Sculpture landscape integration

1、 Modern sculpture and landscape design

There is a close relationship between sculpture and gardens. Historically, sculpture has always existed as a decoration in gardens. Even in modern society, this tradition remains. Compared with modern sculpture, modern painting seems to be easily transformed into some elements in the design plan due to its own lines, blocks and colors, which has had an important impact on the development of landscape design in the early stage of modernism. Landscape designers who pursue innovation have obtained infinite inspiration from modern painting, such as zigzag lines, Amebic curves The formal language of cubism and surrealism, such as kidney type, was often borrowed in landscape design before World War II. However, the essential influence of modern sculpture on the landscape is produced with the development of some aspects of itself.

One is to move towards abstraction. Because the figure of a concrete person or object attracts people's attention is its body itself, it is difficult to evolve into a part of the space elements in the garden, so abstraction is the first step for sculpture to become an element of environmental space.

The second is to go out of the gallery and create on the outdoor land. This does not mean simply moving the works in the museum to the outside, but simply restoring the original meaning of the sculpture; It is not only to create a specific sculpture for a certain outdoor environment, so that sculpture becomes a harmonious part of the environment; More importantly, it refers to the works of art that are created on the natural land and make the natural environment an integral part of the work. Such sculptures have a really close relationship with the environment.Third, expand the scale. As the background of the sculpture changes from the wall of the museum to a noisy city street, square or deserted wilderness, in order to match the environment, the scale of the sculpture inevitably expands, and even reaches the scale that people can enter, and becomes an outdoor structure that can experience space with the body, not just a simple art that can be appreciated with the eyes. At this time, the sculpture has the function of creating outdoor space.

Fourth, use natural materials. Creating sculptures in a natural environment, using some raw materials of nature, such as rock, soil, wood, and even natural materials such as branches, grass, leaves, water, ice, etc. to create sculptures, will appear more harmonious and unified. Sometimes, various phenomena and forces of nature, such as wind, lightning and erosion, also become an important part of some works of art.

When some sculptures develop in such a direction, compared with landscape works, there is no big difference in the objects of work, the materials used and the scale of space, and the integration of the two kinds of art will naturally occur.

2、 The development of modern sculpture - minimalism and earth art

In the 1960s, Western society was torn apart by increasing conflicts, and new shocks appeared in the art world. The dominant position of modernism was shaken, and new ideas were emerging. Conceptual art, process art, and minimalist art became new trends in the art world. The most important influence on landscape art is the minimalist art and the earth art closely related to it.

Minimalism is an art movement that takes simple geometric forms as the basic artistic language. It first appeared in painting, and the climax of its development is concentrated on sculpture. Minimalism is a non-figurative and non-emotional art. It advocates that art is "impersonal presentation", and works are composed of a single simple geometric form, or the continuous repetition of several single forms. The minimalist art is a return to the original structural form, returning to the most basic form, order and structure. These elements have a strong relationship with space. Most of the minimalist art works use geometric or organic forms, use new comprehensive materials, and have a strong industrial color. Famous minimalist art sculptors include Anthony Caro 1924 -, P. King 1934 -, Donald Judd 1928-1994, and so on. Their thoughts and works not only promoted the production of earth art, but also influenced the landscape design after World War II (Figure 1).

In the 1960s and 1970s, some artists, especially minimalist sculptors, began to go out of galleries and society to remote pastures and deserts to create a huge superhuman scale sculpture - Land Art or Earthworks.

Early works of earth art are often placed in places far away from civilization, such as deserts, mudflat or canyons. In 1970, the "Spiral Jetty" of artist Robert Smithson (1938-1973) was a 458-meter-long and 50-meter-diameter spiral stone embankment pushed by bulldozer on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. When people visit it, their first impression is not a new art work, but an extremely old one. It seems that the huge "rock carving" imposed on the lake has been there since ancient times (Figure 2).

In 1977, the artist Walter De Maria (1935 -) took 67 meters in a deserted and thunderous valley in New Mexico × The 67-meter square grid has 400 stainless steel poles inserted on the ground. Each steel pole can act as a lightning rod, forming strange light, electricity and sound effects when the storm comes. This work, entitled "The Field of Lightning", praises the awesome power and magnificent effects of natural phenomena (Figure 3).

The famous "bandaging master" Jaracheff Christo 1935 - has been committed to wrapping up some buildings and natural objects and changing the landscape of the land for 40 years. His works are both novel and magnificent. The "flowing fence" made by him in 1972-1976 is a 48km long white cloth wall, which rises and falls over mountains and valleys, and finally disappears in the bay of San Francisco (Figure 4).

Most of the earth art works are located in remote fields and wastelands. Only a few people can experience its charm on the spot. Moreover, some works can only be seen on the plane because of their super-large scale. Therefore, most people understand these works of art through photos and videos. In a highly secular modern society, when the earth art presents a kind of primitive nature and religious mystery and purity to people, most people feel more or less a kind of spiritual tremor and purification, which forces people to rethink an eternal topic - the relationship between man and nature.

Earth art can not only rely on natural changes, but also change nature. It emphasizes communication with nature, uses existing places, changes their characteristics through artistic means, creates spiritual places, and provides people with different ways to experience and understand the ordinary and boring space they are familiar with, which is full of romantic color.

The earth art inherits the abstract and simple form of minimalist art, and integrates the ideas of process art and conceptual art, becoming a bridge for artists to set foot in landscape design. In the works of earth art, sculpture is not placed in the landscape. Artists use land, rocks, water, trees and other materials as well as natural forces to shape and change the existing landscape space. Sculpture and landscape are closely integrated, regardless of you and me. So many works of landscape design are also considered as earth art.

3、 Sculpture combined with landscape design

In the Western art world in the 1960s, the connotation and extension of sculpture have expanded considerably, and the difference between sculpture and other art forms has been blurred, especially in the field of landscape design. Architects, landscape designers and urban planners have gradually realized that the large-scale sculpture composition will provide a very suitable decoration for the new urban space and gardens, and sculptors will have more and more opportunities to create some key works for people to appreciate for the new urban squares and parks, from the old generation of masters Moore, Calder and Noguchi to the new generation of "minimalist art" sculptors. Some sculptors use large-scale sculpture works to control the landscape of local areas of the city, so as to participate in the creation of urban landscape space. Other sculptors are directly involved in the field of landscape design, using the language of sculpture to carry out landscape design.

The artist Isamu Noguchi 1904-1988 was the first to try to combine sculpture with landscape design. The versatile Japanese-American has been committed to shaping the outdoor land by sculpture. In the design of many game fields, he shaped the surface into various three-dimensional sculptures, such as pyramids, cones, scarps, slopes, etc., and combined with the layout of streams, pools, slides, climbing racks, game rooms and other facilities, creating a free and happy world for children (Figure 5).

Noguchi's most famous garden work is the courtyard of UNESCO headquarters in Paris designed in 1956. The 0.2-hectare courtyard is a ground landscape made of soil, stone, water and wood. Today, the courtyard is too large for recognition because of the trees, but the abstract form of the undulating ground surface under the canopy still reveals the artist's idea of using the courtyard as a sculpture (Figure 6).

In 1983, Noguchi designed a courtyard called "California Scenario" in California. On this flat and basic square base, Noguchi placed a series of regular and irregular shapes on the plane in a seemingly arbitrary way to arouse people's reaction with a certain narrative (Figure 7).

Noguchi once said, "I like to imagine the garden as a sculpture of space." He is one of the pioneers of artists' involvement in landscape design, and his works have inspired more artists to devote themselves to the field of landscape. Today, artists participate in the creation of landscape works everywhere.

Athena Tacha (1936 -), a female artist, has been engaged in the creation of "architectural sculpture at a specific site" for more than 20 years, producing a unique combination of outdoor sculpture and landscape. Her inspiration comes from the layers of ripples left on the beach after the ebb tide of the sea, the typical agricultural landscape in hilly areas - terraces, the deposition of seashells on the rocks, the feathers of birds, and various layers of natural objects in nature. Therefore, most of her works are based on various forms of complex terraces, which are curved, straight, broken and stacked, forming interesting and unique hard landscapes (Figure 8).

The garden of Little Sparta, built by Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925 -) in 1967, is full of symbolic sculptures and implicit inscriptions. He added his understanding and views to the landscape by carving poems, maxims and quotations in the garden, which is similar to the inscriptions in Chinese classical gardens (Figure 9).

4、 Minimalist landscape design

Among contemporary landscape designers, the most affected by minimalism is the famous designer Peter Walker 1932 - who is currently active in the field of American landscape design.

Walker has great interest in art. Western classical gardens, especially the gardens of Andre Le Notre 1613-1700, modernism, minimalism and earth art have jointly influenced Walker's design. At the end of the 1960s, Walker began to have a strong interest in minimalist art. He found that the visual and spiritual vocabulary in minimalist art and his understanding of modernism, such as simplicity, clarity and sense of form, are very consistent in nature. The most common technique in minimalist art, "sequence", is the reuse of a certain element or the repetition of the interval between elements, which is very effective in landscape design.

Walker's minimalist landscape emphasizes geometry and order in the composition, using simple geometric motifs such as circle, ellipse, square, triangle, or the repetition of these motifs, as well as the intersection and overlap between different geometric systems. In addition to using new industrial materials such as steel and glass, the new charm of traditional materials is also explored. Generally, all natural materials should be included in the strict geometric order. Ponds, grass, rocks, pebbles, gravel, etc. are expressed in an artificial form, with neat and strict edges, reflecting the characteristics of the industrial era. The planting is also regular. Most trees are planted according to the grid, and the bushes are trimmed into hedges. The flowers pursue the overall color and texture effect as part of the rigorous geometric composition (Figure 10).

The most minimalist and earth art feature of Walker's works is undoubtedly the Tanner Fountain of Harvard University designed in 1979. He used 159 stones to form a circular stone formation with a diameter of 18 meters. The misty fountain is located in the center of the stone formation. The spray of water droplets forms a mist floating among the stones, reflecting a sense of prehistoric mystery. This design is obviously influenced by a stonehenge sculpture created by the minimalist artist Andrea in Hartford in 1977. Although the design is simple, the landscape experience formed is rich and colorful, with rich changes in the weather, seasons and different times of the day, making the fountain a medium for observing natural changes and reincarnation of all things (Figure 11).

Some of the students that Walker supervised, including Martha Schwartz 1950 - and George Hargreaves 1953 -, later grew into a new generation of landscape designers.

Schwartz studied art at the University of Michigan. Her initial interest in landscape came from the works of some land artists. Because she is familiar with modern art movements and artists, she gets more inspiration from art. Compared with most landscape designers, Schwartz, as a landscape designer and artist, works more boldly. The charm of her works lies in the diversity of design. Her style tends to pop and postmodern on the whole, but some works also show the influence of minimalism. The Federal Court Plaza in Minneapolis, built in 1998, extends the representative vertical lines on the building facade to the plane of the entire square. On both sides of the entrance passage, some drop-shaped green grass mounds of different heights and sizes with an angle of 30 degrees from the line rise from the square. The shape of the grass mound originates from a special terrain in the region, "drumlin" - the product of the retreat of glaciers 10000 years ago. Parallel to these grass hills, there are some thick logs lying on the ground, which are divided into several sections as benches, which also represent the basis of economic development in the region - timber. This square has obvious characteristics of minimalism and earth art. Among the urban landscapes in Minneapolis characterized by straight lines and squares, its landscape is very personalized (Figure 12).

5、 Earth Art in Landscape

At the beginning of the emergence of earth art, artists sought to bring pure soil for artistic creation by staying away from the secular society. However, after this form has achieved great success and recognition, it has returned to the secular society and gradually become an effective artistic means to improve the living environment of human beings. It has achieved great development in the field of landscape design and become a pleasant public art. For example, in 1995, the German painter Wilhelm Holderied and the sculptor Karl Schlammiger created the "island of time" near the Munich airport, inspired by the moment the plane took off and landed. This is a 300m × The 400-meter pattern ploughed on the ground is like the notes on the ground and the sand patterns in the eastern gardens. When the plane flies into the blue sky or glides slowly to the ground, passengers can see this dynamic landmark, which arouses a lot of reverie and enhances the good impression of Munich (Figure 13).

The works of land art are not only completed by a few sculptors. Many designers also use the techniques of land art in landscape design. Many works are often completed by the cooperation of landscape architects and artists, which also promotes the integration of the two arts and the development of both sides.

In fact, as early as the 1950s, a group of artists and designers tried to combine sculpture and environmental design from various angles, and produced some original works of earth art, most typical of which are the works of Bayer and Kramer.

In 1955, the artist Herbert Bayer (1900-1987) designed two environmental works for the Aspen Prairie Hotel, "Marble Garden" and "Earth Mound". Dali Stone Garden is a group of sculptures that can be crossed on the abandoned quarry. The earth mound is a land work. The circular earth dam with a diameter of 12 meters is a sunken grassland. A small circular earth mound, a circular earth pit and a rough rock are arranged (Figure 14). This work has had an impact on the younger generation of earth artists such as Heize and Smithsonian.

In 1959, at the garden exhibition in Zurich, Switzerland, the Swiss landscape designer Ernst Cramer designed an exhibition garden called "Poet's Garden". The grass pyramid and cone are rhythmically distributed around a calm pool. The author's intention is to apply the poetic meaning of modern geometry to the garden, and the result is that the three-dimensional abstract geometric form forms a unique spatial feeling. When passing through the "poet garden", the feeling of it is not so much a garden as a sculpture of the earth (Figure 15).

Bayer has since been committed to promoting the artistry of public landscape. At the end of the 1970s, in the 1-hectare Mill Creek Canyon Earth Works (1979-1982), Bayer transformed an eroded stream in Kent, a suburb of Seattle, into a basin capable of storing flood and a part of a public entertainment park. Bayer created a group of land sculptures at the upstream of the stream, which will be submerged in the flood season and an attractive grassland park in the dry season (Figures 16 and 17).

After decades of development, today's land art has become one of the effective means of landscape design. In many outdoor environmental design, you can see the shadow of land art. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is one of the excellent works combining "earth art" and modern public landscape design in the 1970s. As the designer Maya Lin said, this work is the anatomy and decoration of the earth.

The Barcelona North Station Square, completed in 1991, was designed by architects Andreu Arriola and Carme Fiol in cooperation with the female artist Beverly Pepper, creating an artistic space for the city through three large-scale works of earth art. One is to form two slopes with plants at the entrance; The second is the dragon-like curved sculpture hovering on the grass called "the falling sky"; The third is a sinking spiral dotted with radial trees on the sand - "forest spiral". The three works are all decorated with irregular glazed pottery chips from white, light blue to deep blue, forming colorful flowing patterns under the light, reminiscent of Gaudi or Miro's works. The designer successfully solved the contradiction between the base and the urban grid with the simplest content, created different spaces, provided various functions of the park, and became a successful example of the combination of art and practice in contemporary urban design (Figure 18).

Many works of earth art show the characteristics of non-persistent and transitory, which have great inspiration for landscape designers. Some designers have re-examined the significance of landscape and began to regard landscape as a dynamic system. The purpose of design is to establish a natural process, rather than a static picturesque landscape. In the 1990s, the West8 Landscape Design Firm led by the Dutch landscape designer Adriaan Geuze 1960 - undertook the landscape design beside the Rotterdam cofferdam. After the original disordered sand pile of the base is leveled, the black and white shells abandoned by the local fishery are alternated on it to form a geometric pattern with strong color contrast of 3 cm thick, which also forms a contrast with the curve of the sea. The shells with different colors attract different kinds of birds to nest here. The chaotic scene of factory buildings, docks and sand piles left on the original abandoned land has become a vibrant landscape of birds flying on shells of different depths. Like many earth art works, the thin shell layer will disappear after a few years through the action of natural forces, and this area will become a sand dune (Figure 19).

An important influence of land art on landscape design is the concept of artistic terrain design. Before that, there were generally no more than two ways to deal with the terrain in landscape design: the architecturalized terrace style developed from Renaissance gardens and Le Notre gardens in France, or the form of imitation and refining of nature developed from the traditional British landscape garden.

However, the emergence of earth art is exciting. It takes the land as the material and changes the original appearance of the land with completely artificial and subjective art forms. This kind of change is not as ugly and harsh as previously thought or incompatible with the environment. On the contrary, it integrates with the environment and properly represents itself, bringing visual and spiritual impact. This phenomenon inspires and inspires landscape designers: the land can be changed like this! Therefore, with the acceptance and esteem of the earth art, the artistic terrain design is more and more reflected in the landscape design.

Charles Jencks (1939 -), an architectural critic built in 1990, is located in the private garden of Dumfriesshire in southwest Scotland, and is famous for its profound and mysterious design ideas and artistic terrain treatment. Wave line is the dominant motif in the garden. Land, water and other garden elements are fluctuating. This garden expresses many kinds of thoughts such as wave, bend, overlap, self-organization, ecology and the view of "form follows the cosmology" mentioned by Jens in his book "The Architecture of the Leaping Universe", and also creates a unique visual effect with poetic charm. It is the morphogenesis theory, chaos theory of Jens and his wife, and the garden historian Maggie Keswick The comprehensive embodiment of Yuyuan architecture and geomantic geomantic thoughts (Figure 20).

The design of George Hargreaves, an American landscape designer who is currently the director of the Department of Landscape Planning and Design at Harvard University, has attracted much attention from all parties, and is considered to be the integration of ecologism and earth art.

Hargreaves was greatly influenced by the earth artist Smithsonian. From Smithsonian's works, he understood that "various elements, such as water, wind and gravity, can enter and affect the landscape". Smithsonian's attention to the natural process inspired him. He realized that culture would cause potential damage to the natural system, while the ecological method ignored culture and was far away from people's lives. He began to explore ways between art and ecology.

In 1986, Hargreaves completed the landscape design of Zapu Villa in Napa Valley, California. Two kinds of perennial native grass with different height and color form spiral and serpentine carpets, which fluctuate with the terrain, like an abstract picture of the earth (Figure 21).

In the late 1980s, many projects of Hargreaves in the San Francisco Bay Area involved environmental remediation of abandoned land. He believes that these degraded landscapes also face the challenge of art. In these projects, he often fused a strong sculpture language into the sensitive environmental process and social history, and created a public space rich in metaphors and symbols, showing the ability to transform post-industrial landscape into high-quality landscape.

The Byxbee Park, built in 1991, is about 12 hectares in Palo Alto, California. The park is located on the 18-meter-high landfill. Hargreaves carefully shaped the terrain on the garbage mountain with thin soil layer, opened up the "earth gate" built by soil in the valley, and stacked many mounds on the hillside, which is a metaphor for the shell pile left by the Indians after fishing, and also used as a highland for sitting and watching the bay scenery. In the north of the park, there are array of electric poles. The flat top of the poles is in sharp contrast with the undulating terrain (Figure 22). The concrete barricades are arranged on the slope in a zigzag shape, forming a sequence that is the extension of the runway of the nearby temporary airport.

Hargreaves' design often obtains reasonable and exaggerated surface form and plant layout through scientific ecological process analysis, highlighting the artistry and following the ecological principles. In some waterfront landscape designs, he analyzed the erosion of the river to the river bank, summarized the tree-like gully system, and created the sculptured terrain based on this, which was applied to the waterfront environment to express the fluidity of water, which not only produced dramatic artistic effects, but also was a measure to reduce the erosion of water flow from the perspective of theory and practice. For example, in 1988, when the construction of Guadalupe River Park in the downtown area of San Jose began, Hargreaves shaped the river bank into a braided landform with the characteristics of the western river. The top part of the terrain points to the upstream to conform to the hydraulic principle. When the flood comes, they can slow down the flow of the river, and when the flood recedes, these terrain can organize drainage (Figure 23).

Similarly, the central and eastern parts of the Riverside Park in Louisville are also natural parks formed with sculptural surface forms. The form of the park reveals the natural and cultural process of the site, and the process of river flood and flood discharge is revealed in every space of the park. Similarly, in the design of Parque do Tejo e Trancao in Lisbon, Portugal, Hargreaves has created a fluctuating terrain with garbage and waste from port dredging.

At the Design and Art Center of the University of Cincinnati, Hargreaves designed a series of meandering grass mounds that seemed to emerge from the distorted deconstructive architecture designed by architect Peter Eisenman, creating mysterious shapes and changing shadows (Figure 24). He completed the overall conceptual design and the landscape design of the Olympic Avenue for the public area of the Sydney Olympic Park in 2000, which is full of rich changes in surface forms. At the same time, according to his idea, an artistic form of terrain will not only become the visual center of the Olympic Park, but also become the theme of the broader Millennium Park, including the Olympic Park (Figure 25).

Hargreaves' works connect culture with nature, the earth with human beings, and are a dynamic and open system. His works consciously accept the involvement of relevant natural factors and incorporate the evolution and development of nature into the open landscape system.

It is undeniable that the earth art is developed from sculpture, but unlike sculpture in the general sense, the earth art is more closely combined with the environment, and is the intersection of sculpture and landscape design. The ideas and techniques of earth art have played an important role in the development of contemporary landscape planning and design, and promoted the extension of modern landscape planning and design in one direction.

6、 Earth Art and the Renewal of Abandoned Land

When the earth artists first chose the environment for creation, they preferred the desolate wilderness, mudflat and Gobi, so as to reach the communication between human and natural souls by staying away from the human world. Later, they found that, in addition to this, the land abandoned due to the destruction of human production and life is also a suitable place. The lonely and desolate atmosphere and the strong and deep feeling after the departure of civilization in these places are very close to the theme of land art. As the abandoned land has become the stage for the creation of earth artists, people are surprised to find that this utilization has actually brought benefits to both sides. Land art works are not of no practical value to abandoned land: on the one hand, its small intervention in the environment does not affect the ecological restoration process of this land; On the other hand, in the long process of ecological restoration of the damaged land, it has improved the quality of the landscape and the visual value of the environment with the theme of art. Therefore, earth art has also become one of the effective means for the renewal, restoration and reuse of various abandoned lands.

As early as the early 1970s, the land artist Smithsonian proposed that the best places for land art are those destroyed by industry and blind urbanization, or by nature itself. It is believed that art can become a resource to reconcile ecologists and industrialists. He believes that there are many mining areas, abandoned quarries and polluted rivers in the United States. A practical solution to use these destroyed sites is to recycle land and water in the form of land art. He has put forward a plan to transform some slag piles by means of earth art.

After the 1990s, there have been a large number of examples of participation in the renewal of abandoned land by means of land art in Germany. The 4000 square kilometers of land near Kotbus, Germany, was once rich in lignite. Over the past 100 years, the mining of coal has left a barren and lifeless environment and dozens of huge 60-100m deep open-pit mines. In order to revitalize the region as soon as possible, in the 1990s, artists from all over the world were constantly invited to create works of earth art against the background of huge abandoned mines. Many coal mining facilities, such as conveyor belts, large equipment, and even the temporary workhouses and dilapidated cars where miners lived, have also been preserved and become part of the works of art. Mines, abandoned equipment and artists' works of earth art blend together to form a wild and romantic landscape (Figure 26). Decades later, these earth works of art will be submerged by rising groundwater and water diversion from the nearby Spree River, or be eroded by natural wind. Here will form the largest multi-lake plain in Europe with flourishing trees, fertile soil and 45 large lakes.

In the 1990s, there were many gardens built from industrial wasteland in the Emscher Park, an international architecture exhibition in Ruhr, Germany, among which there were quite a number of themes related to land art. For example, in the Duisburg Landscape Park designed by the landscape designer Peter Latz 1939 - and in the Gelsenkirchen Nordsten Park designed by the landscape designers Wedig Pridik and Andreas Freese in cooperation with architects and artists, the shape of the terrain, the structures in the factory, and even the waste materials and other accumulations are all like works of earth art (Figures 27, 28).

Many of Hargreaves' works mentioned above are aimed at the renewal and utilization of various abandoned lands. Under the guidance of scientific ecological principles, he established a new landscape framework by means of art.

Art, function and science are the three goals of modern landscape design. After the baptism of modernism, functionalism has become the general principle of landscape design. However, with too much emphasis on functions, the landscape is unavoidably dull. If landscape needs to develop continuously, art and science will become the direction of breakthrough. Modern sculpture has played a great role in improving the artistry of modern landscape design, and the ecological ideas contained in many earth arts are also very enlightening to the landscape, and also enrich the ideas and means of landscape design. Of course, minimalism and earth art do not provide an answer for landscape designers, but a rethinking of the landscape. In fact, many landscape designers have used the ideas and techniques of modern sculpture for reference, and their designs may skillfully use the language of modern sculpture to create sculptural landscapes; Or pursue simple and clear structure and rigorous composition to produce unique visual effects; There are also some landscape design works that show the non-persistent and changing characteristics of the earth art, and people have a different experience in such landscape space.