THE VISUAL AND SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF LANDSCAPES

that expresses the dualism explicit in its name. Landscape is the realm that wants to change. Architecture is the discipline that wants to impart order and relative stasis. If, even as Ms. Solomon suggests in her pages on Villa Lante, the garden is a fusion of opposites, what place, if any, do these dualisms have in green architecture? Is it "fair" to examine a recent work by Ms. Solomon (in collaboration with Michael Van Valkenburgh) to begin to answer the question? Perhaps not; it only seems odd to ignore the work since it is such a timely experiment. This design, in the Cowles Conservatory of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden at the Walker Art Center, is a temporary installation in two parts. It is housed in separate wings of the conservatory. The design (which is, in fact, two designs) flanks a central palm pavilion in which a glass carp by Frank Gehry is frozen in midleap, a crystalline memory of the architect’s childhood. One wing consists of a series of four ivy covered gate structures, apparently modelled on images seen on pages 13 and 61 of the book, and intervening "fields," originally of gardenias, now cyclamen. The second wing uses more transparent scrims of ivy to make rooms for heliconia "fields." The designs become--by virtue of their separateness, containment, and relatively small scale--discrete "pieces," less gardens, perhaps, than maquettes of green architecture. More building than landscape, this work, like Ms. Solomon’s book, steps resolutely away from a landscape architecture that is about a fusion of opposites. Here, rather, is a green architecture of order. Underlying this issue of green versus landscape architecture is another significant question: if we have only order regardless of scale and confinement, do we also have the transforming experience of the garden wherein the landscape phenomena supersede our control? The writings in Meanings of the Garden suggest otherwise, but are these only the understandable reactions of people who would be attracted to a conference of this title? As we come to our own individual manifestoes or universal doctrines of the garden, we may gratefully acknowledge the authors of these provocative books. Whatever we choose to practice--green, landscape, or, perhaps, another architecture--we will know better what sort of garden we make about because of these books. Lance Neckar is an Assistant Professor in the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN 55108.