Think like a Historian, Imagine like a Designer:

good afternoon everyone thank you for joining us i am anita berluspectia professor and chair of the department of landscape architecture and i'm happy to welcome all of you to what promises to be an interesting and provocative discussion today before we begin just a quick reminder that our panelists will respond to questions during the final half hour of this event feel free to submit questions into the queue at any time by using the q a button at the bottom of your zoom window we also have live captioning available for this event they can be enabled by clicking the closed caption button at the bottom of your screen finally i want to invite you to join us for some upcoming gst pro public programs on tuesday march 9th at 7 30 pm women in design will host their international women's week keynote address featuring ananya rohi founding director of the ucla luskin institute on inequality and democracy and on thursday march 11 at 7 30 pm catherine steven nortenson will explore the work of sanitary engineer george e waring new junior reassessing his projects in light of contemporary public health and equity issues please visit our website for more information on these and other events today we gather three leading historians in landscape architecture to discuss the role of history in design education why this and why now the question is more interesting that might appear at first for each of these disciplines history and design are independent fields of knowledge but that become inseparable in the context of a design school such as the gsd and specifically to the department of landscape architecture where we require four semesters of history theory in the core curriculum history is a practice itself autonomous with its own frameworks and evolution especially in landscape which has seen such change in the past several decades likewise in landscape architecture has gained not only wider relevance but has also moved towards greater autonomy from its close other half architecture at the same time landscape architecture concerned as it is with imagining and anticipating the future is inextricably linked to the past to history landscape thinking inevitably involves a retrospective look to a site and a territory's evolution over long periods of time and knowledge of precedence is fundamental to the advancement of design whether one seeks to transform adapt or reject past practices we can even say that design accumulates knowledge of many kinds which are embedded in its materials its spaces technologies and the social relations it reproduces through the forms of labor required in the making of landscapes our three guests are historians who have chosen to teach in design schools and they are doing so at a moment that demands drastic and widespread change across all branches of knowledge and design practices today's challenges require imagination and innovation a capacity to anticipate the future so the question of the role of history in a design school is even more relevant now what do historical thinking and design thinking have in common what is the role of history in shaping the design imagination and alternatively how does design shape historical thinking and how do both respond to the current moment of deep reflection and reckoning it is with these questions in mind that i am very pleased to introduce our guests today leading the conversation is tyisa wei professor of landscape architecture at the university of washington but currently the resident program director of garden and landscape studies at dumbarton oaks of harvard university professor way is an urban landscape historian who has published extensively on feminist histories of landscape architecture and public spaces and cities at dumbarton knox she is responsible for leading the programming for garden and landscape studies including the residential fellowships scholarly visitors and events her recent publication river cities city rivers documented the ideas that came out of a two-day symposium on river cities historical and contemporary held at dumbarton oaks rafaela fabiani lecturer in landscape architecture at the gst is a garden historian and critic her research rests on three principle lines of inquiry oasis historiography and reception with a focus on early modern gardens and landscapes on both sides of the atlantic most recently rafaela is the author of the culture of cultivation recovering the roots of landscape architecture published by routledge the book proposes a 21st century shift in thinking about landscape architecture that is no longer driven by binary oppositions such as urban and rural and aesthetics and ecology this semester she's teaching in the histories of landscape architecture 2 topical questions in our department and last but not least is professor ed ayan senior lecturer in the history of landscape architecture at the gsd it is a historian of 19th century landscapes in the european and anglo-american contexts his research and teaching focuses on relationships in and between humanistic and scholarly traditions and the natural sciences and allied practices of knowledge production its recent publication on accident episodes in architecture and landscape published by mit press is a series of engaging essays that roam across uncertain territory in search of sunken forests unclassifiable islands inflammable skies and other phenomena that are missing from the usual architectural history this semester he's teaching a seminar titled natural histories for troubled times or revisiting the entangled bank thank you taissa rafael and ed for being here and i turned the screen to you taissa thank you so so first i just want to say thank you to you anita and to the department and to the gsd for welcoming this conversation i think it's a really important and um i would argue history culturally is a important topic to discuss so i'm delighted to be here in conversation with my history colleagues to consider how we are teaching and thinking of history and design in landscape and more broadly in the world it is a critical moment to pause and to consider the narratives we tell and the designs we steward recently stacey abrams here obviously at an aia conference noted to the architects quote you have an obligation to understand that your command of your industry is so profound it literally shapes the world we live in the way you create community is also the way you can shape the future of our nation abrams encourage the architects to go beyond the surface of health safety and well-being and build a better world demanding designers take action by committing to speak up show up and stand up i am a landscape urban landscape historian teaching in design schools because i believe design requires the tools of the historian and equally important designers are well positioned to contribute to a richer more spatially nuanced historic narratives when these two bodies of knowledge as anita noted history and design are brought to places of struggle they offer immense potential to support us if we are to show up speak up and stand up to design a landscape is to assume a weighty responsibility one thick with aspirations intentions needs and consequences this has never been more evident as we face the immense challenges of climate change and environmental degradation social economic and political inequities and injustices that pervade our built environments everywhere furthermore in the wake of the dakota access pipeline protests on the standing rock sioux reservation the new york times 1619 project and the lynchings of briana taylor and george floyd and all those before and since we know that such violence occurs in place and place is what we design to grapple with this call to action designers must be prepared to fully engage in the discourse practice and policy making and imagination necessary and the decolonization that is central to catalyze real and enduring change to show up speak up and stand up this work demands that we know not only history's writ large but how to engage in history as a method of inquiry that should be central to design let's quickly dispense with what thinking like a historian is not it is not about memorizing dates people places or styles the historian's craft offers the opportunity to willfully reckon with pass in the 21st century i.e now this work foregrounds the importance of what dayo f gord describes as power relations as lived experience in place and the need for attentiveness to the mutually constitutive production of identity and identities and of multiple systems involved in categories of difference the historian mark block wrote that whenever our exacting western society and the continuing crisis of growth begins to doubt itself it asks itself whether it has done well in trying to learn from the past and whether it has learned rightly end of quote architecture and landscape architecture area at such a juncture as we ask whether we have learned rightly from the past we know we have not our professions have supported the very systems that we protest today the very foundations of the white patriarchal supremacy that must be deconstructed to reconstruct a more just equitable and beautiful future we are called upon to understand what part we have played in building and sustaining these systems as block emphasized that to act reasonably it is first necessary to understand and this capacity to understand draws from the historian's craft to see what is behind the record to fathom what is never recorded in so many words and to design is to imagine how we might do differently narrative is an essential tool of both of these crafts narratives reinforce or elucidate a given belief or truth narratives pervade scientific discovery finance education media and all areas of our lives because they frame the boundaries and possibilities of debate and gatekeep access conversely a counter-narrative which all of these books are dispute commonly held assumptions about the nature of reality place positionality and the political moment counter narratives are a means to more fully understand the world the built environment counter narratives reinscribe historical accounts with voices and ideas that have been previously silenced this is at the heart of the feminist approach to history that i apply to challenge gender narratives of landscape architecture that only white men have made the profession offering a counter narrative of how those at the margins actively shape the core in as of yet unacknowledged ways this counter narrative is grounded in the fact that there are hundreds of women who practice landscape design alongside the olmsteds think annette mcrae alongside warren manning think marjorie sewell caughtly alongside tommy church think may arbigast and even alongside kylie and mccarg think geraldine knight scott and barbara fili as just examples a feminist approach is one form of decolonization as a re-thinking of what it means to design recognizing a broad diversity of culturally important forms of making place if for example we dispense with the origin search and instead consider the role of gardens and landscape in the making of place we identify a great variety of approaches to practice gardens as a model offer a lens to more fully interrogate the history of landscape architecture because they are important practices across most any culture they are also an essential contribution to the development of landscape architecture as a practice and then as a profession and yet gardens have been written out of design history as landscape architects have sought in the past to align the practice with the powerful white male professions of engineering and architecture i read the garden specifically in north america as a place of subversive agency as women black brown and white turn to what was deemed as inconse inconsequential space into a place of radical engagement pushing the boundaries of gender and race while simultaneously responding to the constraints of a racist and sexist society women experienced the garden as an intellectual and material place where they stewarded dignity beauty and strength as bell hooks writes quote to tend the earth is always then to tend our destiny our freedom and our hope end of quote in such gardens women have nurtured their creative spirit through the act of designing and making a garden nourishing the soul diane glaves rooted in the earth reclaiming the african-american environmental heritage narrates how the act of transforming yards served as a means for enslaved women to claim authority over her place as well as setting such places apart from those of the violent slaveholders they quote created distinctly african-american spaces that simultaneously mimic nature and rejected urban euro-american control the garden as a place of radical gardening is beautifully evidenced in the work of harlem renaissance poet gardener designer librarian and activist anne bethel spencer 1882-1975 in lynchburg virginia spencer's home and garden served as what bell hooks calls the home place as well as a gathering place for friends many of them the harlem literature including langston hughes w.e.b du bois zora neal hurston mary mcleod bethune and gwendolyn brooks as well as james weldon johnson who published her first poem in the crisis spencer was an activist contributing to the founding of the lynchburg chapter of the national association for the advancement of colored people she resisted virginia's jim crow laws by cultivating her life as an artist gardener garden designer and activist within her home place a closer reading of spencer's garden design and art might elucidate what it meant to be a black woman artist making a garden and it is important here to note the contributions of scholars such as barbara smith and elizabeth spellman who caution us not to conflate identities as if underneath every black or latino woman is a white woman we might also look to suzanne waldenberger's research on hispanic women in the southwest frontier and her focus on how they used urban gardens as an opportunity to quote create their own space within which they could cultivate and nurture traditions relations knowledge and status parallel to but not in direct competition with the conventional male power structure here i would propose drawing from the khambahi river collective work to consider what kimberly crenshaw named as the intersectionality of black feminism as a framework for landscape historians curation of counter narratives and equally applicable to design thinking in building counter narratives we question the emergence of landscape architecture not as inevitable but as a profession always socially constructed in the past through gendered and racialized views of who should take shape place and what it means to be a professional history is an intersectional dialogue or better put a rigorous history engages intersectionality as a foundational method an understanding that humans are complex and our relationships exist within moving constellations of being thinking like a historian requires what evelyn b higginbotham has described as understanding the meta language of race a language that in her words quote mask real differences of class status and color regional culture and a host of other configurations of difference such thinking opens the door to questions that surface the role of women in the profession or of indigenous practices to forest management or about the negro garden clubs and the significance of garden design to democracy or the complex histories of zimbabwe or machu picchu and the legacies of cultures who have shaped their landscapes with intention and purpose today the historians craft and therefore i would argue the designers craft offers the potential to draw from the alternative histories as practiced by scholars such as jessica marie johnson of wicked flesh or sadia hartman's wayward lives history offers one means to embark on a rigorous unraveling of the inherent complexities of places and their becoming this requires that we see and read beyond the tabula raza the erase site the so-called open space it opens the door to interrogate socio-ecological entanglements to make room for the emergence of reimagined experiences and relationships with place and be by decolonizing history and design we might recognize diverse forms of making place and defining space when multiple threads of such practices are layered one with it with and within the other which is something designers are so apt at doing alternative narratives can emerge that make visible the complexities and strangeness of our historic engagements with blandin place this work is evident in the writing of landscape scholars including del upton brandy summers victoria wolcott andrea roberts and rebecca gensberg among so many others who have curated alternative social political and cultural histories of land and place the essays in the recent fantastic book if you haven't read it race and modern architecture edited by chang davis and wilson reveals how modernism was not merely a historical process but deeply shaped by the rhetoric of white supremacists however for us a critical contribution as well is the role of land place and landscape in so many of the essays for it is on and in land that humans make place and enact their relationships to nature and to each other every site holds memories both remembered and forgotten both acknowledged and erased every site is thick with history thus an argument the site analysis is yet a historical tool of research when a piece of land is known to have been stolen from indigenous communities the designer must consider whether that demands interpretation recognition reparation when one acknowledges that a lynching took place exactly where a confederate statue now stands one can no longer simply imagine there is nothing special about that place that site in the 21st century we can no longer design landscapes while privileging only the dominant narratives and instead must struggle to bring visibility and presence to the multiple diverse and conflicting stories inherent to all places how can we not given the socio-ecological injustices we face finally i would propose that if landscape architecture community is to genuinely expand to draw in those from diverse and different backgrounds it cannot merely quote add more and stir we must own the challenge of change radically changing who we are and what and how we do what we do thinking like a historian drawing on the tools of the historian's craft offers the potential for a richer understanding of how we got here and drawing from the designer's craft we might know what the options are for moving forward by pursuing a more rigorous reckoning of history we might curate a more responsible more responsive and more imaginative practice of design thus stewarding a more just equitable healthy and beautiful future thank you good afternoon everyone i am excited to have been invited to join this conversation about history and design and i want to thank anita for conceiving and hosting the event and also those who work behind the scenes for making it possible i want to begin by reflecting on the provocation the title of this colloquium offers think like a historian and imagine like a designer i'd like to turn this prompt around and say that in my experience it is also possible to think like a designer and imagine like a historian what do i mean by this i mean that the capacity to imagine is not exclusive to any particular field and as daesa mentioned earlier the historian's craft and the designers is one of curiosity and inquiry in fact it is creativity itself if properly nurtured that allows us to make a difference in the world because creativity is freedom of thought it is the humility to learn without prejudice to pursue unfroden paths to listen to multiple perspectives and in the end make important contributions however big or small to our communities our fields of studies and the world at large incidentally my colleagues taieses and ed's work show that writing creatively may mean exploring heretofore untold stories such as those of unsung female practitioners or taking the risk of figuratively scattering seeds or fragments of stories which by themselves may not collapse into one continuous narrative narrative to see where they might land and in so doing allowing the readers to tap into deeper levels of historical consciousness and understanding in my own work i have chosen to take a different kind of creative chance by revisiting the so-called canon and interrogating the validity of certain assumptions about theory and design i had inherited as a student of architecture and landscape architecture it all started with a question i could not not explore because having piled up a number of design degrees uh on my path to becoming a historian i was and still am interested in the process that allow designers to transform their abstract ideas into material forms and habitable places specifically in the tools that allow such transformations from mind to matter to happen i decided to focus on early modern italy florence in particular because in the literature on italian gardens the 15th century gardens of the medici villas that dot the countryside around florence have been described as the prototypes of the italian garden which is commonly understood as a garden characterized by symmetrical layouts sometimes spread on multiple terraces supported by stone retaining walls the hole unified by evergreen vegetation and axial paths with integrated waterworks and statuary but the very idea of the prototype suggested to me the existence of a sophisticated design process which i expected would be articulated in the writings of the period perhaps treatises on garden design and other primary visual and written sources led left by the designers however as i began digging the past that is the available records at the medici archives in florence i found no evidence at all of the existence of a design practice in the 15th century what i found instead was a much more interesting vernacular language of garden making that seemed seemed indebted to agricultural practices and oral knowledge about plant cultivation that was handed down from one generation to the other in the form of a slowly evolving tradition this vernacular form of garden making happen directly on site and layouts were traced directly on the ground which told me that florentine garden makers did not conceptualize form as something separate from matter that is something that may be studied at a drawing table or computer screen we would say today form was an integral part of matter be it plants soil or stone only later in the 16th century design practice emerged as a result of social and political changes in the fabric of republican florence and as a consequence of the ascent to power of the medici it is only then that their landscapes were made to perform a representative function that was foreign to their earlier gardens and at a professional figure with an expertise in the arte del diesenio or such fine arts as architectural sculpture and painting that would assume greater responsibility for the laying out of the grounds the first testimony is about the existence of such tools as drawings and models for the study of garden layouts date to this period in fact during the course of the 16th century and throughout the 17th several texts on agriculture and gardens in particular appeared in which it is possible to perceive an evolution in landscape literature from a recording of of modes and practical rules pertaining to garden to garden making to the birth of a body of a body of theoretical literature oriented toward garden design this finding allowed me not only to articulate the significance of the circumstances in which a particular design process came into existence but it also allowed me to cast out on the notion of the italian garden as a timeless type an issue on which i continue to work after the publication of medici gardens and that sparked my interest in historiography that is the making of historical narratives in other words i began to wonder how the italian garden sausage had been made i became particularly curious about a form of history writing that can be described as teleological in that it reflects an agenda that may be cultural or political so i went down the rabbit hole of compiling all the sources used in the secondary literature on the italian garden to try to understand why the timelessness attributed to the type and its apparent ubiquity on the italian peninsula were deemed so important to my predecessors this exercise revealed that one of the most quoted sources in the historiography dating to the first half of the 20th century is a little-known tiny catalogue that was printed in florence on occasion of the first and last exhibition of the italian garden held at palazzo vecchio in 1931. on that occasion the fascists who had already infiltrated the intellectual circles of the country used the idea of a timeless giardino italiana for political propaganda by launching a competition for four modern italian style gardens respectful of their origins and by curating an exhibition in which those origins pointed back to imperial rome and to its renaissance interpretation the fascists portrayed themselves as the heirs of the cultural and political empire their biased definition of a timeless and flawless italian garden presented to the italians as part of a continuous national artistic tradition was never criticized but was in fact repeated countless times in subsequent studies even those published after the fall of the regime my research revealed that the difference with the literature produced before the 1930s is striking the latter was mostly produced by anglo-american expatriates who chose florence as their new home at the turn of the 20th century as kate thomas reminded us just a couple of weeks ago although foreigners narratives focused too on renaissance gardens due to their infatuation with the artistic achievements of 16th century italy they also maintained that the typical italian garden was not to be found everywhere in the country even more tellingly the early meditative properties that after the 1930s are described as featuring the earliest italian garden prototypes in the scholarly literature produced before the fascist period are said to have not included pleasure gardens at all due to their semi semi uh semi-rural and agricultural character ultimately my research on historiography led me to draw three main conclusions the first is the realization that the italian garden carries many differences in form and meaning across the regions of the italian peninsula the second conclusion stems from my criticism of the theological teleological form of historiography that utilizes a top-down approach in its quest for origins and in so doing reduces garden history to a discourse on style rather than culture this narrow approach has the disadvantage of limiting the kind of primary sources examined and of forcing the latter into preconceived interpretive molds these shortcomings highlighted the need for new histographical methods the one i proposed takes advantage of two opposite approaches the so-called laundry which examines a particular phenomenon across a long span of time and the approach of microhistory which focuses on the documented actions and beliefs of marginalized individuals for example those involved in the implementation of the grounds layouts and planting in order to understand the social and cultural systems in which both designed and vernacular landscapes were conceived and constructed lastly my third conclusion which follows from the second is related to the limits of self-imposed scholarly and disciplinary boundaries the historiography of landscape architecture has contributed very little for example on the role of the agricultural landscape and while the hierarchy between the so-called third second and first natures or in other world in other words the polite cultural and wild landscapes has been acknowledged and its origins traced to specific historical moments their relationship or even the possibility of their coexistence has not been sufficiently examined and yet if only we take a cursory look at other sources like travel diaries written by those who had a much broader understanding of landscape than we have today we may find surprising points of view for example witnessing the seemingly effortless productivity of the italian garden planes during their their late 17th and 18th century grand tours many englishmen attributed to the fertility and abundance of the fields with their striking geometry of longitudinal ridges and furrows and orderly planted vines and a static dimension that they identified with the italian way this was then invoked in the productive landscapes orchards and gardens they planted at home it's it's interesting to me to see how this diaries perception of what is italian was altogether different from the fascists definition of the same in the 20th century now my realization that the italian garden type is largely a modern construct has led me to ask the question of how such static definition of the italian garden has influenced the legacy studies of its legacy outside of italy this has broadened my sphere of inquiry to england and north america and has led me to conceive a new book project titled georgia grounds and gardens from the mediterranean to the atlantic world which examines the productive gardens adjacent to the villas designed by andre palladio in 16th century veneto and those of his english and american heirs in the context of the economic social and religious climate in which they were created these projects as well as the research that i've carried out so far are motivated by the understanding that landscape architecture and its history are not only about the aesthetic of forms but they are also an expression of the spirit of the times in which they occur in a mirror of the society that engages in them for this reason both the work of the historian and that of the designer must proceed without preconceptions it must allow the sources be they've written spoken built up or buried under our feet to tell their stories these a creative mind is able to paraphrase an expression from ken wilbur to include and assimilate but also transcend in order to engender in order to engender progress in how we design and write as well as in the society in which we live thank you um i just wanted to thank um anita for including me in this very important and very urgent discussion i want to follow up directly on the term from tais's beautiful presentation notably the historian's craft and more particularly the character of mark block one of my heroes who um was in fact executed by the gestapo on june 16 1944. so i'll start there a question of historical craft how is the mr x of frederick olmsted's a journey in the seaboard slave states identified dilemmas of this sort though typically far less intriguing are encountered everywhere along the pitted path to interpretation why is history so tricky by way of a response i offer these brief remarks on the topic of identity and with them some notes on credibility four once contentedly focused on the self-absorbed figure in the landscape our field is now plainly sociological what's in a name olmsted assumed a number of authorial guises signing his earliest writings manhattan as in the fish used as fertilizer then more appealingly wayfarer and then gaining self-confidence yeoman under which name his letters reported on the slave states were first published in the new york daily times in this context the alienable right to one's own name cruelly manifests itself in the newspaper advertisements for the capture and return of fugitive slaves as david wall striker observed in his study in a self-fashioning american style and with it the dubious laborers of confidence men quote the advertisements often catalog the known aliases of runaways with a sense of injury and outrage as masters rightly associated the power of naming with their own privilege as property owners and here he quotes from the ad i have on the screen he always changes his name and denies his master the unintended echo of deny thy father and refuse thy name is worth mentioning here if only because in a moment the name of shakespeare's will be invoked mr x however was not a slave fugitive or fettered but rather a prosperous slave owner charles mclaughlin the resourceful editor of the franklin frederick law olmsted papers considered him one of his favorite cases as the historian turned detective explained quote to protect the people he wrote about olmsted omitted and changed names and scrambled his itinerary an effective technique that drove later editors wild and quote but was it the slaveholder who needed onomatic cover when it was their property who sought freedom in and by assumed names and what about chasing think of that word chasing the venatori pursuit the hunt and what about chasing after those fugitive facts that lead the historian to wildness an initial clue led mclaughlin to an annotated copy of seaboard slave states where mr x was identified as richard james arnold descendant of a quaker family involved in abolitionist causes history is not straightforward the same annotations reveal that it was olmsted in fact who was remained the enigma his host mclaughlin note couldn't figure out why he disappeared every day only later when they received the book did they discover that their guest was a yankee reporter i don't know which is worth being a yankee or a reporter ordinarily i would pause at this point to discuss the designs pursued by historians in the margins of texts but these are not ordinary times so in the very few moments remaining i wish to look at figures neither at the margin nor at the center those between fugitivity and captivity let's go back to olmsted's discussion of arnold's rice plantation and the great as he called it the great difficulty in management of slaves this took the form of a swarm of jews which had recently settled in nearly every southern town many of them men of no character opening cheap clothing and trinket shops and engaging in an unlawful trade with the simple negroes which is found very profitable says olmsted was hardly alone in making this sort of accusation notably edward king's postbellum report and the predations of the shrewd hebrew upon the great south was eagerly recorded by the russian naval sphero dostoev from whom it was cited as a matter of settled sociological fact by prominent 20th century race polemicists it would take far too much time to diffuse or rather diffuse olmsted's remarks on richmond virginia where he noted the large population of very dirty german jews with their characteristic smells for this tracker of clues ed speaking onset sets out a scent trail to that most vial of anti-semitic tropes the fetor judaicus or the jewish stench suffice it here to know jake geller's coruscating analysis of odor and aura aura comes from the latin and greek word for breath it's wafting which in his words imperils the clearly delineated distinctions such as those between races genders classes species and public and private upon which bourgeois identity seemed to depend to which i add dependency is the drug and maybe we should stop looking for these issues of intersectionality and we might have to waft them out of the air about that swarm rife as it is with biblical implications of plague and pestilence and the designs of history let's ask how many of these traders were there according to one contemporary account quote the shylocks preferred to be unnavigable streams where it was always convenient for them to take passage for parts unknown they were fugitive and off to the wildness so where did these errant and itinerant people unsettlingly settle here distort the sources tell the story or rather they are the story in an important methodological article of 1980 an immigration history newsletter buffalo historian david gerber described the unique source for research on both american business and social structure this was the massive collection of manuscript credit rating reports produced by rg dun and company now housed at the harvard business school by the numbers it's 2522 volumes or 2640 linear feet of shelf space that's one half mile a vast paper technology now put at the service of duly qualified historians for one needs to apply to the library to gain access to this resource some background the same factors that contributed to the panic of 1837 territorial expansion improved but imperfect information and transportation networks and capital speculation demonstrated that uh in the words of one historian the days when a wholesaler personally knew all of the retailers he supplied was gone then cool in 1841 louis tappan a prominent new york silk merchant who suffered large losses from uncollected debts during the 1837 panic founded the mercantile agency later r g dunn and company a credit rating bureau by 1870 the firm had 28 branches off branch offices and over 10 000 correspondents within these churning factories of presumed facts credit reporting shifted in joshua lauer's words from rumor to written record the firm manage risk by pointing as punitively impartial investigators reliable lawyers businessmen bankers with sound reputations and extensive knowledge in local markets they were needless to say white male property and or well employed their commitment to the task as it happens made them accurate recorders of prevalent social biases in the credit reports gerber notes hebrew or jew was used as a code word signifying people of dubious business ability and or business ethics individuals assumed a priori to be unreliable financial risks can we break the code the language of one of the reports shared with subscribers to the credit bureau under terms of strict con confidentiality but now widely quoted in historical literature provides a key to the inner world of these shylocks quote prudence in large transactions with all jews should be used in another we can learn nothing it is enough to say they are jews unquote in instrumentalizing suspicion the credit reports represent an important historical source if not also a tainted well to evoke another ancient and murderously grave anti-semitic libel in the kind of design and or mapping work that many of you do in the studio uh michael cohen applied gis or the uh the method of what he calls digital humanities uh he applied it to the credit report to determine the size shape and spread of jewish-owned general and dry good stores throughout the apparently afflicted region and this historian must admit that i've always been slightly mystified by that term dry goods maybe someone can clarify it for me in any case with the maps with these maps um he has merely given a local habitation and name to just so many credit histories now interpretation may begin credit it must be recalled comes from the latin qadhari to believe and our present calling is to foster habits of trusting each other perhaps anew perhaps once again and encourage mutuality inside and beyond the academy not the solitary self-absorbed figure in the landscape but rather ishmael and queequeg engage in a joint stock company of two or more we also need to remember that credit and the individual and collective identities it defines here think of ulysses s grant's notorious expulsion of the class of jews is manufactured and managed in legible terms in conclusion i cite from an official history of dunning company the credit rating agency they say credit is founded upon confidence and confidence in turn is derived from accurate and impartial information was done a company of confidence men and what about those terms didn't that paradigmatic trickster and storyteller odysseus bear the epithet man of many turns and what about wayfarer become yeoman become frederick law olmsted landscape architect and one of that what about that runaway slave who always changes his name who is known by his master simply as cuff dicks as i said hickory history is tricky so let us begin by solving for x thank you thank you taissa rafaela and ed these they're not only marvelous presentations in themselves but together they're fantastic um may i ask each of you to and taissa perhaps you're going to work here as as a moderator of sorts begin to ask each other questions because there are similarities uh to what you do in the sense of each of you wanting to broaden open up up and restart new methods and processes of understanding history and uh can you comment on that for for the audience please yeah i'll go ahead and start and give the other two the gift of a few minutes to think about an answer um and and i do think that is where where we share and and i would argue it's also where being in a design school is so important um you know one of my questions that i'd love to get to is how how is being in a design school changing how we do history because it's a two-way right it's a dialogue it's not just us coming without so that was going to be my next question we'll get there but um get the first one i think that one of the pieces about that begins to answer the second question but answers your first is that we know when we look at places and sites and begin to explore them that there are multiple histories and that we often only know what is most recent or most famous or you know whatever the the requisite most is um and yet we know as historians to ask for more and to look underneath but we also know that you know as designers as people who think spatially about how people live live you know we don't live in a static manner we we live moving through spaces and on spaces and um so you know i think in that way our our work it's all about uncovering and i think what's interesting is to think about how each of us has sought to uncover the lived experience of people who probably have some connection to us personally as well as professionally so i i you know it's it's not very hard to understand that i would be interested in women um i'm also interested in a feminist approach which is not just about women a feminist approach is an approach about looking at people at the margins but certainly understanding um the lived experience of women so i'll i'll open it up to raphael and ed to chime in um yes um thank you thank you um i want to add one observation um that um has been at the back of my mind for quite some time now and i'll i take this opportunity because this is the right forum to to ask this question which is um there is a a trend i think today to say well to decide what we uh need to include uh in the study of history and what we need to forget or maybe exclude um so for example you were mentioning um the uh the usual names like olmstead uh is a recurring name uh obviously for our discipline as an important figure but the other modernists are that are very often cited us as pioneers uh one way or another um they're all white males um so if we accept that by focusing our attention on these voices that have been prioritized by other historians uh and and colleagues uh if we accept that um and then we make room for other voices that have so far being ignored or underplayed what do we do with the hose what do we do with the olmsteads with the uh james rose's uh then kylie's and uh and and what do we do with them where do we put them um is there room for all uh or do we want to be selective and now cancel those and focus our attention on uh the narratives that so far haven't been um paying attention paying attention to paid attention to sorry and i have to admit i have an answer i i want to respond to that but do you want to respond first and oh um thank you tyson it's uh i have no thumbnail response it's an extraordinarily complex question and i i'm pondering uh raphael if it's a question of displacement which is say do we make room or is it kind of an archimedean three-body problem um i i don't think it's the issue and i'm thinking of uh kind of the um the the temple of fame at stowe that you know when once person needs to be seated at a table somebody else is displaced um it's it's a kind of polyvalent discussion that needs to take place and um i don't know i'll just give you one example because there are many but um uh taisa showed jamaica kincaid one of our incredible colleagues here um at harvard and so for example you know look at olmsted who refers to wordsworth kind of constantly um and part of the task with teaching olmstead to students is even making them aware of those literary relationships which matter and probably occult to them but you know this year we had them read um lucy so you know what does it mean for um someone uh from jamaica to to learn the poem i wandered lonely as a cloud you know what what does it mean to be on that kind of further edge of wandering or to be altogether you know how do those references or cultures come together or apart and kinkade is a wonderful way to do this with obviously because she's a very very competent gardener but also enormously eloquent about her gardening but um i don't see the displacement i see is putting um voices in relation to each other whether it's antiphony throughout the funny or polyphony or disharmony or chorus you know cacophony however you want to put it yeah i guess i i will add i i think i come at that from with a really different kinds of question um i think one of the challenges of history particularly in the professions and i would argue the design professions more so than than some have thought of history as origin stories how do we trace our profession where did it begin and and who who can we put on the timeline so that we end up with where we are and i actually think that's backwards to be polite um because that suggests as as many of our textbooks would you know suggest that there's actually one narrative there's one lineage they followed pretty logically one from the other right and and and instead we should be thinking two things one is what is it that you need to know as a historian you know what do you need to get from history and i would i would propose from this discussion that what designers could benefit from is learning the craft of being a historian what does it mean to ask those kinds of questions what does it mean to reveal the unknown what does it mean to be in dialogue why do we look at certain gardens and not others why do we look at charles platt but we don't look at somebody else's garden at indigenous gardens at the moment why do we think um these are more and so that would be my first is to really think about what they need in a history course and we could talk later about that um because i'm not convinced they need a set cannon of people that they can then say oh olmsted was born in right or did central park the second piece is if we're thinking like historians and imagining like designers history class shouldn't be the only place that students are engaging with the practice and the profession i mean it should be in studio right in studio they should be talking about who else has designed these kinds of projects whether they're professionals or not professionals what other forces and shapes have agents have played a part so that we actually should always in all of our course site and that's why i brought up site analysis and and i have to give danika cooper if she's on a little shout out for reminding me that site analysis is in fact asking about the thickness of sight and and what's there and yes it's often more focused on the physical and things you can trace and measure and draw but um it too can be thought of as a way of thinking so i guess i would say about you know where does the olmsteads or the kylie's go they go in conversation and um sometimes they're highlighted if they're important to a topic or a project or a discourse or a dialogue and sometimes they're not and and again you know it's the only other analogy i can always think of is i don't know about the gsd but in a number of programs that i've taught in students often feel like the plant class doesn't teach enough plants i want more plants and what we have to remind students is we're teaching them how to learn about plants we can't possibly teach them every plant they're ever going to need to know but we can teach them about how to learn about plants and i would say the same for history i want them to get out of there and know how to think like a historian to to apply the craft of history and then i hope they're curious enough because i know they're brilliant enough to go and read cotton kingdom or you know read ecbo's work or read marjorie sewell cotley's theory on color or martha brooks hutchinson or ruth dean um and so that's what we set up so i guess i don't worry so much about who we include or exclude it's more what stories and what's what um what crafts what tools do we build does that make sense and i think did anita can i jump to your second question sure which is this question of you know why why in a design school and how does design i'm really curious as i mentioned before when we were talking before all of this i'm one of the few people i know and i'm sure they're more but who teach design studio but i don't have a design degree and i've never practiced as a designer but i trained under some excellent design studio teachers so nobody threw me in cold i got some really good education but but you two are designers and so i i chose to be in a i'll start it by saying i chose to teach in a design school versus an art history department or i have an adjunct role in the history department so i could have just said i'm going to go teach history sort of history with the big h because i think the lived experience in place is a critical part of history and it's actually part of what history has missed as much as for the spatial turn in social history there they still struggle with being truly grounded in place and i think it's something designers breathe spatiality um and it's been incredibly important for my work to work within the language and the framework of spatial thinking and how designers look at sight and and what it means to think spatially what it means to think about moving through spaces and moving through places and defining spaces and um and so i from my perspective that has been that's the piece of the history that i i hope i is my greatest legacy the the work on women in landscape architecture or other untold stories is one but to me it's being able to bring that spatial language and spatial view to how we think about history because it's always in place you know the history doesn't happen in no place it happens somewhere so i don't know ed and i mean anita you probably have some thoughts on that too but raphael when i you know i um i just uh before we we jump into the the questions that that are starting to to come in but uh you all mentioned uh mapping digital humanities um and and just now mapping of the youth and you know if i i can tell you that we here at the gsd we we think of of that kind of of work the research that goes on before design but we think of it as actually the first act of design because the questions that you don't ask right will not show up later if you don't ask them so in a way ask just just bringing the question of how to map what question are you going to ask rather than you know the more standardized kind of layer cake that it always is includes the same thing yeah that's we're moving away from that um and uh each each form of analysis has to have an intention yeah that perhaps we had not seen before so in that sense it's very similar to know to what ed was saying that that once you you make the map you open for interpretation and they are not fixed things but they have to they are in a way the first act of design yeah um i am going to to go to the audience now um since many questions are coming in uh so sarah whiting our dean uh thank you each of you for these fascinating snapshots into your work i wonder to what extent your approaches depend on landscape based design imagine and design imagining in particular do you see your approach as being as viable for all design fields or particularly apropos of landscape um well that's a that's a good question am i audible yes um i i would say that i did not make the distinction between the design fields i'm trained as an architect um i stud i spent more time studying architecture than landscape but i'm also trained as a landscape architect and i don't see any distinction between um the approach to history writing or to the way in which the creative mind thinks when it designs so i yeah i um interesting because i would i would propose and it's why i'm so interested in landscape even though my degrees are actually technically in architectural history the landscape is where we're the most public give or take obviously there are public buildings but the landscape that space outside is whether it's even in our front yard or it's on the street or it's in the park it's where we're public and i think in that way my work it's why i focus and even the garden though we think of it often as an enclosed space it's often a place like ann spencer's a place of actually bringing people together so it's not public in the way a public park is public but it's not as private and secluded as inside a house and so i i think it could apply to either but i'm particularly interested in that interstitial space of when we're in between the the private spaces and and were were present i don't know ed what do you think well just to respond very directly to the dean's question in my case um i it wouldn't apply to urbanisms i don't and i never do right on organisms it's simply not the topic i understand in part because i'm a microscopist and the scale it just doesn't make sense to me as an object of regard scholarly regard but um yes i i don't see any start division in my own thinking between landscapes and architectures per se and most of the things i've chosen to written about try to construe the the um the premise or the ground of research itself as a special structuring condition but the one thing i will say that i find divides landscape history and architectural history and i originally trained by the way as an art historian is um i and this goes back to taiz's point i don't i don't see arc i do not see landscape history as having a bibliographic clear bibliographic genealogy in the way architectural history does um even though the architectural issue is a relatively recent discipline even if one considers it a subset of art history as properly construed going from the 19th century i see very clear lines of genealogical descent and also a certain bibliographic and axiological darwinism that's taken place in architectural history such that one can identify very clear problems that have been and need to be addressed i i simply do not see a landscape architecture i think the field is far far far from well-defined historiographically i think the two centers if any are in fact dunbar notes which has long promoted a certain type of scholarship and maybe the you know the newton school and all of that but um i i i don't know yeah you point out another place where i think they're there and it's an obvious everybody's going to you know do the moment which is obviously landscape history has to deal with time in a very different way that that art architectural historians can imagine they capture a place at a certain moment in time um you know i was laughing about anita's background that i i know that's not now right because of the color of the leaves um and and so that to me again is an exciting part of landscape history is that we have to constantly be thinking about how the places are changing and how that is engaging so i think that's a also here's a related question from enrique ramirez is it possible to think about landscape as a model for historical inquiry generally speaking i am thinking of emma rothschild's latest book infinite history where she introduces minor figures into the landscape of history by writing it is as though the individuals in this story make a 9 90 degree turn and walk away into a different dimension which is a dimension of historical time i have that book on my bookshelf to read so this is making me want to go and read it um but i i would just put forward absolutely and that i would argue part of my work here at dunbar and oaks has been to try to bring social cultural historians environmental historians in with landscape historians to think about how landscape actually could frame and ground alternative approaches um to history that that i think are really important at this moment as we think about the power of place and and again as i noted earlier i'm not convinced the spatial turn um has been as deeply engaged quickly if that's my enrique marreras um hello enrique thanks for the question [Music] the errors of modernity sort of kind of making a historic of something that's formless constitutively but in response quickly yeah works like tiffany with fellow kings black shoals i think are enormously important in thinking through different terrains and different conditions of knowledge and i just say for my own work i think the very one of the very first things i ever published was called the shifting reef which took me just that the wreath and vern's twenty thousand leagues under the sea as an unfixed geographical and material entity and how does one interrogates something that's ungrounded and also what kind of knowledge is yielded by something that's ungrounded and that continued in my work say with the um the sunken forests of muslim michel and others where the ground itself demands a certain epistemology and with it forms of research documentation interpretation narrative what have you yeah that that's all we could go on on that one that would be that would be another great discussion all right the questions are piling up so paolo um girardelli for rafaela do you think that the conceptualization of a timeless italian garden also distorted the perception and understanding of classical roman gardens what images like the frescoes of the villa the libya convey is is a rather informal and vernacular garden but scholars of the renaissance renaissance have sometimes assumed that the ideal geometry of the so-called italian garden was reviving allegedly classical models which in fact may not exist oh absolutely i i think you're spot on because i think i was james ackerman who famously said that even for the garden makers of the italian renaissance uh they would have been shocked to realize that roman gardens were not as symmetrical and and rigidly geometrical as they thought they were so yes the history of the italian garden from from classical times to through the renaissance um through uh today is full of distortions and so we have to be very careful uh when we read these narratives um and we have to make sure that they don't generalize um the the classical garden goes through changes uh from republican rome to uh to the empire and um and it's very it's it's very complicated it's very difficult to understand them because the sources that we have very often cannot be taken at face value sometimes there's a whole rhetorical um uh apparatus that needs to be taken into account so it's very difficult to take these sources as if they were eyewitness testimony of these long own gardens uh and uh it makes it extremely difficult to um to of course write about them but again it's important to start writing history or understanding place uh trying to not um have preconceptions which is very different very difficult of course but it's something that we have to try and do in order to make yeah i want to i want to add cause i think that's it's an important question in terms of italian gardens and roman gardens but i also think it's again gets this question of what history is and i think history is partly understanding that what we know today has not necessarily always been and that sounds so obvious when you say it and i always use street trees right as an example we think street trees are the most natural beautiful thing you could do there was certainly a time where you'd no more put a tree in a street than you'd put a street in your garden but you know history can show you when you when you decide to put aside the origin stories and trying to trace back some clear lineage and you look at the breadth and diversity you begin to understand that humans have engaged in strange ways with place and landscape and sight and making place and and i don't know whether i can ever go in without any preconceived um biases but i certainly try to go in you know realizing that what i think is normative has not always been and often is fairly recent and and that's right a historian's craft is to be able to dig under and question those assumptions that we make so it's an important question for you rafael in terms of the italian government but i also think that's so important for history it threaded through all of your presentations whether you use the word disc distortion and use the word code that needed to be uh sort of uh interpreted and and found out so to speak you speak of of of unearthing right uh information and and assumptions so it's certainly been a a common topic um a related question from farmer ashasi from zurich would you imagine and how a historian leading a design studio landscape or and or architecture would can we break the code as professor eigen just mentioned within the context of a design studio i imagine is what the question is asking ed you're the code guy the code breaker i'm very poor at mathematics i let my son do it for me um look uh you know part of it again is going back to the site question it's why i put that slightly provocative caption to the franklin park slide which is to say it's one thing to interrogate the um the topographical features even the geological features of a site it's another in franklin park simply to inquire and it's again the most obvious thing in the world where did that franklin fund come from and we saw today precisely where it came from so you're not operating from a value fee sorry value free premise and uh the codes are extremely difficult and i i just can't reinforce sorry tyson keeps saying the historians craft that prior to interpretation this is the key point of uh block's book and i'm sorry to get nerdy but um you know block enumerates the 17 ancillary sciences of history which are numismatics and epigraphy and onomastics or the study of names which i talked about today choreography the study of place what have you and each of these individually severally and collectively offer opportunities to find all sorts of informations and the particular forms in which historical information took and in some cases that might require learning you know a particular type of court hand handwriting or who would have used that hand or what purpose you know so there's many many many layers of um knowledge that kind of give us access to the code that decipherment but for me at least um i know this is the big payoff isn't the interpretation for for me it's always been in those kind of crafts those processes and that's what takes place yeah i i would add to that because i i actually think it's it's as somebody as somebody without a design degree who teaches design studio what i hope students get out of um out of me is obviously not a reference to design practice but is how to do a site analysis that begins to understand what kinds of questions one asks what kind of questions aren't being asked you know it's sort of up there with the question of who's whose voice are we not listening to what questions aren't being asked and then what the resources so i don't know that you could crack the code in a studio in a limited time period you know as we teach in however many weeks one has to teach but i think you can help students to think about the questions they ask and the sources and one of the one of my um goals in a studio actually is to introduce students or or enrich their connections to the rest of the university the university as the academy as a place of knowledge who else is out there and i you know to me design school should be deeply central to the whole school because we bring so much of that knowledge to place and so it's taking the students and helping them think about do i need to go to a classics professor do i need to go to a soil scientist do i need to go to a musician and a compo who who was out there you have this richness a university that you'll never have enough i can't imagine a firm ever having right the breadth of a university um so even the big ones um so to me it's not so much cracking the code but giving them the skills to think about what that might look like and and probably spending your life cracking codes right in some incremental way um related to this uh dom graham asks don't you have a responsibility as an architectural designer to invent an archaeology even where none exists isn't that what bruno latour means by geo story i'm going to leave it to you two designers yeah i'm sorry to say it need i i don't entirely understand the question and um while we need her to share puerto la tour has been terrifically uh interesting to me in certain respects um with regards to the sociology of the laboratory um i i lose them somewhat on the other writings but um i think my simple responses you'd have to interrogate what one means by archaeology whether it's a nietzschean archaeology whether it's kind of a nationalistic uh national heritage type archaeology is it are you crediting a faith in the our case the oldest the kind of things that belong in the archives so you know at least my own work i always invent the objects of regard and that's part of the design process and um i enjoy that i'm punished for it but that's what i do but you could also and and i guess i i took i took the questions around the verb event and i guess what i would say is if we actually dig deep in place we don't have to invent it we can actually reveal it and uncover it unearth it and then our archaeology to create the archaeology to me is to bring those together in some coherent way because we can't we can't reveal everything all at once right it's too complicated it's too messy too conflictual um so then we have to design the the story the narratives that come out and i suppose that that might could be called inventions but but i would argue firmly that we reveal first and we unearth and then we design the narrative and maybe that's inventing an archaeology or creating an archaeology that reminds me of of last night's kylie lecture by julie bartman who literally literally takes the stuff of her designs from under the ground right and exposes and brings them to the surface well and it's also you know diane harris gave a fantastic talk yesterday about frank lloyd wright and his racism um which she reveals through partly his comments on drawings calling black people negro and such um but it's also in the decisions he makes that are not obvious but are clearly privileging white supremacy and that too becomes an archaeology of right of realizing the context of where people are working so i think both the physical and the conceptual yeah but i also just not to be too particular but the the version of archaeology that's coming up it's it's wedded or mated to some kind of notion of the earth or embodied forms you know the the work of georgix which we're involved in but there's also as i wanted to highlight with jay geller's work there's aromatic histories and there's also those things are suspended in history you know not only you know thinking of ceylon's total fuga but things are up in the air things that are unconsecrated things that don't coalesce into discernible form they don't settle [Music] uh we are unfortunately running out of time this has been a fantastic event uh one more question we have 33 to go we will send them to you we're not going to be able to even make a dent here but that from dalia wadden this was fascinating i am an anthropologist would you kindly elaborate on how ethnographic methods could be integrated into this cross-breed history design approach i i guess i'll just add knowing that we're running out of time that's a much longer conversation but certainly using the ethnographic scholarship becomes an incredibly important as well as using ethnographic methods and approaches and some of the current work rafaela you look like you wanted to jump in yeah well i there are designers who are using ethnobotany um in their work i want to study how plants not only can be put together aesthetically in an aesthetically pleasing manner but also to understand them culturally in the sense how they've been used in the past uh and versus today uh and i think that is already part of our design uh discipline of landscape design and certainly landscape history is an ought to be an interdisciplinary discipline where such methods are incorporated um the short answer and both ways right again you know i see i see it as a dialogue i want to thank you uh taissa ed and rafaela uh to begin with not just for today but for everything you do for our students you are really their inspiration and they look look to you for their work in studio um can i i also hope that you are inspired by design um and that there's a kind of you know echo there in some way or feedback between design thinking and historical thinking uh there is much more to to say uh and to talk i hope we have more occasions to do this um whether you know at the barton oaks or back at the gsd um it it's important um and i really do thank you for for joining me i thank you and i just want to add one quick because i realized one of the reasons we did it today was so that i could if they're graduate school students out there dumbarton oaks has a graduate workshop on learning about landscape history and we're going to do the public realm and public health and so go on the dunbar notes website and you have to march 15th to apply just had to do my plug yeah there you go marching orders everyone for spring break all right thank you to the audience also for all of your wonderful questions and for joining us and for staying so engaged thanks thank you you

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Published: Mon Mar 08 2021