Landscape History Now, Part 2
This second of two conversations under the heading, “Landscape History Now,” focusing on thinking through the relationship between design education, public work, and history between Jay Cephas, Sara Jacobs, and Elliott Sturtevant took place on July 22, 2022. It continues the themes of the first conversation regarding landscape history as a field and elaborates upon it by touching on methodologies between design and history, the nature and priorities of design and historical practices, and public-facing aspects of scholarship and design.
Pollyanna Rhee: Traditionally design practice and historical scholarship are treated as two separate and even opposing activities. So I want to start by asking each of you how you came to architectural or landscape history through practice, and how you think of the relationship between design practice and history in your scholarship as well as in your teaching?
Jay Cephas: I want to start with questioning the trajectory from design to history. It’s talked about a lot as a given within landscape history and architectural history. I received a professional degree in architecture, although the professional work that I did was exclusively in landscape design and urban design. But before that, I worked for nonprofit organizations and in community development, and was particularly interested in recording the issues the people I worked with faced. For me it’s less about thinking in terms of moving from design to history and more about how we define those two different domains and why we define them as separate. With the kinds of work I’ve been doing for the last couple of years in the public-facing Black Architects Archive, it’s really difficult to think about design and history as separate. That work encourages public engagement with design history and also requires a certain kind of design intervention that is effective.
Elliott Sturtevant: I had more of a traditional trajectory from one to the other. I entered an undergraduate program that was housed in a faculty of engineering, but I was at an architecture school that happened to be a bastion of phenomenologically-inclined teaching. So I had a great deal of freehand drawing classes and other teaching that promoted a poetic approach to architecture. Then in my master’s degree I was introduced to a completely different approach to the field. Through Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John J. May, I got involved with The Instruments Project, which eventually led to a book called Design Technics. I found the project to be a really interesting way to think through architectural production. Courses such as professional practice in architecture programs tend to be taught by practitioners who may not be interested in the historicity of the things they’re teaching, like how did our building code come to be and where do these normative practices we teach students come from? So The Instruments Project was really compelling as an attempt to historicize architectural practice and a way to bridge practice and a more theoretical and historical position. Ultimately that experience led me to pursue a PhD.
Sara Jacobs: My professional journey feels fairly nonlinear. I did an undergraduate degree in architecture, but it was very much a liberal arts degree. I was less interested in architecture than how stories were told between people, communities, and their relationships to place. I took a lot of urban studies classes, I took a lot of geography classes, I tried to take as few architecture classes as possible. Yet I found myself completing a graduate degree in landscape architecture, largely because I saw it as taking on more of a systematic approach to land and place. I practiced before doing a PhD and I think that experience combined with a long-standing interest in stories and narratives led me in a more historical direction. I felt a fair amount of frustration within professional practice with its focus on the progression toward a future that assumes a particular outcome without always a critical reflection of where or why design was happening in the first place. That focus on progress through design when we live in a non-linear world was difficult to reconcile and ultimately led me to go more explicitly into landscape history for the context it helps provide.
“The assumption toward progress that occurs in practice and maybe especially in education is perhaps what is at the core of this distinction between design and history.”
Cephas: The assumption toward progress that occurs in practice and maybe especially in education is perhaps what is at the core of this distinction between design and history. Historical scholarship requires dwelling in a moment. It usually isn’t our present moment, but there’s a need to delve deep into something that’s not just concerned about moving forward. It’s about trying to understand it from lots of angles. This is a challenge sometimes in teaching design students who can get frustrated when they’re inundated with design education that’s constantly about seeking solutions and moving forward.
Jacobs: Absolutely. I think the way that history can frame past, present, and future at once and grapple with a certain level of specificity and details isn’t often compatible with the ways that professional design practices or the studio sequence is set up in design school.
Sturtevant: One thing that struck me when I practiced for a short period of time and having lots of colleagues involved in practice is that perhaps unlike medicine or law, architectural services are often only remunerated when a particular type of solution is given. It doesn’t seem like there’s a way to build an architectural practice if you say things like, “Don’t build this” or “Don’t develop here,” or “Do this there instead.” History, in some sense, provides a way to critically reflect on this need to always provide solutions and to propose different criteria for evaluation.
Figure 1. Photograph of materials sorting on site after the demolition of the IBM Canada facilities at 844 Don Mills Road, August 2020. © Scott Norsworthy.
Cephas: In my experience practicing landscape design and urban design, sometimes the solution was not doing something. I don’t think that happens in architecture or it’s certainly not going to be to the benefit of the architect to do that. But urban planning, urban design, and even landscape design can engage with policy questions and social questions a lot more. That’s one of the things that compelled me more towards landscape. I didn’t start investigating landscapes because I thought, “oh I’m interested in landscape issues.” I thought I was interested in architecture and kept being told that I wasn’t interested in architecture because I rarely talked about buildings. I figured out that I was interested in people and landscapes and going back and forth between those scales. There is something about the ability of that larger scale to contend with policy and social issues that I find more satisfying.
Jacobs: To add to that, landscape also is always dealing with an existing physical place. There’s a materiality to it. I know that architecture is placing the building on land and you can consider its historical contexts of decision-making. But I think landscapes and the sites associated with any design involve environmental questions of how water moves, soil, and vegetation, as well as previous human contacts. It forces a depth and complexity of thinking about land.
“Landscapes and the sites associated with any design involve environmental questions of how water moves, soil, and vegetation, as well as previous human contacts. It forces a depth and complexity of thinking about land.”
Rhee: Working from Jay’s remarks it seems more productive to think less of distinction between historical scholarship and practice to focus on how they’ve been defined in opposition. I’m thinking of articles written in the late-90s and early-2000s justifying the place of history in design programs. A lot of the basic reasoning in these pieces was, well, we have to teach students the social and political context of what they’re doing, not just offer a host of precedents. But now it seems we’re talking about another way to frame the relationship and argue that historical scholarship can do more besides provide social context or provide precedents for designers.
Cephas: The distinction between the two is primarily disciplinary; it’s not a distinction that exists clearly out in the world beyond academia. The idea that we must teach history to designers is interesting to me because it suggests that social context and history is something to be added to design rather than imagined as an integral part of design.
Sturtevant: To build upon that, it strikes me that the distinction dissolves when you think of your work as primarily public-facing or for a broader audience, but it gets reinscribed when you think of your work as speaking to fellow academics.
Jacobs: That may even dissolve further when we think about the fact that “landscape architect” is a profession that I don’t think is widely known to the public. So distinctions that we might make between architectural history and landscape history often don’t hold much meaning beyond select academic circles.
Rhee: I think about this a lot because I teach a big survey that attracts a wide breadth of students across majors, but I also have this responsibility to landscape architecture students. So I’m combining the early history of agriculture and urban forms with the rise of the profession of landscape architecture. If I find the contrast a bit jarring, then I’m sure the students do as well because the course covers environmental, urban, and agricultural histories alongside the rise of one particular profession. But it also seems as if landscape history in contrast to history of landscape architecture provides the conceptual space to fit these fields. Is that a distinction that makes a difference?
Cephas: I definitely find it much easier and maybe more fruitful to define landscape history by talking about specific projects or books, rather than trying to come up with a definition that’s supposed to apply to lots of different conditions.
“I wonder if architectural history as a whole is moving towards landscape. A project on landfills may not have fit a certain definition of architectural history a few decades ago, but now it seems to provide provisional answers to the kinds of questions the field wants to ask.”
Sturtevant: I wonder if architectural history as a whole is moving towards landscape. A project on landfills may not have fit a certain definition of architectural history a few decades ago, but now it seems to provide provisional answers to the kinds of questions the field wants to ask. I don’t know if this is a grand validation of landscape history, but, at a certain point, questions of land, environment, climate change, and policy pull us towards a bigger scale and landscape is a way to ground those questions.
Cephas: The process of getting a PhD and going into academia was a bit of a shock for me in terms of how separate scholarship was from the public. One experience that really shaped me happened while undertaking archival research at the Detroit Public Library, which at the time was incredibly underfunded. There was one part-time archivist the entire time I was there and the archives were unorganized due to being so understaffed. It was difficult to find most of what I needed. Then it turned out that my graduate institution’s main library actually held many of the Detroit city planning documents that I needed. Those documents were organized in my graduate institution’s library and of course there were multiple full-time librarians and archivists working there to support researchers. I asked myself why my graduate institution held all these public documents in its private library, accessible only to researchers at that institution. Because of that and other experiences, I wanted to be sure that some of my research could have some benefit for the people who are affected by the things I study. Academic research is often extractive of the communities studied. People in the communities who could benefit from the research often don’t have access to it. I’m building my career studying places and I want to be able to return some of that knowledge back to those places, where it rightfully belongs. That has been the impetus behind the Black Architects Archive, which started for lots of different reasons, but people who have reached out to me about it have mostly been K-12 teachers, community organizations, and local amateur historians. These are exactly the people I want to be engaging with by helping them do the local history work they’ve been doing for a long time.
Figure 2. The Black Architects Archive makes architectural and landscape history a public resource for local history.
Jacobs: The public facing aspects of my work right now is probably through teaching. I’m in Vancouver, British Columbia and central to that is that the city is built on unceded Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh territory. So what does public mean on occupied land, and what does that mean for teaching in a design studio sequence where we introduce ideas of public space? It has really forced me in my teaching to think about the positionality and agency of designers, and of the students themselves, within a larger public sphere.
Sturtevant: I’ve been struck by the variety of opportunities that PhD students in urban planning, as opposed to architecture, envision pursuing. They often end up working in local, municipal, and federal organizations, or different policy think tanks, which I think influences the variety of projects students take on. If your program has a vision for its students that is primarily focused on them becoming tenure-track faculty, it also influences their research projects. If there was a more expansive notion of what the degree could provide, then the research produced might be influenced as well.
Cephas: This circles back to the difference between history and design. What are the ways that history is “productive,” for lack of a better word? One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is the notion of practice and having a history practice. What does it mean to think of my day-to-day research as a history practice? Part of it is teaching, part of it might be building or creating things, part of it is writing. I’m interested in how I might think about my engagement with history and historical work differently.
Figure 3: Conrad Speckert, The Second Egress: Building a Code Change. Example of a graduate student project that examines the National Building Code of Canada as an object of design and site of critical inquiry.
Sturtevant: Speaking of the idea of a history practice, I’d very much want to co-teach a professional practice class and engage with other courses that tend to be practice-oriented, such as architectural visualization and building science and technology, and to have students think critically about the tools we take for granted.
We tend to think of change happening from the top down, with large-scale influences, but there may be a lot of movement that could happen with much smaller interventions. How projects are procured, the way the building code is written, the way students think about building assemblies, and other things that are squarely within the realm of what architects or landscape architects do. Students tend to dismiss them for larger-scale issues that tend to be outward facing as opposed to introspective. But I hope there’s room for a history practice to influence those spaces.
Jacobs: I had the opportunity to teach a professional practice class and it was a lot of fun to take a critical approach to practice. Building off of what Elliott said, I’m excited to think about how history can shift something like accreditation within departments or professional licensing standards. I would also like to see more landscape history take land itself more seriously. We work within the context of land and there’s a material and also a social, political and economic dimension to it.
Rhee: A related question might be about the place of public-facing work within teaching and scholarship or what’s the scope of public-facing work in design fields.
Cephas: I think there’s been a shift over the last several years towards more integrative approaches in architecture schools. I really like this notion of the professional practice class being able to take on histories and theories to interrogate how practice is done instead of thinking of it as isolated, but socially routed, particularly in the more technical aspects of architectural production. Just understanding different aspects of the discipline as having different facets can be helpful beyond architectural education specifically. There are probably things that need to happen at the level of practice as well, I hope that at the very least those who are being educated with more integrative approaches to architecture will start to shift things out in the world.
