Everyday Brush Strokes
As a glimmering exodus of people emerge from their homes the evidence of a thawing winter abounds. Like memorial monuments arranged in homage to an historical event, the remains of snowmen dot the Oval Lawn at Central Park - reconvening themselves to a place within the hydrological cycle of the living landscape.
While standing proud and defying even the most casual observer, the landscape architect's eye is particularly obsessed with such banal details of everyday life. Decay, death, and their inherent acknowledgement of the passing of time all manifest an environmental patina of change that measures our engagement with the built and natural environment. Embracing, enhancing, and simply revealing these changes remains our biggest challenge and our greatest achievement.
Central Park is, perhaps, one of these more fundamental and momentous achievements - a place before and of it's time. The gloriously colourful passing of seasonal time is manifest in the manmade arrangement of such subtle but impressive events - a carefully crafted choreography of elements that respond to the worlds cyclical processes. Independently they may be taken for granted. As a bold expression of character, form, and perhaps even personality, however, these elements possess the ability to command an attention that may otherwise be superseded.
This art, that lives as part of our daily lives, brings a softer and quieter resistance to the more brazen and ostentatious realities that abound. As architects create shapes to appropriate voids and musicians create sounds to capture silence, I posit landscape architect's have the earthly ability to understand the basic human requirements of inhabitation amongst our tumultuous present realities of urban life.
The formulation, manipulation and arrangement of objects and space itself create places that serve as testimonials and careful reminders of our closest ally - the natural world. While our experience of light exists in the patient and brooding presence of darkness, our connection to place and our sense of belonging is experienced in the passing of time. Finding beauty not in the arrangement or physical presence of things themselves, but in the patterns they create, the shadows they cast, and the passing of time that they document, provides a more lasting impression. One can only hope that we take the time to notice, and to dwell.
