s place in everyday life. Landscape architecture has the
opportunity to contribute to the emotional wellbeing of the world through
the shaping of places which foster contemplation. Designing spaces which
invoke melancholy and sadness allows for an emotional equilibrium in the
Emotion 31
landscape, as opposed to one which overloads the compulsion for happiness.
As theologian Thomas Moore warns,
Pallasmaa believes that ‘the standard architecture of our time has normalized
the emotions by eliminating the extremes of the spectrum of human
emotions: melancholy and joy, nostalgia and ecstasy’ (Pallasmaa, 2001,
p.29). Not only is the spectrum of emotional experience limited, it is also
skewed, as those feelings which are considered ‘negative’ are likely to be
suppressed in design. Joy, delight and happiness are willingly received as
emotional content of the built environment, and are even used as indicators
of the success of a site. The unlikeliness of melancholy as a central quality of
contemporary architecture is highlighted in a recent critique of David
Chipperfield’s new judicial complex in the city of Barcelona, a project that
has been compared to a de Chirico painting,1 with its enigmatic tower blocks
clustering around spare, urban squares. As critic Rowan Moore writes:
‘Architecture shies away from themes such as melancholy and alienation.
Here [at the City of Justice], Chipperfield seems to say such things are part
of cities and of the law’ (Moore, 2009, p.68).
The presumption that melancholy is an emotion that is best avoided, or if
one is afflicted a cure is required, is challenged by an aesthetics of melancholy.
Literary theorist Jonathan Flatley names Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (1857)
as the turning point in the relationship between melancholia and aesthetics,
founded on a re-conceptualisation of the relationship between the emotional
and the aesthetic in experiential terms. He describes Baudelaire’s work as
‘anti-therapeutic melancholic poetry’, which is to say it is not intended to
make you better or to redeem negative experiences, but rather ‘to redirect
32 The place of melancholy
your attention to those very experiences’ (Flatley, 2008, p.6). Similarly,
Pallasmaa, writing about the films of Aki Kurasmaki, explains that ‘The
spaces and characters of the films are ill-fated and dispirited, yet melancholy
is not hopelessness nor the rejection of life, but rather a metaphysical
seriousness and dejectedness, from which hope and faith in a better future
grow’ (Pallasmaa, 2005, p.31).
In salvaging the realm of melancholy in landscape architecture,
interpretations such as Flately’s and Pallasmaa’s help to demonstrate the
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
potency of emotional depth, stressing that sadness is not the same thing as a
nihilistic freefall. Sites of memory, most especially those of tragedy, are
often conceived of as needing to be places to deal with the event, to find
some means of ‘moving on’ and recovering from sadness. What if, however,
such sites were not conceptualised as a means of moving on, but rather as a
vehicle for moving the beholder, of amplifying the emotional repertoire.
Memorial designs which ‘redirect attention to those very experiences’, for
example, and which acknowledge the gravitas of ‘metaphysical seriousness
and dejectedness’, have the potential to resonate more powerfully with the
tragic than a response which seeks to quickly dissolve weighty feelings.
The overcoming of a single-minded pursuit of happiness needs to be
yoked to an inclusive re-engagement with the breadth of emotions.
Melancholy’s marginalisation results not only from a fear of sadness, but
from the pervasive hesitancy about showing emotion that characterises the
modern Western world. Even the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
revealed how his fear of displaying emotion limited his full appreciation of
an evocative landscape, something which he later regretted. In a letter to
‘T.P. Esq.’ (Thomas Peacock), describing journeying through Switzerland,
Shelley explained how,
The hay was making under the trees; the trees themselves were aged, but
vigorous, and interspersed with younger ones, which are destined to be
their successors, and in future years, when we are dead, to afford a
shade to future worshippers of nature, who love the memory of that
tenderness and peace of which this was the imaginary abode. We walked
forward among the vineyards, whose narrow terraces overlook this
affecting scene. Why did the cold maxims of the world compel me at
this moment to repress the tears of melancholy transport which it would
have been so sweet to indulge, immeasurably, even until the darkness of
night had swallowed up the objects which excited them?
(Shelley, 1845, p.96)
Note
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
References
Davidson, Joyce and Milligan, Christine (2004). ‘Editorial: embodying emotion
sensing space: introducing emotional geographies’. Social & Cultural Geographies,
5(4): 523–532.
Flatley, Jonathan (2008). Affective Mapping. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Lowenthal, David (1985). The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Maddrell, Avril (2009). ‘Mapping changing shades of grief and consolation in the
historic landscape of St. Patrick’s Isle, Isle of Man’, in Mick Smith, Joyce
Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Moore, Rowan (2009). ‘City of Justice, Barcelona, Spain’. Architectural Review,
226(1349): 60–69.
Moore, Thomas (1992). The Care of the Soul. New York: HarperCollins.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (2001). The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema.
Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (2005). ‘Alakulon ja toivon tilat: paikan ja mielikuvan logiikka
Aki Kaurismaën elokuvissa (Spaces of melancholy and hope: the logic of place
and image in the films of Aki Kaurismäki)’. Arkkitehti, 102(5): 22–33.
Price, Joanna (2015). ‘“The last pure place on Earth”: Antarctic affect in Jenni
Diski’s Skating to Antarctica and Sara Wheeler’s Terra Icognita’, in Christine
Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds), Affective Landscapes in
Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 161–172.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1845) Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and
Fragments (edited by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley). London: E. Moxon.
6 Ethics
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
You may see the cottage from the sunk fence over yonder. I’ve seen the
ladies draw it in their books, a hundred times. It looks well in a picter,
Ethics 35
I’ve heerd say; but there ain’t weather in picters, and maybe ‘tis fitter for
that, than for a place to live in. Well! I lived there. How hard – how
bitter hard, I lived there, I won’t say.
(Dickens, 1954, pp.131–132)
And ‘When “poverty and homelessness are served up for aesthetic pleasure”,
then ethics is indeed submerged by aesthetics, inviting, thereby, the bitter
harvest of charismatic politics and ideological extremism’ (Harvey, 1989,
p.337).
36 The place of melancholy
The aesthetic conventions of the picturesque – its anaesthetising effects –
allowed all kinds of pain to be inflicted on the landscape, such as the removal
of villages to create the envisioned compositions. In 1752 Joseph Damer
removed the medieval village of Milton Abbas from his estate to allow for a
Capability Brown design to be realised, and in 1756 Lord Harcourt destroyed
the ancient village of Newham, relocating the villagers discreetly out of
sight. Goldsmith wrote about ‘The man of wealth and pride’ in The Deserted
Village, of the ‘Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn, / Thy sports are
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
fled, and all thy charms withdrawn; / Amidst the bowers the tyrant’s hand is
seen, / And desolation saddens all thy green: And only one master grasps the
whole domain’ (in Short 1991, p.70).
Beyond the traditions of the picturesque, further ethical dilemmas were
mired in seduction by lethal landscapes, as in the cult of the aesthetics of
war. The Futurists elevated the imagery of war to the status of beauty, as in
Marinetti’s vision of war’s contribution to landscape aesthetics: ‘War is
beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of
machine guns’ (in Benjamin, 1969, p.242). The objects of war were valorised
by the Futurists: ‘War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like
that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals
from the burning villages, and many others.’ There are eerie resonances in
the fetishisation of contemporary war machinery, as Neil Leach observes: ‘it
is in this “sacred horizon of appearances” that a machinery of death – the
Stealth Bomber – can seem so seductive against the pink and orange hues of
the Saudi Arabian desert’ (Leach, 1999, p.26). Architect Lebbeus Woods’
proclamation that ‘War is architecture, and architecture is war!’ (in Leach,
1999, p.27) is a contemporary revivification of the intoxicating power of
images of horror. In response to the war-torn landscape of Sarajevo, Woods
proposed ‘injection’, ‘scar’ and ‘scab’ as metaphoric design modes. Leach
contends these ideas ‘constitute an aesthetic celebration of destruction’
(Leach, 1999, p.29), again alluding to the dilemma of how aesthetic pleasure
can be found in something morally wrong, amidst what Susan Buck-Morss
calls the ‘panoply of phantasmagoric effects that aestheticize the violence of
modernity and anesthetize its victims’ (Buck-Morss, 2002, p.xi).
A similar slippage of aesthetics and ethics was observed by Bernard
Tschumi in the USA’s screening of Gulf War coverage interspersed with
footage of basketball games. Tschumi described this as one of many ways in
which history is collapsing into a set of simultaneous images, and everything
is becoming aestheticised (Tschumi 1993). The metaphor of sport is more
insidious than simply appearing in the interstices of war coverage, and Kim
Michasiw criticised how American football was adopted as a frame for the
media discourse in the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, creating a distancing from
the reality of the events, and substituting an ethical response with maleness,
ordered violence and the dynamics of the ‘game’ (Michasiw, 1992).
Michasiw linked this back to landscape, and particularly to the British
Empire’s dissemination of the picturesque to the colonies, asking:
Ethics 37
Is it possible that the class envy, masked violence and gaming that are
embedded in the discursive frame of the picturesque provided imperial
ents with … a comforting frame for activities they knew to be repugnant
to their announced moral senses.
(Michasiw, 1992, p.100)
violence. All of this requires a placement of the self in relation to that which
has experienced loss, whether another individual, an idea, a place, a
landscape. The placement of the self within this unrequitable situation
engenders feelings of empathy.
References
Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans.
Ronald L. Martinez). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Barthes, Roland (1984). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (trans. Richard
Howard; first published 1980). London: Flamingo.
Benjamin, Walter (1969). ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’,
in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn). New
York: Schocken Books.
Brennan, Mike (2008) ‘Mourning and loss: finding meaning in the mourning for
Hillsborough’. Mortality, 13(1): 1–23.
Buck-Morss, Susan (2002). Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass
Utopia in East and West, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dickens, Charles (1954). The Chimes, in the anthology Christmas Books (The
Chimes first published 1844). London: Oxford University Press.
Gansky, Andrew Emil (2014). ‘“Ruin porn” and the ambivalence of decline’.
Photography & Culture, 7(2): 119–139.
Harvey, David (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the
Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kennedy, Liam (2000). Race and Urban Space in Contemporary American Culture.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2003). ‘Kodak moments, flashbulb memories:
reflections on 9/11’. The Drama Review, 47(1): 11–48.
Leach, Neil (1999). The Anaesthetics of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Macauly, Rose (1977). The Pleasure of Ruins. London: Thames and Hudson
Maddrell, Avril (2009). ‘Mapping changing shades of grief and consolation in the
historic landscape of St. Patrick’s Isle, Isle of Man’, in Mick Smith, Joyce
Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Michasiw, Kim Ian (1992). ‘Nine revisionist theses on the picturesque’.
Representations, 38(Spring): 76–100.
Moore, Andrew (2010). Detroit Disassembled. Bologna: Damiani.
O’Neill, Mary (2009). ‘Ephemeral art: the art of being lost’, in Mick Smith, Joyce
Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Ethics 41
Pallasmaa, Juhani (1992). ‘Identity, intimacy and domicile: notes on the
phenomenology of home’, in The Concept of Home: An Interdisciplinary View,
symposium at the University of Trondheim, 21–23 August. www.uiah.fi/studies/
history2/e_ident.htm, 27 December 2015.
Ruskin, John (1856). Modern Painters: Part IV. London: Smith, Elder and Co.
Short, John Rennie (1991). Imagined Country: Society, Culture and Environment.
London: Routledge.
Sontag, Susan (2001). Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors. New York:
Picador.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Sontag, Susan (2003). Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux.
Sontag, Susan (2014). On Photography (originally published 1977). Penguin
Modern Classics, Kindle edition.
Till, Karen (2005). The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Till, Karen (2012). Wounded cities: memory-work and a place-based ethics of care.
Political Geography, 31(1): 3–14.
Tschumi, Bernard (1993). ‘Six concepts in contemporary architecture’, in Andreas
Papadakis (ed.), Theory and Experimentation. London: Academy.
Vergara, Camilo José (1995). The New American Ghetto. New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press.
Vergara, Camilo José (1999). American Ruins. New York: Monacelli Press.
Žižek, Slavoj (2001). ‘Melancholy and the act’, in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism.
New York: Verso.
7 Empathy
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
watching someone eat a lemon will think to themselves about the lemon-
eater’s perceptions, while an empathetic observer will become engaged in
‘involuntary puckering and watering of the … mouth’ (Escalas and Stern,
2003, p.567). Empathy therefore tends towards a fully phenomenological
engagement. In phenomenology, empathy relates to the experience of
another body as another subjectivity, or intersubjectivity, and is the ability
to transfer one’s own bodily awareness to the other, which enables a
recognition of feelings, emotions and intentions.
One of the necessary dimensions of a genuine empathy is an awareness of
context. Sontag’s critique of the aesthetic pleasure founded on images of
suffering is in part attributable to the dehumanising effect of media
saturation. The overwhelming volume of images experienced on a daily
basis leads to a loss of the specificity and palpability of suffering, and the
resulting erosion of empathy. Moreover, as E. Ann Kaplan suggests, the lack
of context of such images means that responses are simply sentimental
rather than genuinely empathetic. Kaplan calls this ‘empty empathy’, where
the beholder is unable to grasp the gravity of the situation, and the
engagement is only at the superficial level of the image (Kaplan, 2005, p.87).
John Berger probed the difficulty of empathy and the attendant responses in
his essay Photographs of Agony. Observing images of war in the newspaper,
Berger says, brings either despair or indignation. But,
and that faint vapour begins to rise from the surface, the hüzün is so
dense that you can almost touch it, almost see it spread like a film over
its people and landscapes.
(Pamuk, 2005, p.89)
When Peter Eisenman boasts that he is able to make the average person
physically ill through his new manipulation of space and Lebbeus
Woods hypothesizes an urban landscape in which people are compelled
to inhabit the bombed ruins of war-torn cities, the New Spirit in design
should be questioned as to its intentions.
(Thomas, 1997, p.254)
The core issue, Thomas argued, was a break-down in the idea of empathy, as
the humanity of the human presence in the built environment was removed.
Instead, the idea of ‘empathy’ became distorted, and the recognition of a
correspondence between the self and the other – in this case the built
environment – simply became a ‘weary recognition of abuse’ (Thomas, 1997,
p.261). The despair and indignation that Berger referred to become accepted,
such that there is in the work of the New Spirit a ‘surrender of humanism’
(Thomas, 1997, p.262). There are echoes between this recapitulation and the
experience of ‘compassion fatigue’ (Moeller, 1999), the ‘waning of empathy’
(Kligerman, 2007a) and the ‘exhaustion of empathy’ (Kleinman and Kleinman,
Empathy 45
1996) experienced as a consequence of the overloading of individuals with
trauma and tragedy. The danger is that such numbing, surrendering, becomes
expressed in the form of the built environment – as with the New Spirit –
thereby amplifying a de-humanised existence.
The New Spirit exemplifies the significance of empathy in design, and the
corollary of adopting principles which deny a human connection with place.
Without ‘in-feeling’ – whether as a perception of a landscape’s embodied
emotional content, or through the indirect connection with its occupants –
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
designers run the risk of a ‘failure of empathy’, and the resultant ethical
disasters. Inflicting inhuman environments on people can, in the worst case,
be a form of torture, and in a lesser situation may simply be a trivialising of
the other, for example in an approach such as ‘datascapes’ which mine data
to produce designs, sometimes overlooking the intersubjectivity of a designer’s
relationship with the landscape, and with others. MVRDV’s ‘Datatown’
project illustrates this method of conceptualising design, imagining a city
which is ‘based only upon data. It is a city that wants to be described by
information: a city that knows no given topography, no prescribed ideology,
no representation, no context. Only huge, pure data’ (Maas, 1999, p.58). The
distance from ‘in-feeling’ resonates in this description.
Even the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale, which was promisingly
entitled ‘Città: Less Aesthetics More Ethics’, apparently overlooked
empathetic considerations. Sanda Iliescu criticised curator Massimiliano
Fuksas’ ‘heroic disregard for the past, along with what may be described as
a nostalgia for an information-driven future’ (Iliescu, 2009, p. 17). This
information-generated design was reflected in Fuksas’ preference for
‘constantly mutating urban magmas’ and ‘virtual architecture and its
shapeless, liquid masses’ which Iliescu considers evinces the ‘buttressing of
an aesthetic style with unrelated moral claims’ (Illiescu, 2009, p.17).
Buildings which make visitors ill or aesthetics of war, and landscapes made
from data or mutating urban magmas, might resonate with melancholy on
some levels, but it is an abject melancholy rather than an empathetic one,
and the consequences of such aesthetic agendas are profound: ‘Choices
made in the making of the landscape are tangible and long lasting’ (Thomas,
1997, p.262).
The humanistic tradition in design is the antithesis of objectified approaches
like the New Spirit or datascaping. Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of
Humanism is the core of an empathetic approach to architecture. First
published in 1914, Scott’s work reflects the legacy of Vischer, traced through
psychologist Theodor Lipps’s Aesthetik (1903–1906), and developed by
British writer Vernon Lee,1 who is sometimes credited with introducing
empathy into the English language. As part of a circle who resided in Italy,
Lee shared her ideas on empathy with the American art historian Bernard
Berenson, subsequently influencing Geoffrey Scott. In The Architecture of
Humanism, Scott wrote that the ‘whole of architecture is, in fact,
unconsciously invested by us with human movement and human moods….
46 The place of melancholy
We translate architecture into terms of ourselves’ (Scott, 1980, p.213,
emphasis in original). This resonance between self and architecture is not,
Scott explains, ‘mere metaphors’ (Scott, 1980, p.214), not simply describing
one thing in terms of another, but transcribing it – that ‘architectural art is
the transcription of the body’s states into the forms of a building’ (Scott,
1980, p.216). This projection of the self into the world beyond is ‘ancient,
common and profound’, and something of beauty (Scott, 1980, p.217).
Scott’s humanism echoes with the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard in
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
his detection of resonances between the house and the self. Bachelard finds,
for example, in the poem ‘Melancholy’ by O.V. de Milosz a uniting of mental
images of mother and house: ‘I say Mother. And my thoughts are of you, oh,
House. / House of the lovely dark summers of my childhood’ (in Bachelard,
1969, p.45). Further, in Henri Bosco’s Malicroix, Bachelard conveys how the
house emanates virtues and offers protection beyond mere shelter; there is a
feeling of reciprocity which parallels the idea of empathy.
Art critic Adrian Stokes’ negotiation of his relationship with his childhood
landscape of London’s Hyde Park illuminates ideas of empathy that resonate
with Bachelard’s embodying of the self in site. Empathy and psychoanalysis
are familiar companions, since the practice of psychoanalytical therapy is
founded upon the building of an empathetic connection between therapist
and analysand. For Stokes the psychoanalytical connection is, on one level,
with the landscape itself. Stokes’ grappling with the melancholy of the park
is founded in part on an empathetic relationship as an imbuing of emotion
within the landscape. Building upon Stokes’ psychoanalytical explorations,
in association with his own therapy under Freudian therapist Melanie Klein,
the park takes on a type of sentience. Stephen Kite proposes that, for Stokes,
Hyde Park is the broken ‘mother-object’ that he is driven to re-create, to
restore, and this is the source of his angst.
In Hyde Park, Stokes found a melancholy which is embedded within
certain times of day – the ‘gardens at dusk when noises are so distinct and
park keepers so noticeable’ – and in the monuments of the park, as in Sir
Christopher Wren’s Marlborough Gate, in which he found a ‘kind of ethical
ugliness in the use of a classical form, particularly the cruel denial of shadow
or depth in the proportion of height’ (in Kite, 2009, p.19). Recalling his
childhood perceptions of the park from the early twentieth century, Stokes
labels these forms within the park as having a ‘blindness’, which is both an
aesthetic commentary on their inability to make a connection, and an ethical
commentary in the context of a landscape which is deeply divided in socio-
economic terms. The park railings form a focus for his critique, in their
division of the ‘parkees’ – the homeless park-dwellers – from the well-to-do
of the surrounding residential areas. This dimension of the empathetic
connection echoes the ‘heartless picturesque’ of the conflicted struggle
between the appreciation of an aesthetic scene and the reality of its occupants.
Stokes’ relationship with Hyde Park illuminates the co-dependence of
aesthetics, ethics, emotion, and empathy, and the circling of all of these
Empathy 47
around melancholy. In making a direct connection between Stokes and the
legacy of empathy in architectural thinking that culminated in Scott’s The
Architecture of Humanism, Kite emphasises the relationships between the
psychoanalysis and empathy, and the intertwining of landscape experience,
embodiment and the dream-theories of Freud. Kite draws a direct parallel
between Freud’s theorising of the thematic significance of water and passages
in dreams, of their association with ‘phantasies of intra-uterine life, of
existence in the womb and of the act of birth’ and Stokes’ description of
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
walking home through the darkening park, through the passage under the
Serpentine Bridge, where the
dirty echoing tunnel with its lingering airs was cold at all times of the
year. It was as if the passage lay beneath the dark water, here at its
deepest…. A dog would be barking like Cerberus…. I think to this
obscene hole I attributed the home of the animus that tore the body of
the park to shreds; the parkee spirit that made the park poor, hungry,
desolate.
(In Kite, 2009, pp.27–28)
Modern civilization has loosened our contact with the earth, made us
less aware of our dependence, which is still entire, and inflated our pride
which can be seen as a corruption of the spirit, for pride has no
substance: it is a spiritual condition. But the earth is still under our feet
and it is upon the earth that we build architecture.… We first feel
architecture with our feet.
(In Jarzombek, 2000, p.248, n.157)
48 The place of melancholy
Empathy is implicit in the conception of ‘weak architecture’ or ‘fragile
architecture’, a perspective which eschews the muscular insistence of a
dominating approach to design. Pallasmaa traces the idea of fragile architecture
through Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s idea of ‘weak ontology’ and
‘fragile thought’, which echo Goethe’s ‘Delicate Empiricism’: ‘to understand a
thing’s meaning through prolonged empathetic looking and understanding it
grounded in direct experience’ (in Pallasmaa, 2000, p.81). A fragile architecture
is one which is contextual and responsive, echoing Allsopp’s position of
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
connecting to the place. Fragility, and even weakness – a term which could
easily have negative connotations – are inherently humanistic approaches to
design. Pallasmaa suggests that fragility embodies the practices of listening
and dialogue, and where ‘Geometry and formal reduction serve the heroic and
utopian line of architecture that rejects time … materiality and fragile form
evoke a sense of humility and duration’ (Pallasmaa, 2000, p.82).
The empathetic dimension of fragile architecture extends from the city
scale, such as the idea of ‘weak urbanism’ in the theories of Ignasi di Sola-
Morales, through to the intimate setting of the garden. It is the garden which
embraces the idea of fragility, almost by default, because of the dimensions
of time and change. Pallasmaa points to ‘the Japanese garden, with its
multitude of parallel, intertwining themes fused with nature, and its subtle
juxtaposition of natural and man-made morphologies’ as a key example of
the aesthetic potential of ‘weak’ approaches (Pallasmaa, 2000, p.82). Other
exemplars of sensitivity include Dimitris Pikionis’ Acropolis footpaths and
Lawrence Halprin’s Ira’s Fountain in Portland, Oregon. These works,
Pallasmaa argues, transcend the domineering approach of a singular concept
or image, and instead are grounded in place, and self-effacing in so far as
they diminish the designer’s presence. Pikionis’ work is so intricately
contextual, in spatial and temporal terms, that it appears anonymous, while
Halprin presents a work which is a ‘man-made counterpoint to the geological
and organic world.’ Further, in describing Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea,
Pallasmaa writes how it demonstrates ‘An architecture of courtesy and
attention, it invites us to be humble, receptive and patient observers. This
philosophy of compliance aspires to fulfil the humane reconciliatory task of
the art of architecture’ (Pallasmaa, 2000, p.82).
Anne Whiston Spirn’s contribution to the collection Landscape Theory
amplifies the continued significance of empathy in landscape architecture. In
words resonating with Vischer’s formulation of the term, as ‘the projection
of one’s own consciousness into another living being and other life forms’,
Spirn emphasises the necessity of reading and telling landscape, of
understanding connections and responding appropriately. She states that
‘Such dwelling invokes a sense of empathy, prompts reflection on the
continuity of human lives with other living things and with the places we
inhabit’ (Spirn, 2008, p.62). Scott, Allsopp, Pallasmaa and Spirn share the
imperative to maintain a connectivity with the landscape, with architecture,
and not to objectify them into distant and inanimate others. Entwined
Empathy 49
within this humanistic approach is not simply an ‘architecture of happiness’,
but an overarching ethos of wellbeing, which encapsulates the full spectrum
of emotional colouring, both in the self and in the other.
The resonances of emotion are perhaps nowhere more profound than in
landscapes of memory, and of the melancholy which inheres within.
However, what are the limits of empathy when we are faced with memorials
that we cannot relate to? What happens when the events, the culture, the
individuals are distant from us, and we struggle to make a connection? In his
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Note
1 Vernon Lee is the pseudonym of the eccentric writer Violet Paget.
References
Bachelard, Gaston (1969). The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas, first published
1958). Boston: Beacon Press.
Bergdoll, Barry (2000). European Architecture, 1750–1890. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Berger, John (2003). ‘Photographs of agony’, in Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography
Reader. New York: Routledge.
Donohoe, Janet (2002). ‘Dwelling with monuments’. Philosophy and Geography,
5(2): 235–242.
Empathy 51
Escalas, Jennifer Edson and Stern, Barbara B. (2003). ‘Sympathy and empathy:
emotional responses to advertising dramas’. The Journal of Consumer Research,
29(4): 566–578.
Franses, Rico (2001). ‘Monuments and melancholia’. Journal for the Psychoanalysis
of Culture and Society, 6(1): 97–104.
Iliescu, Sanda (2009). ‘Introduction’, in Sanda Iliescu (ed.), The Hand and the Soul:
Aesthetics and Ethics in Architecture and Art. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press.
Jarzombek, Mark (2000). The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Part II
The places of melancholy
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
this anxiety draws us away from our constant concern with the mundane
activities of everyday life. Our familiarity with things is interrupted, our
reliance upon the common understanding of the world is disrupted and
each of us must face our own death.
(Donohoe, 2002, p.236)
This melancholy inspection of existence finds a setting within the places and
conditions outlined in the following chapters. Through attention to those
sites and works which are attuned to the anxiety and authenticity of
existence, there is the possibility of deepening an engagement with landscape.
Becoming attuned to the sensing of space, and of melancholy in particular,
is a way to ‘become better placed to appreciate the emotionally dynamic
spatiality of contemporary social life’ (Davidson and Milligan, 2004, p.524).
Within the void and in the uncanny, in a certain light or in shadow,
attended by aura and liminality, the fragmentary and the left behind, the
submerged, the weathered and the camouflaged, and in the state of intimate
The places of melancholy 57
immensity … these melancholic moments grace architecture and landscape.
What is offered here is a compendium of places, images, buildings,
landscapes, in which a suffusion of melancholy gathers – a melancholy
terrain, a map of a landscape of affection, a ‘pays du tendre’.1
Note
1 Pays du tendre is Madeleine du Scudéry’s phrase for a terrain of emotions. See
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Bruno (2002).
References
Bruno, Giuliana (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film.
New York: Verso.
Davidson, Joyce and Milligan, Christine (2004). ‘Editorial: embodying emotion
sensing space: introducing emotional geographies’. Social & Cultural Geographies,
5(4): 523–532.
Donohoe, Janet (2002). ‘Dwelling with monuments’. Philosophy and Geography,
5(2): 235–242.
Hunt, John Dixon (2005). ‘“Come into the garden, Maud”: garden art as a privileged
mode of commemoration and identity’, in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.),
Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design.
Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Kundera, Milan (1997). Slowness (trans. Linda Asher; originally published 1995).
New York: Harper Perennial.
9 The void
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Figure 9.1 Butzer Design Partnership, Field of Empty Chairs, Oklahoma City
National Memorial, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, 2001. Photo by
Ken Lund, 2004.
Figure 9.2 Karl Biederman, Der Verlassene Raum (‘The Abandoned Room’), Berlin,
Germany, 1988–1996. Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, 2011.
The void 61
The ground plan of the synagogue forms the memorial’s base, and 140
bronze chairs stand in pew-like rows above it (Figure 9.3).
The empty chairs in Krakow are not ordered into rows, but are distributed
around the Plac Bohaterow Getta (‘Ghetto Heroes Square’). Seventy empty
chairs, including 33 steel and cast-iron chairs (1.4 m high) and 37 smaller
chairs (1.2 m high) stand on the edge of the square and at tram stops.
Designed by Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak, the memorial remembers
Jews of the Jewish ghetto who had no choice but to live in this place, where
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
they feared for their lives, living in overcrowded conditions, where people
starved to death, were murdered or sent to concentration camps. The chairs
represent loss and absence as the ghetto in Krakow was cleared and all the
residents’ possessions were strewn across the streets. As a symbol of the
domestic interior there is a strange disruption when the chairs are displayed
in the public landscape.
In Santiago, Chile, the three chairs represent three members of the
Communist Party who were abducted and murdered in 1985, during the
Pinochet regime. Santiago Nattino, Manuel Guerrero and Jose Manuel
Parada were the victims of what was known as the Caso Degollados (‘Slit
Throat Case’), a brutal murder which had widespread political repercussions
with arrest of two colonels, a major, two captains and two police officers,
and the resignation of the general director of the Carabineros (national
police force). The memorial was designed by two architects, Rodrigo Mora
and Angel Muñoz, and an artist, Jorge Lankin, and differs from the other
empty chair memorials described here in terms of their larger-than-life scale,
at 10 metres tall (Figure 9.4). Rather than a chair which has an immediate
Figure 9.3 Anna Dilengite and Sebastian Helm, memorial at the site of the former
Great Synagogue in Leipzig, Germany, 2001. Photo by Heinrich Stürzl,
2014.
62 The places of melancholy
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Figure 9.4 Rodrigo Mora, Angel Muñoz and Jorge Lankin, A Place for Memory,
monument to the victims of the Caso Degollados (‘Slit-Throat Case’),
Santiago, Chile, 2006. Photographer unknown, 2009.
sense of humanity through its scale, the chairs making up the ‘Place for
Memory’ are enormous, perhaps to ensure their presence within the vast
landscape where just three chairs might be overlooked.
Christchurch’s work, by Peter Majendie, is a temporary memorial (Figure
9.5). The poignancy of this temporality is expressed in the text displayed
next to the site: ‘this installation is temporary, as is life.’ The Christchurch
empty chairs differ from those in Oklahoma, Leipzig, Krakow and Santiago
in that every chair is distinctive. The chairs are not named, as they are at
Oklahoma, but the poignancy of individual lives is apparent in the chairs’
variability. Throughout the memorial’s life, Majendie tended the chairs,
painting them and in some cases replacing them, so there is an ethics of care
and ongoing change that underpin the memorial’s melancholy.
The melancholy of the void and temporality came together too at Bryant
Park, New York. Marking ten years after the World Trade Center attacks,
the lawn that is usually a place for having lunch and enjoying the sun became
an ephemeral memorial, with 2,753 of the empty iconic Bryant Park chairs
lined up to face south towards the fallen towers – one to honour each person
who died in the attacks.
While the empty chair memorials intentionally enlist the emptiness of the
chairs as a melancholy trope, memorial benches have their own atmosphere
of pathos. Not designed to be empty, memorial benches set up what Avril
Maddrell calls a ‘Third Emotional Space’ – a space that is neither a funerary
The void 63
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Figure 9.5 Peter Majendie, Empty Chairs Temporary Memorial for the Christchurch
Earthquake, New Zealand. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2014.
memorial benches, the many seats that have been placed there ‘in loving
memory’. Looking, in their emptiness, at the view of the sea – literally at the
‘vanishing point’ as Wylie puts it – these benches embody ‘Absence at the
heart of the point of view. Just as they are about landscape, the benches at
Mullion Cove are about absence and love – and in this sense more widely
about memory’ (Wylie, 2009, p.278). But the benches are not just places to
look at the landscape from, their existence as seats in the landscape is
complex as they are also something to be looked at. Were they simply to be
benches in the landscape they would not invite this gaze, since they are in
themselves unremarkable. It is because of their role as markers of
absence that the benches are to be looked at – of staring at a void, at a loss.
Wylie explains:
The empty chairs and empty benches lay bare absence, with the landscape
becoming an expression of the void. Memorial landscapes which enlist the
melancholy of the void are arguably more ethical and empathetic in their
approach to grief than those sites which might be considered a form of
denial. Writing about Rachel Whiteread’s project House, 1993, Doreen
Massey contrasted the sculptural cast of a terraced house with a classic
‘heritage site’:
Adrian Forty argues that the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation is
a success partly due to its
Ntarama church,
Nyamata, Rwanda, Monday,
August 29, 1994.
This photographs shows Benjamin Musisi, 50, crouched low in the
doorway of the church amongst scattered bodies spilling out into the
70 The places of melancholy
daylight. 400 Tutsi men, women, and children who had come here
seeking refuge were slaughtered during the Sunday mass. Benjamin
looks directly into the camera, as if recording what the camera saw. He
asked to be photographed amongst the dead. He wanted to prove to his
friends in Kampala, Uganda that the atrocities were real and that he had
seen the aftermath.
(Jaar, no date)
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Ruzizi 2 Bridge
Bukavu, Zaire – Cyangugu, Rwanda Border
Sunday, August 28th, 1994
The Ruzizi 2 Bridge is one of two bridges across the Ruzizi River that
separates Rwanda from Zaire on the Southwest border. At the peak of
the violence, refugees fled Rwanda at the rate of 35,000 people per day.
Now this bridge has been closed for six days, the banks of the river are
swelling with people waiting to cross.
(In van de Vall, 2008, p.1)
The solidity of the boxes, and their monumental forms, paradoxically took
on the quality of an absence. Forced to imagine rather than simply look, the
‘Real Pictures’ monuments amplified the beholders’ emotional engagement
at the same time as promoting a sense of empathy. Far from the compassion
fatigue of media saturation, or the apathy born of inundation with images
of tragedy, the effect of Jaar’s monuments was to deny a passive response.
The beholder needed to become actively engaged, through the seat of their
own imagination, through locating the tragic within their very self. In
contrast to Roland Barthes’ comments on how ‘shock photos’ tend to be
‘over-constructed’, Jaar’s monuments are under-constructed. Barthes
observed that numerous images of horror results in the construction of an
‘intentional language of horror’, yet it is one which fails to touch us because
‘we are in each case dispossessed of our judgement; someone has shuddered
for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing
– except a simple right of intellectual acquiescence’ (Barthes, 1997, p.71).
Instead of giving everything, Jaar gives almost nothing, and this intensifies
the melancholy of the void. As Jaar explained, ‘I wanted to work in reverse,
I wanted to start with an absence in the hope of provoking a presence’ (Jaar,
no date). The beholder is not able to find a resolution, as the images remain
elusive; the void sets up a strongly melancholic situation that has resonances
with the liminal, described in Chapter 14. As in liminality, the melancholy
of the void is related to a condition of deferment, resistance and imprecision.
Another photographic example illustrates this, as in Renée de Vall’s
recollection of images of the 2004 tsunami, recalling how one in particular
stood out, an ‘apparently peaceful scene of two children running to a sea
line that was slowly retreating’. She explains that what made these pictures
different was that ‘they mobilize the empathy of the spectator as they require
The void 71
an imaginative ‘filling in’. And that is also how they acquire their ‘slowness’:
they entrench themselves in one’s memory, because they ask for the
spectator’s active engagement’ (van de Vall, 2008, p.6).
The void is a condition that promotes an empathetic and ethical
melancholy. Rather than vicariously feasting upon the tragic, the void
replaces the particular with the abstract, and therefore turns emotion back
onto the beholder themselves, grounding it within their own subjectivity.
Robert Ivy observes that: ‘Following the immediacy of loss, when grief has
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
References
Barthes, Roland (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (trans. Richard
Howard). New York: Hill and Wang.
Barthes, Roland (1997). ‘Shock photos’, in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
(trans. Richard Howard; originally published 1979). Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Curl, James Steven (1980). A Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Some of the
Buildings, Monuments, and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western
European Tradition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Davis, Shannon (2009). ‘Ma[r]king memory’. Unpublished PhD thesis, School of
Landscape Architecture, Lincoln University, New Zealand.
Donohoe, Janet (2002). ‘Dwelling with monuments’. Philosophy and Geography,
5(2): 235–242.
Forty, Adrian (2005). ‘Concrete and memory’, in Mark Crinson (ed.), Urban
Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. Oxford: Routledge.
Franses, Rico (2001). ‘Monuments and melancholia’. Journal for the Psychoanalysis
of Culture and Society, 6(1): 97–104.
Gablik, Suzi (1985). Magritte. London: Thames and Hudson.
Gillis, John R. (1994). ‘Introduction’, in John R. Gillis, Commemorations: The
Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Godfrey, Mark (2007). Abstraction and the Holcaust. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Hagopian, Patrick (2005). ‘The commemorative landscape of the Vietnam War’, in
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.), Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity
and Landscape Design. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library
and Collection.
72 The places of melancholy
Ivy, Robert (2002). ‘Memorials, monuments and meaning’. Architectural Record,
190(7): 84.
Jaar, Alfredo (n.d.). Lecture for the series La Generazione delle Immagini. www.
undo.net/cgi-bin/openframe.pl?x=/Pinto/Eng/fjarr.htm, 27 December 2015.
Jaksch, Helen (2013). ‘The empty chair is not so empty: ghosts and the performance
of memory in post-Katrina New Orleans’. The Drama Review, 57(1): 102–115.
Keenan, Thomas (2003). ‘Making the dead count, literally’. New York Times, 30
November, 2003.
Linenthal, Edward T. (2001). The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma City in American
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
the ‘uncanny’ is not the property of the space itself nor can it be provoked
by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension,
a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the
74 The places of melancholy
boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing
ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming.
(Vidler, 1992, p.11)
landscape intervention in such a way that it ‘jolts its context, scrapes the
ordinariness of a situation, and imposes a shift on what seems the most
obvious’ (Descombes, 1999, p.76).
Working with the familiar elements of trees and stones, Goldsworthy
makes them strange. The trees are taken out of context, and planted in the
stones. The stones also are arrayed in a way which is almost formal in its
structure, but also has a strange sense of being stranded, as though the earth
has suddenly been moved away from them, leaving them standing in space.
These visual effects are what the Russian Formalists called ‘baring the
device’ – making apparent the construction and scaffolding of a work rather
than obscuring it in effects. Mukarovský called it ‘foregrounding’, a pushing
of the formal devices to the front of our perception, and through doing this,
raising the consciousness of engaging with the work. This foregrounding
impedes an ‘automatic’ reading of the work, it is not easy to engage, and this
leads to a more profound experience. At the Garden of Stones there is no
easy reading. The devices are foregrounded, bared, and it is in this retardation
and this strangeness that ‘any sense of comfort in relation to this past’, to
use Kligerman’s phrase, is not possible (Kligerman, 2007, p. 246, n. 4).
The familiarity of trees and stones is unsettled by Goldsworthy’s work,
intensifying the emotional weight of otherwise simple elements. They echo
the strange familiarity of the empty chair, as Jaksch explained: ‘It is in that
uncertain space between absence and presence, between empty chair and
missing body, that ghosts appear’ (Jaksch, 2013, p.106). The Judenplatz
Holocaust Memorial designed by Rachel Whiteread, and unveiled in 2000,
also uses seemingly familiar domestic elements in a way which makes them
strange (Figure 10.2).
Whiteread’s modus operandi evokes the melancholy of the uncanny, with
her castings repeating and re-presenting entire rooms and houses,
transforming voids into solids. The resonances with the melancholic ‘lost
object’ are profound, as the works make visible the very absences themselves.
At the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial a library is cast, from the inside out,
so that the books themselves are evident only as an ‘impression’. The specific
titles cannot be seen, and instead there is a caesura, an unclosable hole. On
one hand it looks strangely familiar, it looks like a library. On contemplating
the memorial, however, it becomes clear that here is something profoundly
uncanny, a mirror, a double.
78 The places of melancholy
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
For her work Ghost (1990), Whiteread described how her casting of a room
would be a process of ‘mummifying the air in the room and making it solid’
(in Carley, 2008, p.26). Rachel Carley categorises Whiteread’s Ghost as a
‘fetch’, a particularly liminal species of ghost, of someone about to pass
from life into death. Like Jorge Otero-Pailos’ Ethics of Dust (described in
Chapter 16), Whiteread’s Ghost recorded the almost invisible traces of
human dwelling, revealing the subtle palimpsest of the most ordinary of
surfaces. Carley described how Whiteread’s casting ‘recovers the particular
maculations left on the interior over time, such as the ash deposits embedded
on the fire grate and the traces of yellowing wallpaper stained by nicotine’
(in Carley, 2008, p.29). Or, as Richard Noble poetically evokes the idea of
traces, ‘[i]n imagining what has gone before in a space one has access to
small bits of information, a sort of fossil record on the walls and floors and
ceilings of the space’ (Noble, 2005, p.67). The uncanny of haunting is
invoked, of the after-images of absences, of remanence.1
Making casts, or effigies, also underlies the uncanny monumental
architecture of Etienne-Louis Boullée. A defining moment for Boullée was
the revelation of seeing his shadow cast by moonlight, describing how his
‘effigy produced by its light excited my attention [and] by a particular
disposition of the mind, the effect of this simulacrum seemed to me to be one
of extreme sadness’ (in Vidler, 1992, p.169). Through finding the copy of
himself within the landscape, and the realisation of ‘the mass of objects
The uncanny 79
detached in black against a light of extreme pallor’, Boullée set about
translating these impressions into architecture (in Vidler, 1992, p.170). This
architecture would ‘express the extreme melancholy of mourning by means
of its stripped and naked walls’, and draw on the effigy of the self to construct
an architecture of shadows (Vidler, 1992, p.170). Vidler draws attention to
the way in which the shadow of the self was about the body disappearing
into darkness, but also an alternative view of the body as a model for
architecture. Rather than the body’s perfect form as a proportional guide,
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
here it was something of the self’s darker side, the shadowy silhouette,
haunting. Boullée, Vidler observes, ‘prefigured the nineteenth-century
preoccupation with the double as the harbinger of death, or as the shadow
of the unburied dead’ (in Vidler, 1992, p.171). The architectural invention
is therefore one of ‘experienced spatial uncertainty’, an echo of Caillois’
investigations into ‘legendary psycasthenia’, explored further in Chapter 20.
The melancholy of the uncanny is evoked not only by particular physical
elements of architecture or other spatial interventions, but also through the
way in which the landscape is experienced. As Vidler observed above, the
uncanny is a kind of projection, a mental state which creates ambiguity and
slippage. Through mirroring, doubling and repetition, the pleasurable pain
of the uncanny suffuses movement through the landscape. The sensation of
being lost often brings with it a feeling of déjà-vu, of having been there
before. Wandering through Venice, a city in which becoming lost is
compulsory, one encounters similar scenes over and over again. There is an
elusiveness at play, an ambiguity between that which is sought and that
which is encountered. The weirdness of finding a seemingly parallel version
of the city, or indeed of returning to the same spot again and again, is
uncanny and melancholy in its sense of becoming distanced from the world,
from the point of origin or destination. The French term dépaysement unites
the uncanny precisely with the state of being disoriented in the landscape, as
it literally means out of the country (pays). The aesthetic potency of this
feeling of being lost or displaced was mined by the Situationists, creating
intentional disorientation that oscillated between familiar landmarks and
making them strange through defining random routes within the city based
upon games of chance. The related practice of the dérive, or drift, was
suffused with the melancholy of disorientation, based upon the dislocation
and detachment made possible by being a ‘man of the crowd’. The strange
poignancy of this drifting and the uncanny experiences it produced were
woven through surrealist works, including André Breton’s Nadja (1928)
and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938). Breton wanders through a mostly
vacant Paris, the ordinary landscape made strange. Photographs are included
within the book, including the scene of a dinner outside the City Hotel,
which is poignantly deserted; the image which relates to a remembered walk
through the Tuileries Gardens together is similarly desolate. Sartre’s
character Roquentin evokes the ambiguous slipping between the real and
80 The places of melancholy
the imagined, of wanting to disappear into the crowd, evoking the ennui of
the twentieth-century urban experience.
The melancholy uncanny of the landscape is also found in the writing of
Jorge Luis Borges and Edgar Allan Poe. The works of both authors offer
modi operandi for landscape experience which invokes the poignancy of
strangeness. In Borges the effect of copying and mirroring create a sense of
unease. The Library of Babel contains everything ever written or said – i.e.
an exact parallel of the world – and In Exactitude in Science describes a map
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Borges’ evocation of the library, the map and the mirror as uncanny allude
to potential perspectives on an experience of the landscape, suggesting the
possibility of succumbing to the unnerving relationship between our selves
and the world, and finding the aesthetic appeal of such disorientation.
In Poe’s stories, extreme attention to detail in order to create atmosphere
summons a sense of the strange in the familiar. In The Domain of Arnheim
and The Fall of the House of Usher, the landscape and buildings are
described in such exacting detail, an extreme verisimilitude, that they possess
a sense of forensic documentation. The resonances with detective stories are
not coincidental, as Poe is considered one of the inspirations for this genre,
and with this comes a constant shuttling between certainty and ambiguity.
Also, within the exactitude, the landscape so closely observed, there is the
constant implication of something sinister which is at the same time
seductive. The landscape becomes hermetic, claustrophobic. Hoffman
describes Poe’s technique as one of creating ‘mood-invested space’, of
‘making the atmosphere visible’; in terms which might be drawn from a
landscape architecture text, he points to how through
change of close and distant perspective with the impact on the observer
remaining constant, Poe derives one of his most important effects for
building an uncanny atmosphere. On the objective side, form, color,
magnitude, and situation of concrete objects are expressive by nature:
they cause things to appear strange or normal, threatening or familiar,
The uncanny 81
uncanny or idyllic. Tones and sounds, light and shadow, brightness and
darkness are additional phenomena which create atmosphere.
(Hoffman, 1979, p.3)
One of the particular moments where melancholy and the uncanny coincide
is when the narrator in The Fall of the House of Usher views the scene
reflected in a lake. The narrator has already recognised the pathos of the
scene, as he ‘had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the
evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher’. Curious
as to whether the effect of the scene was a product of ‘combinations of very
simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us’ or if this
power ‘lies among considerations beyond our depth’, the narrator pulled his
horse alongside a ‘black and lurid tarn’ to view the reflection. Here he
experienced ‘a shudder even more thrilling than before – upon the remodelled
and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the
vacant and eye-like windows’ (Poe, 1966, p.178). The uncanny repetition of
the landscape in the reflection served to intensify the melancholy, emphasising
the manner in which the mode of experiencing the landscape might be
drawn into the amplification of emotion.
And, if reflection is the visual evocation of an uncanny melancholy, then
echoes resonate aurally. The repetition of sound is productive of poignancy,
bringing to mind Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, invoked
above as a site of the Holocaustal uncanny. Within the Memory Void,
visitors walk across the surface of an artwork by Israeli artist Menashe
Kadishman, 10,000 metal faces with screaming mouths (Figure 10.3).
The installation, Shalechet (Fallen Leaves), produces an eerie sound as the
metal shapes knock together and echo within the abyss of the Memory Void,
a sound of melancholy. The uncanniness of sounds that echo those of
humans also produce a particular poignancy, as Henry David Thoreau
noted of the call of the owl. In Walden, Thoreau described the hooting owl
as ‘the most melancholy sound in nature’, drawing parallels with a human’s
dying moans or sobs, a sound of ‘swamps and twilight woods’ (Thoreau,
1995, p.66).
While echoes suggest an uncanny aural manifestation of melancholy, so
too does the absence of sound. Freud concluded his seminal essay on the
uncanny with a reminder that ‘solitude, silence and darkness’ are residues
from infantile anxiety, dark presences that continue to haunt our
apprehension of the world (Freud, 2003, p.159). It seems no coincidence
that these three qualities are also quintessentially melancholy.
82 The places of melancholy
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Note
1 In physics the term ‘remanence’ refers to the magnetic traces that remain in a
material after the external source of magnetism is removed. In metaphysics it is a
term used by dowsers to refer to psychic remains within ruins.
The uncanny 83
References
Boulter, Jonathan Stuart (2001). ‘Partial glimpses of the infinite: Borges and the
simulacrum’. Hispanic Review, 69(3): 355–377.
Carley, Rachel (2008). ‘Domestic afterlives: Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost’, Architectural
Design, 78: 26–29.
Descombes, Georges (1999). ‘The Swiss way’, in James Corner (ed.), Recovering
Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture. New York:
Princeton Architectural Press.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so
pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility. It was … a
Silence 85
silence which was almost pain … And the spirit of memory brooded
over it all.
(Manchester Guardian, 12 November 1919 in Dyer, 1994, p.20)
The silence of the Armistice Day observance was anchored at the Cenotaph
in Whitehall, London. The memorial was a marker which was seen to
‘record – to hold that silence – the silence that was gathered within it and
which would, therefore, emanate from it’ (Dyer, 1994, p.24). With the
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
the dweller to recover the precious silence of his/her soul’ (Beaver, 2006,
p.167). Further, Pallasmaa made silence one of his six themes for the
millennium, stating:
Further, Pallasmaa ends his proffering of themes with a plea: ‘We need an
ascetic, concentrative and contemplative architecture, an architecture of
silence’ (Pallasmaa, 1994, p.79).
References
Beaver, Robyn (2006). A Pocketful of Houses. Mulgrave, Australia: The Images
Publishing Group Pty Ltd.
Cave, Nick (2007). ‘The secret life of the love song’. In The Complete Lyrics 1978–
2007. London: Penguin.
Dyer, Geoff (1994). The Missing of the Somme. London: Phoenix Press.
Eagleton, Terry (2003). Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Goffi-Hamilton, Federica (2006). Carlo Scarpa and the eternal canvas of silence.
Architectural Review Quarterly, 10(3/4): 291–300.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (1994). ‘Six themes for the next millennium’. Architectural
Review, 196(1169): 74–79.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2004). ‘Reveries of the solitary walker’ (originally published
in 1782), in Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, The Emergence of Modern
Architecture: A Documentary History from 1000 to 1810. London: Routledge.
12 Shadows and darkness
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Darkness and the play of shadows are saturated with melancholy. Time’s
passage is written in the world of shadows, and resonates with the estranging
sensations of the uncanny. To darken has a double meaning: optically it is
the loss of light or increase in pigment; emotionally it refers to a mounting
gloom or sadness. Both senses are at play in melancholy’s affinity with
shadows. And, like silence, there is a pervasive sense of absence which
defines the condition.
The move from shadows into darkness, blackness, brings melancholy
close to the edge of the sublime, the point at which an emotional regime of
contemplation and sadness is overtaken by awe. Kant found the melancholy
moment within the sublime, with the ‘deep ravines and torrents raging there,
deep-shadowed solitudes that invite to brooding melancholy’ (in Casey,
2002, p.70). Edmund Burke, in his On the Sublime and the Beautiful, also
plotted this shadowy domain, highlighting the delicate boundary between a
pleasurable feeling of apprehension and an all-consuming fear. Blackness,
he observed, could have painful effects to begin with, but we can become
accustomed to them so that the initial terror abates. With this familiarity
comes a softening of the ‘horror and sternness’ of the original impression,
but the brooding blackness is indelible. Burke stated: ‘Black will always
have something melancholy in it, because the sensory will always find the
change to it from other colours too violent; or if it occupy the whole compass
of the sight, it will then be darkness’ (Burke, 1764, p.285). In darkness lies
the constant possibility of encountering the unknown, of walking into
dangerous obstructions or falling off precipices (Figure 12.1). The edge
between melancholy and fear is a line that must be negotiated carefully.
The effect of darkness is profound, as in the description by the psychiatrist
Eugène Minkowski:
while it is not so for light’; the feeling of mystery that one experiences at
night would not come from anything else.
(In Caillois, 1987, p.30)
References
Boullée, Étienne-Louis (2004). ‘A treatise on architecture’ (originally published
1793–1799), in Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, The Emergence of Modern
Architecture: A Documentary History from 1000 to 1810. London: Routledge.
Brown, Mark (2009). ‘Tate Modern puts void in Turbine Hall’. Guardian, 12
October. www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/oct/12/tate-modern-turbine-
hall-balka, 27 December 2015.
Burke, Edmund (1764). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful. London: R and J Dodsley.
Shadows and darkness 91
Burton, Robert (1838) The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, With All the Kinds,
Causes, Symptomes, Prognostics, and Several Cures of It : In Three Partitions.
With Their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections, Philosophically,
Medicinally, Historically Opened and Cut Up. London: B Blake.
Caillois, Roger (1987), ‘Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia’ (trans. John Shepley;
original essay published 1935). In Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas
Crimp and Joan Copjec, October: The First Decade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Casey, Edward S. (2002). Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Harrison, Neil A., Wilson, C. Ellie and Critchley, Hugo D. (2007). ‘Processing of
observed pupil size modulates perception of sadness and predicts empathy’.
Emotion, 7(4): 724–729.
Rattenbury, Kester (2009). ‘A limited yet boundless sensory explosion in darkness’.
Architectural Review, 226(1354): 110.
Siegle, Greg J., Granholm, Eric, Ingram, Rick E. and Matt, Georg E. (2001).
‘Pupillary and reaction time measures of sustained processing of negative
information in depression’. Biological Psychiatry, 49(7): 624–636.
Vidler, Anthony (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
13 Aura
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Aura is vulnerable and fragile, with an always imminent sense of fading that
is suggestive of a melancholy aesthetic. As an intangible quality, aura is
often described in terms of its absence, its impending loss, and it is inherently
elusive and fugitive. Even the very definition of aura is mysterious. Walter
Benjamin, the pre-eminent theorist of aura, wrote of it in a variety of ways,
each suggestive of a distinctive emphasis. The pivotal point was aura’s
association with authenticity and originality, something which was under
threat from mass production. This in itself was a paradox, a conflict, as it
meant at once the loss of the uniqueness of an object and at the same time
the achievement of egalitarian access to art: ‘For the first time in world
history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its
parasitical dependence on ritual’ (Benjamin, 1969, p.226).
Defining the nature of aura extended beyond debates over the politics of
mass consumption and into the aesthetic quality of what is beheld. For
Benjamin, aura is the perception of ‘distance’, however close something may
be. And, it also relates to a phenomenon – a painting, a landscape, a tree, the
sky – ‘looking back at us’, returning our gaze. These two core threads of
Benjamin’s theory of aura are fundamental to our experience, our sensing of
the world. The power of aura was invoked in his explanation in The Arcades
Project, distinguishing between
Crossing the monstrous shade of its elevation, we are halted by the blow
of a cool wind which is cruising around the corners of its lofty massif.
As we approach its body, we are confronted by an intimate protective
warmth radiating through the walls, wings, and open doors, confused
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Photographs are not simply pictures of things, but imprints of the invisible
made visible. This resonates strongly with Jean-Luc Marion’s revelations
regarding the painter of ‘authentic’ images: ‘He deepens a seam or fault line,
in the night of the inapparent, in order to extract, lovingly or more often by
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
force, with strokes and patches of color, blocks of the visible’ (Marion,
2004, p.25). As an analogue of landscape experience, the photographer
shapes space phenomenologically, working with light, as in Noble’s
photographs where: ‘black the extreme absence of light evoking the darkness
of suspicion, doubt, despair … white the overwhelming presence of light,
announcing revelation, exaltation, bliss’, and that white is apprehended as a
‘spiritual value’ (Keith, 1983, p.24).
As a parallel of landscape experience, photography manifests the qualities
of becoming imbued with place, of being open to the auratic. Benjamin’s
writing on photography is in part contradiction and in part paradox in its
relation to aura. While photography is the very manifestation of mass-
production and therefore the erasure of the original, it is also for Benjamin
a significant site of auratic presence. Photography highlights how such
qualities are embedded in the moment, allied to the idea of a photograph as
an imprint, an impression. Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky made Polaroid
photographs of landscapes, a medium which is intensely auratic in that each
image is an original, a unique impression of that moment. Actor Tonino
Guerra remembers the moment when Tarkovsky photographed him on their
travels through Italy, writing that he could
remember when we entered the little church on the edge of the water-
filled square, where the mist rising from the water gave a sense of
distance to the landscape of ancient houses. The warm light that
morning streamed through the dusty windows and came to rest on
faded decorations on a wall. He surprised me, sitting on a pew, as
though I were just the right shadow to accentuate the caress of the sun
beyond my dark body. These images leave with us a mysterious and
poetic sensation, the melancholy of seeing things for the last time.
(Guerra, 2004, p.9)
Press.
Damisch, Hubert (1978). ‘Five notes for a phenomenology of the photographic
image’. October, 5: 70–72.
Edwards, Elizabeth and Hart, Janice (eds), (2004). Photographs Objects Histories:
On the Materiality of Images. New York: Routledge.
Harries, Karsten (2009). ‘The need for architecture’. Environmental and Architectural
Phenomenology, 20(3): 11–18.
Keith, Sheridan (1983). ‘Anne Noble’s Wanganui’. Art New Zealand, 27: 24–25.
Koss, Juliet (2006). ‘On the limits of empathy’. The Art Bulletin, 88(1): 139–157.
Marion, Jean-Luc (2004). The Crossing of the Visible. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Marks, Laura U. (2002). Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McCarthy, Kerry (2010). ‘Thinking with photographs at the margins of Antarctic
exploration’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Canterbury, Christchurch,
New Zealand.
Molodkina, Ludmila (2009). ‘Utilitarian-aesthetic dynamics of nature’. Analecta
Husserliana, CI: 213–229.
Paton, Justin (ed.) (2001). Anne Noble: States of Grace. Dunedin: Dunedin Public
Art Gallery; Wellington: Victoria University Press.
Rainey, Ruben M. (2005). ‘The garden as narrative: Lawrence Halprin’s Franklin
Delano Roosevelt Memorial’, in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.), Places of
Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design. Washington, DC:
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Vidler, Anthony (2001). ‘Staging lived space: James Casebere’s photographic
unconscious’, in James Casebere, James Casebere: The Spatial Uncanny. New
York: Sean Kelly Gallery.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof (2003). ‘Public projection’, in Charles Harrison and Paul
Wood (eds), Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas.
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Zumthor, Peter (2006). Thinking Architecture (second edition). Basel: Birkhauser.
14 Liminality
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Melancholy inhabits the liminal, the times and spaces of transition, threshold
places. Anthropologist Victor Turner theorised liminality as core to
developmental stages, especially in the context of rites of passage in tribal
culture. Moving through each of the stages of life involves a period of
transition – a liminal phase – when an individual is ‘betwixt and between’
the more definite phases either side. As a type of cultural limbo, liminality in
time and space expresses an indefinite character, a suspension of certainty.
Turner wrote: ‘Liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the
womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to
an eclipse of the sun or moon’ (Turner, 1969, p.95).
The passage across thresholds, through indefinite zones, occurs in the
landscape at places like the seashore, in shadows, on the horizon, and in the
temporal interludes of dawn and twilight, spring and autumn. In the late
afternoon, in the illumination of dust motes by a ray of glancing sunlight, or
the long shadows cast across a square, there is the intangible, ephemeral
melancholy moment. Or a winter’s day when the grey light falls through a
rain-spattered window, time seems slowed almost to a standstill, a palpable
poignancy hangs in the air. For Giorgio de Chirico it was the liminal
seasonality and time of day that were particularly evocative, ‘the melancholy
of beautiful autumn days, afternoons in Italian cities’ (de Chirico, 1994, p.
61). Martin Barnes links the gloaming, the twilight time, to feelings of
transience, a time which facilitates the subverting of normality, and he says
that the liminal time is the threshold when ‘hard facts become elusive, and
an evocative obscurity begins’ (Barnes, 2006, p.10). At twilight there is an
indistinct quality of the light, almost as though it is emitted from somewhere
other than the sun, as Steven Connor describes, ‘an eerie kind of “earthlight”,
as though objects themselves were giving out their own illumination, stored
during the day and given off as day retreats’ (Connor, 2006, p.26).
In one of the seminal texts of landscape architectural theory, Henry
Vincent Hubbard’s An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design,
melancholy is included among the catalogue of landscape effects. Hubbard
describes the melancholy effect as ‘peaceful, restful, suave’ and links it in
part to conditions of liminality, ‘atmospheric conditions, such as approaching
100 The places of melancholy
darkness or drizzling rain’ (Hubbard, 2010, p.82). Temporal liminality is
also invoked with reference to the melancholy which might arise from
associations sparked by ‘a ruined building, a churchyard, an old and
decaying tree, or anything which suggests the end or destruction of something
once beautiful and prospering’ (Hubbard, 2010, p.82). The invocation of
death in a beautiful landscape heightens feelings of liminality, of passages
and thresholds. The artistic theme of Et in Arcadia Ego encapsulates the
conflicted condition of the presence of death in paradise, and is often
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
translated as ‘Even in Arcadia I (death) am.’ Ruins and old trees are part of
this Et in Arcadia Ego tradition, transcending a scene which is simply
beautiful to one which has that gravitas of death’s presence.
Ruins and decay sit at the intersection of temporal and spatial liminality
– the passage from one domain into another. The threshold condition where
architecture bleeds into landscape was the foundation for Walter Benjamin’s
magnum opus, The Arcades Project. The spaces of arcades were transitional
zones between the interiors of shops and the wider city spaces – at once
‘landscapes’ and ‘rooms’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.10) – and those that strolled
through them, the flâneurs, were also liminal in their place in society,
inhabiting the edges of the new world of the metropolis, but pulled by the
domain of the middle class. In his notes, Benjamin described the feeling of
passage experienced at this point of threshold: ‘At the entrance to the arcade,
a mailbox: the last chance to make some sign to the world that one is leaving’
(Benjamin, 1999, p.88). Divining the network of threshold spaces that
weave through the city – ‘those lines that, running alongside railroad
crossings and across private owned lots, within the park and along the river
bank, function as limits’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.88) – Benjamin amplified their
significance through his description of the arches such as that of Scipio that
stood in isolation at the city limits. With a quotation from Ferdinand Noack,
Benjamin highlighted how the arches were ‘for the … Romans a conception
of the sacred as boundary or threshold’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.97).
At the moment of threshold it is possible to look forwards and backwards
simultaneously, and Hunt identifies this quality as underpinning the elements
of landscape architecture that ‘augment its commemorative functions
beyond the opportunities of the other arts’ (Hunt, 2005, p.20). Noting the
frequency with which gardens are used as places of burial, Hunt identifies
the importance of gardens as intermediate zones, ‘liminal enclaves between
outside and inside, town and country, social space and private space’ (Hunt,
2005, p.20). As in the liminal passages of the Arcades, or the arches on the
city limits, gardens as commemorative spaces place us in a transitional
space. Gardens are temporally liminal too, in their backward-looking gaze
towards the Arcadian and Edenic ideals as much as their prospective
qualities. As Pallasmaa observes, ‘Melancholy is the recognition of the tragic
dimension within the moment of bliss. This mental state combines happiness
and sadness, understanding and bewilderment, into a heightened experience
Liminality 101
of being. Melancholy is the sorrow accompanying the comprehension of
limits’ (in MacKeith, 2005, p.316).
The threshold qualities are not only confined to the horizontal realm, in
the manner of a crossing over, but also in the boundary of the terrestrial and
celestial, as Hunt explains: ‘The placement of memorials in open space is
mediatory in one final way: sited on the earth, in human space, they are
nevertheless under the open sky, in the eye of God’ (Hunt, 2005, p.20).
Liminality is a potent zone for the evocation of memory. The passing
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
between life and death, between the real and the imaginary, between the
immanent and the transcendental, are threshold terrains, lingering, obscure.
Exploring this in a hypothetical memorial to road workers who died during
the construction of improvements to an alpine pass, I drew upon both the
horizontal liminality of passage and the vertical threshold of earth and sky
(Figure 14.1).
Two workers died during work to improve the safety of a treacherous
stretch of road through the Southern Alps in New Zealand’s South Island.
Being killed while making the road safer for others is a poignant paradox,
worthy of a memorial gesture. The men were working on huge structures,
including a viaduct and ramparts to protect motorists from rocks falling
from cliffs above. The rampart is manifested in the landscape as a strong
horizontal line, an emphatically ordered gesture in a landscape alive with
geomorphological unease, a stone’s throw from the active seismic zone of
the alpine fault line.
The hypothetical memorial draws on the horizontal’s moment of order
within chaos, enlisting it into a new form. Resonating with the sublimity of
the landscape and the monumental scale of the road safety interventions, I
proposed a huge steel I-beam, over 40 metres high, to be inserted beside the
road, into the river bed below. This is the sole addition to the landscape, an
economic gesture, but one that works on alchemical principles. Through the
illusory powers of juxtaposition and parallax, this single vertical insertion
becomes first a cross and then a gate, or vice versa depending on the
motorist’s direction of travel. The vertical visually fuses with the existing
horizontal of the rampart to form an enormous cross, echoing the small
roadside crosses which are scattered along highways as memorials to
accident victims. Through parallax the vertical and horizontal pull apart, as
the road curves around the cliffside, plunging the motorist through a gate of
sorts. The vertical is inscribed with the names of the two roadworkers, a
simple and humble writing into the landscape, a statement of vulnerability
and loss. The gate form echoes the brooding landscapes of Colin McCahon,
where the haunting melancholy of his curious geometries sit within the
sublime landscapes of New Zealand’s high country. McCahon saw his gates
as ‘a way through’, a passage, a journey (Brown, 1984). His work is suffused
with a sublime poignancy, in the use of dark and light, of emptiness,
fragments and absences.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
gangs from nearby Goat Island, followed in 1841 by the sculpting of the stone
to construct grain silos and water reservoirs, and docks and other naval
facilities in the late 1850s. Even some of the prison cells themselves were
excavated directly into the sandstone, a detention space which, it is suggested,
‘would not have been approved had it been submitted to the Inspectors of
Prisons at the Home Office in London’ (Kerr, 1984, p.17). A prison continued
on the island, alongside shipyards, until 1869, when the prisoners were
re-located to the mainland jail in Darlinghurst, Sydney; in 1871 the facilities
found a further use as an industrial school for girls, and a reformatory for girls
who were convicted criminals. It was at this time that the name was changed
to Biloela in an effort to remove the connotations of the previous prisons. One
last prison phase began in 1888, housing petty criminals, such that ‘the evil
[was] more seeming than real’ (Kerr, 1984, p.11).
Shipbuilding continued on the site until 1992, with its name eventually
reverting to Cockatoo Island. Heavily modified and burdened by its history,
Cockatoo Island is a shadow within the bright, sparkling Sydney Harbour.
An ideas competition held in 1996 yielded such visions as a return to
incarceration,2 to maritime industry3 or a grid of fig trees which would
slowly engulf the entire island and provide a habitat for bats.4 Instead of any
of these dark possibilities, the island is undergoing a transformation which
involves an ordered re-working of the site, a cleaving of the mess and
complexity of history. Developed as an urban park, Cockatoo Island became
described as ‘big, surprising, entertaining’ (Cockatoo Island, 2010) and
additions include a camping ground, a café and a bar. The island’s
melancholy, its place as a liminal refuge, is being replaced by a usage which
in many ways overlooks the dark history. This is one of the conundrums of
sites where the heritage is ‘difficult’ – like Cockatoo Island’s history of
prisons and reform schools, or Christchurch’s Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum.
These past uses, with their heavy baggage, make them challenges for the
heritage ‘industry’. The legacy of danger and discomfort, sadness and
isolation, can become suppressed as part of moves to create pleasant places.
Islands like Hart and Cockatoo persist as liminal zones very close to
major settlement areas. Rather than remote oceanic locations, these islands
lurk near the land and resonate with other prison islands like Alcatraz in San
Francisco Bay, and Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town in South
Africa. These islands are loaded with symbolic cargoes, heavy with the
burdens of society. Despite Hart Island’s proximity to one of the world’s
106 The places of melancholy
biggest cities, and its role as home to that country’s largest cemetery, it is, in
effect, written out of the everyday consciousness. And Cockatoo Island,
although within Sydney’s populous harbour, represented a remote location
for undesirables, so that in many ways it might as well have been in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean; the litany of problems included the non-arrival
of the basics of bread, lighting oil, and, the lament that ‘Neither candles nor
onions have come as expected’ (Parker, 1977, p.6).
Their condition as an edge zone, a threshold state, casts islands as the
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
ultimate terrains vagues. Found at the city edges, or on left over and
abandoned sites, terrains vagues are spatially and socially marginalised
landscapes. Their imprecision is both spatial and temporal, often existing at
points of transition, where places which were previously assigned to a
particular category of occupation – residential, industrial – have, with
abandonment, drifted into a state of vagueness. These spaces become
stranded in a different time, outside of the city’s normal activities. The
‘Zone’ of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker expresses the spirit of the terrain
vague, a mysteriously imbricated space which seems to inhabit a different
time frame. The marginal qualities of the terrain vagues landscape are also
found in Bill Henson’s photographs, depicting what the New Yorker
described as ‘battered landscapes and fragile, wispy youths’ (in Spens, 2005).
The imagery of Tarkovsky and Henson makes the melancholy of terrains
vagues palpable, and embodies the description of such places as
The intervention in such places offers the opportunity to engage with the
melancholy of liminality, one that might be intensified by visiting the site at
only the liminal times of day or seasons. Such temporal bracketing is a
Liminality 107
means of designing with time, that as much as landscape architects shape
space, they also have the possibility of structuring time, drawing visitors at
times of emotional potency, and resisting them when the light is flat.
Gardens, memorials, islands, arcades and terrains vagues emphasise the
poignancy of passage, the melancholy of that which is near yet lingers on the
edge of the unattainable. Vast lands such as Antarctica possess their own
liminal melancholy. Undergoing sustained twilight during the spring and
autumn of each year, and even the year through there are lingering periods
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
of half-light, the Antarctic is also a threshold place that exists just over the
horizon of the tangible world, a place of thwarted expeditions, death and
longing. Beyond these terrestrial and even quotidian examples, the moon
hovers as a further liminal location par excellence. The lunar landscape is
particularly evocative of literally other-worldly beauty, the intangible sense
of loneliness and desolation. Following the intense interest throughout the
1970s and even the 1980s, the moon has more recently receded from the
radar. Yet the images remain in the mind’s eye. The photographs of the
moon produced from the early voyages, the Apollo missions, had the frisson
of aura, and also the yearning for discovery, for finding ourselves out there.
Astronomy in general is a melancholy pursuit, such is the vastness of the
endeavour, and this is made more so by the desire to make some kind of
connection. If ‘landscape’ is conceptualised as extending beyond our familiar
terrain on earth, to the moon, and even beyond, perhaps the most melancholy
of objects might be the Voyager spacecraft. Launched in 1977, the spacecraft
set out in search of life, departing our solar system in December 2004. On
board Voyager is a Golden Record which contains a range of audio tracks,
including what Ry Cooder has called ‘the most soulful, transcendent piece
in all American music’: Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark was the Night, Cold
was the Ground’ (in Cresswell, 2006, p.73).
Notes
1 ‘Potter’s fields’ are cemeteries for the unknown or destitute. The origin of the
term is as an area of land for the burial of strangers, as in Matthew 27: 7: ‘And
they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.’
A potter’s field would have been a place to dig for clay, with the terrain of ditches
and excavations providing places for burials.
2 Jason McNamee’s commended entry (see Simpson 1996).
3 Ross Ramus and students from University of New South Wales, first prize (see
Simpson, 1996).
4 Richard Weller’s commended scheme (see Simpson, 1996).
References
Barnes, Martin (2006). ‘The gloaming’, in Martin Barnes and Kate Best, Twilight:
Photography in the Magic Hour. London: Merrell Publishers in association with
the Victoria and Albert Museum.
108 The places of melancholy
Benjamin, Walter (1999). The Arcades Project. (ed. Ralph Tiedemann; trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin). Boston: Harvard University Press.
Brown, Gordon (1984). Colin McCahon, Artist. Auckland: Reed.
Burgin, Victor (2009). ‘Monument and melancholia’. In Victor Burgin, Situational
Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (essay originally published in
2008). Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press.
Cockatoo Island (2010). Promotional website. www.cockatooisland.gov.au/about/
index.html, 12 March 2010.
Connor, Steven (2006). ‘A certain slant of light’, in Martin Barnes and Kate Best,
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Hitler directed that all German buildings would be made from marble, stone
and brick – all materials which would ruin well – rather than concrete and
steel. Nazi architect Albert Speer’s drawings of the marble colonnade at the
Nuremberg Zeppelin Field showed it as an ivy-clad ruin.
Beyond specific buildings is the fragmentary applied to a landscape scale,
as in Gustave Doré’s engraving The New Zealander, 1873. A Maori, the
‘New Zealander’, sits on a ruined arch of London Bridge drawing the
remnants of St. Paul’s in his sketchbook (Figure 15.1).
The melancholy of the fragment is allied with the melancholy of the collector.
The art of collecting is recognised as one of the most melancholy of tasks,
profoundly contemplative, and filled with persistent longing. The collector
is always searching for items, yet at the same time seeking to elude
completion. Like a lover’s melancholy which rests upon unrequited love,
collector’s melancholy is built upon an eternal infinity, the prospect of the
collection never being complete, a perpetual non finito. In this context the
partial nature of a fragment is everything, it is the core of melancholy,
gesturing to the impossibility of completeness, to the passing of a prior
entirety. For the time of modernity this can be conceptualised as a forever
backwards contemplation, to that time before that was, perhaps, complete,
and subsequently fell into ruin. The poignancy of these ruins derives from
the unattainability of the past, that ‘[w]e may kneel to gather a fragment,
but it stays a fragment and can speak to us only of a beauty which is lost
forever’ (Rella, 1987, p. 35).
The collector is a ‘pearl diver’, one who lowers themselves into ‘dizzying
sea depths to gather pearls and coral in which even death has become
something “rich and strange”’ (Rella, 1987, p.32). The pearl diver is, as
Franco Rella explains, ‘saturnine, melancholic’, challenged by the
‘unreachable totality’ implied by collecting (Rella, 1987, p.33). The vastness
and impossibility of completeness is such that
relates this melancholy relationship with the world of things to the experience
of the labyrinth, ‘a place without exits, or better yet, a place with thousands
of exits, none of which lead outside’ (Rella, 1987, p.31), and draws parallels
with Kafka’s description of the world as a collection, and Bellow’s perception
of the world as the ‘province of the collector of ruins’ (Rella, 1987, p.34). The
melancholy of exits, of departures, as well as the fragmentary, leads towards
the dual losses bound up in the poignancy of leavings.
Note
1 The phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans is Latin for ‘fearful and fascinating
mystery’, and is used by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy to name the awesome
mystery common to all forms of religious experience.
References
Buck-Morss, Susan (1991). The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (illustrated edition). Boston: MIT Press.
Burgin, Victor (2009). ‘Monument and melancholia’. In Victor Burgin, Situational
Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (essay originally published in
2008). Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press.
Girardin, R.L. (1982). An Essay on Landscape (trans. Daniel Malthus; originally
published in French in 1783). New York: Garland Publishing.
Harries, Elizabeth Wanning (1994). The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment
in the Later Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Harries, Karsten (1997). The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Holl, Steven (2006). ‘Water: a phenomenal lens’, in Alberto Perez-Gomez, Juhani
Pallasmaa, Steven Holl, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture,
San Francisco: William Stout.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2003). ‘Kodak moments, flashbulb memories:
reflections on 9/11’. The Drama Review, 47(1): 11–48.
Leach, Neil (2003). ‘9/11’, Diacritics, 33(3/4): 75–92.
Marshall, William (1795). A Review of ‘The Landscape, a Didactic Poem’, also of
‘An Essay on the Picturesque’, Together with Practical Remarks on Rural
Ornament. London: G. Nicol, G. G. and J. Robinson, and J. Debrett.
Rella, Franco (1987). ‘Melancholy and the labyrinthine world of things’, Substance,
53: 29–36.
116 The places of melancholy
Rothstein, Eric (1976). ‘“Ideal Presence”, and the “Non Finito”, in Eighteenth-
Century Aesthetics’. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 9(3): 307–332.
Scully, Vincent (2003). Modern Architecture and Other Essays, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Smithson, Robert (1967) ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, ArtForum, December: 48–51.
Steinmetz, George (2008). ‘Harrowed landscapes: white ruingazers in Namibia and
Detroit and the cultivation of memory’. Visual Studies, 23(3): 211–237.
Thomas, Sophie (2008). Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle.
New York: Routledge.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
leavings, the sadness from being apart and the inexplicable pleasure of the
pain of separation.
The loss of landscape, the leavings from it (departures), and the leavings
behind (residues), are a source of melancholic contemplation for refugees.
Displaced from their homelands, refugees will sometimes carry with them
small mementos of place, items which form armatures for mourning. Such
extended, prolonged, even permanent, mourning becomes melancholy
proper, in Freudian terms – the wound is kept open and the subject does not
seek closure but instead longs for longing, pursuing the pain of loss. The
fragments of a former existence are bearers of identity, of the seat of one’s
self, for the nostalgic refugee. Landscapes are powerfully evocative of
identity and connection, and for displaced Latvians the fragments were
representations of the countryside, providing a portable means to tie them
back to their homes. In paintings, songs and pastoral narratives, the
landscape was the core of an emotional repertoire, even though that very
same landscape was also the place of the darkest of memories. Soviet control
from 1944 created a climate of fear, and the forests were a place of refuge
for Latvians. The imposition of collective farming, heavy taxation, and the
deportation of one-tenth of the rural population to Siberia, saw a dramatic
change to the Latvian countryside. As Vieda Skultans laments: ‘Those who
survived deportation and exile often had no homes to go to and their return
to the homeland could also be painful’ (Skultans, 2001, p.30). For Latvians,
landscape imagery was intensely melancholy. Skultans describes this
irresolvable connection to place: ‘descriptions of the pastoral embody a
contradiction: they hold out hope and yet they contain a fear lest the
landscape will speak of the brutalities it has witnessed’ (Skultans, 2001,
p.38). This conflicted relationship with memory is what Svetlana Boym
terms ‘reflective nostalgia’, in distinction from ‘restorative nostalgia’ which
tries to recreate the past. For the reflective nostalgic, the past cannot be
recreated, it is irrevocable, unrequitable, and will remain as a wound that
can’t be healed. This melancholy irresolution reflects on a past that is not as
it was, but as a creative reinterpretation, ‘not a property of the object itself,
but a result of an interaction between subjects and objects, between actual
landscapes and landscapes of the mind’ (Boym, 2001, p.354).
The melancholy of leavings is connected to the poignancy of the souvenir.
As a trace of a memory the souvenir is the ultimate ‘stranded object’, isolated
forever from its origin. Susan Stewart describes how the potency of souvenirs
Leavings 119
rests upon the fact that the event which they are connected to cannot be
repeated. The connection between the object and its origin is lost, but the
relationship remains as an ethereal trace. Stewart explains how souvenirs
are the means by which nostalgics nurture their desire for the past. Although
the souvenir exists in the present, the nostalgic wants to push it into the past,
to find that distance between what is here now, and what was. This distance
is something which must be maintained for the nostalgic’s desire to be able
to continue, it must remain at an unattainable arm’s length, a fragment from
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
the past, a wound that can’t heal. Distance also resonates with aura, and the
cult value of objects, all that is tied up within elements persisting from the
past. ‘The souvenir involves the displacement of attention into the past’,
Stewart observes, adding that it is ‘not simply an object appearing out of
context, an object from the past incongruously surviving in the present;
rather, its function is to envelope the present within the past. Souvenirs are
magical objects because of this transformation’ (Stewart, 2005, p.151).
The abandoned fragment falls outside time and space – becoming a
‘stranded object’,2 a ‘melancholy object’ where ‘through death, the most
mundane objects can rise in symbolic, emotional and mnemonic value
sometimes outweighing all other measures of value’ (Gibson, 2004, p. 292).
Inhering within remnants, these are the phantom presences that prevent
closure. Strandings exhibit the familiar, making them strange, amplifying a
melancholic out-of-placeness, where their awkwardness induces pangs of
poignancy. The traces left by a prior inhabitation, abandoned belongings, a
child’s swing which hangs forlornly, a shoe, the mark on a wall where a
picture once hung – the leavings left by those who have departed magnify
the presence of absence, desertion is palpable. Leavings are the intensification
of loss. Leavings are also represented not by the fragments but the holes
where they should be. Melancholy pours into the lacunae, gaps and holes in
history. That which is missing somehow persists, a ghostly presence. The
phenomenon of the ‘phantom limb’ is one well-documented within
psychology, the ache that resides in an absent arm or leg after amputation.
The phantom limbs of landscapes ache in all places of departures, of lands
abandoned, of downfalls and aftermaths. It is what Jan Morris calls the
‘Trieste effect’, a sense of being ‘taken … out of time to nowhere’ (Morris,
2001, p.17). And, as Morris reflects, this feeling is founded upon ‘an
unspecified yearning [that] steals narcotically over me – what the Welsh
language, in a loved word, calls hiraeth’ (Morris, 2001, p. 16).
The poignancy of leavings is amplified in the landscapes of exiles,
departures, diasporas. As Edward Casey writes in paralleling Freudian
mourning with a loss of landscape, ‘We mourn places as well as people’, and
as such the same emotions
Concorde, dating from 1755, ‘had the decay, the melancholy and deserted
look of an old amphitheatre’ (in Woodward, 2002, p.19).
A sense of loss stems from eviction, exile and also from change beyond
one’s control. The landscape historian W.G. Hoskins expresses such
melancholy in his reflection on the marks of progress on the English
landscape, creating – the ‘England of the Nissen hut, the “pre-fab”, and the
electric fence ... England of the by-pass ... England of the bombing-range
where there was once silence ... England of battle-training areas.... Barbaric
England of the scientists, the military men, and the politicians’ (in Cloke et
al., 1994, p.29). Hoskins’ lament evokes the observation of the sixth-century
philosopher Boethius, that ‘The beauty of things is fleet and swift, more
fugitive than the passing of flowers’ (in Eco, 1986, p.9). This recognition of
the beauty of things about to disappear, of the intensification of beauty at
the approach of death, is the melancholic species of ubi sunt, Latin for
‘where are?’. The beauty of the ubi sunt moment is a nostalgic yearning and
backwards-looking wonder at the fragility of what comes to pass, and is
usually presented as a list of what has been lost – something which Hoskins
does in reverse in his ‘Nissen hut’ lament. Meditation upon the passage of
things induces contemplation, the melancholy of reflection, as in
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64, ‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / That time
will come and take my love away’ (in Harries, 1994, p.97).
Thoughts of loss are associated with the sense of transience, of the passage
of all things. Reflection upon transience spans a polarity, with the ubi sunt
contemplation of the beauty of passing at one extreme, and desolation and
despondency at the other. Freud’s essay ‘On Transience’ described his walk
through ‘smiling countryside’ with an aloof friend and a young poet. This
young poet, while admiring the scene for its beauty, could take no joy in it,
being ‘disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction,
that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the
beauty and splendour that men have created or may create’ (Freud, 1997,
p.197). This seemingly perverse anti-joyful perspective in the face of beauty
echoes what Žižek called the ‘old racist joke about Gypsies’, that ‘when it
rains they are happy because they know that after rain there is always
sunshine, and when the sun shines, they feel sad because they know that
after the sunshine it will at some point rain’ (Žižek, 2001, pp.661–662). For
both the Gypsies and Freud’s young poet, the relationship with the transience
Leavings 121
of nature is one of melancholy, of a constant awareness of the fragility of
things, of the inevitability of leavings.
The Irish Diaspora of the potato famine underpins an affective topography
of leavings. In 1845–1852 the devastation of the Irish potato crop, followed
by an inhospitable political response, resulted in the mass abandonment of
agricultural lands and a death toll of over 1.5 million. The Diaspora saw the
Irish leave their homelands and head to new homes around the world,
including New York and Sydney, both of which have sites which memorialise
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
An Gorta Mór, the Irish Hunger. New York’s memorial was opened in July
2002, and is located in Battery Park City, towards the southern tip of
Manhattan Island (Figure 16.1).
Designer Brian Tolle recreated the countryside of County Mayo, including
the local flora and a ruined cottage donated by his extended family. The slab
of countryside is held aloft on a podium of fossilised Irish limestone, striated
with lines of illuminated text, selected from accounts of the famine. Tolle
describes how this is ‘a landscape supported by language’. Passing through
the tunnel in the podium, written text is amplified by the sound of the
spoken voice. Here, the references depart from the specific context of the
Irish famine, and extend into a discourse on famine at large. These are tales
of leavings, set against the affective scene of a deserted landscape.
At the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, Australia, another memorial to the
Irish Potato Famine effects a sense of abandonment and pathos, designed by
Hossein and Angela Valamanesh (1999) (Figure 16.2). With a table and
shelves with the most spare of possessions – a few books, a basket – there is
a profoundly melancholy air. An empty plate sits on the table. These
remainders hold within them small universes of loss. Inhering within these
remnants are the phantom presences that prevent closure, with the paradox
that it is absence which becomes palpable. The humble domestic elements
left behind echo the ‘straw bag, filled with balls of wool and an unfinished
piece of knitting … her blotting paper, her scissors, her thimble’ that Simone
de Beauvoir described in the memoir of her mother’s death, observing:
‘Everyone knows the power of things: life is solidified in them, more
immediately present than in any one of its instants’ (de Beauvoir, 1985,
p.98). Like the books, basket and empty plate in Sydney, the shoes on the
bank of the Danube that form the memorial to Jews shot into the river in
Budapest are achingly melancholy. The memorial, designed by Gyula Pauer
and Janos Can Togay, is ‘To the memory of the victims shot into the Danube
by the Arrow Cross Militiamen in 1944–45. Erected 16th April 2005’ (in
Taylor-Tudzin, 2011, p.40). Taylor-Tudzin describes how the memorial
came about through one of the designers’ ‘childhood memories of seeing
people being marched at gunpoint’ and how the shoes could become a
prompt for remembering (Taylor-Tudzin, 2011, p.40).
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Figure 16.1 Brian Tolle, Irish Hunger Memorial, Manhattan, New York, USA,
2002. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2004.
Leavings 123
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Figure 16.2 Hossein and Angela Valamanesh, Irish Famine Memorial, Sydney,
Australia, 1999. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2006.
Figure 16.3 Alberto Burri, Il Cretto (‘The Crack’), Earthquake Memorial, Gibellina,
Italy, 1984–1989. Photo by Andrea Lodi, 2008.
nocturnal visit, when the ‘Cretto offers an eerie presence: its white surfaces
dimly lit but clearly reflect the moonlight and stand out against the absolute
darkness of its surroundings’ (Grinda and Moreno, 1999, p.55).
There are 122 blocks around 1.5 metres high making up the concrete
form, a ‘discontinuous archaeological landscape’ containing ‘the remains of
walls, roofs, personal effects: the material possessions of a population which
has moved its homes to a distance of some kilometres’ (Maksymowicz,
1997, p.25). Like Rachel Whiteread’s castings, the Cretto presents a death
mask, a record of lives lost. The site is now held in stasis, petrified, and
the concrete matrix holds the residue within it, the remnants entombed.
Trigg’s commentary on the mourning of the loss of place resonates with the
Cretto memorial:
il Cretto approaches the melancholy of the void. In its aspirations and its
form, Burri’s memorial anticipates Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe two decades later, and both sites emphasise how melancholy
is sustained by forms which are abstract, and suggestive of absence,
departures, residues.
The memorials to the war dead are also markers of absence. While
memorials can be criticised as glorifications of war, a mind receptive to the
affectivity of loss reads them as surrogate tombs. These are the places which
intensify absence, the substitute graves for those who died on the battlefields
far away. In places like New Zealand and Australia, the war memorials
remember the losses on the battlefields of Europe, of the many who never
returned home. To recognise the melancholy of the dead, rather than the
adoration of heroism, in such sites is to appreciate the beauty of sorrow in
the human condition. The memorials stand as metonymic markers,
synecdoches of the hundreds of thousands.
While the obelisks of the conventional language of memorials can become
clichéd, the taken-for-granted forms are undone when they too become
subjected to leavings. The spatial vacuum of an empty plinth quickly fills
with emotions which can be more intense than the statue itself invoked. As
Forty (1999) observes, the iconoclastic removal of 50 of the 60 Lenin statues
in Moscow left empty plinths which were charged with more memories than
the statues had ever been (Forty, 1999).
The melancholy potency of an empty plinth is explored in Rachel
Whiteread’s project for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. The
plinth in Trafalgar Square, designed in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, has
always been empty. The original intention was to display an equestrian
statue, but it was never completed due to issues with funding. The Fourth
Plinth Commissioning Group, under the auspices of the Greater London
Authority, runs the programme of selecting temporary sculptures to be
exhibited on the empty plinth. Whiteread’s sculpture, Untitled Monument
(2001), was a cast of the empty plinth itself made in clear resin, and exhibited
on top of it in the manner of a figurative sculpture. Here, though, the figure
was a doubling of absence, creating a sense of leavings ‘squared’, a heightened
melancholy
This sense of absence is evoked through a very different materiality in
Martha Schwartz’s Field Work installation for the Spoleto Festival in
Charleston, South Carolina. Lines of white sheets flapped in the breeze,
126 The places of melancholy
poignant ciphers of loss and departure. Pegged onto the steel wires with
wooden pegs, the white sheets evoked domesticity, and also made connections
within the landscape, between the lines of slave cottages and the fields
beyond. John Beardsley remarked on how the project
The rails
From far away I heard the noise of the station, the frontier, the railway
clanking, and the sound of the cattle trucks on their way to the death
camps.
(In Omer, 1997, p.69)
From the memorial site, the Portbou railway station is a constant presence,
underscoring the references to travelling and departures. Although only a small
village, Portbou is an important node on the rail network as it is the point at
which the rail gauges change to those traditionally used in Spain. The activities
associated with the gauge changes accentuate the presence of the railway, and
obliquely infuse the Passages memorial with sounds and sensations.
A second fragmentary element of the memorial is a set of steel steps that
seemingly lead to nowhere. Gesturing, perhaps, towards the olive tree that
stands outside the cemetery, the steps also allude to a feeling of senselessness
and loss. One of the most poignantly powerful moments in Karavan’s
memorial work is the plinth, high up and secreted away behind the cemetery.
The steel platform is topped by a simple cube, immediately triggering
thoughts of absence (Figure 16.4).
This element is serenely melancholy in contrast to the sublime terror of
walking down the steps leading to the sea. It is possible to enter this space
of absence and sit upon the cube. As an experience it is a necessarily solitary
one, and in my own encounters with this site it seems that this is quite
possible – there are no queues or milling masses, one can simply ‘be’. Seated
upon the cube, the view is out to the Mediterranean beyond, a prospect
which is mediated by the chain link fence running along the top of the
cemetery, preventing falls down the heavily banked sides. Mordechai
Omer suggests the cube is both an empty chair and a memorial stone, and
together with the presence of the fence ‘barring passage, the wanderings and
hardships of Benjamin’s last days are conjured up with great poignancy’
(Omer, 1997, p.67).
128 The places of melancholy
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Doesn’t a life leave traces, traces that can attach themselves to others
who pass through the aura of that life? Doesn’t a place absorb the events
it witnesses; shouldn’t there be some sign of commemoration, some
symbol embedded in this building always for Angie’s life there?
(In Hua, 2009, p.142)
Notes
1 Pothos is a term used by E.B. Daniels in his discussion of nostalgia (Daniels,
1985). The term ‘pothos’ refers to the mythological character Pothos who was
either the brother or son of Eros, and was associated with longing and the
unattainable, and ultimately with death.
2 ‘Stranded objects’ is Eric Santner’s term, who in turn attributes it to a colleague
who provided it unknowingly (Santner, 1990).
References
Beardsley, John (2005). ‘Filling a void: creating contemporary spaces for
contemplation’, in Rebecca Krinke (ed.), Contemporary Landscapes of
Contemplation. Abingdon: Routledge.
Boym, Svetlana (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books.
Burgin, Victor (2009). ‘Monument and melancholia’. In Victor Burgin, Situational
Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (essay originally published in
2008). Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press.
Casey, Edward S. (1993). Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding
of the Place-World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cloke, Paul, Doel, Marcus, Matless, David, Phillips, Martin and Thrift, Nigel
(1994). Writing the Rural: Five Cultural Geographies. London: Paul Chapman.
Daniels E.B. (1985). ‘Nostalgia: experiencing the elusive’, in Don Ihde and Hugh J.
Silverman, Descriptions: Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy 11. Albany: State University of New York Press.
de Beauvoir, Simone (1985). A Very Easy Death. New York: Pantheon Books.
Eco, Umberto (1986). Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Forty, Adrian (1999). ‘Introduction’, in Adrian Forty and Susanne Kulcher (eds),
The Art of Forgetting. Oxford: Berg.
Freud, Sigmund (1997). ‘On transience’, in Sigmund Freud, Writings on Art and
Literature (essay first published 1915). Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gibson, Margaret (2004). ‘Melancholy objects’. Mortality, 9(4): 285–299.
Grinda, Efré García and Moreno, Cristina Díaz (1999). ‘White lava: Alberto Burri’s
Certto in Gibellina’, Quaderns, 223: 54–59.
Harries, Elizabeth Wanning (1994). The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment
in the Later Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
132 The places of melancholy
Hua, Anh (2009) ‘“What we all long for’: memory, trauma and emotional
geographies’, in Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi
(eds), Emotion, Place and Culture. Farnham: Ashgate.
Maksymowicz, Virginia (1997). ‘Art renews life – Gibellina: an uncommon
collaboration’, Sculpture, 16(2): 22–27.
Malcom, Carolyn (2006) ‘Melancholic MoMA: Groundswell’s missing histories’.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 11:232–238.
Morris, Jan (2001). Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo
Press.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
It should seem that at the time of the dreadful shower of ashes which
overwhelmed the City, the family took refuge in the cellars, and there
perished from suffocation, for here were found 24 skeletons, which
remain to this time. In another house we were conducted into the cook-
room, where there are several vessels and the skeleton of a woman in
the very posture in which she died. In the prisons were found skeletons
with fetters on their leg bones. In short, it was pleasing, and at the same
time melancholy, to view this monument of antiquity and to reflect on
the devastation of a volcano!
(In Nicholls, 1822, p.628)
sad blankets of dust endlessly invade earthly dwellings and soil them
uniformly: as if attics and old rooms were being arranged for the
imminent entrance of obsessions, of ghosts, of larvae fed and inebriated
by the worm-eaten smell of old dust. When the big servant girls arm
themselves, each morning, with big feather dusters, or even with vacuum
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
cleaners, they are perhaps not entirely unaware that they are contributing
as much as the most positive scientists to keeping off the evil ghosts who
are sickened by cleanliness and logic. One day or another, it is true,
dust, if it persists, will probably begin to gain ground over the servants,
overrunning with vast quantities of rubble abandoned buildings,
deserted docks: and in this distant epoch there will be nothing more to
save us from nocturnal terrors.
(In Vidler, 2003, p.4)
lawn, on which some elms have grown, and which are interspersed
towards their skirts by masses of the fallen ruin, overtwined with the
broad leaves of the creeping weeds. The blue sky canopies it, and is as
the everlasting roof of these enormous halls.
(Shelley, 1845, p.125)
This city was once of vast extent, and the traces of its remains are to be
found more than four miles from the gate of the modern town. The sea,
which once came close to it, has now retired to the distance of four
miles, leaving a melancholy extent of marshes, interspersed with patches
of cultivation, and towards the seashore with pine forests, which have
followed the retrocession of the Adriatic, and the roots of which are
actually washed by its waves. The level of the sea and of this tract of
country correspond so nearly, that a ditch dug to a few feet in depth, is
immediately filled up with sea water. All the ancient buildings have been
choked up to the height of from five to twenty feet by the deposit of the
sea, and of the inundations, which are frequent in the winter.
(Shelley, 1845, p.151)
intent on sterilising the scene had arrived at the site before Shelley, there
would have been no Prometheus Unbound, as it was the scene of the baths
becoming assimilated into nature that was the source of his inspiration.
Woodward continues:
Archaeologists will argue that flowers and ivy on a ruin are just
Picturesque fluff, curlicues to amuse an artist’s pencil. What Shelley’s
experience shows is that the vegetation that grows on ruins appeals to
the depths of our consciousness, for it represents the hand of Time, and
the contest between the individual and the universe.
(Woodward, 2002, p.69)
Figure 17.2 James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, The High
Line, Manhattan, New York, 2009 (showing graffiti before being
painted over, and the replaced ballast and railway tracks). Photo by
Jacky Bowring, 2009.
Submersion 141
the index of neglect, where submersion by nature signals the shifting
condition. His time sequence photography over a number of years shows the
slow dissolution of the forms of buildings and infrastructure, becoming
replaced by semi-wilderness.
Another photographer documented the submersion of the High Line in
Manhattan beneath a mantle of vegetation. Originally an elevated railroad
serving the industrial area of Lower Manhattan, it had gone wild, deserted,
and was in a state of decay; it was the epitome of the aesthetic of melancholy.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
The ruderal vegetation, the graffiti, the rust, the decay, formed an impression
of a place outside of time, like Tarkovsky’s mysterious ‘Zone’ in his film
Stalker. Joel Sternfield’s compelling photographs showing the High Line
across the seasons contributed to interest in the abandoned railroad, and
helped inspire the formation of the Friends of the High Line, who set about
saving it. A competition was held, and the winners, Field Operations and
Diller Scofidio + Renfro, developed the design of the High Line as an elevated
park. But with its transformation into an urban park, the melancholy of
submersion was eroded. While Vergara embraced the incursions of nature in
his vision of an ‘urban Monument Valley’ for Detroit, at the High Line
decay was arrested. The High Line was tidied up, the graffiti was painted
over; the infrastructure of rails and ballast was replaced, and the vegetation
was ‘corrected’ to represent those plants which should grow in this setting,
rather than those which had (Figure 17.2).
It became something cadaverous – like landscape taxidermy – the wild
landscape hunted, killed, stuffed and then given the semblance of life, but
with glassy eyes and groomed fur. This silences the aura at the heart of
melancholy, the authentic, original and vulnerable version of reality. The
transformation of the High Line from a wild and unkempt plateau into a
smart urban plaza prompts reflection on the place of melancholy within the
landscape. A billboard adjacent to the site depicted the High Line as part of
the reinvented, chic and trendy vision for this part of Manhattan. The
imagery was bathed in the glow of conspicuous consumption, and seemed a
universe away from the poignant photography of the High Line’s prior state
of abandoned beauty.
References
Ballard, J.G. (2008). The Drowned World (originally published 1962). London:
Harper Perennial.
Clear, N. (2009). ‘London after the rain’. Architectural Design, 79(5): 62–65.
Dickens, Charles (2006). Great Expectations (originally published 1861). Clayton,
DE: Prestwick House Inc.
Dickens, Charles (2009). Pictures from Italy (originally published 1846). Sydney:
ReadHowYouWant.com.
Nicholls, John (1822). Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century:
Consisting of Authentic Memoirs and Original Letters of Eminent Persons; and
Intended as a Sequel to the Literary Anecdotes, Volume 4. London: Nichols.
142 The places of melancholy
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1845) Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and
Fragments (edited by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley). London: E. Moxon.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (2008). Poems of Shelley (Ozymandias originally published
1818). Alcester: Read Books.
Starobinski, Jean (1964). ‘Melancholy among the ruins’, in The Invention of Liberty,
1700–1789. Cleveland: Sikra.
Trigg, Dylan (2006). The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the
Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang.
Vergara, Camilo José (1999). American Ruins. New York: Monacelli Press.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Patina and weathering are analogues for memory, traces of time’s passage,
and are important facets of a melancholy aesthetics. One step removed from
the dilapidation of ruins and fragments, weathering and patination register
on surfaces as a cumulative process, like Ruskin’s ‘golden stains of time’.
Weathering is an index of age, evocative of a sentimental, affective
connection, and a manifestation of aura. As Mădălina Diaconu explains,
‘because the patina materialises, i.e., makes visible, a repeated touch over a
long interval of time, it encodes an own story of the object and therefore
implies temporality and narrativity’ (Diaconu, 2003, p.8). Patina resonates
with melancholy’s inherently paradoxical quality. At once individual and
universal, the markings show the patterns of a person’s hands, their passing,
but we do not know exactly who: ‘the patina – designating the traces on the
surface of a repeatedly touched object – is both anonymous yet utterly
personal insofar as it involves fingerprints, which are unique’ (Diaconu,
2003, p.3). The phenomenologicality of patina charges it with tactility, the
intimacy of touch, even its own anthropomorphic sensibility, in Georg
Simmel’s words, like a ‘growth of skin’ (in Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow,
1993, p.69).
Allen S. Weiss traces the connections between patination and the Japanese
concept of mono no aware, the ‘melancholic sense of things lost and time
passed’ (Weiss, 2010, p.91). Central to the idea of mono no aware is serenity
in the face of impermanence. Rather than time’s passage inducing existential
anguish, it is embodied as an aesthetic pleasure, a Japanese version of
lacrimae rerum, the classical conception of the ‘tears of things’. Patina
develops at the very intimate scale of the tea ceremony, where, as Murielle
Hladik explains, ‘[t]he traces left by the passage of time, signs of wear and
use and the traces of finger marks (teaka) offer so much micro-information,
mini-histories for us to reinterpret’ (in Weiss, 2010, p.91). The resonances
between the intimacy of the touch and the immensity of temporality inform
this dimension of the melancholy aesthetic, and Hladik observes that ‘these
traces of time and use confer a superior degree of beauty upon things, one
which transcends quotidian beauty within an aesthetic of contemplation’ (in
Weiss, 2010, p.91). Within the landscape weathering introduces this
144 The places of melancholy
reflective, melancholic quality, reducing contrast and bringing a sense of
continuity between surfaces. Lowenthal and Prince observe how ‘[o]ld
things are apt to be wrinkled, variegated, accidented; above all, weathering
has harmonized them with the rest of the landscape’ (Lowenthal and Prince,
1965, p.196). This is appreciated as part of the picturesque aesthetic, and
the romantic melancholy that underlies it.
While patination relates to the cumulative effect of surface marking, time
can also register through more substantive changes such as cracking and
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Figure 18.1 Abandoned sound mirror, Denge, England. Photo by Paul Horsefield,
2015.
Figure 18.2 Orford Ness – Landscape with Pagoda. Photo by Amanda Slater, 2014.
148 The places of melancholy
The strength of architectural impact derives from its unavoidable
presence as the perpetual unconscious pre-understanding of our
existential condition. A distinct ‘weakening’ of the architectural image
takes place through the processes of weathering and ruination. Erosion
wipes away the layers of utility, rational logic and detail articulation,
and pushes the structure into the realm of uselessness, nostalgia and
melancholy. The language of matter takes over from the visual and
formal effect, and the structure attains a heightened intimacy. The
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
References
Bird, Jon (1995) ‘Dolce Domum’, in James Lingwood (ed.), Rachel Whiteread’s
House. London: Phaidon Press.
Davey, H.E. (2003). Living the Japanese Arts & Ways: 45 Paths to Meditation &
Beauty. Berkeley: Stonebridge Press.
Diaconu, Mădălina (2003). ‘The rebellion of the “lower” senses: a phenomenological
aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste’, in Chan-Fai Cheung, Ivan Chvatik, Ion
Copoeru, Lester Embree, Julia Iribarne and Hans Rainer Sepp (eds), Essays in
Celebration of the Founding of the Organization of Phenomenological
Organizations. Published online: www.o-p-o.net.
Juniper, Andrew (2003). Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. Boston:
Tuttle Publishing.
Lowenthal, David and Prince, Hugh C. (1965). ‘English landscape tastes’. Geography,
55(2): 187–224.
Mostafavi, Mohsen and Leatherbarrow, David (1993). On Weathering. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (2000). ‘Hapticity and time: notes on fragile architecture’.
Architectural Review, 1239: 78–84.
Sebald, W.G. (1999). The Rings of Saturn (originally published in 1995). New York:
New Directions Paperbacks.
Trodd, Tamara (2008). ‘Lack of fit: Tacita Dean, modernism and the sculptural
film’. Art History, 31(3): 368–386.
Weiss, Allen S. (2010) ‘On the circulation of metaphors in the Zen garden’. AA Files,
60: 89–93.
19 Ephemerality and transience
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
The slowed time of ephemerality offers the time of grief and gives
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Resonating with the ethic of wabi sabi, O’Neill concludes: ‘Our lives, and
the lives of those we love, are chancy and short. This is the lesson of these
works of art – the knowledge of what it is to be lost’ (O’Neill, 2009, p.158).
Spontaneous shrines and temporary memorials enlist the melancholy of
transience. Never intended to be permanent, these momentary memorials
tend to be very quickly created in response to trauma, at the sites of disasters,
road crashes, killings. Slowly giving way to time’s influence, the memorials
wilt, fade and eventually disappear. There are parallels to life itself, in their
appearance, endurance and ultimately disappearance. Writing on roadside
memorials, Robert M. Bednar shares how one experience in particular filled
him with melancholy (Bednar, 2015). He realised that one memorial he had
studied for his research was transforming. The memorial to four young
children was ‘growing up’, with the mementos left at the site being updated
from time to time to reflect time’s passing, moving from baby dolls to
grown-up girl dolls, for example. The transformation of this roadside shrine
is like a constantly deferred ephemerality, where rather than fading and
disappearing, each of the phases of items becomes newly transient. Drawing
attention to the palpability of time’s passage echoes the ancient melancholy
idea of lacrimae rerum, the tears of things. When Aenid was reflecting on the
murals of battles in Virgil’s Aenid, he was struck by how much had passed,
and said ‘sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent,’ – there are tears
for misfortune and mortal sorrows touch the heart (Virgil, 1986, p.273).
There are echoes, too, of another melancholy concept, ubi sunt, or the
‘where are?’ lament. Ubi sunt is usually expressed as a listing of the things
that have passed, and in this memorial to four young children there is a
sense of the lamenting of where they are, and through constantly renewing
the toys and childhood items this question is asked over and over as they
‘grow up’.
Ephemeral memorials, like roadside shrines, are counter to Western
convention not only in their transience, but also in the public display of
grief. Erica Doss’ research on ephemeral memorials challenged the traditional
Western distinction between grief as a private behaviour, and mourning as
Ephemerality and transience 151
the public face of death. She suggests that the rise in ephemeral memorials
sees a shift in this way of thinking, and further that these memorials foster
an ongoing link between the living and the dead. Doss points to how Freud’s
own experiences of grief challenged his ideas on melancholia, and echo
broader ideas on the continuing bonds with those who have passed on.
As in O’Neill’s work, Doss highlights how the ephemeral memorial
emphasises the importance of this continuity and that mourning is part of a
changed but ongoing relationship with the deceased, and ‘mourning is …
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
References
Bednar, Robert M. (2015). ‘Placing affect: remembering strangers at roadside crash
shrines’, in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds),
Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham, Surrey:
Ashgate, pp. 50–66.
Doss, Erica Lee (2008). The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials:
Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press.
Juniper, Andrew (2003). Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. Boston:
Tuttle Publishing.
O’Neill, Mary (2009). ‘Ephemeral art: the art of being lost’, in Mick Smith, Joyce
Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Virgil (1986). Virgil: Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid 1–6 (trans. H. Rushton Fairclough;
Aeneid written first century bc). Boston: Harvard University Press.
20 Camouflage
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
At New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Ken Smith’s roof garden
is an ironic commentary on landscape architecture’s predilection for hiding
154 The places of melancholy
things. The profession’s involvement in mitigating infrastructure, often
through vegetative screens and veils, suggests that landscape architecture is
founded on the practice of camouflage. Smith’s camouflage garden ‘outs’
this practice of disguise, and puts it on display. Peter Reed suggests that the
garden is a ‘subversion of camouflage’s function to hide or conceal’ (Reed,
2005, pp.21–22). Adding to the play of mimicry is the construction of the
garden in materials which are fake versions of nature – mock rocks and faux
foliage. Using a caricature of camouflage derived from iconic camouflage
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
patterning used on fabrics, the garden is, in fact, incredibly obvious when
seen against the background of the surrounding rooftops. It as though in
having the camouflage garden on its roof, MoMA has become like Caillois’
Oxyrrhyncha, or spider crabs, who made themselves more conspicuous in
their gathering of materials from their environment and displaying them on
their shells.
The paradoxical use of camouflage as display is inherent in the theories
used by the ‘camoufleurs’ – the artists, designers and architects who
developed the various ‘disruptive patterns’ for military use, including Franz
Marc, Arshile Gorky, László Moholy-Nagy and Ellsworth Kelly. Norman
Wilkinson developed the unlikely ‘dazzle’ camouflage to be used at sea,
creating a series of patterns based on Cubist principles. Rather than
attempting to disguise the ship by means of blending in, the dazzle approach
breaks up the surface through the use of line and colour, accepting that
within the constantly changing conditions of sea and sky, to attempt a
perfect colour match was not possible. Instead, patches of bright or
contrasting colours and lines were used to counter the actual shape and size
of the craft, for example taking a dark colour around the bow, from port to
starboard, to create a sense of ambiguity about the length of the ship. While
the ships were made to appear quite visible in an absolute sense, they were
deceptive in terms of their form, scale, speed and direction, and thus the
dazzle scheme underscores the paradoxical relationships between self and
other that underlie any philosophy of camouflage.
Bernard Lassus echoes these observations on the apparent incongruity of
camouflage. Recalling a 1969 stroll along a quay in Stockholm, he says how
he was
curious traces of the garden in the gallery as MoMA holds some of Andy
Warhol’s Camouflage series, which also present an ironic interpretation of
camouflage patterning. The garden therefore becomes doubly melancholy,
and much more than a simple statement about artifice in landscape architecture.
Curiously, Julia Kristeva, a key theorist of melancholia, uncannily anticipated
the camouflage garden a decade earlier, writing:
References
Blackman, Melissa Rowell (2003). ‘Elitist differentiation: melancholia as identity in
Flaubert’s November and Huysmans’ A Rebours’. Journal of European Studies,
33(3–4): 255–261.
Caillois, Roger (1987), ‘Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia’ (trans. John Shepley;
original essay published 1935). In Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas
Crimp and Joan Copjec, October: The First Decade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Flaubert, Gustave (2005). November (trans. Andrew Brown; first published as
Novembre in Oeuvre de jeunesse, 1910). London: Hesperus Press Limited.
Krauss, Rosalind (1985). ‘Corpus delicti’, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone,
L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism. London: The Arts Council of Great
Britain.
Kristeva, Julia (1995). New Maladies of the Soul (trans. Ross Mitchell Guberman).
New York: Columbia University Press.
156 The places of melancholy
Lassus, Bernard (1998). The Landscape Approach. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Leach, Neil (2006). Camouflage. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Meuris, Jacques (2004) René Magritte: 1898–1967. Köln: Taschen.
Reed, Peter (2005). ‘Beyond before and after: designing contemporary landscape’, in
Peter Reed, Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape. New
York: Museum of Modern Art.
Schneider, Eckhard (2005). ‘Constructing the ephemeral’, in Eckhard Schneider
(ed.), Rachel Whiteread. Köln: Kunsthaus Bregenz.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
21 Monochrome
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Imagine that you are walking across a desolate moor. The land that
stretches out into the distance is empty and spacious, coloured by
subdued shades of brown and green against the grey backdrop of the
sky. The air is still and mild with a refreshing mist. A reflective mood
descends as you settle into the rhythm of a quiet pace. A feeling of
longing forever to be in the pleasurable solitude of the moor combines
with pangs of loneliness. Specific memories and thoughts may come into
play; perhaps memories of living near that place long ago. There is some
pleasure felt in recollecting the good times, but along with it, almost in
equal measure, comes sadness from missing the place itself. The desire
to prolong the emotion is strong, and you indulge in the rich feelings by
cultivating the mood and lingering in it.
(Brady and Haapala, 2003)
those which are too bright may be thrown into shadow; the wood may be
thickened, and the dark greens abound in it; if it is necessarily thin, yews
and shabby firs should be scattered about it; and sometimes, to shew a
withering or a dead tree, it may for a space be cleared entirely away.
(Whatley, 1801, p.62)
Look at your room in the late evening when you can hardly distinguish
the colours any longer – turn on the light and paint what you saw in the
twilight. There are pictures of landscapes or rooms in semi-darkness,
Monochrome 159
but how do you compare the colours in such pictures with those you
saw in the semi-darkness? A colour shines in its surroundings. Just as
eyes only smile in a face.
(Jarman, 2000, p. 1)
to see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of
history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the
rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble
simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire melancholy, a pained
submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty
that must be endured like incurable disease; it is resignation that
nourishes Istanbul’s inward-looking soul.
(Pamuk, 2005, p.51)
Black- and copper-leaved plants, dark pink blossoms and a mass planting of
black tulips all contribute to this monochromatic colour scheme. Whereas
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Note
1 A Claude Glass is also known as a Claude Mirror, Landscape Glass or Mirror, or
Convex Mirror (see, for example, Bertelsen (2004).
References
Bertelsen, Lars Kiel (2004). ‘The Claude Glass: a modern metaphor between word
and image’. Word and Image, 20(3): 182–190.
Brady, Emily and Haapala, Arto (2003). ‘Melancholy as an aesthetic emotion’.
Contemporary Aesthetics. http://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/
journal.php?search=true, 18 December 2015.
Grainge, Paul (1999). ‘TIME’s past in the present: nostalgia and the black and white
image’. Journal of American Studies, 33(3): 383–392.
Jarman, Derek (2000). Chroma: A Book of Colour: June ’93 (originally published
1994). London: Vintage.
Lowenthal, David (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pamuk, Orhan (2005). Istanbul: Memories of a City. London: Faber and Faber.
Porteous, Douglas J. (1996). Environmental Aesthetics: Ideas, Politics, and Planning.
Routledge: London.
Sontag, Susan (2014). On Photography (originally published 1977). Penguin
Modern Classics, Kindle edition.
Weilacher, Udo (2005). In Gardens: Profiles of Contemporary European Landscape
Architecture. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Whately, Thomas (1801). Observations on Modern Gardening, and Laying Out
Pleasure-Grounds ... &c. To Which is Added, an Essay on the Different Natural
Situations of Gardens. London: West and Hughes.
22 Intimate immensity
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Each art has, by nature, its distinctive Duende of style and form, but all
roots join at the point where the black sounds of [Flamenco singer]
Manuel Torres issue forth—the ultimate stuff and the common basis,
uncontrollable and tremulous, of wood and sound and canvas and
word. Black sounds: behind which there abide, in tenderest intimacy,
the volcanoes, the ants, the zephyrs, and the enormous night straining
its waist against the Milky Way.
(In Gibbons, 1989, p.39)
The delicate and the vast are bound up in duende, and resonate with Milosz’s
‘concordance of world immensity with intimate depth of being’, where he
writes of standing in ‘contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space’
(in Bachelard, 1969, p.189). Like Lorca, Milosz reflects upon the night as
the bearer of intimate immensity: ‘When you felt so alone and abandoned in
the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in
162 The places of melancholy
the night, or the night’s own solitude in a universe without end!’ (in
Bachelard, 1969, p.189). These evocations of the small vessel of the self
adrift in the vast oceans of the cosmos call to mind Pascal’s lament: ‘The
eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread’ (in Chrétien, 2003,
p.52). For Pascal, the dread expresses the existential crisis that such an
imagining can provoke, and the solitary contemplation of the vast and the
eternal resonates with the contemplative qualities of melancholy.
Pascal’s melancholic reflection on the silence of the intangible otherness
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
scene is divided evenly between land and sky. A line of blasted trees
separates the shattered foreground from the land-ocean, the sea of mud,
which, as in The Monk by the Sea, reaches to the horizon. Instead of
receding into the distance, these trees disappear beyond the edges of the
frame. There is no perspective. The vanishing point is no longer a more
or less exact point, but all around. A new kind of infinity: more of the
same in every direction, an infinity of waste.
(Dyer, 1994, p.119)
Immensity and intimacy correspond in the arc from the vastness of space or
the depth of the ocean to the detail of the individual, and across the scales
from cities to molecules. The intimate and the immense are yoked together
in the landscape visions of Patrick Keiller’s London (Keiller, 1994) and
Robert Smithson’s The Monuments of Passaic (Smithson, 1967). The first of
these is a film, set in early 1990s London, a bleak and poignant study of
Thatcherite Britain. In the second, environmental artist Robert Smithson
takes a field trip to his home town of Passaic, New Jersey, and presents it as
an illustrated article in an art magazine in the late 1960s. The two pieces
offer parallel visions of landscapes wrought by the processes of modernity,
bearing the scars of progress, with the two artists re-casting their chosen
landscapes into altered states, part fact and part fiction. Both artists re-invent
elements of the ordinary landscapes they encounter as ‘monuments’. In
Smithson’s ‘suburban Odyssey’, the monuments are brought into focus with
his Instamatic camera. The stark monochromes document the banal
landscape, with their monumental decree coming from the text and captions:
the ‘Monument of Dislocated Directions’ (a bridge); the ‘Sand-box
Monument (also called The Desert)’ (a children’s sand-box); ‘The Fountain
Monument’ (six large pipes disgorging water into the Passaic River); and
‘The Great Pipes Monument’ (a long section of steel pile).1 In London, the
static shots linger over the various points in the landscape and the narrator
enumerates the invented monuments within his voice-over, where Leicester
Square is declared a monument to Laurence Sterne; Canary Wharf ‘adopted’
as a monument to Rimbaud; Cannon Street designated a ‘sacred site’ – with
the Number 15 a ‘sacred bus route’; and Telecom Tower is imagined as a
monument to the tempestuous relationship of Rimbaud and Verlaine
(Keiller, no date, line 5.45). Through bestowing upon these ordinary
elements the gravitas of age, Smithson and Keiller re-tune the landscapes of
164 The places of melancholy
modernity, inflecting the otherwise impersonal and unfathomable scenes
with the familiar infrastructure of memorialisation.
Bound up in the poignancy of these two visions of the quotidian landscapes
of modernity is the reverberations that are set up between the minute and
the vast, between the individual and the great sweep of time and space into
which we are placed. Keiller’s central character, Robinson, ‘sometimes
sees[s] the whole city as a monument to Rimbaud’ (Keiller, no date, line
2.26) and Smithson identifies the voids of the city of Passaic as monumental
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
shifts cause him to pause and prompt reflection: ‘I’m drinking a Vittel water,
whereas yesterday I was drinking a coffee (how does that transform the
square?)’ (Perec, 2010, p.30). As Perec’s translator, Marc Lowenthal,
observes, even despite the efforts to ‘exhaust’ place, to describe every detail,
there is so much that escapes the written account, falling outside the process
of documentation. In as much as the focus on detail provides a locus for
pensive contemplation, so too does that which falls outside this study of
minutiae. Lowenthal remarks that ‘[i]t is almost in what it doesn’t say that
this short text, this noble exercise in futility, conveys such a sense of
melancholy’ (in Perec, 2010, p.50).
The ordinariness of intimate life within immensity can be seen too in
memorial design. Set in opposition to architecture which is about excess and
display, Liu Jiakun’s memorial to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake is a place of
humility. Alex Pasternack describes the memorial, with how its
pitched roof and redbrick terrace mimic the makeshift tents and paving
material ubiquitous throughout Sichuan’s recovery. The gray plaster
that coats the brick walls gives the building a universality and solidity,
transforming the survivors’ tent into an earthquake-ready structure. Its
austerity sets off the vital color and beauty within. Warm and rosy, with
Huishan’s ephemera pinned to the walls, the interior is exquisite.
(Pasternack, 2010)
ordinary dimensions of our lives (Stewart, 2007, n.p.). The little world of a
schoolgirl, or the life of someone suffering the ‘ordinary trauma’ of a road
accident, can become an articulation of intimate immensity, the smallness of
the individual within the vastness of time and place.
Here, in this final condition of melancholy – intimate immensity – is one
of the most profound of paradoxes. In the oscillations between the vast and
the detailed, the far and the near, is the melancholic aesthetic, suffused with
poignancy and contemplation. In Bachelard’s daydreams, Friedrich’s monk
adrift in oceanic space, Dyer’s reflections on the depiction of war, Keiller
and Smithson’s monuments and molecules, and Perec’s Place Saint-Sulpice,
the individual is pitted against the vast milieu of which they are a part. Yet
rather than a nihilistic abandonment, a desolation, intimate immensity
brings forth the depth of being rooted in the very conundrum that it presents.
To end with a paradox is fitting, since the impossibility of resolution is the
knot at melancholy’s core. Melancholy’s complex twists and turns are filled
with contradictions and polarities. This irresolvability presents an enduring
tension of impossible longings, of things eternally delayed. Freud distinguished
mourning from melancholia through this very condition, the resistance of
resolution. ‘The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound’,
Freud observed, in distinction from normal mourning, which reaches closure
(in Ramazani, 1994, p.79). While Freud’s diagnosis defined a pathological
condition, there is a poetry in this abstention from solace, as evoked by
Lorca: ‘With idea, with sound, or with gesture, the Duende chooses the brim
of the well for his open struggle with the creator. Angel and Muse escape in
the violin or in musical measure, but the Duende draws blood, and in the
healing of a wound that never quite closes, all that is unprecedented and
invented in a man’s work has its origins’ (Gibbons, 1989, p. 36).
Space for private contemplation has a precedent in the Dark Ages, where
the monks who were stationed in the deserts of Egypt lived as hermits. They
were required to rise at 4 a.m. for prayers, and to spend their days in solitude.
The regime of the Desert Fathers was one which both promoted melancholy
in a contemplative sense, and produced it in a depressive sense, as it resulted
in a feeling of psychic exhaustion, or even acedia – the melancholy of sloth.
The place for melancholic contemplation requires a balance, and the
provision of a space into which to retire, rather than be condemned to, was
realised in eighteenth-century gardens, reviving the idea of a hermitage.
However, as Hunt points out, these hermitages ‘bore little resemblance to
Intimate immensity 167
either the physical or metaphysical rigours of the early fathers’ (Hunt, 1976,
pp.1–2). While the presence of a hermitage in the landscape might evince the
ideal of a place designated for ‘philosophical contemplation’, and act as a
magnet for melancholy, their purpose was not always realised, and in fact
the landowners sometimes employed a hermit in order to achieve melancholy
by proxy.
The insertion of such vehicles for contemplation into the landscape is
echoed also in theologian and counsellor Thomas Moore’s advice to provide
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
places for Saturn, the planet of melancholy. Such places would echo the
bowers of Renaissance gardens dedicated to Saturn, ‘a dark, shaded, remote
place where a person could retire and enter the persona of depression
without fear of being disturbed’ (Moore, 1992, p.147). And, as Kant put it,
‘Melancholy separation from the bustle of the world due to a legitimate
weariness is noble’ (Kant, 1960, p.56), there is nothing shameful about the
need for silence and reflection, for a slower pace. Moore suggests a need to
acknowledge Saturn within buildings, where ‘A house or commercial
building could have a room or an actual garden where a person could go to
withdraw in order to meditate, think, or just be alone and sit’ (Moore, 1992,
p.147). These places would not be ‘centres’, or places for gathering, Moore
cautions. More likely they would be peripheral rather than central, and, he
avers, just as ‘Hospitals and schools often have “common rooms” … they
could just as easily have “uncommon rooms,” places for withdrawal and
solitude’ (Moore, 1992, p.147). Such a facilitation of what is often seen as
something to be avoided – solitude, introspection, aloneness, even depression
– creates an enhanced capacity for the landscape to be melancholy in a
meaningful way, and reiterates Julia Kristeva’s recognition of the need to
create space for an ‘inner zone’ in a garden or intimate quarter. As an added
dimension of existential being there is potential for an enhanced connectivity
with the affective dimensions of life – that compass of emotion which Shelley
regretted turning away from because of the ‘cold maxims of the world’ –
and this is related to the condition of an intimate immensity. As Moore
writes, ‘Hiding the dark places results in a loss of soul; speaking for them
and from them offers a way toward genuine community and intimacy’
(Moore, 1992, p.148).
Even the most functional room – the toilet – can offer a place for
melancholy contemplation, an intimate space within the vastness beyond.
Jun’ichiroˉ Tanizaki writes poetically of Japanese toilets, ‘surrounded by
tranquil walls and finely grained wood, [where] one looks out upon blue
skies and green leaves’ (Tanizaki, 1977, p.4). The introspective space of the
Japanese toilet is evoked further by Tanizaki:
I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain,
especially if it is a toilet from the Kantoˉ region, with its long, narrow
windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy
to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the
168 The places of melancholy
earth as they wash over the base of the stone lantern and freshen the
moss about the stepping stones.
(Tanizaki, 1977, p.4)
moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of
the seasons’ (Tanizaki, 1977, p.4).
Note
1 Smithson also designated a number of other monuments besides those included in
his short Art Forum article, such as the ‘cube monument’ and ‘small fountain
monument’ (a drinking fountain). See, for example, Roberts (2004).
References
Bachelard, Gaston (1969). The Poetics of Space (trans. Maria Jolas, first published
1958). Boston: Beacon Press.
Bednar, Robert M. (2015). ‘Placing affect: remembering strangers at roadside crash
shrines’, in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds),
Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham, Surrey:
Ashgate, pp. 50–66.
Chrétien, Jean-Louis (2003). Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. New
York: Fordham University Press.
Cioran, E.M. (1992). On the Heights of Despair (trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston;
first published in Romanian in 1934). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dyer, Geoff (1994). The Missing of the Somme. London: Phoenix Press.
Gibbons, Reginald (1989). The Poet’s Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hunt, John Dixon (1976). The Figure in the Landscape. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Kant, Immanuel (1960). Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
(trans. John T. Goldthwait; originally published 1764). Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Keiller, Patrick (n.d.). ‘London’, unpublished script.
Moore, Thomas (1992). The Care of the Soul. New York: HarperCollins.
Pasternack, Alex (2010). ‘Forget me not’. Metropolis Magazine, February. www.
metropolismag.com/February-2010/Forget-Me-Not, 24 December 2015.
Perec, Georges (2010) An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (trans. Mark
Lowenthal, originally written in 1974). Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press.
Ramazani, Jahan (1994). The Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy
to Heaney. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Roberts, Jennifer L. (2004). Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Smithson, Robert (1967) ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, ArtForum, December: 48–51.
Intimate immensity 169
Stewart, Kathleen (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press (Kindle
edition).
Tanizaki, Jun’chiroˉ (1977). In Praise of Shadows. Stony Creek: Leete’s Island Books.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Conclusion
A landscape of melancholy
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
In the void and the uncanny, in silence and shadows, in the auratic and the
liminal, the fragmentary and the abandoned, in the monochromatic and the
submerged, the weathered and the camouflaged, an aesthetics of melancholy
emerges. These marginal conditions carve out space on the edge, an emotional
terrain vague, where meaning drifts and contemplation intensifies. It is in
these zones where the intimate and the immense are fused, the self within
oceanic space. For landscape architecture there are challenges and
opportunities, from resisting the temptation to develop any site which appears
vacant and abandoned, to providing spaces for solitude and reflection.
Melancholy landscapes are often ordinary places, everyday landscapes,
Kathleen Stewart’s ‘little worlds’ (Stewart, 2007). Melancholy infuses places
which have been affected by trauma, and places which are the containers of
memory. For post-disaster landscapes there is a melancholy of all that has
been lost, the people, the things, the places. The images of empty chairs from
New Orleans compiled by Helen Jaksch were a vivid ubi sunt litany,
invoking the poignancy of the ordinary, a lament for all of the absences they
represent (Jaksch, 2013). While the inevitable narratives of resilience and
rebuilding are played out in post-disaster landscapes, making space for
sadness is part of attending to wellbeing. The pressure to recover, get over
it, move on, is symptomatic of the broader insistence on happiness in
Western culture. The counter to this is the recognition, as Karen Till has
written, that wounds sometimes need to remain open (Till, 2005; 2012).
Following the emotional turn in allied disciplines like geography,
landscape architecture is ripe for a deepening of emotions. Drawing on the
ancient legacy of the humours, and the emotional colourings of conventions
like the Picturesque, the landscape is a potent setting for memory and
melancholy. Emotion is both personal and collective; it is a means of finding
connections, and expanding the meaningfulness of existence. For a designer,
emotional potential in the landscape is to be carefully navigated, and not
overdetermined. As Peter Zumthor explains, ‘An emotive content is crucial
in architecture as in all arts, but I have the attitude that no one else should
be forced to live my emotions. So, I try to create sensual, emotive and
responsive images – in matter and words – which can receive and reflect
Conclusion 171
anyone’s personal feelings or emotional tendencies. I attempt to make
resonant things’ (in Stott, 2015).
So often references to emotions in design are only about ‘positive’
emotions, about being happy. Wellbeing necessitates not just happiness,
though, there is also the need to design for sadness, and to engage with a
spectrum of emotions. Melancholy also challenges a superficial and one-
dimensional emotional range through its qualities of unrequitedness and
irresolvability. An ‘easy’ emotional landscape might be one which is about
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Franses also pointed to the social role of melancholy, explaining one of the
ways in which stranger memorials function is in creating an irresolvable
melancholia that becomes an agent of social binding (Franses, 2001, p.102).
Melancholy’s irresolvability and unrequitedness can be troubling, but this
very conundrum is critical in keeping alive the human condition. Instead of
quickly papering over the cracks of landscapes of sadness and disaster, an
enhanced appreciation of their place in the landscape deepens connections.
Caution against landscapes which aren’t happy, resolved and easy is echoed
in a fear that places of melancholy might be ugly. But the very core of the
melancholy aesthetic is a beautiful sadness. Some of the most vivid
expressions of the beauty of melancholy landscapes are seen in films and
photography, where the alchemy of the image is a process of strangemaking,
of allowing us to see something familiar with new eyes. Susan Sontag
observes that ‘Bleak factory buildings and bill-board cluttered avenues look
as beautiful, through the camera’s eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes’
(Sontag, 2014, p.78).
Sadness and pain in the landscape can be most palpable in the face of
disaster and trauma. Places which have experienced violence, death and
damage are redolent in melancholy. It is not ethical to enjoy the suffering of
others, but nor is it ethical to overlook what has taken place, to want to
quickly cover it over and replace it with a benign design. James E. Young
reminds us that places like Auschwitz and Falstad are vexing in aesthetic
172 Conclusion
terms, in the cohabitation of beauty and death. At Falstad, the former SS
camp in Norway, murders took place in the forest, because the forest could
hide the events. But now there is a tension with the forest’s beauty, even a
sense that it is somehow complicit in the deaths. In the memoirs of prisoners
at Falstad, there were references to how
incongruous their suffering was with the beauty of the place. Even
Auschwitz had its physical beauty and as hard as that is for us to accept
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
now, for the prisoners it was very important because this was a
theological question: how could Nature and God be so indifferent to
our suffering? I’m suffering but the sun is shining and the birds are
singing and the blossoms are blooming.
(Young, 2010)
Young goes on to say that the coincidence of suffering and beauty at Falstad
is the thing that makes it such a powerful memorial site, and casts it as a
‘pastoral lament’.
Even in the most simple of landscapes the incongruity of beauty and
sadness evoke melancholy, and heighten emotions. Hart Island’s potters
field cemetery is a place of sadness, where the homeless and destitute are
buried. The beauty of the Long Island Sound setting balances this bleakness,
with new graves taking only a season for the landscape to transmute them
into a place of melancholy beauty. The placement of memorial benches
illustrates how a humble gesture can bring together sadness and beauty, as
Maddrell observes: ‘In many ways benches and other memorials in beauty
spots echo this discursive location of a loved one in an ideal setting that they
previously accessed periodically and temporarily, but was nonetheless highly
significant’ (Maddrell, 2009, p.49).
Melancholy offers a means of finding emotional balance, as in the ancient
idea of the humours, where it was recognised that to be solely sanguine was
not healthy. And with this comes the potential for reflection and embracing a
different pace of engagement with the world, a counter to the predilection for
instant gratification. In drawing together this exploration of the conditions of
melancholy, Melancholy and the Landscape does not seek to be definitive and
exclusive – this book is not about closure. Rather, it points to possibilities,
offers a language for melancholy landscapes, and perhaps even provides some
legitimation for the emotional self. This legitimation comes not from any
presumption of authority, but through a camaraderie, a collective – the
recognition that feeling sad is a critical part of being in the landscape.
References
Bednar, Robert M. (2015). ‘Placing affect: remembering strangers at roadside crash
shrines’, in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds),
Conclusion 173
Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham, Surrey:
Ashgate, pp. 50–66.
Franses, Rico (2001). ‘Monuments and melancholia’. Journal for the Psychoanalysis
of Culture and Society, 6(1): 97–104.
Jaksch, Helen (2013). ‘The empty chair is not so empty: ghosts and the performance
of memory in post-Katrina New Orleans’. The Drama Review, 57(1): 102–115.
Maddrell, Avril (2009). ‘Mapping changing shades of grief and consolation in the
historic landscape of St. Patrick’s Isle, Isle of Man’, in Mick Smith, Joyce
Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture.
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Farnham: Ashgate.
Sontag, Susan (2014). On Photography (originally published 1977). Penguin
Modern Classics, Kindle edition.
Stewart, Kathleen (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press (Kindle
edition).
Stott, Rory (2015). ‘Juhani Pallasmaa on Writing, Teaching and Becoming a
Phenomenologist’. ArchDaily, 7 November. www.archdaily.com/776761/juhani-
pallasmaa-on-writing-teaching-and-becoming-a-phenomenologist, 2 December.
Till, Karen (2005). The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Till, Karen (2012). Wounded cities: memory-work and a place-based ethics of care.
Political Geography, 31(1): 3–14.
Young, James E. (2010). Interview during his visit to Falstad, Norway in September
2010. www.youtube.com/watch?v=66O4fd6hob0, 25 June 2011.
Index
Downloaded by [University of California, San Diego] at 18:35 11 January 2017
Add Routledge titles to your library's digital collection today. Taylor and Francis
ebooks contains over 50,000 titles in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural
Sciences, Built Environment and Law.
n
~\.
Routledge I The home of
Routledge books
T•ylo,&fmomGcoop www.tan
df b
e
k
00 s.com