Review: The Modern Architectural Landscape, by Caroline Constant

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Caroline Constant. The Modern Architectural Landscape Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, 344 pp., 139 b/w illus. $30.00, ISBN 9780816676354 In an era when many think the historic narratives of landscape architecture and architecture are irreconcilably distinct, Caroline Constant elegantly constructs “thresholds out of boundaries” (99). Written over twenty years, the essays collected in The Modern Architectural Landscape critique recognized projects from the 1920s design of Sunnyside Gardens in New York City to the 1980s competition for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, countering the assumption that architects did not play a role in “shaping new attitudes toward the field” of landscape architecture (vii). Constant persuasively describes how the relationship between modern architecture and landscape architecture has never been monolithic, but rather becomes “capable of elaboration and change by means of iterative processes of negotiation” (8). Formulating an alternative framework, she reassesses the “nature of the architecture-landscape continuum” (vii) in the West, suggesting it has been far more fluid than previously acknowledged. Binding Constant’s nine essays (three new, six revised) is the contention that there were modernist architects who took landscape seriously. She uses text as well as selected black-and-white photographs and drawn plans for each project to build the arguments within contextually rich frameworks. In the end, she has deconstructed the abstract white building placed on the tabula rasa as the quintessential product of modern architecture, a deeply embedded trope in architectural as well as landscape history. Her argument expands on David Leatherbarrow’s descriptions of shared topographical conditions of architecture and landscape architecture to engage in the process and the final product of design, socially, culturally, and ecologically.1 Setting the stage for the essays, Constant’s introduction describes “potential points of convergence” between architecture and landscape architecture practice. She begins with the challenge that “if we understand landscape as the medium through which the social, political, and physical structures that endow the ground with cultural value are brought …