{"id":126270,"date":"2025-10-27T10:40:55","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T09:40:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/landezine.com\/?p=126270"},"modified":"2025-10-27T13:48:36","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T12:48:36","slug":"michael-jakob-landscape-architecture-suffers-from-a-lack-of-self-conscience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/landezine.com\/michael-jakob-landscape-architecture-suffers-from-a-lack-of-self-conscience\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Jakob: Landscape Architecture Suffers from a Lack of Self-Conscience"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Jakob teaches Theory and History of Landscape at Politecnico di Milano and the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio. He publishes widely on landscape-related issues, aesthetics, the history of vertigo, and “ways of seeing”. His books include The Swiss Touch in Landscape Architecture<\/em><\/a>, The Bench in the Garden<\/em><\/a>, and Faux Mountains<\/em><\/a>. We caught him in Mendrisio to discuss the profession, aesthetics, climate change, art, and the significance of theory in its development.<\/p>\n

Za\u0161 Brezar: To start, could you give a brief history of your interests and how you entered the field of landscape?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Michael Jakob: I studied literature \u2014 Comparative Literature, German and French Literature \u2014 and at the same time Philosophy. My interest in landscape therefore stems from philosophy and literature. However, quite early on, when I started teaching more than forty years ago, I was extremely interested in the representation of nature. My first courses were hence on bucolic or pastoral literature \u2014 Theocritus, Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, and so on. My main activities were in the field of comparative literature, which gave me the possibility to work on the most diverse subjects.<\/p>\n

I came to landscape by chance, not by following any plan. The Center for Modern Art in Geneva invited me to give a course of my choice, and when they asked me what I intended to do, I suggested \u201clandscape.\u201d The basis of the course I gave was entirely autodidactic; I began working on landscape in painting, read the classical texts by Kenneth Clark and Gombrich, and from there, one thing led to another. During the last twenty years I\u2019ve always worked in parallel: comparative literature and philosophy on one side, and aesthetics and theory of landscape on the other.<\/p>\n

Since you draw comparisons with art constantly, how would you describe the relation between recent attitudes in landscape architecture\u2014its shift to ecology and sustainability\u2014and art?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Art is always ahead of its time. Artists discover things\u2014often not fully consciously, or without knowing it at all\u2014that others will recognize only a decade or several decades later. When art is truly innovative, it is frequently not understood as such because it is simply too new.<\/p>\n

Landscape architecture has to face a central problem: it is a very recent, \u201cyoung\u201d discipline and does not have a real consciousness of its own doing. Even well-known people in the field, fully recognized by their peers, when asked what is landscape architecture?<\/em>, can only very rarely define their own field. That\u2019s quite strange, because if you ask a painter, she or he will tell you: I\u2019m a painter. I can do this, and I cannot do that, and these artists of the past were essential for me<\/em>, etc. If you\u2019re an architect, it is the same \u2014 you can immediately name who influenced you, and you have some kind of knowledge of the history of the discipline. In the field of landscape architecture, even key protagonists act without being able to place their works on a timeline or identify a curriculum.<\/p>\n

I have always been surprised by this lack of theory \u2014 and of history as well. Even prominent colleagues of ours can hardly name five masterworks essential for them. Sometimes, of course, they cite their own works. This means that some professionals work in the field without fully knowing what they do when they claim to practice \u201clandscape architecture.\u201d Of course, already Olmsted was unhappy with the label \u201clandscape architecture,\u201d but after 200 years, someone in the profession should be able to identify at least the possible guidelines and fundamental concepts of the discipline. This weakness also explains why so many landscape architects have an inferiority complex in regard to architects, which is wrong, because their projects can easily compete with those of architects or urbanists.<\/p>\n

In recent years, landscape architecture has turned toward the material, the ecological, the infrastructural. Do you think this is enough, or should the discipline also delve deeper into philosophy? How do you see this shift changing the very foundation of the field?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The shift to ecology is part of a trend I sometimes like to call the new \u201creligion of nature.\u201d And rightly so: today, caring for the earth is no luxury\u2014it is a necessity.<\/p>\n

We should never forget that both \u201clandscape\u201d and \u201clandscape architecture\u201d are historical and specific, not universal phenomena. Landscape, as we understand it today, is a very particular European invention of the 15th century; landscape perception, or lived landscape \u2014 the possibility to see<\/em> landscape in situ \u2014 came even later, in the 18th century. It was promoted by a specific social class and its ideas concerning nature, art, taste, and private property. As W. J. T. Mitchell and many others have stressed: seeing the world as landscape is not natural, it is cultural.<\/p>\n

For two centuries, this peculiar \u201cway of seeing\u201d was often mistaken for nature itself. In reality, we learned to recognize beautiful, sublime, picturesque, and romantic landscapes as if they were simply there, waiting for us. Today, faced with the climate crisis, we must recognize that our aesthetic interest in nature is in fact a partial\u2014and European\u2014way of seeing and framing visual reality, imposed upon the world.<\/p>\n

We are at a critical and complex moment. For the last two or three centuries, landscape was primarily about aesthetics: classical beauty, picturesque beauty, even the strange beauty of wastelands\u2014the aesthetics of ugliness, if you like. But if we take the ecological crisis seriously, then our way of interpreting the world was a luxury. We stared at nature for too long, believing that everything would remain as it was. Now it is too late\u2014we cannot simply look and contemplate; we must act. Hence, aesthetics becomes secondary, and perhaps even irrelevant.<\/p>\n

You can already see this shift happening. Some landscape architects openly admit that they have decided not to intervene on a site, that they are more interested today in soil, in what is not visible, or in dynamic processes. Aesthetics is no longer the key, or the only answer, for defining our relationship with nature. It will not disappear entirely\u2014it will survive\u2014but it is no longer at the center. For a discipline built upon the aesthetic tradition of landscape, this is a profound shift.<\/p>\n

Landscape is, after all, tied to human perception \u2014 to the body, the eye, the brain, and then to interpretation. Even in the context of ecological crisis, isn\u2019t our entanglement with the environment still mediated through aesthetic experience? And by aesthetics I don\u2019t mean the binary of beauty and ugliness, but the wider field of the sensible \u2014 of what can be perceived, felt, and made meaningful.<\/strong><\/p>\n

We are marked by the primacy of view, by the primarily scopic access to what we call reality. The world is what we see and what we grasp with our eyes. With the ecological crisis, Bertolt Brecht\u2019s idea comes true: first you have to eat, to find food, and only afterwards come morality, beauty, and the arts, as he said (I use my own words for his citation: Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral<\/em>). Our bodies need food in order to survive. Once our survival is at stake, simply contemplating landscapes for our immediate pleasure is something we can no longer afford. A certain idea of beauty has been at the core of much landscape architecture and is still very much around, even if it sometimes takes the form of postmodern, that is, bizarre beauty.<\/p>\n

Landscape is unilaterally tied to view. I do not agree with the sometimes naively used concept of acoustic landscapes or soundscapes. Hearing does not constitute landscape. Landscape is sight\u2014a specific way of framing the world born in Europe, tied to visual control, to one-point perspective, to Brunelleschi, to cartography, to the grid, etc. This kind of rational control is now in crisis because the thing to be \u201ccontrolled\u201d has become the entire earth. We need a different consciousness.<\/p>\n

You also dive into art as an observer. Over the last century, contemporary art has largely let go of traditional aesthetic experience. Does landscape architecture need a similar shift, or should its material aspects take precedence now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

What we need is more criticism within landscape architecture\u2014and within our own use of the word landscape<\/em>. We must define our operative terms with precision; we cannot keep going with things half-defined.<\/p>\n

As for the relation between landscape architecture and art, I would say that many interesting projects have profited from the dialogue with artists. Take G\u00fcnther Vogt, for instance, and his collaboration with Dan Graham.<\/p>\n

\u2026 or Olafur Eliasson \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am more sceptical about Olafur Eliasson. I see in him the typical product of our postmodern society. Eliasson is less an artist than a brand, with a large group of very talented people working for him and producing his art. It’s a factory\u2014but not in the Warholian sense. With him, we are in a certain way beyond the artist, which is very telling about the state of contemporary art.<\/p>\n

Art\u2014art that matters\u2014is always contemporary, and it always has something to teach us. Tarkovsky, Antonioni, the poets Andr\u00e9 du Bouchet and Andrea Zanzotto\u2014they all clearly anticipated things to come. When Il deserto rosso<\/em> came out, people walked out of the cinema because they did not understand a thing; the language of the film was too new for them. But today we understand perfectly one of the first scenes of Red Desert<\/em>, when Giuliana, the protagonist, opens her eyes and discovers that everything around her is full of waste, of toxic materials and debris. It is terrible and, at the same time, beautiful in its own way\u2014a landscape marked by the aesthetics of ugliness. Antonioni had already shown, back in the 1960s, the hidden implications of the capitalist system and its misuse of natural resources, but it took decades for people to recognize the value of what he revealed in a single sequence.<\/p>\n