A Dutch perception interpretation of the landscape

A Dutch perception: a rational interpretation of the formal language of the landscape
By Saskia de Wit
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2006, Landschaft - Architektur - Kunst - Design, CGI-Studies 4



This paper proposes a rational method for interpreting the formal language of landscapes, particularly in the context of Dutch lowlands. Through a systematic analysis of landscapes as layers of natural, cultural, urban, and architectural forms, the authors present a design toolbox aimed at addressing contemporary challenges such as urbanization, agricultural restructuring, and water management.


Inge Bobbink und Saskia de Wit

The landscape speaks many different languages and we all hear a different
one. To communicate our different perceptions and interpretations of the
landscape it is necessary to translate those different languages into one of our
own. That language could be an artistic language, a historical one or a formal
one. At the Faculty of Architecture in Delft, at the Chair of Architecture and
Landscape, we have developed a method to understand the formal language
of the landscape. The systematic unravelling of the formal characteristics
results in a design toolbox. This toolbox enables us to address present pro-
blems of urbanisation, de-urbanisation, restructuring of agriculture, water
management, etc.
Landscapes in this analytical sense can be regarded as accumulations of sy-
stems or treatments that have piled up and acted upon one another over time
informed by a succession of functional-morphological transformations.
That this method is developed in Delft is understandable since the Dutch
lowlands incontestably have their own formal system which can only be de;-
ned by unravelling it into layers. Its physical-spatial development, rather than
following an unbroken course, crystallizes in stages and it is here that this
layeredness characterizing every landscape is most clearly visible. The natural
landscape, cultural landscape, urban landscape and architectural landscape
(whether latent or present) each has an organization and form of its own.
The whole steps off from the natural landscape. The natural landscape has
a form that re;ects its geological evolution but has no formal determinants.
We can imagine this form as being built up from a number of ‘basic forms’
whose physical appearance is de;ned by the relative strengths of land, water
and wind. The basic form of the lowlands combines the arabesque shape of
the coast with the peat cushion beyond it and the triangle of the delta. The
20 Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
Layering of the landscape: the natural, cultural, urban and architectural landscape
The architectural landscape is a transformation of the foregoing three layers.
1: St. Germain-en-Laye in Paris (1665/1669) is a direct transformation of the natural landscape of
the River Seine.
2: Villa Cetinale near Siena (1678) is a transformation of the cultural landscape of agricultural
terraces, which in itself is a transformation of the natural landscape.
3: The Vondelpark in Amsterdam (1864-1877) is a transformation of the urban fabric, which is an
adaptation of the cultural landscape of peat reclamations, which again is an adaptation of the natural
landscape of the rivers IJ, Amstel and Schinkel.
1 2 3
21 Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
cultural landscape arose out of a process of cultivation enacted on the natural
landscape. The urban landscape for its part arose out of a civil engineering
process enacted on both natural and cultural landscapes. The historical la-
yeredness and spatial cohesion of the geomorphogenetic system of nature,
the land development system of agriculture and the civil engineering system
of the city together constitute the rural-urban system. One might describe the
layer where the form is most consciously created as the architectural landscape.
Landscape architectural quality arises where the architectural treatment of
the basic forms in the successive layers (the genius loci) renders the landscape
‘lucid’ or ‘legible’ as an identity in its own right.
1
This strati;cation is not harmonic, not an endless re;ection of the ‘sub-
structure’ in the ‘superstructure’, the ground in the form; rather it is accom-
panied by reworkings, transformations. These can be ;rst-hand topographical
renderings, architectural transformations or visual references. Topographical
renderings are technical and in landscape architectural terms one- or two-
dimensional; architectural transformations bring to bear a three-dimensional,
architecturally controlled cohesion. Visual references are associative and
‘four-dimensional’, being about time or the history of the place.
2
We can distinguish four aspects in a landscape architectural design. These
are the basic form (the ground plan), the geometric treatment of the topo-
graphy; the spatial form, the architectural treatment of the spatial system or
three-dimensional space of the landscape; the visual structure, the treatment of
the metaphorical images of the natural, cultural and urban landscapes; and
the programmatic form, the spatial organization of the programme. By distingui-
shing these aspects we are able to further explore the interaction at every scale
between the architectural form and the underlying landscape structure.
3
Implicit formal moments reside in the natural, cultural and urban lands-
capes. Whenever these moments are made explicit in a design, when the
natural, cultural or urban landscape are given expression in the design, we can
describe it as an architectural landscape.
The 20th-century large-scale landscape design admits to such moments in
which the essence of the landscape ;nds expression. There is also a string of
examples among small-scale designs, villas for instance, that we can justi;ably
1
Wouter Reh, Clemens M. Steenbergen and Peter de Zeeuw, Landschapstransformaties, Publicatiebureau
Delft, 1995, p. 10
2
Saskia I. de Wit, Typology of the Dutch Lowlands, Publicatiebureau Delft, 2005, p.6
3
Clemens M. Steenbergen and Wouter Reh, Architectuur en landschap, het ontwerpexperiment van de klassieke
Europese tuinen en landschappen, Uitgeverij Thoth, Bussum, 2003, pp. 383-385
22 Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
describe as architectural landscapes. The most explicit architectural form in
the Dutch lowlands is that of the villa landscape, whose impact extends con-
sistently through the scales from delta to individual plot.
A pantheon of the lowlands
The lowlands villa or buitenplaats (literally, a ‘place outside’) evolved from a
medieval forti;ed manor into a type that re;ected and intensi;ed the cultural
landscape, the plantage (Dutch for plantation). Here, productive landscape (ne-
gotium, work) and pleasure ground (otium, restorative relaxation) joined forces
in an enclosed orthogonal composition of house, orchards, avenues, woods,
vegetable gardens, formal gardens and water features. Concentrations of
these lowlands villas sprang up round Amsterdam, The Hague and Utrecht.
The villa landscape expresses Holland’s lowlands at different scales. The
;rst level is that of the plot and the layout of grounds, proceeding from the
two-dimensional grid of the cultural landscape.
The second level is that of the villa landscape, the constellation of villas as
these interact in an interpretation of the landscape. The third level is that of
Holland’s delta region as a whole.
The villa
The precursors of the villas were the medieval manors, estates with a
feudal agricultural background. These manors were sparsely ;tted out and
their gardens were small and contained mainly agricultural features, such as
an orchard and a kitchen garden. They were located around the towns in the
Dutch lowlands located at strategic places along key routes. Many manors
sprang up in the river landscape, whose higher-lying banks could be used to
control the water routes. In later periods the old manors were often trans-
formed into villas and any one manor was soon joined by more. This gave
rise to strings of villas.
The villa reached its apogee in the 17th century. A powerful economic
growth brought an increase in the number of villas and enlargement of the
existing ones. The money earned from trade in tropical products was invested
in the secure commodity of land.
Most 17th-century villas stood in claylands and peatlands whose luxurious
appearance offered the appropriate context for the mood the villas were to
project. Besides, these ;at regions were suitable for laying out formal gardens
and were easily reached by barges towed from the shore by horses and the
principal means of transport in those days.
23 Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
Fig. 2. Villa: Heemstede, the
villa as developed from the peat
landscape (copperplate etching
by I. de Moucheron and D.
Stoopendaal, 1700/1702).
These villas, the plantages described earlier, can be construed as a landscape
architectural treatment of the plot, or alternatively as the projection of a
rational plot onto the natural landscape. They were based on an ‘ideal’ plan
which was technically and formally optimized and as such self-suf;cient. This
schema was carefully laid in place in the natural framework of the landscape
so that both it and the form of the natural landscape became clear. The unity
of the space was achieved by a water system that ‘mediated’ between the
ideal plan and the natural landscape. Here, differences between the different
landscape types need taking into consideration.
The peat matrix consists of clusters of elongated peat excavation ;elds,
the treatment of the peatland plot in the lowlands villa being such as to sub-
divide it into a chain of garden ‘rooms’. The grid of reclaimed land consists
of polder modules that together approximate a square and accommodate the
ideal plot size. The polder villa in the reclaimed land proceeds from a subdivi-
24
sion of plot measurements into the square of the parterre, an architectural
reduction of the polder module. On the river banks mediation is between the
linear land divisions of the hinterland and the bend in the river. The lowland
villa on the beach ridges consists of a rectangular plot draped over the con-
tours of the landscape so as to best exploit the view across the lowlands. The
differences affect both the scenography and the way the garden composition
is articulated.
After a relapse in the 18th century, the following century saw the Dutch
economy ;ourish anew. It was the dawn of the industrial age, and a fresh
and vigorous period for trade with the East Indies. This prosperity was once
again re;ected in the villas. Many old villas were spruced up and enlarged and
a string of new ones built.
The differences between the villas of the 17th century and those of the
19th can be related to changes in garden design, the cheap sandy sites that
became available and the town-dweller’s widening radius of activity. Unlike
the 17th-century lowland villas, where nature was the ‘improved’ man-made
variety - the productive landscape - and wild and chaotic nature was regarded
as incomplete and to be looked down on, the garden art now prevailing was
an idealized natural landscape: a man-made natural prospect with a mix of
woods, meadows and buildings and structures in a rustic setting. This new
garden art required another, more uneven landscape, namely the sands along
the coast and on Utrechtse Heuvelrug, the ridge of hills passing between
Utrecht and Amersfoort. The arrival of the train and the tram (horse-drawn
at ;rst) opened up these areas to the towns.
4
The landscape types of the Dutch lowlands have produced a wide array
of villas. Here the natural geomorphology and colonizing techniques were
decisive for the variety in their architecture. In that sense the villas of Holland
were architectural ‘observatories’ from which the delta landscape’s spatial
qualities could be scrutinized. Together they presented a ‘pantheon of the
lowlands’ that illustrated and recorded the architectural wealth of the delta.
geography of the villa landscape
Wherever several villas were laid out in proximity, they grew into an ar-
chitectural aggregate. Responding to each other, they interpreted the spatial
structure of the cultural landscape. In a deeper sense they interpreted the form
of the natural landscape. A succession of villas arose on the beach ridges.
4
Bart Bordes, Het Hollandse buitenplaatsenlandschap, geogra;e en ontwikkeling in de tijd, unpublished, Delft,
2001
Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
25
Fig. 3. Villa landscape along the inner edge of the dunes, thereby exploiting the differences in
height among the dunes for optimum views across Wijkermeer and to Haarlem and Amsterdam.
(copperplate etching from Brou;rius and De Leth, Het Zegepralent Kennemerlant, 1729.
drawing: Sandra van Assen)
Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
26 Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
Fig. 4. Distribution of the villas in the delta (17th century). (drawing: Bart Bordes)
27
These were linked breadthways with the lagoon and the dune landscape in
terms of views and/or by the network of avenues in the beach plain. Along
the inner edge of the dunes, at Wijkermeer (then an inland sea), a regional
landscape theatre took shape that visually tied the inner dune edge to Amster-
dam. Strings of villas sprang up along small rivers south of Amsterdam with
cross-views across the water. In the land reclamations villas lined the polder
avenues with the drainage system linking them at the rear. Along comparable
lines, the villas in the sand excavation at the edge of the peatland are strung
together by drainage ditches and avenues in parallel marking as this does the
transition between the Utrechtse Heuvelrug and the peat lands.
The factor binding all types is their close link with the city. The territory of
the city related directly to the position of the villa in the environs. In the 16th
century, when wars still made the open country a dangerous place, there were
limits to the urban territory. It increased in the 17th century and in a few cases
territories met. Villas sprang up throughout the areas surrounding the towns.
The Amsterdam territory was particularly expansive and the villas of Amster-
dam merchants could even be found near the town gates of Utrecht. In the
19th century even larger areas became accessible and the territory reached
far beyond the con;nes of what are now the Holland provinces. Territories
began to overlap and the borders between towns became blurred, generating
a Dutch urban landscape, a Delta Metropolis.
the delta
Here, an aggregate of villas gave rise to architectural landscapes of a
wide-ranging scale, surface area and composition stepping off from differ-
ent cultural landscapes. The distribution pattern of the 17th-century villas
in the coastal landscape was directly related to the beach ridges, peat rivers,
reclaimed polders and natural water network of the lagoon. In regional terms
they amount to a unitary whole, presenting in all their typological wealth an
architectural rendition of the morphology of the natural landscapes of the
delta. As such, these villas mark the architectural limits of the urban territory
in Holland’s delta landscape.
Current landscape transformations
Tools generated from the classic repertoire are proofed in an experimental
way, like in the University of Hannover in the department of ‘Garden art and
Landscape architecture’.
There are a number of basic forms to be discerned in the montage land-
scape of today’s metropolis. The landscape of ;ows is the landscape architectural
Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
28 Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
staging of the urban machinery of motion; as such, it arranges the urban
;eld in accordance with the mobility scenario of the metropolis. The plantage
organizes the colonization of the urban ;eld using the new programmes of
the metropolis. The landscape theatre for its part contains the visual-spatial
expression of the genius loci of the polder plain.
landscape of ;ows
Kinetic perception is the stepping-off point here; it relates to the town-
dweller’s movements by car, tram, train or airplane, seen from which the urban
landscape ;ashes by episodically. How these glimpses are perceived depends
on the way the route crosses the natural landscape, towns and cultural land-
scape. The landscape of ;ows is in fact an enlargement of the principle of the
route as basis for a succession of ‘scenes’, as in the 18th-century landscape
garden. The locomotion is motorized and en masse; just as the ‘scenic drive’
threaded through the landscape garden, so the motorways of today wind like
human rivers though the urban landscape.
5
The infrastructure has become self-suf;cient, taking up ever more physical
space and becoming visually dominant. The regional transport network steps
outside both the morphology of the natural landscape and the architecture
of the city. The nodes in this network - structural works and roundabouts,
intersections with railways and waterways and the sculptural-looking build-
ings and ensembles of the motorway decor - are not directly bound to the
rural and urban topography but constitute a new metropolitan topology.
The motorways of Holland make their way with maximum ef;ciency
through the dense cultural landscape. Agricultural lots are laid out at right
angles whenever possible to minimize loss of land. In the reclaimed polders
the road is set low and straight; at their edge it rises to adopt a direction
towards another polder where the most expedient direction is often not on
axis with the existing stretch. These alignments must be reconciled - hence
the gentle curves designed into the route.
Often, in the straight lines we can recognize elements of formal staging
such as viaducts, sight lines to towers or chimneys and the sometimes rigid
lines of poplars. Changes in direction are often picturesque moments; a bend
disappears in the trees around a water crossing to reappear with a new line
of sight.
5
Reh/Steenbergen/de Zeeuw, Landschapstransformaties, 1995, p. 64; Ministerie van Landbouw, Natuur-
beheer en Visserij, Vormgeven aan stadslandschappen; Visie stadslandschappen 2, LNV Directie Natuurbe-
heer, Den Haag, 1995, p. 25
29 Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
Figs. 5, 6. Landscape of ;ows. Crossing the natural framework of the landscape can sometimes lead
to dramatic moments, such as when the A4 leaves the peat landscape at Roelofsarendsveen to enter
the plains of Haarlemmermeer, dramatized by the narrow passage where the A4 slips under the belt
canal and by the bend made by the motorway to move into alignment with the land divisions of the
polder.
30 Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
Fig. 7. Plantage. Ellen Marcusse‘s design (2001) for Almere-Hout, a district of Almere, is based on
an trade-off between a simple urban grid and an invisible landscape layer composed of the many
archaeological sites in the plan area, the former bed of the Zuiderzee. Holes are to be scooped out
of the urban fabric to receive public gardens at key archaeological sites to enable future excavations
there. The location of these sites is as yet unknown, so that the resulting pattern has a major element
of unpredictability built in.
31
Figs. 8, 9. Landscape theatre. In ‚Deltawerken 2.0‘ (;nal year design by Ronald Rietveld, Amsterdam
Academy of Architecture 2004), for an area between the Rijn and Waal rivers separating Arnhem
and Nijmegen, an expanse of 3000 ha has been secured within the small-scale urban landscape. The
design targets a ;ood bypass proposed to counter the threat of peak discharges from the Rijn and
Waal. This civil engineering intervention comprises an empty ‘green river’ which is expected to ;ll
every 20 years with excess water from the rivers. The void is contained by a 200 metre wide dyke
planted with 50,000 elms. The existing settlements seem to ;oat as islands in the void.
Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
32 Inge Bobbink, Saskia de Wit
plantage
This is the urban colonization grid whose programme is staged in landscape
architectural terms. In its basic form the plantage harks back to land reclama-
tion, the colonization of the cultural landscape and the rational pattern of
the 17th-century Dutch town. The term plantage (plantation) evokes associa-
tions with markets and production, and denotes that the underlying landscape
has been technically modi;ed. The plantage is the ordering principle in urban
programmes for dwelling, work and leisure (as regards plot subdivision, di-
mensions, form and alignment) but also for programmes geared to intensive
cultivation such as forestry and glasshouse horticulture. These programmes
lay down rules for the physical environment that give rise to regular patterns
(grids) placed upon the existing natural and cultural landscape.
6
The basis for spatially organizing the urban programme is an imaginary
rational grid of squares laid over the existing landscape. The grid module
derives from the dimensional characteristics of the urban programme but is
carefully balanced against the grid dimensions of the cultural landscape. This
landscape gains architectural expression in the interaction of new grid and
existing landscape. This in turn gives rise to urban and rural fragments with
an active duty to perform and able, together with the plantage, to effect a new
compositional equilibrium.
landscape theatre
In the landscape theatre, the city-dweller stands face to face with the
landscape of the plain. The word theatre refers to the spatial staging of the
panorama, the ‘scene’. The theatre is conceivable at every scale within the
panoramic range, with the confrontation with nature, the silence and the
emptiness the main points of contact. At centre stage in the urban ;eld is the
phenomenon of the ‘inverted horizon’ internalizing the physical horizon of
the cultural landscape.
Landscape of ;ows, plantage and landscape theatre can be regarded as
landscape architectural prototypes of the urban transformation. Described
here as complete and more or less self-suf;cient landscapes, in reality they
are impossible to distinguish geographically. In the villa landscape with its
intense relationship between villas (plantage), the view across the open land-
scape (landscape theatre) and the transport arteries formalizing the urban
territory (landscape of ;ows) we can see how an ingenious interplay between
the prototypes can breach the scales de;ning the landscape and endow that
landscape with architectural form.
6 Reh/ Steenbergen/de Zeeuw, Landschapstransformaties, 1995, p. 64; Ministerie van Landbouw, Na-
tuurbeheer en Visserij, Vormgeven aan stadslandschappen, 1995, p. 24