Why History for Designers? (Part 2)
This essay is the second of a two-part series. Follow the link to read part 1
We have had many discussions and debates on the role of history in design over the almost two centuries of its professionalization. The program that I lead at Dumbarton Oaks is the result of one such discussion, when in 1972 Elizabeth MacDougal took on the project of shaping the new discipline of landscape and garden history. In the same decade, the Journal of Architectural Education on Teaching the Landscape, edited by J.B. Jackson (1976), featured provocative essays describing the richness of landscape history when framed broadly by cultural and social histories and readings. In many ways the arguments were a humanist approach to understanding design in the context of landscape history. Jump forward another two decades and the discussion that resonates with my own career was in the 1990s when Robert Riley and Dianne Harris sparred over the very purpose of history. While Riley sought to make history relevant to the design studio, Harris argued to broaden such an instrumentalist approach. She delineated history from criticism and theory acknowledging the essential contributions of each. As she wrote, designers must be “culturally and environmentally responsible” (193) and that is where history is useful, not as an applied science but as a grounding for inquiry and ethics. Many of us, including Harris and later me, studied in architectural history and art history programs, often as the only scholar interested in gardens or landscapes. Soon Harris, James Wescott, and D. Fairchild Ruggles were establishing one of the first Ph.D. programs in landscape architecture that would support young scholars pursuing landscape history as a discipline. There was excitement about the growing interest and scholarship in landscape history that spanned broadly defined geographies, topics, and approaches. This was short lived. There has never been the robust job market to warrant an increase in Ph.D. students in landscape history with a lack of programs committed to fostering landscape history as equivalent to art and architectural history. Far too many programs to this day allow their history courses to be taught by designers with an interest in history or rely on their architectural and art historians to offer the relevant courses that nevertheless don’t address the complexities of land, landscape, and natural systems.
And yet the power of historical thinking is a critical component of equipping students to face the challenges of today and the future, as long as we don’t reduce history to a chronological timeline of important projects outlined in a digital slide show. Nor is history a matter of “break throughs” that can be neatly explained in sequence. History is a way of thinking as is design. History is a way of asking questions about how people inhabit place, a topic at the core of the design process. History is the foundation for arguments about the future. The capacity to engage design and history thinking is what we need to build in the next generation of designers. History is a means to embark on a rigorous reckoning in order to unravel the inherent complexity of places and their becoming as we know them today.
Figure 1. The Maerschalck map of the City of New York is a historic map made in 1754 that clearly shows the African Burial Ground and its surrounding neighborhood, Library of Congress.
This requires that we see and read beyond the tabula rasa, the erased site, the so-called open space of a place. It was only in 1991 that the “Negroes Burial Ground” in New York City dating to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was made visible again during construction of a federal office building. The Lakota considered what we know today as the Black Hills of South Dakota as traditional hunting grounds and sacred ground. As late as 1875 the US military respected the importance of this land to the Lakota. Nevertheless, by 1876 10,000 non-natives were settling on the land to mine for minerals and farm the land. To this day the ownership and use of the Black Hills remains in contention. A significant slave-trade port, Valongo Wharf sits in Rio de Janeiro’s Jornal do Comércio Square, built in 1811, and used until 1843. For over 150 years it lay under the urban infrastructure of a second wharf followed by the city’s roads and plazas. During the construction in 2011 of a light rail system, the wharf was re-discovered when the remains of the massive stones of the slave dock were uncovered. This re-discovery demanded that historians recall the stories of the estimated 900,000 enslaved Africans that passed through. While the site of the Wharf is today a UNESCO world heritage site, the question remains how to design the place so as to allow the stones to speak of the history of the enslaved peoples. These are just three stories of places that might have appeared empty or unimportant or blank, but, as with all places, are the sites of history writ small and large. To address such histories, designers need to start by knowing the histories. This requires unraveling historical and contemporary socio-ecological entanglements to make room for alternative communities that might re-imagine experiences and relationships with place to emerge. Put simply, history allows one to make decisions moving forward, grounded in where we are today and how we got here. It offers one the potential for integrity as a designer.
Figure 2. Valongo Wharf (Cais do Valongo), built in 1811 for the trading of enslaved Africans and used until 1831. From 1850 to 1920 it was the place of many black enslaved and freed peoples often called Pequena Africa. licensed under CC BY 2.0. Photo by Halley Pacheco de Oliveira, Wikimedia.
It is an exciting moment for historians, as public discourse increasingly grapples with our historic narratives and their complexities. As a culture we are beginning to come to grips with what it might mean to understand how the legacies of the past shaped both the inheritance and future of environmental degradation and destruction, climate change and its disparate impacts, and the economic and social inequities we see around us near and far. These are not new challenges, but rather consequences of the interactions of cultures and people with landscape over time. When multiple and diverse traces and threads of such practices and places are layered one with the other, new narratives emerge that suggest the inherent complexities and strangeness of our historic engagements with land and place. Practicing history thinking compels designers to engage in the inherently transdisciplinary work that grounds an understanding of the socio-ecological entanglements of landscape. History thinking enriches design thinking.
“History is a way of thinking as is design.”
Thinking historically expands a designer’s capacity to respond creatively and responsibly. When a piece of land is known to have been stolen from indigenous communities, the designer must consider whether that demands interpretation, recognition, and reparation. The designer asks who is at the table and what stories are being shared and considered by whom and for whom. When one acknowledges that a lynching took place exactly where a Confederate statue now stands, one can no longer simply imagine nothing happened. In the twenty-first century we can no longer design landscapes while ignoring their histories and the multiple, diverse, and conflicting stories inherent to all places. Designers cannot be ignorant. Instead, designers might lead a more rigorous reckoning of past narratives of the sites and places leading to more responsible and responsive designs for all.
