To even the most jaded browser of bookstores' architecture shelves, a title like The American Landscape begs consideration. Carefully extracted from a shelf of oversized, heavily illustrated volumes, the book appears yet more promising: the diverse scenes depicted on the jacket further the title's suggestion of a broadly-painted picture of the country's rich and varied landscapes -- natural, naturalistic and urban. And a quick flip through the lavishly illustrated volume confirms that what author Christian Zapatka has attempted is a "sweeping overview" (jacket text) which selects, orders and analyzes episodes from a century and a half of American landscape design and intentional use. Bringing under one cover such breathtaking natural spectacles as Niagara Falls and Yosemite, the masterful design of Central Park, the large-scale public works projects of Robert Moses and the work of prominent contemporary designers, The American Landscape celebrates both the natural landscape and the creative genius of designers that have shaped the urban environment. More generally, it is a paean to the American qualities of natural abundance, human achievement and public consensus, a happily-ever-after family photograph album on a national scale.
Always an ambitious undertaking, the crafting of a survey is particularly demanding in today's intellectual climate which challenges both the method and content of traditional historical narratives. Multicultural awareness, the erosion of disciplinary borders, and heightened interest in cultural and aesthetic theory have brought new areas of study to the attention of scholars of the built environment. These intellectual trends hold the survey maker to high standards: she/he must be more inclusive of subject matter, reconsidering the accepted canon which reflects hierarchies of gender, class and race. At the same time, greater selectivity, or the case study approach, is advocated as a means of establishing a more textured study that moves beyond formal and factual presentation, and permits the application of theoretical consideration.
Zapatka seems well-equipped to meet these challenges. An architect, a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and lecturer in History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, he notes that the project took shape under the tutelage and influence of such well-known scholars and designers as Georges Teyssot, Anthony Vidler, Diane Agrest, Mario Gandelsonas and Michael Graves, and in such distinguished societies as Dumbarton Oaks, the American Academy in Rome and the Chicago Institute for Architecture and Urbanism (p.11). The result, Zapatka notes, is "a selective survey of some significant moments in the history of American landscape painting, planning and design" ( p.8).
The book's sweep of a century and a half's landscape design is organized into six chapters, arranged in rough chronological order. The first four are typological, featuring the wilderness and the American sublime; nineteenth-century urban parks; the private landscapes of suburbs, estates and schools; and national parks and highways. The fifth chapter treats New Deal landscape projects of all types, and a final chapter surveys major contributions of contemporary landscape design. Within each chapter, a brief general statement introduces a series of descriptive texts. For example, the chapter on urban parks includes entries for Central Park, Prospect Park, Eastern "Park-Way," Riverside Park, Morningside Park, Boston's Emerald Necklace and Franklin Park; Belle Island, Detroit; Chicago's waterfront parks; and the Mall in Washington.
Accompanying the relatively brief chapter texts is a rich trove of images culled from museums and archives. Most images follow the text in their corresponding chapter, and are not keyed to it, but are identified with descriptive captions. Throughout the book, the visual material far outweighs the text: the chapter on national parks contains 5 pages of text and footnotes and 15 pages of images, and coverage of the New Deal projects pairs 10 pages of text with 36 full pages of photographs and plans.
The images are remarkable not just by virtue of their quantity, but for their variety and presentation. Zapatka gathers paintings and photographs, stereoscopic views, postcards, designers' plans and renderings, published views, maps and models to create an attractive visual display, while making the point that instruments of popular culture, such as postcards, as well as specialized design documents are primary sources of information for the landscape historian. Reproduced on a heavy, coated paper stock at a generous scale, the numerous maps, aerial photographs and panoramic views receive the space appropriate to their large-format presentations, a condition regrettably uncommon in today's publications. In fact, it is the visual matter which most successfully effects the "sweeping overview" (jacket text) the book promises: to flip through this beautifully produced book is to see in flashes the beauty, the grandeur and the incongruous variety of the American landscape.
Given its ambitious title and topical range, and its impressive visual qualities, the absence of theoretical or conceptual framework and limited reliance on historical methods are disappointing, even frustrating. The book lacks a clear direction or argument, its stated purpose to simply "share" examples that appeal to the author, and to "provoke a few ideas in the reader's mind" (p.9). Without a specific goal, the text drifts vaguely, without, the author tells us, a beginning or end (p.9). The aimlessness of the presentation is confirmed by the lack of a concluding or summary chapter, bibliography and index, those pieces of scholarly apparatus that signal a coherent scholarly enterprise.
A first and central problem concerns the author's selection of designs and events to chronicle the American landscape. Zapatka has chosen for critique a predictable list of canonical landscapes and designers, including Central Park and other Olmsted park and parkway plans, Chicago's Burnham Plan, Biltmore, the great national parks, and Robert Moses's parks and parkways. While this distinguished roster is not particularly imaginative, and skews an overview of the American landscape rather heavily toward the New York of Frederick Law Olmsted and Robert Moses. The replay of a traditional subject matter could conceivably be a purposeful strategy to employ familiar material as a base upon which to present new historical information or insights, propose innovative comparative analyses or construct theoretical interpretations. However, because this book breaks no new ground in the areas of history or theory, the re-presentation of material already collected in published surveys such as Norman T. Newton's Design on the Land (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971) and American Landscape Architecture: Designers and Places (Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1989) and found in more selective studies like Walter Creese's Crowning the American Landscape (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) seems redundant.
In a book that offers a set of apparently unrelated essays, and Zapatka has indicated that they are discreet entities, one can often seek shelter within the subject and logic of a chapter. But here, the casualness that hobbles the project as a whole also registers in the construction of individual chapters, with unhappy results. Only the vaguest of formal or temporal relationships hold the chapters together internally, and although Pierluigi Nicolin asserts in a preface that the author skillfully threads incidents of landscape history "like beads on a necklace," the thread is hard to find. The jewels of course are easily identified. Whether by virtue of their natural or designed beauty, or by their popularity among the American public, the landscapes featured in this collection are unarguably significant in aesthetic, managerial and cultural terms. But Zapatka never links these episodes chronologically or conceptually, choosing rather to stack them, like so many entries in a Michelin Guide. Nor does he explicate their significance independently, as the text is simply too brief to treat the number of examples the book sets forward: even the most succinct prose cannot reasonably cover the establishment of the national parks, their meanings and usage, and note the highlights of Yellowstone, Yosemite, Glacier National Park, the Grand Canyon and Mount Rainier in two pages. In addition, far too much of the text is given over to historical narrative, formal description and lengthy quotes from historic guidebooks or plans.
Nested within a carefully constructed thematic or typological argument, a series of descriptive, formally-focused entries might function as a narrative counterpoint to the theoretical proposition. While these overarching constructs are absent, Zapatka does attempt to set out the major focus of each chapter. Yet even these are not well formed, and the specific design examples at times seem wrongly placed. For example, the first chapter "The Sublime in the Wilderness" does not address the specifically American adaptation of Burke and Kant's concepts of the sublime, a phenomenon meticulously detailed by David Nye in American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994, pp.1-43). Instead, Zapatka splices a lengthy description of Cole's paintings to two paragraphs on Olmsted and Downing (whose landscapes, he notes, do not evoke the sublime) and a brief description of the nineteenth-century tourist at Niagara Falls, without clearly relating painting to designed and natural landscapes. Zapatka further weakens his presentation of the sublime by shrinking the massive landscape paintings of Thomas Cole and Frederick Church (Church's Niagara Falls measures nearly 4 by 7 feet) to postage-stamp-sized images, thereby neutralizing any awe the works might evoke.
The next chapter, which treats "pastoral reserves," large open spaces within the urban fabric of nineteenth-century cities, identifies Olmsted's romantic urban parks, the park systems of the City Beautiful-City Practical era, and the Macmillan Plan's reclamation of the Washington Mall as part of the same formal and conceptual fabric, signaling either a casualness of thought or a fundamental misunderstanding of the ideologies and circumstances that shaped these projects. Certainly there are similarities: all of these spaces are sited within metropolitan areas, and engage their urban context in some fashion. They are not "leftover spaces," but land reserved and designed to accommodate specific functions. But these spaces each embody different approaches and attitudes, even different formal strategies. Zapatka might have used these oft-cited landscape events to demonstrate the varieties of intentions that have given rise to spaces that coexist in today's American city: the notion of natural oasis as antidote to the city; the inflection of system and holistic metropolitan planning on turn-of-the-century park system proposals; and the simultaneous reservation of ceremonial, architectonic open spaces within cities, modeled on the Columbian Exposition's Court of Honor. But the ideologies, cultural factors, and design ideas that take physical form in plans and built landscapes are not considered, and the "stack" of descriptive narratives that are provided are confusing due to their inconsistent coverage of plan and implementation.
There are problems and disjunctures within other chapters, some of which are small points, and others that reveal more serious lacunae. Even if one is not inclined to demonize Robert Moses for his massive refiguration of New York's urban landscape, it seems naive to valorize him as a hero of the people: the entire chapter on New Deal landscapes suffers from Zapatka's practice of removing landscape projects, however large-scale, from their physical, social and political contexts. As the book concludes with an insufficiently-explained emphasis on Dan Kiley and Mary Miss, one longs again for a contextual discussion, this time focused on design ideologies and strategies that are having a profound impact on the public and private spaces of our cities: New Urbanism, and the theme-ing and privatizing of urban space that have shaped sites like South Street Seaport and the work-in-progress of Times Square.
A look to the sources Zapatka consults suggests one reason for the weakness of the textual presentation. Footnotes indicate use of certain primary sources, but reveal a heavy reliance on period guide books and designers' plans and reports, which speak of intent but are silent about reception and actual usage. Notably absent are citations of recent scholarship: Elizabeth Blackmar and Roy Rozensweig's work on Central Park (The Park and the People. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992); the multiple works of landscape scholars Charles Beveridge and David Schuyler; the broad-ranging and valuable scholarship on the phenomenon of city planning by William H. Wilson (The City Beautiful Movement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) and Stanley K. Schultz (Constructing Urban Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); the bounty of work done in recent years on Robert Moses and New Deal projects, including Phoebe Cutler's The Public Landscape of the New Deal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and the work of a range of scholars, including Marc Treib, Sharon Zukin and Michael Sorkin on the contemporary landscape. Even a brief text for the lay reader could benefit from these focused studies and interdisciplinary surveys.
Zapatka's strategy of "stacking" frustrates not just the chapters' internal coherence, but the text as a whole, which is all the more frustrating given the richness and range of pieces that he so lavishly spreads before us. When relationships are drawn, it is frequently due to the most superficially formal details, such as images of two circular designs, a century apart, placed side by side (p.9), or the assertion that the urban parkways of the 1930s, such as the Henry Hudson Parkway, are "refined" versions of earlier cross-country highways. The fleeting observation that the contemporary landscape architects featured continue the nineteenth-century ambition of identifying and enhancing the sublime seeks to link the book's final chapter with the first essay on Cole and Church, yet this statement is not fleshed out in the text, nor is it supported by the accompanying images or project descriptions. Relationships should not be forced for the sake of a neat topical package, a century of landscape design vignettes inform each other by their coexistence within our national design and popular culture. Even the most sublime of wilderness sites may be discussed profitably in conjunction with a technologized landscape, as demonstrated by David Nye's previously-mentioned American Technological Sublime.
If there is any consistent theme or method in evidence, it is the way Zapatka understands his subject matter as self-referential pieces of the city, rather than as complex, urbanistic or cultural designs. Primary to his view is that of the designer or visionary client, not a surprising focus for an architect-turned-historian. The book thus operates as a kind of biographical anthology, offering descriptive entries of the work of the most celebrated landscapists of the nation's cultural pantheon: Cole, Church and the Hudson River School; Frederick Law Olmsted, his sons and their successor firm; Daniel Burnham; Robert Moses, Dan Kiley and Mary Miss. This approach is particularly disturbing in the last chapters on New Deal and contemporary projects, which could enlighten the lay reader, the inhabitant of these urban sites, by providing historical perspective and consideration of landscape's cultural and political dimensions.
Given the distinguished pedigree of the author and of the development of this book, one anticipates a text that balances history and theory without the encumbrance of detail that accompanies focused study, a book that offers a survey whose selected facts are packaged with such intellectual agility as to illuminate both differences in the episodes of American landscape design, as well as the connective tissue that is presumably there (else why the book in the first place?). But this text claims neither historical nor theoretical advances, inexplicably casting a blind eye to a set of landscapes that are so individually rich and collectively provocative.
It may not be entirely fair to criticize this project for something it does not aspire to. Zapatka is clear that the design intentions, the aesthetics of these projects, are what interest him, hence his perfunctory mention of the "debatable economic and sociological ramifications" of major urban interventions directed by Olmsted, Roosevelt or Moses (p.8). Still, without either theoretical frame or the traditional apparatus of historical scholarship, this text appears to fall, by process of elimination, into the category of coffee table book, one whose breadth of subject matter may excite the browser, in a moment of sublime experience, to make those connections that Zapatka has not.