1、Not So SimpleThe New Classical LandscapeMinimalist Gardens, by Peter Walker, Spacemaker Press, Washington, D.C. and Cambridge, MA, 1997, distributed by Watson-Guptil Publications and Hearst Books International, pp. 207, $35.By Carter B. HorsleyPeter Walker is one of the great design poets of the 20t
2、h Century as the more than 280 color illustrations and photographs in this large and handsome paperback testify. More than 30 of Walkers projects are presented in considerable detail.Both his own essay and an accompanying essay and project notes by Leah Levy illuminate much of the artistic, philosop
3、hic and intellectual foundations of his designs, but the illustrations really need little exposition. Walkers projects are brilliant integrations of the natural and man-made environments that are distinctly modern and abstract, at times mysterious and sometimes awesome. Minimalist is an inappropriat
4、e adjective to describe this work for it is far too rich in beauty and power to be less than grand.But one must respect the artists own interpretation and here Walker is wonderfully incisive, not only about his own oeuvre, but about much of modern architecture and, in particular, the Minimalist era/
5、school.While none of the projects are in New York, almost all offer exciting clues to the thrilling potential cityscapes that can and should be wrought.Any intelligent mayor should appoint Walker as the citys Master Designer, with powers over all development and planning. Walker, of course, is not t
6、he only great environmental designer. Others are Martha Schwartz and Michael Heizer.In her essay on Walkers work, Levy finds traces of the Nazca Lines in Peru and Stonehenge in England in some of his work an awareness of and quest for connection with earthly and celestial mysteries: There are many i
7、nstances when the work focuses on the enigmatic qualities of nature represented by the sound of water, the stasis and weight of stone, rustling changes by the wind, blocks and patterns of shifting color, shimmering and magical mists, and elusive light.She also finds that the classical order of seven
8、teenth century French gardens, especially those of Andre Le Notre, serves as strong precedent to individual elements of Walkers approach, adding that His intuitive as well as intellectual affinity with patterns, rhythms , and order, and a to a kind of Cartesian synthesis, is apparent throughout his
9、work.Not surprisingly, also she finds the influence of Zen gardens: An underlying philosophical distillation of the complex to achieve the simple is evidence in both distinct components and the unifying wholeness of many of his gardensThe work of garden makers of the mid-twentieth century, especiall
10、y Thomas Church and Isamu Noguchi, was particularly inspiring to Walker in his formative years.Her brief but pithy essay tries to place Walker in his proper and self-proclaimed minimalist niche: Since its most crucial years in the 1960s, minimalism, arguably the first truly American art, has become
11、a loosely used catchall term absorbed into the culture to refer to styles that are non-figurative, non-referential, geometric, or merely of few and simple parts. But the term minimal art was coined to refer to and identify a very specific point in time, approximately 1963-1968, and a small collectio
12、n of individual artists working primarily in New York City Levy proceeds to relate some of Walkers work to that of such artists as Gordon Matta-Clark, Christo, Richard Serra, Walter de Maria and Robert Smithson, Maya Lin, Siah Armanjani and others. Walkers own essay is much more rewarding for its pr
13、ovocative insights into Modern architecture and the Minimalist temperament. As a late second-generation modernist trained in the 1950s. I was denied, along with a generation of my peers in the design disciplines, an integrated view of architectural history because our professors, including Gropius a
14、nd Giedion and their followers, did not present the full historic information that they themselves had been given by their teachers, and thus did not grant us the opportunity to make our own ideological choices. I have, therefore, not had the historic perspective that the educated professional of a
15、hundred years ago might reasonably expect.Until recently little debate or theoretical refinement had occurred in modernism, leaving the legitimate ideas of modernism unseparated from those that perhaps should have been discarded. Most criticism related to modernism has come in the form of denunciati
16、on from postmodernists. Abstraction had removed most of the expressive content and narrative from modernists design, and references to nature were generally missing from internationalist thinking. Social, democratic, or economic purpose had largely replaced metaphor, though how a dialogue with the users would be achieved was not clear. Without this dialogue, or even an agreed-upon language, what democratic design might m
