View Slideshow
A new book, An Art of Instrumentality: The Landscape Architecture of Richard Weller, collects four decades of research and design by Richard Weller, professor emeritus of landscape architecture and co-founder of The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism & Ecology. In an excerpt from the book’s foreword, Jillian Walliss, an associate professor of landscape architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, describes Weller’s expansive vision for the profession and far-reaching influence.
A reception for an exhibition, ODDS AND ENDS: The Landscape Architecture of Richard Weller, is scheduled for Thursday, April 25, 6:00 — 8:00 pm.
Australians have a strong sense of the periphery and the center. Occupying the center does not come naturally to antipodeans and risks the dampening of original insights gained from being on the fertile edge. Richard’s influential iconoclastic views of landscape architecture in the 1990s and 2000s constructed variously from Sydney, Berlin, and from Perth — the most isolated capital city in the world — reflect these advantages.
In many ways design competitions, rather than formal design education, have shaped Richard’s career and craft. The competition format has honed Richard’s practice offering concise provocations to explore via theoretical and creative speculation. Through the strict limitations of the competition Richard has developed his signature approach – a manifesto-like proposition communicated through a compelling graphic and narrative. Competition briefs provided him with an opportunity to directly engage with the impossibilities of absence in post-war Berlin (explored over a four-year period); the events of 9/11 (which many claim as the end of postmodernism); the experiential potentials of Sydney’s post-industrial harbor sites; the enormity of loss inflicted by tsunami; and the culture wars of Australia.
In the 2000s, Richard reoriented his focus toward the slippery challenges of an Australian urbanism. He identifies as part of the early 21st-century push toward conceiving a landscape driven urbanism (although aligned with the North American landscape fraternity rather than the AA parametric flavor). Working within the research context of Australia, where money is tight, and emphasis applied, Richard spent eight years interrogating Australian urbanism across the scales of the suburb, the city, and the megaregion.
The climate crisis has reinvigorated landscape architecture internationally. It has, though, been accompanied by two problematic tendencies: first, for the profession to spend considerable energy describing the crisis (as if it has gone unnoticed); and second, the declaration of landscape architecture’s unique position to address these issues. Critical of landscape architecture climatic dogma, Richard entered the era of the Anthropocene through his preferred mode of the project. His intentions were not to find a solution but to work with design speculation to test landscape methods at the scale of the global and planetary. As he comments, while every discipline is concerned with climate change, “design is the one thing the landscape architect can bring to the table that others cannot.” His first project the Atlas for the End of the World, used mapping, supported by statistics, to highlight the conflict between global urban development and biodiversity. The scale then shifts to ground the project in the cultural, ecological, and political specifics of the world’s “biodiversity hotspot” cities where the surrounding unique biodiversity is critically threatened by urbanization. The World Park project builds on the Atlas.
Image by Gordon Stillman
By his own admission, landscape architecture frustrates Richard. A creative and intellectual indifference permeates the discipline – whether an uncritical acceptance of genius loci (the site) as the source of all ideas to the moral righteousness currently shaping the response to the climate crisis. In a particularly bruising observation, he comments that “by shifting the problems of culture onto the innocence of nature, works of landscape architecture effectively inoculate themselves from the sort of critique that would apply to any other aesthetic practice.” Richard could have left landscape architecture and had success in any number of creative fields. But he elected to stay within. Through projects, exhibitions, writing, and lectures, alongside running landscape architecture programs, research centers, journals, and competitions, Richard has challenged landscape architecture to deepen its engagement as a design discipline.
Over 40 years he has amassed an extraordinary body of work – some built, many remaining speculative, some acclaimed, others challenged. The idea of the project — which he considers the fundamental way to make sense and engage with the world — drives this productivity. However, not the project as defined by a site or a brief, but a project as a focus to explore ideas about something – national identity, trauma, loss, the suburb, the Anthropocene to name just a few. It is a record of work that challenges the discipline to be braver and smarter, to be experimental and creative, and at times to fail. This is what it means to work between art and instrumentality.