We asked Robin Winogrond to share which publications she has been reading lately and finds particularly relevant for landscape architects today. Here is her selection:

Are We Human?

Notes on an Archaeology of Design

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley

Under such premises as “to talk about design is to talk about the state of our species” and “we live in a time when everything is designed,” Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley invite us to reconsider the foundations of design itself. They step back from our habitual registers of perception and questions to elucidate the genealogy and intimate relationship between humans and the world of “modern design” and “good taste” we consider a necessity. Avoiding any sense of arrogance, they pose questions so simple and basic that we might have carried them around ourselves for years yet never considered asking them. And yet the connections made between human life and design are profound, breathtaking (unsettling?), and humorous—revealing the deeper layers of our daily life and the “why,” and the “what if …,” but explicitly, as well, the “What if NOT.”

Among the book’s wealth of provocations and syntheses are reflections such as Walter Benjamin’s Poverty of Experience, “Good Design” Is an Anesthetic, Design in 2 Seconds, and The Frictionless Silhouette. The book helps to give us agency for critical reflection about the designs surrounding us, using curiosity and richness of experience rather than slickness as a measure of a world that can stimulate our senses.

Colomina, Beatriz, and Mark Wigley. Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016.

The Emotional Power of Space

Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine

“Like sound, space embraces us, immerses us… It guides and directs our paths, defines our movements… But how does space affect what we feel?”

The authors, originally from the discipline of film, delve into space as a multi-sensorial experience. In poetic and personal detail, twelve architects reflect upon the immaterial questions of how we experience and relate to space. The reader slips into a wide array of anecdotes, personal perceptions, and analyses of the slippery, intuitive, and irrational nature of emotional space and emotional memory, which form a basis for architectural thought and for designing spaces of all kinds.

Among the many interviews, in The World Beyond What You Perceive, Junya Ishigami says, “More than about space, my strongest memories are related to a landscape or scenery.” Anne Holtrop’s interview, titled The Attractive Essence of the Unknown, speaks of the balance between knowing and not knowing, the unknown becoming a driving force behind his design process, one that triggers imagination. Tatiana Bilbao learned how space needs to hold the body from the spirituality of monks while working on a monastery and feels Barragán was able to build his extraordinary spaces because he was a spiritual man. Bijoy Jain writes, in The Space of Intuitive Thought, “Our relationship with the sky… With the advent of electricity, we experienced a caesura with the sky… being protected under a blanket of stars. For me this is architecture.”

Bêka, Ila, and Louise Lemoine. The Emotional Power of Space. Bêka & Partners, 2023.

Being and Circumstance

Notes Toward a Conditional Art
Robert Irwin

Last year, we lost Robert Irwin, one of the most influential artists of the last century. He taught generations how to use a phenomenological approach to reading site. In short, he brought an awareness of the value of creating public art as site-specific and “site conditioned / determined” to a new level, one in which the perceiver has a specific and individual experience of place and phenomena. Over decades, he studied how to create works based on the phenomena of a specific outdoor environment, which in turn offered a strong, new impulse in the discourse of landscape architecture.

In the 1960s, Irwin belonged to the Los Angeles-based group of artists known as the Light and Space artists, along with James Turrell, Dan Graham, and Larry Bell, among others. They posed questions such as what kind of art could be non-object-based and what this art would then be made of. His early explorations questioned perceptions and the lack thereof—unseen phenomena in front of our eyes, such as the pillar in the center of a gallery space. He spent a year alone on an island studying his own perceptions as a basis for his artworks.

He begins his timeless, if not pivotal, book Being and Circumstance with the statement that change makes perception possible. He asks us to drop the dichotomy between the perceiver and the thing perceived, extending the boundaries of object-based art to nonobjective or phenomenal art, which “requires our immediate presence and puts individual experience at the root of our understanding.” He concludes that phenomenal art is really about seeing and not-seeing.

As difficult as it might be to access the text in its philosophical and phenomenological use of language, it sets the basis for delving into a series of projects, which he uses as testing grounds for understanding how to create installations that solely address the specific place itself. His brilliant and innovative project at Wellesley College remains one of my favorite artworks of all time.

Irwin, Robert. Being and Circumstance: Notes Toward a Conditional Art. Santa Monica, CA: Lapis Press, 1985.