13.09.04
cook, evans
Although Robert Cook discusses temporality in the practice of landscape / architecture, he frames time mostly in terms of an imagined future unfolding from the conditions we set forth in the act of design. If we suppose the city to develop and change in ways analogous to Cook’s ‘new paradigm’ of ecology, it seems to me that his argument might also structure an understanding of the past. The study of ecology is a study of history, in that ecology seeks to understand form through the relationship between parts in a system and through the dynamic forces that drive the constant shifting of those relationships in time. In his Glacier Bay example, Cook notes that the variables intrinsic to the system—the nature and frequency of disruption, the range of adaptations exhibited by particular species—lead to a community in which individuals and types change at different rates and in different ways. The ecosystem, rather than representing a coherent stage in a linear model of succession, in fact becomes a highly variable and highly contingent set of individuals, related to each other and yet responding in different ways to different stimuli.
Each of these responses, Cook argues, is “highly contingent on history and context” (121). If we consider Cook’s argument in terms of the city—and, in particular, in terms of change within the city—his notion of “context” becomes a complex set of feedbacks in which not only does the new insert itself within an understanding of the old, but in fact the old itself adapts to the presence of the new. In Venice, the city which cannot be touched, it seems that this understanding of time might release us from the hegemony of the past by inserting the present moment, the moment of design, within a stream of time moving continuously from past to present to future. This, perhaps, is Jane Jacobs’ city in flux.
If Cook’s ‘new paradigm’ of ecology can be taken to describe the city in time, then his argument also suggests a means
by which we might understand Robin Evans’ invocation to place drawing somewhere between the corporeal and the wholly abstract. Cook notes that, in the study of ecology, mathematics “describe the dynamic flux of nature, whether it is the probability of events (statistics) or the description of rates of change (calculus).” Is it possible that these two terms, probability and rate, might occupy the interstice between ‘drawing’ (or representation) and ‘building’ (or effecting change in the city)? That is, might these terms describe the temporal operation in such a way as to both represent and bring about ‘disturbance’?