LYLE John Can Floating Seeds Make Deep Forms 37.Full

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Can Floating Seeds M ake Deep Form sohn Tillman Lyle

John T. Lyle is a Professor of Land-

scape Architecture at California StatePolytechnic University in Pomona,

where his teaching and research focus

on methods for ecological design. Herecently served as Visiting Professorat the Universities of Venice and SaoPaulo and at the Kyushu Institute ofDesign. His book Design for Human Eco-

systems was published by Van N ostrandReinhold.

Abstract: For more than two centuries, landscape design in Western culture has been considered a

matter of creating visual imagery, usually divorced from an y concept or u nderstanding of natural

process. This view has often resulted in landscape forms that lack roots in the earth an d are

therefore shallow in character. The ecological understanding developed over the past several decades

makes it clear that in nature the landscape we see is the visible manifestation o f underlying, ongoing

processes. Form a nd process are inseparable. For landscape design to be truly mean ingful, i t should

also give visible expression to the processes that shape the earth, thus making a connection between

nature and hum an culture. Landscapes that accomplish this can be described as having deep form s.

Words are becoming more

important in design,

which I think means that theories andconcepts are becoming more impor-

tant. This trend is not unique in

history. Design ideas have often takenshape in verbal descriptions before tak-ing form in three dimensions.

Words can explain, where phys-

ical forms cannot, and words can

sometimes be as evocative as forms.But we have to be careful in what weevoke. Around every word there

gathers an aura, an enveloping atmo-

sphere of tacit implications that are

often more important in conveyingmeaning than dictionary definitions.

Since the two terms that define our

theme are especially rich in aura, it

seems worthwhile to spend some timeconsidering their meanings before

trying to deal with their interre-lationships.

Avant-Garde and Landscape D@ ’ned

Avant-garde was once a militaryterm, and for me it conjures the image

of a phalanx of tanks moving out ahead

of columns of infantry. The term has

an aura of force mixed in with the auraof new territory. It conveys a kind of

aggressive, heavily armored confi-

dence, which may or may not reflect

the feelings of the artists and thinkerswho form a cultural avant-garde. But

if artists or thinkers ever do think of

themselves in this way, they are victimsof delusion. Like it or not, a culture

does not gain new ground by the samemeans an army does. Rather, a culture

grows and develops more along thelines of natural succession. Seeds growon older plants and eventually separatethemselves and float away. Some arecarried long distances on the wind orin the bellies of animals, and a few of

those seeds eventually arrive in soildisturbed by an upheaval of somesort. Among those few there may bemutants that carry within them some-

thing truly new.If the floating seeds drop into fer-

tile soil and find a fit with the environ-

ment, they sprout and grow and even-

tually evolve a new culture in that

place. If one of the seeds finding fertilesoil happens to be a mutant strain, we

may see a great rarity: something both

new and fertile on the face of the earth.That is the way of nature and the way

of culture.

So I suggest that we might bewise to reach beyond military imagery

with its aura of power and think more

in terms of fecundity and chance en-

counter. Those of us who experimentwith landscape form are not tanks; we

are floating seeds. But being human

and having minds, we are seeds with

some control over our destiny.The word landscape is even more

complex in its aura and perhaps even

more misleading in its implications.

Meinig (1976) has shown that the

term landscape can have at least twelve

distinctly different meanings according

to the perspective of the person using

it. ButJ. B. Jackson (1984) points outthat, of all those meanings, the most

prevalent by far is the one attached toscenery. Most dictionaries define land-scape in terms of scenes viewed fromparticular places. At least since the18th century in Western culture, the

landscape has been what we see, andlandscape design has been a matter of

reshaping what we see into pictorially

acceptable scenes. In the 19th century,the landscape as painting became thelandscape as photograph. W hen pho-tography was invented in 1839, Oliver

Wendell Holmes believed it would

introduce a new age in which "the

image would become more important

than the object itself and would in factmake the object dispensable." History

has proven Justice Holmes right. Pho-tography and the other visual media

following it have reshaped the human

perception of reality. Certainly they

have dominated architecture and land-

scape architecture. We know more

buildings and landscapes through pho-tographs than we know through

experience.Some say the media and the arts

they engender have reshaped realityitself, but that is only partially correct.

It is important to remember that the

reality of nature remains with us,

though often masked by visual imag-

Lyle 37



ery. All landscapes, natural and

human, live, change, and die by

nature’s ongoing processes. Substanceremains behind the mask, though

much of the time we take image for

substance without question. As aresult, we find ourselves living in a

world of imagery, an unreal world with

human beings seemingly set apart from

nature. A philosopher might say that

form and content have parted ways.Landscape design has beenguilty of promulgating unreality for

well over 200 years. Photography sim-

ply provided a new tool for expanding

pictorial thinking. The English land-

scape garden, though commonly

interpreted as an expression of respect

for natural forms, was actually an effort

to shape an idealized image of the pas-

toral landscape. The forms of the 18th-

century English gardens owe far more

to the Arcadian paintings of artists likeLorrain and Poussin than they do to

any deeper understanding of nature

(Thacker 1979),During the following century,

Uvedale Price and his contemporaries

made an effort to expand the sylvan

ideal with a larger sense of nature’s

random and destructive side and thus

of ongoing process. But m ost of thosewho followed Price in the Picturesque

tradition tended to present such forms

in merely pictorial ways with little

sense of process. Even as interest inhorticulture developed in the 19th cen-

tury, the romantic forms (or nonforms)of these periods remained essentiallystylistic, making no attempt to embody

the inner rhythms or processes ofnature, or to embody any deeper con-

cept of the nature of nature.These pictorial preoccupations

have stayed with us down to our owntime. Despite efforts during the modern

era to give stronger expression to socialconcerns and human activities as basesfor form, our design vocabulary re-mains predominantly pictorial. What

is called design theory in most

schools is entirely a matter of visual ter-minology-line, form, color, texture,

and so forth--and the designs of land-

scape architects still derive from visual

premises. Much of the exploratorywork of avan t-garde designers is essen-

tially pictorial, though the pictures

from which they draw inspiration tendnow to be abstract, which tends to pro-

duce landscapes that are more abstractin character. Even at the larger plan-

ning scales, landscape architects areoften preoccupied with what is seen onthe surface of landscapes, as in VisualResource Management.

The forms derived from this con-

cern for surface appearance I will referto as shallow forms because they lackthe inner substance that the embodi-

ment of nature’s less visible but more

essential processes can impart.

Dynamic Co mplexityBy a curious confluence of his-

tory, human understanding of natural

processes grew at a rapid pace throughthe same several decades during whichour control of imagery developed. Sci-

ence showed us that underlying thelandscape we see is infinite complexity.

Nature is ongoing process, and human-ity, consciously or not, flows with it.And the process is all one, inextricably

interconnected. Meteorologists like tosay that the flutter of a butterfly’s wingin Beijing can change the weather in

New York. A tree falling in Costa Rica

can change bird populations in Califor-

nia and vice versa.In the late 20th century, this

immense tangle of dynamic complexity

is the reality of landscape, and among

the most useful tools for putting it into

coherent, usable order is the ecosystemconcept. A. G. Tansley coined the

term ecosystem in 1935, and since then ithas become one of the more interestingwords in the international vocabulary.It comes wrapped in a dual aura that is

both technical in a usefu , scientific

sense and loosely popular in a verybroad sense. On the one hand, the eco-system concept provides a scientificallydefined framework for ecological re-

search. On the other, it has entered the

popular vocabulary as an all-encom-

passing synonym for the wholeness of

nature. The ability to bridge those twoworlds is a most valuable property in a

world where science becomes ever morespecialized, while participation in deci-

sion making becomes ever broader.In fact, the ecosystem concept

may turn out to be one of history’s piv-otal scientific revelations. Since the

time of Descartes, the prevailing view

in science has been the redu ctionist

view that we understand nature’s order

by taking her apart into ever smallerpieces. In the early years of the 20th

century, the reductionist view inspired

the artists of the avant-garde in their

efforts to convey a reality reduced toessential parts. The abstractions of the

modern ~novement followed the samepath, breaking nature apart and re-

casting the pieces in forms that in the

end very nearly lost touch with humanperception.

In science, the reductionist viewserved very well for more than three

centuries. In the 20th century, it has

led to unlocking the secrets of the atomand of DNA. Beyond that, it has led us

into the strange world of quantum

physics, and wh at scientists have foundthere ironically calls into question some

of the basic assum ptions that gave riseto scientific method in the first place.

Even the most elementary particles

sometimes move in random paths.

Nature is not entirely predictable. Ineven the most minute parts there is

uncertainty.While the quantum physicists

were finding that neither absolute

objectivity nor absolute certaintyexists at the most minute levels of

nature, the ecosystem concept was

emerging to show that nature’s funda-

mental order does not lie entirely at the

submolecular level but exists at every

level of organization, most importantly

for our purposes at the ecosystem level.

At the level of particles, molecules, andgenes, reductionist science is as mean-ingful and productive as ever. What

has been added is the understandingthat a pond or a river system embodies

underlying organization that is equally

meaningful. Larger, more inclusive

patterns of order are becoming clearer,

and for designers as well as scientiststhis understanding can be even more

productive.To put this emerging model of

nature in perspective, we can view

nature as being hierarchically orga-

nized. The elementary particles, which

we now recognize as being capable ofrandomness, combine to form atoms,which combine to form molecules.

From there, we can progress through

the levels of living order--cells, tissues,

38 Landscape Journal



organs, organ systems, organisms--

and then through the groupings of liv-ing organisms: populations, communi-

ties, ecosystems. Research makes it

clear that at each level there are de-

scribable and reasonably consistentpatterns of order up to the global scale.At the ecosystem level, these patternslink together all living things, including

humans. Thus the ecosystem concept

gives scientific substance to the intui-tions of myriad holistic thinkers

through history, from Lao Tzu to Chief

Seattle to John Muir, who have seenwholeness in nature.

This brings us back to the wordlandscape and the limitations involved inconsidering the surface expression of all

this wonderful complexity as a mere

picture. Ecosystematic order lies

within and informs the landscape we

see. Small ecosystems combine tomake larger ones, and these combine to

tnake still larger ones, and so on up tothe regional and eventually the global

scale. If we can observe that order atevery scale and work with it, we can

hope to bring our perceptions into con-gruence with nature’s order. We can

hope to restore humanity to its right-

fully harmonious role in nature’s

scheme of things. On a practical level,

we might reduce pollution and

environmental degradation. And we

might restore the relationship between

image and substance.With all this in mind, I propose

that we redefine the word landscape as

the visible manifestation of an ecosystem.

When we design a landscape, we arequite literally shaping an ecosystem,

and we might hope to approach the

beauty and balance of a natural sys-tem. Landscape architecture thenbecomes the joining of human percep-

tion and ecosystematic order and this, I

propose, is the most promising direc-

tion in which the seeds of our profes-

sion can float.While landscape as visible eco-

system presents a view of the worldquite different from the reductionist

view of the early-20th-century avant-

garde, there are commonalities. What

the two have in common is a search forunderlying order based on scientific

understanding, along with a faith that

human creativity can use such under-

standing to give cultural significance to

bare theory. The radical difference

between the two views lies in the factthat one seeks order by breaking thewhole into component parts, while the

other seeks to augment and expressinteractive wholeness, ecological pro-cess, and relationship with the larger

world.

Order in Ecosystems

Ecosystematic order, while enor-

mously complex in its infinite detail, is

relatively simple in concept. In es-

sence, ecosystems are defined by threemodes of order, all of which we reshapewhen we design a landscape (Lyle

1985a).

The first is structural order,which describes the composition of liv-ing and nonliving elements: rocks, soil,

plant, and animal species. In consider-

ing ecosystem structure, we expandour focus from an exclusive preoccupa-tion with humans to include all life. In

natural ecosystems, structure is usuallyconsistent in that each species inhabitsa particular niche and maintains

ongoing interactions with certain other

species. We can understand ecosystemstructure as a process in that it changesin time, either gradually through the

progressive sequence called succession,or rapidly through sudden perturba-

tion. Natural structures organize

themselves according to certain consis-

tent principles. For example, complexnetworks of interaction and diversityare generally associated with stability.When humans redesign a landscapewithout concern for this natural order,

the result is usually oversimplification,

ecological disorder, and instability,even though the designed landscapemay have a strong pictorial order.

The second mode of ecosystemorder is the functional system, the flowsof energy and materials that distribute

the necessities of life to all the species

included in the structure. These flowsconstitute the dynamics of the eco-system and often explain the flux and

change that it undergoes. As withstructure, they operate within certain

rules that define the behavior of eco-systems. And also like structure,materia and energy flows are easily

altered by human activity. When we

include ecosystem functions in thedesign process, we deal with energy

and with flows of water and nutrients

and other substances which, in amountsthat are too large or too small, cause

serious disruption in the environment.

The third mode of ecosystem

order is comprised of locational pat-terns and is the only one oftenconsciously observed in landscapedesign. The shape, character, and

cover of the landscape vary in space,

creating ranges of conditions that differin their ability to support different spe-

cies and communities and different

human activities.

In natural landscapes, these

three basic modes of ecosystematicorder combine to generate form. Thus

what we see in a natural landscape is

the direct expression of its structural,

functional, and locational order as they

exist at that particular moment. Formis the visible manifestation of underly-

ing organization. In fact, the order is socomplex that only an observer who isknowledgeable in the ecology of land-scape will perceive it within the form.

Natural order is not designed for

human perception or understanding.

One understands the order of a natural

landscape only by meeting it on its ownterms.

In the designed landscape, form

is a somewhat different matter. Ecolog-

ical order is as much there as in a

natural landscape, but it meets and

merges with human activity and with

aesthetic order as perceived by the

human mind. We can know natureonly through perception and intellect.

Where the merging is harmonious,

where ecological and aesthetic orderare in congruence, we have a human

ecosystem.A human ecosystem embodies

ecological order, including the wholephysical, emotional, and cultural realm

of humanity, in human terms. Such a

landscape has deep form, becauseunderlying its surface and giving it

deeper substance is this cohesive fun-

damental order. Thus deep form isshaped by the interactions of innerecological process and human vision,which can make the underlying order

visible and meaningful in human

terms: Such deep form stands in con-

trast to shallow form, which has only

Lyle 39



Figure 1. The garden of Vaux-le-Vicomte: deep form and Cartesian order. Photographerunknown.

Figure 2. Isamu Noguchi’s California Scenario a summation of the California landscape.

the surface perceptual order and lacksthe solidity of coherent process beneath

the surface. In deep form is a meetingof appearance and reality, mind and

nature, art and science.To generate deep form requires a

rational understanding of natural sys-

tems in combination with intuitive

imagery, and thus a design process thatcombines high levels of both analyticaland creative thinking. The right and

left sides of the brain come into alter-

nating play, each feeding the other.

This interplay of creativity and

rationality is the passageway to deepform. As in nature, form is the

expression of process (Lyle 1985b). In

the process of design, we merge human

creativity with the ongoing rhythm andharmonies of nature’s evolving order.

What I propose then is that wetake the underlying complex and ele-

gant ecosystematic order of nature as

the essential and fundamental inspira-tion for design. Too often, landscapearchitects have ignored the inspirationfor creativity offered by natural pro-

cesses and have chosen instead to view ecological factors as constraints oncreativity. Too often, too, they haveresponded to nature by shaping paleimitations of her forms in the pictur-

esque tradition and in so doing haveproduced shallow form.

Illustrations of Deep For m

Now, to illustrate what I mean by

this, let’s consider several examples of

deep form: historical and contempo-

rary examples including two drawn

from my own work.

Historical Examples. The garden of

Vaux-le-Vicomte is a magnificent

example of deep form, perhaps the

greatest in history (Figure 1). It is the

Cartesian concept of natural order

made not only visible but palpable.

Vaux-le-Vicomte was completed tenyears after the death of Ren~ Descartesand thirty years after publication of his

Discourse on Method. Though we knowthat Andr~ Le Notre, the designer of

Vaux-le-Vicomte, studied mathematicsin his younger years, there is no evi-

dence that he read Descartes, and thetwo men almost certainly never met.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to walkthrough this garden and not know thatLe Notre was profoundly affected by

Descartes’ conception of a precise,mechanically and mathematically pre-dictable universe. The static grid and

the precise geometry of the forms

express a strong sense of underlyinguniversal Cartesian order. Although

some historians have characterized Le

Notre as a master of illusion, his true

genius was in the ab solute clarity of hisforms. In fact, the analyses of Hazel-

hurst (1980) and others who see Vaux

as no more than a collection of visualtricks show how far astray art historians

can go in applying the principle of art

4 Landscape Journal



criticism to works that are part of the

earth.

Beyond giving expression to aconcept of order beneath the surface,Vaux clearly embodies the potentials of

human control. The palace stands at

the center in the position of dominance,and the controlling forces emanate

from there. This is a static, precisely

ordered landscape, an image of know-

able, controllable nature: deep form atits best and most profound, providing a

model for the next 300 years of cultural

development. Its forms tell us a great

deal about the culture of 17th-century

France and about the ways in which a

landscape can give expression to na-ture and culture. But it presents a view

of nature and culture very different

from the ecological view. Perhaps even-tually we will find ways to give forms to

our ecological understanding as elo-quent as those Le Notre gave to thereductionist model. That is a task for a

truly exploratory avant-garde.

Now we by pass three centuriesduring which strict geometric for-

malism of the kind practiced by Le

Notre came and went several times in

the fickle world of design. But the

notion of a mechanically ordered world

that gave meaning to its forms retained

intellectual predominance. The next

example stands in contrast to Le

Notre’s work; it has nothing to do with

mechanical order and much to do with

ecological order. This is Isamu No-

guchi’s Ca lifornia Scenario, which sum-marizes the natural landscape of a very

large state in a space of less than anacre (Figure 2). It is an austere, evoca-

tive work as beautiful in its way asVaux. The tiny river, hardly more than

two to three feet wide, recalls all of the

narrow, trickling rivers of California

that wind their ways through flat

brown valleys. But the course and thebanks of Noguchi’s river are stone;there is nothing here of ecological pro-cess. This is not an ecosystem in any

sense; rather it is a visual representa-tion of one. For all its symbolic attach-ment to nature, California Scenario is stillan essentially pictorial work. Is it deep

form? In some ways it is, in other

ways not.Now consider a work that incor-

porates process without pictorialsuggestion. Michael Van Valkenburgh’sIsaacs Water Wall is a simple series of

Figure 3. Michael Van Valkenburgh’s Isaacs Water Wall. Photograph by Michael Van

Valkenburgh and Associates.

three copper panels within a wooclframe (Figure 3). The copper was

roughened with steel wool and treatedwith acid solutions to hasten oxidation.Water washes over the copper panels

after being introduced through a set of

carefully placed openings. The copper

gradually changes color and texture as

it oxidizes, and the wood frame is peri-odically repainted in tones that contrast

with the current panel color. Thus peo-ple join into the process of nature.

Van Valkenburgh’s panels are

Lyle 4



Figure 4. Lyle garden.

simple rectangles, equal in size, forms

that have more in common with Le

Notre than with Noguchi. Neverthe-

less, the expression of p rocess is vivid;it makes deep connections.

Examples of Author’s Work. T h e

next two examples are drawn from my

own work; they are two ongoing proj-ects that have become processes in

themselves. The first of these is my

own garden and laboratory for explor-ing landscape form (Figure 4). Specif-

ically, it is a place for exploring mind-

nature relationships and searching for

forms that give expression to eco-systematic order.

While Vaux-le-Vicomte has little

or no relationship with the landscapebeyond its boundaries, my garden de-

rives its forms from the processes of thelarger landscape of which it is a part.

The eftbrt here is to embrace and distill

ecological process and complexity.

The garden lies at the base of theSan Gabriel Mountains, a dramatically

rugged range on the edge of the south-ern California urban area. This

mountain interface zone is the setting

of a dramatic and dynamic set of eco-

logical processes at the transition frommountain to valley. Writing of its vol-

atile character, John McPhee (1988)

compared the interface landscape to a

battle zone: "The first line of battle is

where the people meet the moun-

tains-up the steep slopes where the

subdivisions stop and the brush

.begins." The garden incorporates andexpresses the major transition pro-

cesses in a more conciliatory way. Thusit is not an imitation of natural forms,

but an expression in human terms of

natural processes.The most active points in the nat-

ura landscape of southern California

occur where water collects and moves.When runoff water pours out of the

canyons at the mountains’ edge, it

spreads out and flows at a slower paceover a broad depression called a wash

(Figure 5), much of it percolating intounderground storage along the way.Washes are important nodes for dis-sipating flood waters and recharging

groundwater. They are covered with

rocks and dotted with plants struggling

to take hold.

Figure 5. Southern California wash, one of the region’s most characteristic landscape forms.

42 Landscape.Journal



The analog washes in the gardenplay a similar role, holding water and

allowing it to percolate (Figures 6 and7). Thus the process is the same, andthe basic material--rock--is the same

as that of the natural wash, but it is

used in a controlled way at a scalerelated to human dimensions. Theform of the garden wash does not

mimic the natural wash, but recalls its

process in human terms related to thehuman environment.

In the mountain canyons abovethe washes, the water from the upper

peaks falls toward the valley in a seriesof cascading streams (Figure 8), which

are also represented in the garden in

abstract terms (Figure 9).

In the native plant forms of the

foothill zone, one sees the meager andefficient water regimen of an arid zone

and an abundance of solar energy (Fig-

ure 10). They give visible expression to

semi-desert flows of water and energy.

The leaves are small, mostly grayish-green, and many of them turn their

edges to meet the sun’s rays, thus mini-mizing water loss. Most of the plants,

except for the oaks, are sparse and low

growing. The plant community of the

garden follows the same principles,though only a few of the plants arenatives of the zone (Figure 11). The

result is a complex composition of var-

ied fine textures in shades of grayish toreddish-green.

From the very personal and intu-

itive forms of the garden, we go to alarger and much more diverse land-

scape, the forms of which evolved outof a more formal design process in

which a number of specialists partici-

pated. The Institute for Regenerative

Studies will be a living environment for

90 students and scholars on the campusof the California State Polytechnic Uni-

versity. The residents will grow food,generate energy, recycle water andnutrients, and, in the process, they will

experiment with and demonstrate sus-

tainable life-support technologies. The

16-acre site will function as a human

ecosystem, that is, it incorporates thestructural and functional principles

that support a natural ecosystem in

equilibrium and thereby sustain it. The

important point here involves the

Figure 6. Analog wash in the garden.

Figure 7. Analog wash, urban forms.

Lyle 43



Figure 8. A wild cascading stream in the San Gabriel mountains.

design process, which focused first ondeveloping the order of the ecosystemand then on giving that order visualexpression. We might call this processForm Follows Flow. It may be the surest

route to deep form.

The diagram in Figure 12 was

the first sketch made in an effort to

draw together information from all the

experts of the design team and to shapeit into an integrated whole. The dia-

gram is intuitive and very rough; it is

here to demonstrate a means for shap-ing ecosystematic order. Similar

sketches described initial efforts toward

structural and locational order.

For the sake of brevity, I will notdeal with structure or location for the

moment, but will trace the development

of the dynamics of energy and material

flow, as it evolves through the designprocess and eventually finds expressionin landscape and architectural form. Af-

ter a period of study and refinement,

the initial sketch developed into the

more clearly articulated flow modelshown in Figure 13. T his model includesthe flows of energy, water, and nutri-ents, describing in qualitative termsthe functional order of the Institute.

The next step was to develop thequalitative model into quantifications

of flow and into actual form on the

land. This form translation for water

flow is shown in Figure 14. At thispoint, form is beginning to evolve out

of process.Structural and locational order

developed in concert with functional

order. The plan that eventually

emerged is shown in Figure 15. The

forms in the plan reflect processes ofbiotic production, which together con-

stitute a diverse agricultural ecology.

Each of the component productionmethods--terraced polycultures,

agroforestry, intensive vegetable pro-duction, and grain fields--is suitable

to particular locational situations, andeach is associated with certain charac-

teristic forms in the landscape. Thelegend explains these forms; by refer-

ring to them, one can read the patternof the agroecosystem on the plan. Ide-ally, this pattern will read just as clearly

in the landscape when the project iscompleted. Thus the perceived land-

scape will express the internal ecolog-

ical order. The forms of the communityas they are evolving from this processof design are shown in Figures 16, 17,

and 18.

We live in a time when our con-

ceptions of nature and the human role

within it are evolving; for the moment

they seem blurred and contradictory.Much contemporary landscape reflects

this confusion. A major task for a land-

scape architectural avant-garde is to

explore possibilities for restoring

cohesive relationships between p eopleand nature and to give form to rela-tionship. In such a time there must




Figure 11. Plants of semi-arid zones in the garden.

Figure 9. Hillside stair recalls the cascading forms.

Figure 12. Form evolving from ecological concept of energy and

material flow: first sketch for flows of energy and materials in the

Institute.

Figure 10. Native plants of the semi-arid foothill zone.

Lyle 45



~ WATER

m ENERGY

~ NUTRIENTS

FLOWS OF ENERGY NUTRIENTS AND WATER

Figure 13. Form evolving from ecological concept of energy and material flow: developed and

articulated flow model.

POTABL E WATER SUPPLY =~ RACEWAYS . fo P R E T R E T M E N T~ RECLAIMED WATER SUPPLy ~ NURSERY PONDS SEWAGE ~ PUMPING TO KNOLLTOP

B G ROW OUT PONDS = P O N D D R A N~ HOLDING TANK ~ HAND TECH F~ONDS ........... BYPASS TO SEWER

~ IRRIG ATION DISTRIBUTION ~RESERVOIR ~lm~l SEWAG E TREATMENT~ AMMONIA TREATMENT DRAIN TO STREAM

WATER FLOW P N

Figure 14. Form evolving from ecological concept of energy and material flow: water flow plan

merges into the site.

I NSTI TUTE FOR REG ENER T I V E STUD I ES

necessarily be a great many floating

seeds in the air, each with different

notions of landscape form. We might

argue that all have equal value until

they have landed and tried the newsoil. But I argue that the seeds thatreally carry the future are those with

the DNA of deep form. They have the

potential--at least symbolically if not

in actuality--to fill the chasm that the

19th century dug between nature andhumanity. Nature’s underlying order is

the most powerful and the most endur-ing inspiration for landscape designand, especially in our own time, the

most compelling. The esthetics of land-

scape is not separable from the greatissues of environmental degradationand resource depletion that cast dark

shadows over the 21 st century.

Except where otherwise credited, pho-

tographs are by the author.

R~ferel~ces

Hazelhurst, E H amilton. 1980. Ga rdens of I llu-

sion. The Genius of Andr~ Le Notre. a s h

ville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Jackson, John Brinkerhoff. 1984. Discovering the

Vernacular Landscape. New Haven, Conn.,

and London: Yale U niversity Press.

Lyle,John Tillman. 1985a. The Alternating

Current of Design Process. Landscape

Journal4, 1: 7-14.

--. 1985b. Design for Human Ecosystems. N ewYork: Van N ostrand Reinhold Co.

McP hee, John. 1988 . The Control of Nature--

Los Angeles Against the Mountains.

New YorLe~ September 26: 59.Meinig, D. W. 1976. The Beholding Eye: Ten

Versions of the Same Scene. Landscape

Architecture 66, 1 : 47-55.Thacker, Christopher. 1979. 7;~e History of Gar-

dens. Berkeley and Los Angeles:

University of California Press.

Van Valkenburgh, Michael R. 1986. Notationsof Nature’s Process. Landscape Architecture

76, 1: 40-46.

SITE PLAN

C L IF O R N I S T T E P O L Y T E C H N I C U N IV E R S F r Y P O M O N

Figure 15. Form evolving from ecological concept of energy and material flow: site plan

developed around the pattern of flow.




Figure 16 (top left), 17 (top right), and 18 (bottom). Model of the preliminary design for the Institute.

Jacobs 4 7

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LYLE John Can Floating Seeds Make Deep Forms 37.Full