Melancholy and The Landscape Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in The Landscape

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Jacky Bowring’s Melancholy and the Landscape offers a wide-ranging

insight into how melancholy can join the eighteenth-century triad of Beauty,
Sublimity and Picturesque as a new measure of landscape’s scope and effect.
As she explores the role of shadows, fragments, weathering, among other
elements of melancholy, the role of empathy in landscape is made clear and
a potent factor on its reception.
John Dixon Hunt
Emeritus Professor of the History & Theory of Landscape
University of Pennsylvania, USA
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Melancholy and the Landscape
Written as an advocacy of melancholy’s value as part of landscape experience,

this book situates the concept within landscape’s aesthetic traditions, and
reveals how it is a critical part of ethics and empathy.
With a history that extends back to ancient times, melancholy has hovered
at the edges of the appreciation of landscape, including the aesthetic
exertions of the eighteenth century. Implicated in the more formal categories
of the Sublime and the Picturesque, melancholy captures the subtle condition
of beautiful sadness.
The book proposes a range of conditions which are conducive to
melancholy, and presents examples from each, including: The Void, The
Uncanny, Silence, Shadows and Darkness, Aura, Liminality, Fragments,
Leavings, Submersion, Weathering and Patina.
Jacky Bowring is Professor of Landscape Architecture at Lincoln University,

Christchurch, New Zealand. She is the author of A Field Guide to
Melancholy.
Routledge Research in Landscape and Environmental Design
Series editor: Terry Clements
Associate Professor, Virginia Tech
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Regions and Designed Landscapes in Georgian England

Sarah Spooner
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Landscape and Branding

The Promotion and Production of Place
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Edited by Mohammad Gharipour

Locating sadness, memory and reflection in the landscape
Jacky Bowring
Locating sadness, memory and reflection
in the landscape
Jacky Bowring
First published 2017
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Jacqueline Bowring
The right of Jacqueline Bowring to be identified as author of this

work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bowring, Jacky.Title: Melancholy and the landscape :
locating sadness, memory and reflection in the landscape / Jacky
Bowring.
Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge
research in landscape and environmental design | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016002252| ISBN 9781138946989 (hardback :
alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315670386 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Landscapes--Psychological aspects. | Melancholy. |
Landscape design. | Nature (Aesthetics) | Environmental psychology.
Classification: LCC BF353 .B686 2016 | DDC 152.4--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002252
ISBN: 978-1-138-94698-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-67038-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Saxon Graphics Ltd, Derby
Contents
List of figures ix
PART I
The place of melancholy 1
1 Placing melancholy in landscape architecture 3

2 Defining melancholy 12
3 The Sublime, the Beautiful, the Picturesque … and the
melancholy 18
4 Aesthetics 23
5 Emotion 30
6 Ethics 34
7 Empathy 42
PART II
The places of melancholy 53
8 The places of melancholy 55

9 The void 58
10 The uncanny 73
11 Silence 84
12 Shadows and darkness 87
13 Aura 92
14 Liminality 99
viii Contents
15 Fragments 109
16 Leavings 117
17 Submersion 133
18 Weathering and patina 143
19 Ephemerality and transience 149
20 Camouflage 152
21 Monochrome 157
22 Intimate immensity 161
Conclusion 170
Index 174
Figures
9.1 Butzer Design Partnership, Field of Empty Chairs,

Oklahoma City National Memorial, Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma, USA, 2001 60
9.2 Karl Biederman, Der Verlassene Raum (‘The Abandoned
Room’), Berlin, Germany, 1988–1996 60
9.3 Anna Dilengite and Sebastian Helm, memorial at the site of
the former Great Synagogue in Leipzig, Germany, 2001 61
9.4 Rodrigo Mora, Angel Muñoz and Jorge Lankin, A Place
for Memory, monument to the victims of the Caso
Degollados (‘Slit-Throat Case’), Santiago, Chile, 2006 62
9.5 Peter Majendie, Empty Chairs Temporary Memorial for the
Christchurch Earthquake, New Zealand 63
9.6 Georges-Henri Pingusson, Mémorial des Martyrs de la
Déportation (‘Memorial of the Deportation’), Paris, France,
1962 68
10.1 Andy Goldsworthy, Garden of Stones, Museum of Jewish
Heritage, New York, USA, 2003 76
10.2 Rachel Whiteread, Nameless Library: The Judenplatz
Holocaust Memorial, Vienna, Austria, 2000 78
10.3 Menashe Kadishman, Shalechet (Fallen Leaves), at Jewish
Museum, Berlin, Germany, 2001 82
12.1 The shadowy melancholy of darkness, Monaco, France 88
14.1 Jacky Bowring, Otira Roadworkers’ Memorial, 2000 102
15.1 Gustave Doré, The New Zealander, 1873 113
16.1 Brian Tolle, Irish Hunger Memorial, Manhattan, New
York, USA, 2002 122
16.2 Hossein and Angela Valamanesh, Irish Famine Memorial,
Sydney, Australia, 1999 123
16.3 Alberto Burri, Il Cretto (‘The Crack’), Earthquake
Memorial, Gibellina, Italy, 1984–1989 124
16.4 Dani Karavan, Passages, Memorial to Walter Benjamin,
Portbou, Spain, 1994 128
17.1 Kolmanskop, Namibia 137
x Figures
17.2 James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio +
Renfro, The High Line, Manhattan, New York, 2009
(showing graffiti before being painted over, and the
replaced ballast and railway tracks) 140
18.1 Abandoned sound mirror, Denge, England 146
18.2 Orford Ness – Landscape with Pagoda 147
Part I
The place of melancholy

1 Placing melancholy in
landscape architecture
Melancholy is at once complex and contradictory. For some it is an emotion,

for others a mental illness, or even a mood, a disposition, an affect, an effect.
Melancholy’s extensive history ranges across everything from cures for
something considered a disease, to paeans to its poignant beauty. While in
the Dark Ages the ‘melancholy of monks’ – also called acedia – necessitated
a redoubling of prayer and an extra dose of courage, by the Romantic era
melancholy was a source of inspiration for the poetry of Milton, Coleridge
and Keats.1 Melancholy imbues artworks from Dürer’s Melancolia I (1514)
to Anselm Kiefer’s Melancholia (1989),2 literature from Shakespeare to
Sebald, and music from the medieval mystic Hildegard of Bingen to Nick
Cave.3 But it is to the landscape that this book turns.
Landscape is itself a convoluted term, a ‘slippery word’ (Stilgoe, 1997,
p.64).4 In its original form as landschaft, the term referred to ‘a compact
territory extensively modified by permanent inhabitants’, holding within it the
idea of an occupied and ordered environment, a particular type of place
(Stilgoe, 1997, p.64). When paintings of these kinds of places were taken to
England, the word became landskip, and was forever transformed into the
idea of something seen, of scenery and views, which ultimately became the
complex word ‘landscape’. The word carries with it, then, both a pictorial
appreciation of that which is beheld in the outdoors, as well as a holistic sense
of the landscape as the place of dwelling, where culture inscribes itself. This
expansive etymology means that ‘landscape’ also encompasses architecture,
as a contiguous element of the lived-in world. Both landscape and architecture
constitute this continuous fabric, as the expressions of culture, the negotiations
of the bio-physical givens, the inscriptions of ideas, the revealing of values,
and all that makes up our occupation of places. Collectively, landscape
architecture and architecture are professions which explore, analyse, speculate
on and design the landscape, and both bodies of thought coalesce within the
writings which follow. Across its vast compass, landscape in its expansive
incorporation of gardens, environmental design, architecture, agriculture,
infrastructure, and everything between and beyond, is the embodiment of
identity. Points of reference are found as much in the representations of
landscape – paintings, films, texts – as in the experiential, sensory,
4 The place of melancholy
phenomenological realm. Whether landscape is a mirror,5 a theatre,6 a text7 or
a seamless continuity with its inhabitants,8 it is the place from which we draw
meaning, feeling; it is the armature for existence, the realm in which place and
culture co-exist, and where the self dwells. As David Crouch majestically
invokes, ‘Landscape is not perspective and horizon, a particular shape or
defined aesthetics, but caught in its occurrence of affects: felt smudges, smears,
kaleidoscope, a multi-sensual expressive poetics of potentiality, becoming and
poetics: shuffling, unstable and lively’ (Crouch, 2015, p.244).
Within this expansive and meaning-imbued terrain the landscape holds

within it the natural habitat for melancholy, as the locus of places of
contemplation, memory, death, sadness. Yet, the place of melancholy within
the landscape is one which is often resisted, marginalised and edited out. As
part of the salvaging of the idea of melancholy as a dimension of existence,
this book also offers a critique of the impoverishment of the emotional
content of the contemporary designed environment. Juhani Pallasmaa’s
critique of contemporary architecture is a lament which is true too of the
broader sphere of the designed landscape, regretting how architecture
tends to be engaged with visual effects, and it lacks the tragic, the
melancholy, the nostalgic, as well as the ecstatic and transcendental
tones of the spectrum of emotions. In consequence our buildings tend to
leave us as outsiders and spectators without being able to pull us into
full emotional participation.
(Pallasmaa, 2001, p.91)
Melancholy appears in tension with prevailing cultural attitudes at large,

and the designed landscape is no exception. Design is an embedding of
values and ideals, and a critique of any landscape at any time is therefore an
examination of the societal context, as much as of the work of the individual
designer. Landscape architecture is gaining a much more visible presence
globally, and ‘landscape’ as a concept has developed a certain cachet in a
range of disciplines, including architecture, urban design, art and geography.9
The many seductive and lavish survey books on contemporary landscape
architecture bear witness to its popularity, and browsing through these is to
open a window into the prevailing trends. The extensive tomes 1000 X
Landscape Architecture (1,024 pages) and The Sourcebook of Contemporary
Landscape Design (600 pages), for example, exhaustively sample built
landscapes and present them uncritically, as a form of ‘eye candy’ or perhaps
twenty-first-century pattern books.10
The everyday landscape is also a barometer of contemporary values. In
the popular media, in real-estate magazines, and mass market home and
garden publications, landscape design has become a commodified realm,
one of the main forms of conspicuous consumption. ‘Reality TV’ shows
such as Extreme Makeover Home Edition (USA), Backyard Blitz (Australia)
and Garden Wars (New Zealand) reduce the designed landscape to little
Placing melancholy in landscape architecture 5
more than instantaneous horizontal wallpaper. Gardens are designed and
laid out in a matter of hours, rolled out by the square metre, with the
expectation that enhancing the exterior décor of a home will either increase
its value or provide an instant cure for whatever might be troubling the
occupants. The economic value of well-designed gardens, as well as their
healing properties, are inherent within landscape architecture, yet the
theatrics of reality TV reduce all of this to superficial sensationalism.
In this context of reality TV, the emotional dimension of landscape,
rather than possessing the subtle timbre of melancholy, becomes a

melodramatic attempt to provoke extreme displays of overwhelment by the
recipients of the garden makeover. Within the culture of spectatorship – the
‘society of the spectacle’ (Debord, 2014) – the voyeuristic observation of a
stranger’s exhibition of emotion serves as entertainment, with a touch of
schadenfreude, the ‘pleasure of flinching’. The anaesthetising effect of reality
TV detaches us from really feeling, and condemns us to wander in the ‘desert
of the real’.11 Martin Jay warns that
only if aesthetic spectatorship declines the opportunity to conflate itself

entirely with the entertainment industry’s cinema of attraction can it
provide a possible alternative mode of relating to a world that threatens
to dissolve the distinction between reality and simulacra entirely and
make every experience vicarious, derivative, and ultimately hollow.
(Jay, 2003, p.117)
Bound up in the aspirations of reality TV garden makeovers, and in the vast

numbers of self-help books on dealing with sadness, and in the self-
medication for ‘depression’ is the fact that happiness has become an obsessive
compulsion, and the inability to be constantly happy is perceived as a failing,
or even a mental illness (de Graaf et al., 2002; Hamilton and Denniss, 2005).
As a consequence of the relentless pursuit of happiness, melancholy tends
to be suppressed within contemporary society. Paralleling the pharmaceutical
and popular psychological remedies, which are insistently promoted as a
means of divesting us of any emotion other than joy, landscape interventions
can simply become part of the drive for an eternal euphoria. In this context,
the contemporary designed landscape is characterised by a one-dimensional
existential spectrum, lives become sanitised and emotionally aseptic.
Melancholy’s marginalisation reflects in part modernity’s ontological
objectification – the splitting of subject and object. Philosopher Giorgio
Agamben lamented:
Nothing can convey the extent of the change that has taken place in the
meaning of experience so much as the resulting reversal of the status of
the imagination. For Antiquity, the imagination, which is now expunged
from knowledge as ‘unreal,’ was the supreme medium of knowledge.
(Agamben, 1993, p.11)
The loss of the rich realm of the imaginative, through its placement within
the subordinate category of subjectivity, is echoed in the words of geographer
Tim Edensor:
The illuminating searchlight of modern science, in its rendering history,

life and things transparent, whilst no doubt valuable in its contribution
to the sum of knowledge, tends to subject all spaces to its pitiless glare,
fostering the illusion that all might be revealed everywhere. This
monumental banishment of the dark and mysterious within such a

modern topography leaves little room for gloom and the disordered yet
evocative matter which might lurk there.
(Edensor, 2005, p.135)
Related to this severance from the world of imagination is the loss of the
introspective dimension of life. Melancholy was not simply a heightened
awareness of the poignancy of existence, but the capacity for contemplation.
A productive solitude is afforded by melancholy, in distinction from an
imposed isolation, as in the ‘acedia’ or melancholy sloth of the monks in
devotional exile in the Desert of Cells in the Egypt of the Dark Ages. A
modern-day equivalent of acedia is found in the self-imposed exile within
the isolation of technology, where all manner of personal devices have
served to construct a virtual landscape of separation. As with the monks
suffering from sloth in their cells, these worlds of isolation lack the restorative
powers of melancholy solitude. The world of MP3 players and mobile
phones is filled with noise and constant stimulation, imparting a sense of
estrangement and ennui – a negative form of melancholy which is associated
with boredom and anomie. Ever more introspective modes of entertainment,
and the idea of communication-as-entertainment, challenge the authenticity
of interpersonal relationships – as when someone who is essentially a
stranger invites you to be a ‘friend’ on an internet social networking site.
The landscape has a role in proffering places of escape, of re-building the
capacity for contemplation. Pallasmaa states the house is a ‘metaphysical
instrument, a mythical tool with which we try to introduce a reflection of
eternity into our momentary existence’ (in MacKeith, 2005, p.95). Echoing
philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s conception of the house as ‘an instrument
with which to confront the cosmos’ (Bachelard, 1969, p.46), Pallasmaa
advocates that a house is more than simply shelter, but in the words of Karsten
Harries, it can create places of meaning, places which transform ‘chaos’ into
‘cosmos’ (in MacKeith, 2005, pp.59–60). This vision of the house as a place
in which to find one’s self in the world is also true of landscape architecture.
From the tradition of hermitages in Picturesque gardens to the practice of
seeking solace within wilderness, the landscape is the locus for contemplation,
for meaningful solitude and melancholy reflection.
However, despite landscape’s potential as a site of melancholy, the
embracing of sadness or contemplation is avoided in much contemporary
design thinking. The single-minded pursuit of happiness and the avoidance
of places of solitude and contemplation are nowhere more evident than in
contemporary attitudes towards tragedy. James Steven Curl describes a
contemporary condition of ‘emotional anaemia’, a turn away from the
‘celebration of death’ (Curl, 1980, p.359). While ‘celebration’ might have
unfortunate connotations of festivity, Curl’s diagnosis highlights the
tendency to create diversions from the emotional depth of the tragic.
Many contemporary memorials are characterised by an overloading of
information, an emblemisation of the ‘data’ associated with the tragedy –

the numbers of dead, the volume of debris, the ages of victims, creating
death datascapes.12 Thomas Keenan suggests that this type of response aims
for an ‘almost automatic machinery of remembrance’, and that this ‘can
shield us from the powerful disorientation of the event the [memorials] seek
to mark’ (Keenan, 2003).
In her study of genocide memorials in Cambodia and Rwanda, Shannon
Davis found that tourists were drawn towards the informational elements of
the sites (Davis, 2009). Having the respondents draw maps and take
photographs, Davis noted that the tourists migrated towards signs or other
informational sources wherever possible. At the less formalised site of
Choeung Ek in Cambodia, where there were few directions or descriptions
for visitors to gravitate towards, the tourists were left feeling adrift. Some
felt that because of the lack of data on the site, they were left uninformed of
the facts. Yet, this is a site which is emotionally charged, where visitors
wander on paths formed only by footsteps. Through the slow erosion of the
site by foot traffic, the teeth, bones, and other fragments of those buried in
the unmarked mass graves surface and appear along the paths. Even after
such a visceral experience of the tragic, it seemed that visitors simply wanted
information, to have things neatly conveyed, perhaps manifesting a desire
for the aseptic, detached, informationally intense media culture with which
they are familiar, rather than a gut-wrenching immersion in place.
In his discussion of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of
Europe in Berlin, Agamben wrote of the two dimensions of the ‘memorable’
and the ‘unforgettable’ (Godfrey, 2007, p.243). The memorable is that which
is able to be archived, stored, sorted and placed within the orthodox devices
of memory. This parallels the predilection for informational content. The
unforgettable, however, exceeds these containers, and was applied to
Eisenman’s memorial in the context of its abstraction: the memorial is non-
representational, it is in essence a void and seeks to elude reading. Agamben’s
‘unforgettable’ is the place of melancholy in the context of memory, it is about
a wound kept open, one that is lived, suffered, rather than being catalogued
and simply ‘remembered’. It is within such moments that melancholy’s vital
role is realised, and as Rico Franses observes, such memorials
generate [...] affect, making the stranger into a melancholic griever. And
this as well is the social role of the memorial, and the social purpose
which melancholia serves; through the memorial, melancholia comes to
function as an agent of social binding.
(Franses, 2001, p.102)
Melancholy and the Landscape embraces more than simply an exploration

and amplification of melancholy itself, it also encompasses the allied
resuscitation of an emotional life, as well as contributing to the revival of the
phenomenological. Landscape architecture shares disciplinary territory with
architecture and geography, and developments in these fields complement

the striving for an emotional, phenomenological engagement with place.
Geography, for example, has recently undergone an ‘emotional turn’. The
collections Emotional Geographies (Davidson et al., 2005) and Emotion,
Place and Culture (Smith et al., 2009), as well as the journal Emotion, Space
and Society and books such as Giuliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion (2002),
mark the resurgence of the emotional self as a significant consideration in
the exploration of the lived environment. Phenomenology continues to be
an important thread within architectural theory, most notably in the work
of Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Steven Holl, and Juhani Pallasmaa, and in the
theory of Critical Regionalism as propounded by Kenneth Frampton,
Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre. More recently, phenomenology has
gained significance within the geographical literature; after the earlier
writings of David Seamon and Yi-Fu Tuan in the 1970s, there is a renaissance
of sorts instigated by contemporary geographers such as John Wylie. The
interest in the multisensory domain (Rodaway, 1994), including in particular
the non-visual (Macpherson, 2006) and the haptic, and the experiential and
embodied (Crang and Thrift, 2000) within geography provides useful terrain
for landscape architecture, and most especially for a landscape of melancholy.
This book is divided into two parts. Part I sets out to form a definition of
melancholy, and as part of this imparts some of the complex and imbricated
history of the idea. Following that, connections between the aesthetic
conventions of the Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque with
melancholy are discussed. This first part of the book is then concluded by a
series of chapters exploring the problems raised by a melancholy landscape
architecture, under the headings of Aesthetics, Ethics, Emotion and Empathy.
Part II offers a guide to melancholy places, tracing the conditions that are
conducive to beautiful sadness, including The Void, The Uncanny,
Ephemerality and Transience, and Intimate Immensity.
Notes
1 See, for example, Milton Il Penseroso (1631), Coleridge The Nightingale (1798)
and Keats Ode on Melancholy (1819).
2 Melancholy art was the subject of a major exhibition, Mélancolie: Génie et Folie
en Occident – ‘Melancholy: Genius and Madness in the West’ – staged at the
Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais in Paris, and then in the Neue Nationalgalerie
in Berlin, in late 2005 and 2006. A catalogue, edited by the curator Jean Clair,
was published by Gallimard in 2005.
3 For an overview of the breadth of melancholy, see the precursor to this book
(Bowring, 2008).
4 For more on the etymology and development of the idea of ‘landscape’, see also
Jackson (1984) and Cosgrove (1985).
5 The conception of the landscape as a ‘reflection’ of culture is a pervasive one; for
example, as simply stated in the iconic essay by Lewis ‘Axioms for Reading the
Landscape (1979)’.
6 As a theatre, landscape was seen as a setting for the playing out of culture, framed,
as Cosgrove (1993, p.1) put it, ‘a stage for human action’. See also Jackson (1980,
p.75).
7 The poststructuralist concern with text was applied to landscape most explicitly
by Barnes and Duncan’s Writing Worlds (1992).
8 For an overview of a phenomenological sense of landscape, see Wylie (2007).
9 For architecture and urbanism this is most evident in the development of the
theory of Landscape Urbanism – see Waldheim (2006) and Mostafavi and Najle
(2003). The concept of ‘landscape’ in geography is well-articulated in Wylie’s
Landscape (2007). In art, see Elkin and deLue’s Landscape Theory (2008), which
provides a useful investigation of the concept of ‘landscape’ within art.
10 Pattern books were produced during the Victorian and Edwardian eras as a
means of providing mass market access to design. The ‘patterns’ included in such
books included standard designs for houses and gardens, exemplified in the work
of Andrew Jackson Downing, including Treatise on the Theory and Practice of
Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America, 1841, and Cottage Residences:
or, A Series of Designs for Rural Cottages and Adapted to North America, 1842.
11 ‘Desert of the real’ is a phrase from the 1999 film by Larry and Andy Wachowski,
The Matrix. The phrase has been adopted as a commentary on contemporary life,
notably by Slavoj Žižek (2002).
12 Datascapes is a term coined by Winy Maas of Dutch architectural firm MVRDV,
and describes designs generated by information. See, for example, MVRDV
(1998). A critique of the dehumanising nature of datascapes follows in Chapter
7.
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Miller and Hal Rothman (eds), Out of the Woods: Essays in Environmental
History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Waldheim, C. (2006) The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton
Architectural Press.
Wylie, John (2007). Landscape. Abingdon: Routledge.
Žižek, S. (2002). Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11
and Related Dates. London: Verso.
2 Defining melancholy
Melancholy is elusive. Slipping and sliding between widely disparate fields,

it is as common to find a debate over the definition of melancholy in a
psychiatric journal as it is in a journal of literature, art, design or philosophy,
as illustrated in two conferences from the last decade. The first, in 2002, was
in the area of the humanities and titled ‘Culture and Melancholy’,1 and
the diversity of interpretations of melancholy characterised contributions

which ranged from late medieval recognition of melancholy as the truth
behind supposed witchcraft; Burton’s voracious effort to encapsulate a
frayed, fugitive subject; the romantic manifestation of a melancholy
both uneasily masculine and insistently feminine; the nineteenth
century’s poetic reappraisal and refraction of medieval, Renaissance
and romantic models; the uncanonized interstices of Freud’s ostensible
monolithic formulations; and the contemporary significance of a
specifically American, fictional, variant of a suffering in some ways so
acutely European.
(Dillon, 2003, p.202)
The breadth of subject matter and interpretations of melancholy might be

presumed to simply reflect the disciplinary range, including scholars in
literature, philosophy, film studies, and languages, yet the second conference,
focused only on the field of psychiatry, offers no more precision in terms of
a formulation of melancholy. The conference ‘Melancholia: Beyond DSM,
Beyond Neurotransmitters’ was held in 2006,2 with psychiatry researchers
concerned that a ‘single, widely accepted definition [of melancholia] has
proven elusive’ (Coryell, 2007, p.36) and conceptualising it as ‘a potpourri
of depressive diseases, disorders and syndromes, and more, awaiting
definition and measurement’ (Parker, 2007, p. 30).
Eluding definition in either the arts or sciences, and threading its way
through all manner of disciplinary fields, melancholy persists as an enigmatic
and provocative concept. This complexity has accumulated over two
millennia, and while allied ideas, such as beauty, have a similarly lengthy
genealogy, melancholy alone has challenged both the arts and sciences.
Defining melancholy 13
Unlike concepts like beauty, which undergo constant metamorphosis, and at
any point in time can mean something quite different, melancholy has
remained surprisingly constant.3 Throughout all of the debates, questions,
and contradictions, there has persisted what Agamben terms a ‘constellation’
of melancholy, which is not that different today to any time in its history.4
As psychoanalytical theorist Julia Kristeva puts it, melancholy is ‘essential
and transhistorical’ (Kristeva, 1989, p. 258).
Melancholy has two distinct poles, the scientific and the poetic. The
scientific embraces efforts to define melancholy objectively, to pinpoint its

psychological and physiological symptoms and classify it. Categorising
melancholy was a preoccupation in the development of medicine in ancient
times, and has become again a concern in more contemporary psychiatric
diagnoses. In the context of medicine and science, the complex of depressed
mood and allied ailments is often referred to as melancholia, as in the work
of Sigmund Freud. By contrast, melancholy has also been explored and
documented for its poetic qualities, as a literary ideal or aesthetic quality.
Oscillating between body and mind, melancholy has been an enticing
condition that eludes a definitive categorisation.
The melancholy complex is rooted in the ancient idea of the humours, the
hypothesised four fluids that rule the body and mind. Phlegm, blood, yellow
bile and black bile were identified as the four humours which needed to be
in balance. This four-part humoral frame was reinforced by alignment to
colours, planets, temperature and moisture, season, time of the day, element,
and body organs. Melancholy and sanguine sit opposite each other on the
quadripartite diagram of humours, and should be in balance, so that an
excess of one humour would be balanced by an addition of a supplement of
another. Melancholy is associated with black bile, the colour black, the
planet Saturn, coldness and dryness, twilight, autumn, earth, and the spleen.
The idea of the humours has contributed to the elusive nature of melancholy,
as on one hand humoral medicine was devised as a means of establishing
degrees of wellness, but on the other was simply a categorisation of types of
disposition. As the authors of the iconic text, Saturn and Melancholy,
Klibansky, Panofsky and Saxl, explain, there were two quite different
meanings to the terms sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholy, as
either ‘pathological states or constitutional aptitudes’ (Klibansky et al., 1964,
p.12). Melancholy became far more connected with the idea of illness than the
other temperaments, and gained recognition as a ‘special problem’. The blurry
boundary between an illness and a mere temperament was a result of the fact
that many of the symptoms of ‘melancholia’ were mental and difficult to
objectify, unlike something as apparent as a disfigurement or wound. The
theory of the humours morphed into psychology and physiognomy, with
particular traits or appearances associated with each temperament.
As a pathological state, melancholy was associated with ideas of illness
and evil. Behaviours or abilities which could not be explained were perceived
as madness, what one of the key theorists of melancholy, Frances Yates,
called ‘bad melancholy’, as opposed to the ‘good melancholy’ of geniuses
and heroes (Yates, 1979, p.154). Satan rather than Saturn become the
governing force for melancholy in the eyes of those who considered it a sign
of possession by the devil, or a punishment for evil. The fear of melancholy
was encapsulated in both physiological and religious explanations, as in the
Salem witch trials of the late seventeenth century. Cotton Mather, a Puritan
New England minister involved in the trials, explained melancholy as being
related to ‘flatulencies in the region of the Hypochondria as well as a degree
of diabolical possession’ (Jimenez, 1986, p.31).

The relationship of intelligence and melancholy was a central theme in
the Renaissance concept of sensibility, along with Robert Burton’s concept
of ‘love melancholy’. Burton’s 1621 work remains one of the key texts in the
history of melancholy, with its title embodying its inherent complexities:
The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes,
Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine
Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections.
Philosophically, Historically, Opened and Cut up (Burton, 1821). Burton,
writing under the pseudonym Democritus Junior, set out to describe all the
forms of melancholy, including head melancholy, hypochondriacal
melancholy, religious melancholy, love melancholy, and ‘Maids, Nuns, and
Widows’ Melancholy’. Rather than formulating a precise definition of
melancholy, Burton’s 783-page volume further emphasised its complexity.
Burton placed the spleen, which became synonymous with melancholy,
firmly on the map, defining it as that organ which ‘draws this black choler
[melancholy] to it by a secret virtue, and feeds upon it, conveying the rest to
the bottom of the stomach, to stir up appetite, or else to the guts as an
excrement’ (Burton, 1821, p.25). Spleen was one of the dimensions of
George Cheyne’s ‘English Malady’ (Cheyne, 1991) and poets like Matthew
Green, known as ‘Spleen Green’, who wrote about the prevention of spleen
in 1737: how to ‘drive away / The day-mare Spleen, by whose false pleas /
Men prove mere suicides in ease / And how I do myself demean / In stormy
world to live serene’ (in Doughty, 1925, p.265).
The cult of ruins and the Gothic sensibility of the Romantic era were
inherently melancholic. The development of the aesthetic of the Picturesque
incorporated these various threads, favouring scenes, both painted and
actual, that were imbued with signs of the passage of time. Melancholy also
related to the aesthetic companion of the Picturesque – the Sublime – but as
discussed in Chapter 3, melancholy was not as intensively cultivated as the
other conventions during the exhaustive discourses on the definition of
aesthetics during the eighteenth century. One of the purest statements of a
melancholy aesthetic is in William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem,
The Prelude, begun in 1805, with its ‘Moods melancholy, fits of spleen, that
loved / A pensive sky, sad days, and piping winds, / The twilight more than
dawn, autumn than spring; / A treasure and luxurious gloom of choice’ (in
Doughty, 1925, p.267).
Charles Baudelaire further developed the melancholy of ‘spleen’,
presenting it as a desirable aesthetic quality, as in his Spleen de Paris (1869),
where he sighs: ‘How poignant the late afternoons of autumn! Ah! Poignant
to the verge of pain, for there are certain delicious sensations which are no
less intense for being vague; and there is no sharper point than that of
Infinity’ (Baudelaire, 1970, p. 8). In his Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), Baudelaire
includes several poems titled ‘Spleen’, invoking the dark moods ingrained
within landscapes, as in his vision of ‘When the low, heavy sky weighs like
a lid / On the groaning spirit, victim of long ennui, / And from the all-
encircling horizon / Spreads over us a day gloomier than the night’
(Baudelaire, 2015).
The early twentieth century brought another significant dimension to the
defining of melancholy, in Sigmund Freud’s 1917 essay, Mourning and
Melancholia. Freud related ‘normal’ grief to mourning, where loss is
processed by the individual and they gradually recover. ‘Abnormal’ grief is
the pathological condition he termed melancholia, where mourning is
arrested and the process of recovery fails to reach completion. In melancholia,
the individual, or ego, embeds their sense of loss within themselves, refusing
to recover, not willing to let go of the loss. Freud described how ‘[t]he
shadow of the object fell upon the ego’ and ‘the loss of the object had been
transformed into the loss of ego’, so that the loss of the object, whether it be
a person or an idea, becomes the same as the loss of the self, the ego (Freud,
2005, p. 209).
A further significant dimension of melancholy’s legacy in the twentieth
century was found in the work of philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and
Walter Benjamin, concerned with the cultural crises related to progress and
modernity. Rapid change and progress brought with it a sense of optimism,
but at the same time feelings of alienation and estrangement produced a
sense of ennui as the promises went so often unrealised. For Kierkegaard
this was, in the words of Ferguson, ‘the empty depth of modernity’ (Ferguson,
1995, p.35). Benjamin, too, theorised melancholy in the face of twentieth-
century culture, most extensively in his major work The Arcades Project.
Another kind of emptiness was recognised by Benjamin, that of ‘linke
Melancholie’, or ‘Left Melancholy’, which encapsulated melancholy as a
narcissistic self-obsession, which he cast as a form of criticism. The inertia
that comes with melancholy, the wanting to resist closure – as in Freud’s
‘open wound’ – is in political terms a type of inactivism: a ‘mournful,
conservative, backward-looking attachment to a feeling, analysis, or
relationship that has been rendered thinglike and frozen in the heart of the
putative leftist’ (Brown, 1999, p.22). Left Melancholy resulted in a state of
paralysis, as in the ‘German Autumn’ of 1977–1981, a time of terrorism,
murders and hijackings, where left-leaning intellectuals found themselves
unable to act. Consumed by cultural pessimism, an existential crisis of sorts,
a feeling of abandonment, they entered a state of melancholy detachment.
As well as this negative critique of melancholy, Benjamin contributed
significant layers to the aesthetic of melancholy, as in his writings on the
connection of melancholy and memory in photography. Here, Benjamin
divined the presence of aura as something that he believed was lost when
photographs moved from having value as part of the ‘cult of remembrance’
to succumbing to their ‘exhibition value’ (see Chapter 13). Aura inheres
within the connectivity to intimacy, to the notion of an original, authentic
presence, and Benjamin believed:
It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography.
The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last
refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura
emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a
human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable
beauty.
(Benjamin, 1969, p.226)
Defining melancholy is evidently impossible. The diverse threads of humoral

imbalances, witchcraft, political inactivity, abnormal grief, romantic beauty,
and aura present a confounding array of concepts. Landscape architecture is
no stranger to difficult definitions, itself bridging the gulf between art and
science, so that at any one moment it might concern the physics of highway
construction and the poetry of an attachment to place. Yet, in adopting
Agamben’s concept of the ‘constellation’ of melancholy, there is the
provision for both the breadth and allegiance of ideas which make up the
rich and elusive term.
Notes
1 The conference was held in 2002 at the University of Kent, England, and papers
were published in 2003 in the Journal of European Studies, 33 (3/4).
2 The conference was held in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006, with papers published
in a 2007 special issue of Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 433. DSM is the
Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and is the American standard
reference book for the diagnosis of mental illnesses.
3 This constant shift in the development of concepts is well-illustrated by Umberto
Eco (2004).
4 The term ‘constellation’ is Giorgio Agamben’s, and captures the sense of
melancholy’s persistence as a collection of ideas, rather than one simple definition.
See Agamben (1993, p.19).
References
Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans.
Ronald L, Martinez). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Baudelaire, Charles (1970). Paris Spleen (trans. Louise Varèse; first published 1869).
New York: New Directions Books.
Baudelaire, Charles (2015). The Flowers of Evil/Les Fleurs du Mal (English and
French edition, trans. William Aggeler). Digireads.com Publishing, Kindle edition.
Benjamin, Walter (1969). ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt; trans. Harry Zohn). New
York: Schocken Books.
Brown, Wendy (1999). ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’. Boundary 2, 26(3): 19–27.
Burton, Robert (1821) An Anatomy of Melancholy (first published 1621). London:
J Cuthell.
Cheyne, George (1991). The English Malady (first published 1733). London:
Routledge.
Coryell, W (2007). ‘The facets of melancholia’. Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica,
115(Suppl. 433): 31–36.
Dillon, Brian (2003). ‘Introduction’. Journal of European Studies, 33 (3/4):
199–202.
Doughty, Oswald (1925). ‘The English malady of the eighteenth century’, The
Review of English Studies, 2(7): 257–269.
Eco, Umberto (ed.) (2004). History of Beauty. New York: Rizzoli,
Eco, Umberto (2007). On Ugliness. New York: Rizzoli.
Ferguson, Harvie (1995). Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Soren
Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology. London: Routledge.
Freud, Sigmund (2005) On Murder, Mourning and Melancholia (trans. Shaun
Whiteside; Mourning and Melancholia essay first published 1917). London:
Penguin Books.
Jimenez, Mary Ann (1986). ‘Madness in early American history: insanity in
Massachusetts from 1700–1830’, Journal of Social History, 20(1): 25–44.
Klibansky, Raymond, Panofsky, Erwin and Saxl, Fritz (1964). Saturn and
Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art.
London: Thomas Nelson and Sons.
Kristeva, Julia (1989). Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Parker, G. (2007). ‘Defining melancholia: the primacy of psychomotor disturbance’.
Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 115(Suppl. 433): 21–30.
Yates, Frances A. (1979). The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
3 The Sublime, the Beautiful,
the Picturesque … and the
melancholy
Alongside the debates over melancholy’s psychiatric, metaphysical and

artistic dimensions is an area of particular relevance to landscape architecture
– melancholy as an aesthetic. While the familiar aesthetic conventions of the
Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque readily bring to mind a range of
exemplars, a melancholy aesthetic lingers at the edges of the familiar.
The paradox of a beauty founded in sorrow, a love of loss, of longing, is
melancholy’s gift to aesthetics. Despite the potency of this bittersweetness,
melancholy has been largely marginalised within landscape architecture,
overshadowed by the aesthetic conventions of the Sublime, the Beautiful
and the Picturesque. While melancholy was well established in the lyrical
and pictorial traditions of the late sixteenth century, its significance later
paled in the face of the eighteenth-century codification of aesthetics.
Vigorous debate was focused on defining and categorising the nature of
aesthetic experience, and general ideas like ‘beauty’ gave way to more
particular definitions. But melancholy was never elevated to a capitalised
aesthetic type, nor given the definite article, like the other categories – there
was never ‘the Melancholy’. In the late eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant
designated the first two significant aesthetic domains, the Sublime and the
Beautiful, both of which are in themselves immensely complex conditions
(Kant, 1960). The Sublime is that which is unbounded, beyond comprehension
and awe-inspiring, and imparts feelings of horror. The Beautiful, on the
other hand, brings feelings of joy and pleasure.
The ancient concept of the humours is resuscitated by Kant in his critique
of each of the four temperaments from the perspective of aesthetic
appreciation. Both the phlegmatic and the choleric temperaments were
lacking in their appreciation of aesthetics, with the phlegmatic too apathetic
and the choleric too moralistic. The sanguine has a feeling for the beautiful,
and is sensitive, noble and compassionate. Kant referred to these as adoptive
virtues, which are charming and beautiful, and genuine virtues which are
sublime and venerable. It is the melancholy temperament that possesses
genuine virtues, and has a ‘profound feeling for the beauty and human
nature and a firmness and determination of the mind’ in contrast to the
‘changeable gaiety’ and inconstancy of a ‘frivolous person’ (Kant, 1960,
Sublime, beautiful, picturesque, melancholy 19
pp.63–64). The melancholic is gentle and noble, feels awe in the face of
danger as something to be overcome, and aspires to self-conquest.
Kant’s relating of melancholy and the Sublime is significant in recognising
the potency of solitude as a way of being in the landscape. In The Critique
of Judgement (1790), Kant set out the boundaries for a Sublime solitude,
where melancholy is motivated by self-sufficiency or even asceticism. But a
misanthropic solitude lacks these genuine virtues and is not a condition to
aspire to. The idea of a Sublime sadness embraces imagination, retreat and
contemplation. Philosopher Dylan Trigg underscores this:
The awareness of the self and so necessarily the Other is … accentuated

in the melancholic: he is aware of all that he isn’t; and the sublime is
always a contrast between microscopic and macroscopic polarities – the
greater this is realized, the higher the sublimity.
(Trigg, 2004, p.168)
This melancholy sublime is vividly seen in James Corner and Alex MacLean’s
Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (Corner and MacLean,
1996). The book’s aerial photographs and montages give a distancing effect,
transforming the landscape into an abstract composition. There is a sense of
detachment, like the ocularcentrist, or eye-centred, aesthetic conventions of
the Picturesque. Just as followers of the Picturesque enlisted optical devices
as part of their aestheticising, Corner and MacLean have been described as
resembling ‘Claude-glass-toting eighteenth-century visitors to the English
Countryside’ (Herrington, 2006, p.33). Yet, these images are not picturesque,
but they are Sublime in their melancholy, as Susan Herrington puts it: ‘The
cultivation of melancholy is stimulated by the insignificance of the human
figure in contrast to the significant scale of the human drama portrayed’
(Herrington, 2006, pp.33–34). Kant, however, believed that for a genuinely
virtuous melancholy, this sense of solitude in the vastness should not be
inhospitable. A Kantian melancholy of the sublime might be called a ‘spirited
sadness’, grounded in a moral frame. Kant strives to distinguish this aesthetic
pleasure from the ‘languid emotions’ and also from the perversity of the
grotesque.1 The third aesthetic convention, the Picturesque, was also
complex and extensively theorised. The underpinning for the Picturesque
was its aspiration towards being picture-like, of achieving the effects of the
works of seventeenth-century artists Salvator Rosa, Nicholas Poussin and
Claude Lorrain – who gave his name to the ‘Claude Glass’ for its evocation
of his works.2 Rosa, Poussin and Claude painted landscapes that were
culturally rich, with historical narratives, where ruins and dead trees
reflected the passage of time. As one of the aesthetic ideals of the wealthy
young men on the Grand Tour of Europe, the Picturesque became embedded
in the practice of travelling to look at scenery, and in turn of making gardens
that looked like these scenes.
But just as Kant grappled with elevating the melancholy of the Sublime
above being languid or immoral, the Picturesque was confounded with
ethical dilemmas. The Picturesque’s love of ruins and dead trees – even to
the extent of building ruins and planting dead trees – treads a fine line in the
context of ethics. The late eighteenth-century theorists, including Richard
Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, could defend the melancholy attraction of
picturesque ruins, but the perversity of such an aesthetic became apparent
when applied to people, where it might be called grotesque.3 Could those
same signs of picturesque decay be found to be aesthetically pleasing in a

person? Price reflected that if a woman was afflicted by the signs of
‘irregularity’ that he could wax lyrical about in the landscape, ‘You will
hardly find a man fond enough of the picturesque to marry a girl so
thoroughly deformed’ (in Lowenthal, 2003, p.166).
Ruins sit at a crossroads between the aesthetic conventions of the
Beautiful, the Picturesque and the Sublime, and also of melancholy. Prior to
the ruination of a structure, the Beautiful might prevail, achieving the
aesthetic qualities of smoothness and completeness. As Uvedale Price set out
in his Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the
Beautiful, the moment that decay sets in beauty is diminished. However, this
alters as the embellishments of buildings are exchanged for the embellishments
of ruins, ‘for incrustations and weather stains, and for the various plants
that spring from, or climb over walls – the character of the picturesque
prevails over that of the beautiful; and at length, perhaps, all smoothness, all
symmetry, all trace of design are totally gone’ (Price, 1810, p.260).
With their alluring chiaroscuro, variety and evocation of culture worked
over by nature, ruins were the epitome of Picturesque beauty. Beyond these
formal characteristics, ruins also satisfied the complementary thread of
Picturesque theory, which averred association as the source of aesthetic
pleasure. Ruins were particularly rich in their store of associative triggers,
with a wealth of allusions to times past. This hybrid appeal to both the
formal and associative qualities was pointed to by William Shenstone in his
Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening (1764), observing that
RUINATED structures appear to derive their power of pleasing, from

the irregularity of surface, which is VARIETY; and the latitude they
afford the imagination, to conceive an enlargement of their dimensions,
or to recollect any events or circumstances appertaining to their pristine
grandeur, so far as concerns grandeur and solemnity.
(In Hunt and Willis, 1988, p.291)
Ruins were also Sublime, where pictorial effects of light and shade, and
other attributes of scale and proportion, were exceeded, becoming instead
an image of awe and even fear. Diderot’s critique of the paintings of Hubert
Robert’s Salon of 1767, for example, evaluated them as being too picturesque.
Diderot’s ideal of ruins was one informed by the aesthetic of the Sublime,
Sublime, beautiful, picturesque, melancholy 21
and in this context he found Robert’s paintings to be overpopulated, and
advised him to remove three-quarters of the figures, such that
Only those enhancing the effect of solitude and silence should be

retained. A solitary man who’s wandered into these shadowy precincts,
his arms across his chest and his head inclined, would have made a
greater impression on me; the darkness alone, the majesty of the
building, the grandeur of the construction, the extent, serenity, and
muted reverberation of the space, would have sent me shuddering.

(In Thomas, 2008, p.81)
Diderot goes on to expand on how his conception of ruins is allied with the
Sublime, as ‘The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to
nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains,
only time endures’ (in Thomas, 2008, p.81).
While ‘the Melancholy’ was never elevated to the level of the Beautiful,
the Sublime and the Picturesque, it was an integral part of the theorising and
debates. From Kant’s admission of melancholy as a ‘vigorous affection’ to
its appearance in discussions of landscapes and particularly ruins, it was
recognised as a critical yet complex element of aesthetic appreciation.
Melancholy’s potency within an aesthetics of landscape is underlined by
these debates, and demands an expanded understanding of the very idea of
‘aesthetics’.
Notes
1 The grotesque in the writings of Kant remained, like melancholy, a minor
category, and a qualification used to express the limits of aesthetics. Tracing a
range of reactions to literature, religious practices, and relationships with others,
Kant used the terms sublime, noble, adventurous, trifling and grotesque. See Kant
(1960, pp.56–57).
2 The Claude Glass is described further in the following chapter.
3 As with Kantian aesthetics, the grotesque remained a minor element in the
theories of the Picturesque, and Richard Payne Knight listed ‘grottesque’ alongside
‘sculpturesque’ as some of the many adjectives which could extend Uvedale
Price’s descriptions of the Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque. Knight
suggested that ‘grottesque is certainly a degree or two at least, further removed
from the insipid smoothness and regularity of beauty, than [Price] supposes the
picturesque to be’. See Knight (1806).
References
Corner, James and MacLean, Alex (1996). Taking Measures Across the American
Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Herrington, Susan (2006). ‘Framed again: the picturesque aesthetics of contemporary
landscapes’. Landscape Journal, 25(1): 22–37.
Hunt, John Dixon and Willis, Peter (1988). The Genius of the Place: The English
Landscape Garden 1620–1820. Boston: MIT Press.
Kant, Immanuel (1960). Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
(trans. John T. Goldthwait; originally published 1764). Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Knight, Richard Payne (1806) An Analytical Enquiry into the Principles of Taste.
London: T. Payne.
Lowenthal, David (2003) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Price, Uvedale (1810) Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and
the Beautiful. London: J. Mawman.
Thomas, Sophie (2008). Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle.

New York: Routledge.
Trigg, Dylan (2004). Schopenhauer and the sublime pleasure of tragedy. Philosophy
and Literature, 28(1): 165–179.
4 Aesthetics
Melancholy’s presence within the early development of aesthetic conventions

was largely as a footnote, rather than a clearly defined species. Arguably,
however, there is an aesthetics of melancholy which might take its place
alongside the Picturesque, the Sublime and the Beautiful. Defining an
aesthetics of melancholy requires an identifiable complex of features, and
perhaps the first instinct is to think of this as a distinctive appearance.
Aesthetics in the arts has been commonly elided with ideals of ‘beauty’, and
most often resides in the domain of appearance, the realm of the visual.
Martin Jay and David Michael Levin have written extensively on
ocularcentrism, and the ongoing intersection of ideas of knowledge with
those of sight (Jay, 1994; Levin, 1988). While the dominance of the eye can
be traced back to the Greeks, it was primarily through developments such as
perspective and the picturesque, and the rise of viewing-based practices such
as museums, zoos and tourism, that sight became elevated to the position of
the pre-eminent sense. In the design professions, the shorthand of aesthetics-
as-appearance is yoked to the need to solve design problems. For landscape
architecture this often means that aesthetics is the visual foil to the challenges
of utility, and embedded in the profession’s history is an attention to aspects
such as mitigation of infrastructure (e.g. screening a power station) and
visual impact assessments.
Landscape architecture’s origins in the eighteenth-century theory of the
Picturesque amplifies this sense of detachment, particularly during the later
phases which were, in the words of Sidney K. Robinson, characterised by
‘the end of complexity and the triumph of gross sensory abbreviation’
(Robinson, 1991, p.114). The concurrent development of Picturesque theory
and the profession of landscape architecture created ideal conditions for an
elision of the two, something which has continued to be a source of criticism
within the discipline. Laura Haddad describes landscape architecture as
a discipline whose method of design has in large part been mired in the
safety and preservation of visual representation since the late eighteenth-
century advent of the Picturesque. Symptomatic of this quandary is the
condition that too many projects are designed to be seen, to be
photographed and published as pictorial works in glossy magazines,
and not to be experienced in any way that transcends visual stimulation
and elicits subjectively perceived emotional content.
(Haddad, 1996, p.48)
Haddad’s observation echoes the critique by Catherine Howett, that

landscape architecture is ‘trapped … in a tyranny of the visual imposed by
an inherited picturesque aesthetic’ (Howett, 1987, p.7).
The way in which the picturesque contributed to the diminishment of the

breadth of environmental experience is acutely illustrated by the Claude
Glass. This device is a small, polished convex mirror, sometimes made of
obsidian, used to transmute the environment into ‘landscape’, into a picture,
into scenery. The convexity of the surface forces the landscape reflection
into a repoussoir or framed composition, while the dark colour of the
speculum reduces the spectrum, mimicking the sepia tones of the paintings
of Claude Lorrain. Nature is ‘corrected’ into the compositional conventions
of the picture. The expansiveness of the landscape in time and space, and its
sensory richness, becomes inert, something to be held in the hand. The
detachment from the landscape occurs not solely through these
transmutations and reductions, but also through the mode of looking, where
the glass was held out in front of the viewer, in order to view the landscape
over their shoulder, behind them. The Claude Glass metaphorically
encapsulates the dominance of the visual, the dislocation from the landscape,
and the concomitant reduction of sensory experience.
The Picturesque consolidated the dominion of the visual over the fields of
art and design, extending the hold established by the development of
perspective some centuries before, during the Italian Renaissance. Implicated
in the dominance of the visual as the means of apprehending the world,
perspective created a sleight of hand, morphing the real into the represented.
Julian Thomas describes how perspective
allowed painters to represent a three dimensional world on a two

dimensional surface, through a technique which organised represented
objects in relation to each other. Yet this technique was regarded not as
an artifice, but as a means of revealing truth.
(Thomas, 1993, p.21)
Kenneth Frampton reinforces this point, explaining
According to its etymology, perspective means rationalized sight or

clear seeing, and as such it presupposes a conscious suppression of the
sense of smell, hearing and taste, and a consequent distancing from the
more direct experience of the environment. This self-imposed limitation
relates to what Heidegger has called a ‘loss of nearness’. In attempting
Aesthetics 25
to counter this loss, the tactile opposes itself to the scenographic and the
drawing of veils over the surface of reality.
(Frampton, 1983, p.29)
The Claude Glass’s landscape-over-the-shoulder and the ‘loss of nearness’

are symptomatic of the Enlightenment’s hallmark of objectification.
Aesthetics was bundled up with the tendency of the age to place everything
within a scientific framework. As Arnold Berleant summarises, aesthetics
proceeded along the lines of ‘objectification, dissection and analysis’, and

the spectator was soundly separated from the object (Berleant, 1994, p.15).
The spirit of the Cartesian age was captured in the theories of Kant, in
which the split between the subject and object, the cleaving of the viewer
from the viewed, was embedded in his term ‘disinterestedness’. Berleant
highlights the fundamental problem with this idea as a foundation of
aesthetics through citing Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique:
Kant had thought he was doing an honor to art when, among the
predicates of beauty, he gave prominence to those which flatter the
intellect, i.e., impersonality and universality…. Kant, like all
philosophers, instead of viewing the esthetic issue from the side of the
artist, envisaged art and beauty solely from the ‘spectator’s’ point of
view, and so, without himself realizing it, smuggled the ‘spectator’ into
the concept of beauty…. [W]e have got from these philosophers of
beauty definitions which, like Kant’s famous definition of beauty, are
marred by a complete lack of esthetic sensibility. ‘That is beautiful’,
Kant proclaims, ‘which gives us disinterested pleasure.’ Disinterested!
(Berleant, 1994, p.15).
Nietzsche’s railing against disinterestedness highlights the way in which

‘aesthetics’ is implicated in the impoverishment of sensory experience which
has characterised the modern age. Further to the detachment and distancing
between the subject and object – and importantly for landscape architecture,
a schism between the beholder and the landscape – were the value judgements
and presumptions that aligned visuality with the intellect, and conceived of
other senses as less worthy. Vision is privileged through its connection to the
intellect, and the connection between seeing and knowing are entwined in
language, as in the most simple confirmation of understanding: ‘I see.’ Even
the ability to predict the unknown is linked with sight, as in clairvoyance, or
clear-seeing. The alignment of the ‘eye’ and the ‘I’ emphasises the distancing
of the subject from the object, the ‘disembodied eye’, or in landscape terms,
a detachment of the self from place (Jay, 1994, p.81).
Liz James describes how,
It is the traditions of Western philosophical thinking about the senses,

based on Plato and Aristotle, that have placed sight and then hearing as
the most significant and spiritual of the senses, relating them to the
higher functions of the mind, and which have relegated smell, touch and
taste to the lower functions of the body, considering them base and
corporeal.
(James, 2004, p.523)
The elevation of vision and hearing in a ranking of the senses privileges

distancing and detachment, as Christian Metz explains: ‘It is no accident
that the main socially acceptable arts are based on the senses at a distance,
and that those that depend on the senses of contact are often regarded as
“minor” arts (= culinary arts, arts of perfume, etc)’ (Metz, 1982, pp.59–60).
The elevation of sight over the other senses is most marked in contrast to
smell. Kant dismissed smell as the sense which is least important and not
worthy of cultivation, and Horkheimer and Adorno warned that ‘When we
see we remain what we are; but when we smell we are taken over by
otherness. Hence the sense of smell is considered a disgrace in civilization,
the sign of a lower social strata, lesser races and base animals’ (Classen,
1998, p.58).
An aesthetics of melancholy is therefore a problematic endeavour. As a
concept strongly associated with the emotions, sensation and experience,
melancholy exceeds the visual. And, how might an aesthetic so enmeshed
with emotion relate to a system which privileges the intellect? At this point
a renovation of the original concept of aesthetics as that which is at the very
root of the experience of the world is timely. Aesthetics was not always
simply a concern with appearance, but was more intricately related to the
entire sensory realm. Literary theorist Terry Eagleton states that ‘Aesthetics
is born as a discourse of the body.’ The alignment of aesthetics and the body
places it firmly within the experiential realm, rather than the purely
intellectual or theoretical. Eagleton draws out the way that ‘The aesthetic
concerns this most gross and palpable dimension of the human, which post-
Cartesian philosophy, in some curious lapse of attention, has somehow
managed to overlook’, and emphasises the distinction between ‘our
creaturely life of perception as opposed to what belongs in the mind’
(Eagleton, 1990, p.13). For philosophy, then, the construction of a
theoretical and disinterested aesthetics led to a schism between ideas and
sensations. This rift meant the ‘overlooking’, as Eagleton ironically puts it,
of an entire domain:
a dense, swarming territory beyond its own mental enclave, threatening

to fall utterly outside its sway. That territory is nothing less than the
whole of our sensate life – the business of affections and aversions, of
how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, or what takes
root in the guts and the gaze and all that arises from our most banal,
biological insertion into the world.
(Eagleton, 1990, p.13)
Aesthetics 27
What was lost in modernity’s objectification of aesthetics was the vital
core of the word aisthesis. In its original form aisthesis referred to the
breathing of the world, and invoked the full range of sensory experience. As
a means of reawakening those senses which have lain largely dormant during
the reign of the visual, it is worth momentarily speculating on an inversion
of the hierarchy – an elimination of the visual. Democritus, for example,
wanted to blind himself, so that he could see, or as the painter Georges
Rouault put it, ‘I do not believe either in what I touch or I see. I believe only
in what I cannot see and in what I sense’ (Soby, 1947, p.14).

The experiences of those who are without the sense of sight can shed light
on the latency of the other senses. Helen Keller, for example, lived in a
world without sight or sound, yet in her writing the emotional compass of
experiencing the world – including inflections such as melancholy – is very
evident. In one passage Keller related:
The other day I went to walk toward a familiar wood. Suddenly a

disturbing odor made me pause in dismay. Then followed a peculiar
measured jar, followed by dull, heavy thunder. I understood the odor
and the jar only too well. The trees were being cut down.
(In Classen, 1998, p.153)
Constance Classen responded to this olfactory and sonic moment through

imagining how this might be represented,
Suppose Keller’s sensations on that day were to be transformed into a

gallery exhibit. One would walk into a room entitled, say, The
Disappearing Forest. The room would be visually empty but filled with
the sharp scent of a cut tree. The vibrations of sawing would reverberate
throughout the room, followed by a heavy thud. Would such an exhibit,
lacking as it does any visual referents, be any less moving or evocative
than a painting or photograph of a tree being felled?
(Classen, 1998, p.153)
The renovation of aisthesis requires a phenomenological stance. Through

re-asserting the place of the perceiving body within landscape architecture,
there is expanded potential for emotional engagement. Despite the problems
inherent in the origins of landscape architecture being fused with picturesque
theory, there is potential for the experiential and the picturesque to co-exist
within the discipline. Holly Getch Clarke argues for a ‘phenomenological or
non-pictorial picturesque of modernity’ (Clarke, 2005, p.59). As a counter
to the dismissing of the picturesque from landscape architecture due to it
visual fixation, Clarke instead proffers the idea of the ‘phenomenological
picturesque as a hybridized picturesque mode wherein bodily experience
supercedes viewing alone as its primary operation’ (Clarke, 2005, p.59,
emphasis in original). Drawing on the precedents that conceive of picturesque
experience as one of movement through a series of spatial phenomena, for
example the writings of Yve-Alain Bois, she proposes that ‘the picturesque
is displaced from a purely pictorial operation to an experiential phenomenon
of actualized space’ (Clarke, 2005, p.59). The recognition of the picturesque’s
inherent, yet most often suppressed, phenomenologicality, therefore
promotes the possibilities within landscape architecture to move beyond the
eye candy, beyond the photogenic and scenographic.
Further, Susan Herrington cautions against dismissing the picturesque as
a merely visual, and therefore superficial, aesthetic. Illustrating how aspects

of contemporary landscape appreciation and design embody a picturesque
aesthetic, but not necessarily a picturesque style, Herrington asserts the
continued value of the picturesque, particularly in the context of its
associative dimensions – the way it demonstrates ‘not only landscape’s
enduring ability to stir responses in the viewer, but the viewer’s ability to
give shape to this experience; framing the effects and the associations it
portends in ways relevant to our own times’ (Herrington, 2006, p.36).
However, a distinction must still be drawn between the richly associative
foundations of the picturesque, and a modern interpretation of the aesthetic,
which, as John Dixon Hunt cautions, is ‘a dedication to the thin end of that
particular cult and not to the careful blend of mental associations with
visual stimuli that had marked its heyday’ (Hunt, 1993, p.140).
Renovating aisthesis and re-tuning aesthetics elevates the emotional
dimension of landscape experience and requires an expansive understanding
of the picturesque as the pre-eminent means of appreciating the landscape.
Eighteenth-century theorists such as Richard Payne Knight explored the
ways in which emotions could be evoked by the landscape, and how that
which is beheld can become a source of feeling. The paradox at the heart of
a melancholy aesthetic is born of such a moment, of the seeming contradiction
between finding something aesthetically pleasing which is at the same time
morally wrong, or seemingly ugly or grotesque. Significantly, that which
was seen, and valorised by the picturesque aesthetic, was also felt – the
emotional was very present in the early picturesque theory. And in Edmund
Burke’s descriptions of the beautiful in music, he makes a direct reference to
melancholy. In this emphatically non-visual medium, Burke explains how
the beautiful in music is ‘that sinking, that melting, that languor’ as opposed
to mirth and excitement. He says that these are the qualities that define the
beautiful as experienced by every sense, and the ‘passion excited by beauty
is in fact nearer to a species of melancholy, than to jollity and mirth’ (Burke,
1764, p.235).
A melancholy aesthetic of landscape architecture therefore rests upon a
number of adjustments to some of the prevailing presumptions. These
including renovating aisthesis to recognise the multi-sensory nature of
aesthetics as opposed to an ocularcentric perspective; appreciating a
‘phenomenological picturesque’ which embodies the ideas of movement
Aesthetics 29
rather than one mired in the static image; and the embracing of emotional
and associative aspects of landscape experience.
References
Berleant, Arnold (1994). Re-thinking Aesthetics: Rogue Essays on Aesthetics and the
Arts. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Burke, Edmund (1764). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful. London: R and J Dodsley.

Clarke, Holly Getch (2005). ‘Land-scopic regimes: exploring perspectival
representation beyond the “pictorial”, project’. Landscape Journal, 24(1): 50–68.
Classen, Constance (1998). The Color of Angels: Cosmology, Gender, and the
Aesthetic Imagination. New York: Routledge.
Eagleton, Terry (1990). The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Frampton, Kenneth (1983). ‘Towards a critical regionalism: six points for an
architecture of resistance’, in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press.
Haddad, Laura (1996). ‘Happening: paradigms of light a blaze (a dialectic of the
sublime and the picturesque’. Landscape Journal, 15(1): 48–57.
Herrington, Susan (2006). ‘Framed again: the picturesque aesthetics of contemporary
landscapes’. Landscape Journal, 25(1): 22–37.
Howett, Catherine (1987). ‘Systems, signs, sensibilities: sources for a new landscape
aesthetic’. Landscape Journal, 6(1): 1–11.
Hunt, John Dixon (1993) ‘The dialogue of modern landscape architecture with its
past’. In Marc Treib (ed.), Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
James, Liz (2004). ‘Senses and sensibility in Byzantium’. Art History, 27(4):
522–537.
Jay, Martin (1994). Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century
French Thought. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Levin, David Michael (1988). The Opening of Vision. New York: Routledge.
Metz, Christian (1982). The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Robinson, Sidney K. (1991). Inquiry into the Picturesque. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Soby, James Thrall (1947). Georges Rouault: Paintings and Prints, New York: The
Museum of Modern Art.
Thomas, Julian (1993). ‘The politics of vision and the archaeologies of landscape’,
in Barbara Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Providence, RI:
Berg Publishers.
5 Emotion
Recent work on emotion in geography and architecture primes the fuse for
an emotional landscape architecture. Avril Maddrell writes of emotional
geographies, how they are ‘particular spaces [which] become emotion-laden
places, both those which we choose to identify and those affective spaces
which can unexpectedly interpolate us’ (Maddrell, 2009, p.38). Emotion
and affect are intertwined, and can be related to the individual and the
social, respectively, and closely associated with feeling and phenomena.
Brian Massumi indicates emotion and affect can also be correspondingly
linked with the mind and body (in Price, 2015), but as Stephanie Clare
cautions, this can reintroduce ‘a reductive distinction between mind and
body’ (in Price, 2015, p.162). Bearing this caution in mind, and the various
definitions of and distinctions between emotion and affect, the significant
point is the shift towards acknowledging the subjective dimension of place,
a counter to the objectivity which has prevailed in attempts to design and
plan the landscape. This subjective connection can also be considered a
dwelling perspective, a means of offsetting the distancing of objectivity, and
engaging emotion and affect. Dwelling engenders proximity and temporality
and connects us with place.
Emotion, mood, temperament and disposition are intertwined in the
nature of melancholy, and register in both the somatic and the psychic
domains. The body and mind dimensions of melancholy were originally set
out in the ancient notion of humours, as outlined in Chapter 2. The four-
sided humoral framework was based on the need for balance between
complementary pairs, so that the choleric and the phlegmatic were balanced,
as well as the sanguine and the melancholy. In contemporary society this
concept of balance has been lost, and the emphasis is firmly upon the
so-called positive emotions such as happiness and joy, while sadness and
melancholy become marginalised.
The necessity of experiencing a full range of emotions underpins
melancholy’s place in everyday life. Landscape architecture has the
opportunity to contribute to the emotional wellbeing of the world through
the shaping of places which foster contemplation. Designing spaces which
invoke melancholy and sadness allows for an emotional equilibrium in the
Emotion 31
landscape, as opposed to one which overloads the compulsion for happiness.
As theologian Thomas Moore warns,
If we do away with Saturn’s dark moods, we may find it exhausting

trying to keep life bright and warm at all costs. We may be even more
overcome then by increased melancholy called forth by the repression of
Saturn, and lose the sharpness and substance of identity that Saturn
gives the soul.
(Moore, 1992, p.146)
Resuscitating melancholy is especially vital for the landscape, for the

geography of emotion. In the context of landscapes of melancholy, there is
a palpability of emotional space. Davidson and Milligan remind us of the
spatial attributes of emotion, that,
in attempts to articulate emotion – to embody it linguistically – we

speak of the ‘heights’ of joy and the ‘depths’ of despair, significant
others are comfortingly close or distressingly distant. The articulation
of emotion is, thus, spatially mediated in a manner that is not simply
metaphorical.
(Davidson and Milligan, 2004, p.523)
Pallasmaa believes that ‘the standard architecture of our time has normalized
the emotions by eliminating the extremes of the spectrum of human
emotions: melancholy and joy, nostalgia and ecstasy’ (Pallasmaa, 2001,
p.29). Not only is the spectrum of emotional experience limited, it is also
skewed, as those feelings which are considered ‘negative’ are likely to be
suppressed in design. Joy, delight and happiness are willingly received as
emotional content of the built environment, and are even used as indicators
of the success of a site. The unlikeliness of melancholy as a central quality of
contemporary architecture is highlighted in a recent critique of David
Chipperfield’s new judicial complex in the city of Barcelona, a project that
has been compared to a de Chirico painting,1 with its enigmatic tower blocks
clustering around spare, urban squares. As critic Rowan Moore writes:
‘Architecture shies away from themes such as melancholy and alienation.
Here [at the City of Justice], Chipperfield seems to say such things are part
of cities and of the law’ (Moore, 2009, p.68).
The presumption that melancholy is an emotion that is best avoided, or if
one is afflicted a cure is required, is challenged by an aesthetics of melancholy.
Literary theorist Jonathan Flatley names Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal (1857)
as the turning point in the relationship between melancholia and aesthetics,
founded on a re-conceptualisation of the relationship between the emotional
and the aesthetic in experiential terms. He describes Baudelaire’s work as
‘anti-therapeutic melancholic poetry’, which is to say it is not intended to
make you better or to redeem negative experiences, but rather ‘to redirect
your attention to those very experiences’ (Flatley, 2008, p.6). Similarly,
Pallasmaa, writing about the films of Aki Kurasmaki, explains that ‘The
spaces and characters of the films are ill-fated and dispirited, yet melancholy
is not hopelessness nor the rejection of life, but rather a metaphysical
seriousness and dejectedness, from which hope and faith in a better future
grow’ (Pallasmaa, 2005, p.31).
In salvaging the realm of melancholy in landscape architecture,
interpretations such as Flately’s and Pallasmaa’s help to demonstrate the
potency of emotional depth, stressing that sadness is not the same thing as a
nihilistic freefall. Sites of memory, most especially those of tragedy, are
often conceived of as needing to be places to deal with the event, to find
some means of ‘moving on’ and recovering from sadness. What if, however,
such sites were not conceptualised as a means of moving on, but rather as a
vehicle for moving the beholder, of amplifying the emotional repertoire.
Memorial designs which ‘redirect attention to those very experiences’, for
example, and which acknowledge the gravitas of ‘metaphysical seriousness
and dejectedness’, have the potential to resonate more powerfully with the
tragic than a response which seeks to quickly dissolve weighty feelings.
The overcoming of a single-minded pursuit of happiness needs to be
yoked to an inclusive re-engagement with the breadth of emotions.
Melancholy’s marginalisation results not only from a fear of sadness, but
from the pervasive hesitancy about showing emotion that characterises the
modern Western world. Even the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley
revealed how his fear of displaying emotion limited his full appreciation of
an evocative landscape, something which he later regretted. In a letter to
‘T.P. Esq.’ (Thomas Peacock), describing journeying through Switzerland,
Shelley explained how,
The hay was making under the trees; the trees themselves were aged, but
vigorous, and interspersed with younger ones, which are destined to be
their successors, and in future years, when we are dead, to afford a
shade to future worshippers of nature, who love the memory of that
tenderness and peace of which this was the imaginary abode. We walked
forward among the vineyards, whose narrow terraces overlook this
affecting scene. Why did the cold maxims of the world compel me at
this moment to repress the tears of melancholy transport which it would
have been so sweet to indulge, immeasurably, even until the darkness of
night had swallowed up the objects which excited them?
(Shelley, 1845, p.96)
Some 30 years after Shelley wandered through Switzerland, John Ruskin

was musing upon his own visit to Amiens in the north of France. Ruskin
expressed his unease in finding aesthetic pleasure in scenes of poverty as he
walked among the slum-dwellers of Amiens, whom seemed ‘all exquisitely
picturesque, and no less miserable…. Seeing the unhealthy face and
Emotion 33
melancholy mien … I could not help feeling how many suffering persons
must pay for my picturesque subject and happy walk’ (in Lowenthal, 1985,
p.166). The tensions alluded to within Shelley’s regrets and in Ruskin’s
aesthetic dilemma raise two further significant challenges for a melancholy
landscape architecture – ethics and empathy.
Note
1 Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings of Italian squares are characterised by their empty,

uncanny quality. The bare squares were often warped by multiple perspective
points, and late afternoon lighting produced long shadows. Psychoanalysis of de
Chirico’s paintings has suggested many references to the loss of his father in
phallic presences, seen in smoke stacks, columns, trains and bananas. This sense
of loss, and its perpetuation, is quintessential Freudian melancholy, in distinction
from mourning: a means of absorbing the loss and feeding off of it. The images
have also been diagnosed as being symptomatic of intestinal disorders, migraine
or epilepsy, all of which are associated with melancholia in the sense of depression.
References
Davidson, Joyce and Milligan, Christine (2004). ‘Editorial: embodying emotion
sensing space: introducing emotional geographies’. Social & Cultural Geographies,
5(4): 523–532.
Flatley, Jonathan (2008). Affective Mapping. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Lowenthal, David (1985). The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Maddrell, Avril (2009). ‘Mapping changing shades of grief and consolation in the
historic landscape of St. Patrick’s Isle, Isle of Man’, in Mick Smith, Joyce
Davidson, Laura Cameron and Liz Bondi (eds), Emotion, Place and Culture.
Farnham: Ashgate.
Moore, Rowan (2009). ‘City of Justice, Barcelona, Spain’. Architectural Review,
226(1349): 60–69.
Moore, Thomas (1992). The Care of the Soul. New York: HarperCollins.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (2005). ‘Alakulon ja toivon tilat: paikan ja mielikuvan logiikka
Aki Kaurismaën elokuvissa (Spaces of melancholy and hope: the logic of place
and image in the films of Aki Kaurismäki)’. Arkkitehti, 102(5): 22–33.
Price, Joanna (2015). ‘“The last pure place on Earth”: Antarctic affect in Jenni
Diski’s Skating to Antarctica and Sara Wheeler’s Terra Icognita’, in Christine
Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds), Affective Landscapes in
Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 161–172.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1845) Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and
Fragments (edited by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley). London: E. Moxon.
6 Ethics
The ethics of aesthetics troubles an appreciation of melancholy landscapes,

as in Ruskin’s quandary of admitting to enjoying a scene in which others
were suffering. Complicit in such a dilemma is the Kantian foundation of
aesthetics, and the belief in disinterestedness as fundamental to beauty.
Disinterestedness, along with voyeurism, are potentially toxic ingredients
for an aesthetics of melancholy. At the extreme, such an unethical aesthetics
becomes instead an ‘anaesthetics’, numbing and overcoming the beholder in
ways which cause them to abandon their moral compass. ‘Anaesthetic’
comes from the same root as ‘aesthetic’, relating to the sensations, but in this
case is a deadening of sensation. The ‘culture of spectatorship’ is a pernicious
manifestation of the power of aesthetic desire, and Susan Sontag speaks of a
lust where the ‘appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen,
almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked’ (Sontag, 2003, p.41).
Writing of her own trauma of seeing photographs of Bergen-Belsen and
Dachau at the age of 12, Sontag questioned the role of images of suffering.
‘Images transfix. Images anesthetize’, she wrote, and that, like pornography,
the shock wears off with repeated images and eventually dulls any sense of
shock or sorrow (Sontag, 2014, n.p.).
Landscape shares with photography the potential to anaesthetise its
beholders, and aesthetics can become seductive. This is particularly true of
the picturesque, one of melancholy’s bedfellows. The picturesque remains a
de facto language of landscape architecture, and its aesthetic conventions
allow a type of schadenfreude, a narcosis that sees beholders suspend
emotional responses in favour of finding aesthetic pleasure. The immoral,
predatory version of melancholy beauty, the aesthetic of ‘miserable’ sadness,
is epitomised by Charles Dickens’ character Will Fern in The Chimes. Will,
‘a poor and honest man, but who has been given a bad name’, emphasises
the potential danger in the conundrum of finding beauty in melancholy
suffering. His home is a leaky hovel, and evidently a popular subject for
picturesque sketching, and he declares,
You may see the cottage from the sunk fence over yonder. I’ve seen the
ladies draw it in their books, a hundred times. It looks well in a picter,
Ethics 35
I’ve heerd say; but there ain’t weather in picters, and maybe ‘tis fitter for
that, than for a place to live in. Well! I lived there. How hard – how
bitter hard, I lived there, I won’t say.
(Dickens, 1954, pp.131–132)
A modern-day version of a challenge to the aestheticising impulses of the

heartless picturesque is found works like Camilo José Vergara’s New
American Ghetto (1995) and American Ruins (1999), where as both
sociologist and photographer he documents decay in the city, and in

photographer Andrew Moore’s Detroit Disassembled (2010). Photographic
works which capture an aestheticised decay have been called ‘ruin porn’, an
exploitative attitude towards images of decay (Gansky, 2014, p.119). The
ethical dilemmas of ‘ruin porn’ are illustrated by Vergara’s experience in the
South Bronx, New York, where when perusing a seemingly abandoned
apartment building in the South Bronx, he was told by one man: ‘This is not
a ruin, this is my home. If you don’t like it, lend me money to fix it’ (Vergara,
1999, p.208). Liam Kennedy underlines the heartless picturesque implicated
in Vergara’s photographs, stating that his ‘aesthetic valorisation of ruin and
decay ultimately presents the ghetto as a “pictorial network” of singular
images that allow sensations of wonder and loss to diminish the urge for
social action he periodically calls for’ (Kennedy, 2000, p.115). Andrew
Moore was conscious of the conflicted aesthetics and ethics of photographing
ruins, and spent time talking to residents of Detroit. He found that ‘very few
residents of Detroit saw any beauty whatsoever in [its] scarred places’, and
as Gansky observes, ‘Moore’s own comments suggest that Detroit’s novel
appearance is imaginative fodder chiefly for those who live outside the city’
(Gansky, 2014, p.128).
Landscape schadenfreude is evident in practices which aestheticise poverty
and ruins, for example in landscape sketching and photography, and in the
‘heartless picturesque’, a term coined by Ruskin to express the prioritising
of aesthetics over social responsibility. This immoral aesthetic position is
echoed in the comments of David Harvey on postmodernist images which
feed off of the conventions of the picturesque:
The street scenes of impoverishment, disempowerment, graffiti and

decay become grist for the cultural producers’ mill, not … in the
muckraking conformist style of the late nineteenth century, but as a
quaint and swirling backdrop (as in Blade Runner) upon which no
social commentary is to be made.
(Harvey, 1989, p.336)
And ‘When “poverty and homelessness are served up for aesthetic pleasure”,
then ethics is indeed submerged by aesthetics, inviting, thereby, the bitter
harvest of charismatic politics and ideological extremism’ (Harvey, 1989,
p.337).
The aesthetic conventions of the picturesque – its anaesthetising effects –
allowed all kinds of pain to be inflicted on the landscape, such as the removal
of villages to create the envisioned compositions. In 1752 Joseph Damer
removed the medieval village of Milton Abbas from his estate to allow for a
Capability Brown design to be realised, and in 1756 Lord Harcourt destroyed
the ancient village of Newham, relocating the villagers discreetly out of
sight. Goldsmith wrote about ‘The man of wealth and pride’ in The Deserted
Village, of the ‘Sweet smiling village, loveliest of the lawn, / Thy sports are
fled, and all thy charms withdrawn; / Amidst the bowers the tyrant’s hand is
seen, / And desolation saddens all thy green: And only one master grasps the
whole domain’ (in Short 1991, p.70).
Beyond the traditions of the picturesque, further ethical dilemmas were
mired in seduction by lethal landscapes, as in the cult of the aesthetics of
war. The Futurists elevated the imagery of war to the status of beauty, as in
Marinetti’s vision of war’s contribution to landscape aesthetics: ‘War is
beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of
machine guns’ (in Benjamin, 1969, p.242). The objects of war were valorised
by the Futurists: ‘War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like
that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals
from the burning villages, and many others.’ There are eerie resonances in
the fetishisation of contemporary war machinery, as Neil Leach observes: ‘it
is in this “sacred horizon of appearances” that a machinery of death – the
Stealth Bomber – can seem so seductive against the pink and orange hues of
the Saudi Arabian desert’ (Leach, 1999, p.26). Architect Lebbeus Woods’
proclamation that ‘War is architecture, and architecture is war!’ (in Leach,
1999, p.27) is a contemporary revivification of the intoxicating power of
images of horror. In response to the war-torn landscape of Sarajevo, Woods
proposed ‘injection’, ‘scar’ and ‘scab’ as metaphoric design modes. Leach
contends these ideas ‘constitute an aesthetic celebration of destruction’
(Leach, 1999, p.29), again alluding to the dilemma of how aesthetic pleasure
can be found in something morally wrong, amidst what Susan Buck-Morss
calls the ‘panoply of phantasmagoric effects that aestheticize the violence of
modernity and anesthetize its victims’ (Buck-Morss, 2002, p.xi).
A similar slippage of aesthetics and ethics was observed by Bernard
Tschumi in the USA’s screening of Gulf War coverage interspersed with
footage of basketball games. Tschumi described this as one of many ways in
which history is collapsing into a set of simultaneous images, and everything
is becoming aestheticised (Tschumi 1993). The metaphor of sport is more
insidious than simply appearing in the interstices of war coverage, and Kim
Michasiw criticised how American football was adopted as a frame for the
media discourse in the Vietnam and Gulf Wars, creating a distancing from
the reality of the events, and substituting an ethical response with maleness,
ordered violence and the dynamics of the ‘game’ (Michasiw, 1992).
Michasiw linked this back to landscape, and particularly to the British
Empire’s dissemination of the picturesque to the colonies, asking:
Ethics 37
Is it possible that the class envy, masked violence and gaming that are
embedded in the discursive frame of the picturesque provided imperial
ents with … a comforting frame for activities they knew to be repugnant
to their announced moral senses.
(Michasiw, 1992, p.100)
Aesthetics’ potential for anaesthetising is there in the Gulf War coverage, in

the fixation on the images and machinery of war, in the colonisation of
landscape, and seductive images of decay. For melancholy, this ethical

dilemma haunts an advocacy of an aesthetics of sadness. On one hand it is
acceptable to seek beauty within a quality of light or a scenic attribute, but
what of seeking out decay and ruins – does this run the risk of, as in the
specific case of Detroit, ‘naturaliz[ing] the social processes responsible for
Detroit’s decline’? (Millington cited in Gansky, 2014, p.130). Henry James
captured the quandary of this internal contrariety, ‘To delight in aspects of
sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess,
shows a note of perversity’ (Henry James in Macaulay, 1977, frontispiece).
Walking through the ruins of the Roman Campagna, James was conflicted
by his own delight in speculating that a suicide may have taken place behind
one of the bolted doors or barred windows. A contemporary version of the
heartless picturesque, of an immoral melancholy, of a perverse aesthetics,
was seen in the aftermath of 9/11. As one of the ultimate ‘Kodak Moments’,
the site in lower Manhattan was extensively photographed. The desire to
capture the scene – whether for its ghoulishness, as an iconic historic site or
even for its aesthetic appeal – rubbed against the raw emotion of those
directly connected to the tragedy. Echoing Will Fern’s outcry at the women
disinterestedly drawing his hovel in their picture books, a poster at the
Ground Zero site, signed Firegirl, read: ‘I wonder if you really see what is
here or if you’re so concerned with getting that perfect shot that you’ve
forgotten this is a tragedy site, not a tourist attraction’ (in Kirshenblatt-
Gimblett, 2003, p.14). Tensions over the ways in which representations can
have a masking or naturalising effect are reminders of the need to maintain
vigilant to ethical transgression, conscious of not descending into the
predatory consumption of images of suffering, and to remain alert to what
it means to see images of post-disaster scenes, of 9/11, or New Orleans, or
Christchurch, or the slow disaster of Detroit.
An aesthetics of melancholy is fraught with these ethical dilemmas. The
heartless picturesque always lurks nearby, deriving aesthetic pleasure from
the pain and misfortune of others; as Gansky puts it, ‘trafficking in the
sickening loveliness of suffering’ (Gansky, 2014, p.130). In the context of
the designed environment, could this mean that poorly designed places
could be sources of melancholy? After all, they are often sites of suffering,
and therefore associated with melancholy. A useful distinction is found in
Susan Sontag’s words, ‘Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the
animation, the fits’ (Sontag, 2001, p.50). Although writing about a mental
state, Sontag’s description could apply to the designed environment, where
sad buildings and sad parks are nothing more than depressive because of
their poor design, their bad lighting and their spatial dysfunctionality. Such
places are not melancholy, they are simply depressing.
An ethical melancholy makes a critical distinction between emotionally
bankrupt environments, and those which induce poignancy, pathos,
yearning. Melancholy is often associated with broken-down places, yet this
elision overlooks its generative potential for the imagining of place.
Wastelands and broken landscapes represent only one part of melancholy’s

character. Finding the place of melancholy is not the same as advocating for
depressing environments, just as much as it is not a plea for wholesale
nostalgia or sentimentality. It is necessary to recognise melancholy’s dual
quality, as expressed in the early writings attributed to Saint Augustine: ‘I
discovered sadness to be double, indeed I knew two kinds of sorrow: one
that works salvation, the other, evil; one that draws to penitence, the other
that leads to desperation.’ This is echoed in Alucin’s belief in ‘two kinds of
sadness; one that brings salvation, one that brings plagues’ (Agamben, 1993,
n.12, p.10). Shuttling between these poles of sadness, or held in tension
between them, is an ethical melancholy, with all of the complexity of
aesthetic experience that transcends that of plain sadness.
Despite the culpability of Kantian aesthetics in proposing disinterestedness
as the heart of appreciating beauty, in his The Critique of Judgment Kant
offers a means of navigating part of the ethical dilemma of an aesthetics of
melancholy. As examined in Chapter 3, alongside the specific aesthetic
conventions of the Sublime, the Beautiful and the Picturesque, a Kantian
melancholy might be called a ‘spirited sadness’, one which draws strength
and conviction from a grounding within moral ideas. This is the inverse of a
‘miserable’ sadness, and distinct from John Ruskin’s ‘heartless picturesque’.
Ruskin echoed this position in what he called the ‘noble picturesque’, which
he found in the works of Joseph Mallord William Turner and Samuel Prout,
where suffering, poverty and decay were ‘nobly endured’ (Ruskin, 1856,
p.6). In the construction of an ethical melancholy, founded on a noble
picturesque, could be added tristitia utilis, or ‘useful sorrow’, as advocated
by Hugh of St. Victor in his Medicine of the Soul, which recognises
melancholy’s association with humanitarian concerns, noble solitude, and
the contemplation of nature (Agamben, 1993, p.13).
Melancholy’s complex metaphysical dimensions rescue it from a nihilistic
abandonment to voyeurism or sentimentality. At the very root of melancholy
is a loving regard for what is lost, or for impending loss, of an object, a
landscape, a moment. This love of loss, of longing, resonates with images of
decay, with sites of ruin, but spurs a poignant compassion as opposed to
vicarious consumption, or sense of dread. Roland Barthes captures how this
association is found within images of people, known or unknown, where
Ethics 39
From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately
touch me … the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will
touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links
the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable,
is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been
photographed.
(Barthes, 1984, pp.80–81)
It is this intangible sadness and collective melancholic presence that

Pallasmaa finds in ‘an abandoned home or a demolished apartment house
that reveals traces and scars of intimate lives to the public gaze on its
crumbling walls’ (Pallasmaa, 1992, n.p.).
An aesthetics of melancholy must therefore involve a sense of loss, and of
the existential infinitude that this entails. Such a position is not that of
mourning sickness, since that is finite, a process which finds completion.
Freud distinguished clearly between mourning and melancholy, making the
observation that with melancholy the subject wishes to enter the object of
mourning. While melancholia might be perceived as a negative condition,
through its abnormal relationship to loss, as Slavoj Žižek suggests, there is
a ‘conceptual and ethical primacy of melancholy’ that needs to be asserted.
Žižek points out that mourning can be interpreted as a ‘kind of betrayal’ as
it is the second killing of the lost object, but the more enduring relationship
is found in the melancholic subject who ‘remains faithful to the lost object,
refusing to renounce his or her attachment to it’ (Žižek, 2001, p.141). Judith
Butler also points to an alternative reading of Freud’s melancholia, where
the relinquishment of the love object becomes ‘its internalization and, hence,
preservation’ (in Brennan, 2008, p.4). This is reinforced by Mary O’Neill,
who suggests that the use of the term ‘lost’ rather than ‘gone’ for the dead
suggests a possibility of being ‘found’ (O’Neill, 2009, p.151). Mourning,
O’Neill observes, can be continued as a form of fidelity to the loved one.
This commitment to attending to loss can find form in landscape, even in the
simplest of forms, as Maddrell observes of memorial benches, ‘the very form
of the bench, as seat, implies not only resting, but also visiting and the
maintenance of continuing bonds’ (Maddrell, 2009, p.46).
For landscapes of melancholy, an ethical position on the loss of the object
is located in Karen Till’s theory of wounded cities. Till’s work concerns
cities who have experienced state-perpetrated violence, and the idea of the
wound is part of a resistance to forgetting (Till, 2012). In Till’s words,
open wounds in the cities of Kassel and Berlin create an irritation in

everyday space through which the past collides with the present. These
commemorative sites are ‘out of place’ in the contemporary urban
setting, for they are defined by (re)surfacing and repressed memories of
violent pasts.
(Till, 2005, pp.102–103)
This keeping open of the wound, this internalisation of the lost object,
relates to faithfulness and preservation – and in the case of violence it
becomes a means of preventing forgetting. Till describes how ‘the wound is
kept open as an uncomfortable critical site of experience, interpretation, and
meaning’ (Till, 2005, p.103).
Melancholy brings a sense of unrequitedness. Of unrequited love, of
wounds kept open. The critical position is one which maintains an ethics of
practice, an understanding of the place of loss and absence, and even of
violence. All of this requires a placement of the self in relation to that which
has experienced loss, whether another individual, an idea, a place, a
landscape. The placement of the self within this unrequitable situation
engenders feelings of empathy.
References
Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans.
Ronald L. Martinez). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Barthes, Roland (1984). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (trans. Richard
Howard; first published 1980). London: Flamingo.
Benjamin, Walter (1969). ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’,
Brennan, Mike (2008) ‘Mourning and loss: finding meaning in the mourning for
Hillsborough’. Mortality, 13(1): 1–23.
Buck-Morss, Susan (2002). Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass
Utopia in East and West, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dickens, Charles (1954). The Chimes, in the anthology Christmas Books (The
Chimes first published 1844). London: Oxford University Press.
Gansky, Andrew Emil (2014). ‘“Ruin porn” and the ambivalence of decline’.
Photography & Culture, 7(2): 119–139.
Harvey, David (1989). The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the
Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kennedy, Liam (2000). Race and Urban Space in Contemporary American Culture.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2003). ‘Kodak moments, flashbulb memories:
reflections on 9/11’. The Drama Review, 47(1): 11–48.
Leach, Neil (1999). The Anaesthetics of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Farnham: Ashgate.
Michasiw, Kim Ian (1992). ‘Nine revisionist theses on the picturesque’.
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Moore, Andrew (2010). Detroit Disassembled. Bologna: Damiani.
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Farnham: Ashgate.
Ethics 41
Pallasmaa, Juhani (1992). ‘Identity, intimacy and domicile: notes on the
phenomenology of home’, in The Concept of Home: An Interdisciplinary View,
symposium at the University of Trondheim, 21–23 August. www.uiah.fi/studies/
history2/e_ident.htm, 27 December 2015.
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Giroux.
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of Minnesota Press.
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Political Geography, 31(1): 3–14.
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New York: Verso.
7 Empathy
Sitting at the edge of a melancholy aesthetics is the troubling zone of an

unethical delight in suffering, what might be called ‘heartless melancholy’.
Efforts to define a morally sound melancholy include Kant’s ‘spirited
sadness’, and the allied ideal of Ruskin’s ‘noble picturesque’.
One of the checks and balances in the emotional repertoire which helps
guard against a descent into predatory melancholy is the concept of empathy;
ethical dilemmas can be attributed to a ‘failure of empathy’ (Marinelli and
Dell Orto, 1999, p.51). Empathy is the forming of an emotional engagement
with that which is encountered, the placement of the self into the other. This
might be found in the dialogue between one’s self and the natural world, as
in Henry David Thoreau’s observation that a ‘lake is the landscape’s most
beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the
beholder measures the depth of his own nature’ (Thoreau, 1995, p.99). The
exchange, the empathetic bond of looking at one another, is echoed in Jean-
Marie Morel’s ‘Water is to the landscape as the soul is to the body’ (in
Bergdoll, 2000, p.81) and poet Paul Claudel’s ‘Water is the gaze of the earth’
(in Murphy et al., 2000, p.81).
Importantly for an aesthetic of melancholy, although now widely
associated with psychology, empathy was a term originally developed in the
context of art, and was the seeking of a connection between subject and
object. The word Einfühlung was coined by philosopher Robert Vischer in
1873, and translated as ‘empathy’ or ‘in feeling’ by psychologist Edward
Titchener in 1909. Vischer’s concept of empathy captured the re-combination
of the self with the world, conceiving of a reciprocal relationship with the
other, as in his belief that:
I entrust my individual life to the lifeless form, just as I do with another

living person. Only ostensibly do I remain the same although the object
remains an other. I seem merely to adapt and attach myself to it as one
hand clasps another, and yet I am mysteriously transplanted and
magically transformed into this other.
(In Koss, 2006, p.139)
Empathy 43
Empathy is sometimes elided with sympathy, but there is a difference in the
nature and degree of engagement. While both terms relate to communing
with an other, empathy goes deeper, and has the sense of ‘in feeling’ rather
than sympathy’s ‘with feeling’. Escalas and Stern plot the distinction in this
way: ‘whereas sympathy stems from the perspective of an observer who is
conscious of another’s feelings, empathy stems from that of a participant
who vicariously merges with another’s feelings’ (Escalas and Stern, 2003, p.
567). By means of an illustration, they suggest a sympathetic observer
watching someone eat a lemon will think to themselves about the lemon-
eater’s perceptions, while an empathetic observer will become engaged in
‘involuntary puckering and watering of the … mouth’ (Escalas and Stern,
2003, p.567). Empathy therefore tends towards a fully phenomenological
engagement. In phenomenology, empathy relates to the experience of
another body as another subjectivity, or intersubjectivity, and is the ability
to transfer one’s own bodily awareness to the other, which enables a
recognition of feelings, emotions and intentions.
One of the necessary dimensions of a genuine empathy is an awareness of
context. Sontag’s critique of the aesthetic pleasure founded on images of
suffering is in part attributable to the dehumanising effect of media
saturation. The overwhelming volume of images experienced on a daily
basis leads to a loss of the specificity and palpability of suffering, and the
resulting erosion of empathy. Moreover, as E. Ann Kaplan suggests, the lack
of context of such images means that responses are simply sentimental
rather than genuinely empathetic. Kaplan calls this ‘empty empathy’, where
the beholder is unable to grasp the gravity of the situation, and the
engagement is only at the superficial level of the image (Kaplan, 2005, p.87).
John Berger probed the difficulty of empathy and the attendant responses in
his essay Photographs of Agony. Observing images of war in the newspaper,
Berger says, brings either despair or indignation. But,
Despair takes on some of the other’s suffering to no purpose. Indignation

demands action. We try to emerge from the moment of the photograph
back into our lives. As we do so, the contrast is such that the resumption
of our lives appears to be a hopelessly inadequate response to what we
have just seen.
(Berger, 2003, p.289)
While empathy is often used to describe an interpersonal connection, it also

relates to the ‘in feeling’ of animals or even landscapes. An empathy with the
landscape embodies both an anthropomorphising of the environment –
ascribing emotions to it – as well as the recognition of landscape as the very
embodiment of humanity. In the first sense, empathy with a melancholy
landscape resonates with the humoral tradition, where the qualities of
twilight, emptiness and so on exist in landscapes: they are embodied by the
landscape, just as they are in humans. Orhan Pamuk’s descriptions of his
native Istanbul evoke such an embodied melancholy, where he depicts the
city as possessing a collective poignancy, almost as though a person. Pamuk
portrays Istanbul as an entity exhibiting hüzün, or Turkish melancholy, and
that it is something that
by paying our respects to [hüzün’s] manifestations in the city’s streets

and views and people that we at last come to sense it everywhere: on
cold winter mornings, when the sun suddenly falls on the Bosphorus
and that faint vapour begins to rise from the surface, the hüzün is so
dense that you can almost touch it, almost see it spread like a film over
its people and landscapes.
(Pamuk, 2005, p.89)
In the second sense the empathetic response relates to the apprehension of

landscape as a setting for daily life, and therefore of empathising indirectly
with its occupants. In this case it could be argued that the ladies drawing
Will Fern’s hovel in their picture books lacked empathy with the scene they
were beholding, and were distanced from it by the disinterestedness of a
Kantian aesthetics, a heartlessness.
The so-called ‘New Spirit’ in architecture during the late 1980s and 1990s
illustrates the consequences of a lack of empathy in design. Advocates of the
New Spirit included the architects Peter Eisenman and Lebbeus Woods,
driven by the idea of redefining architecture in the context of the dominance
of media and commerce. While originally a provocative and intellectual
exercise intended to explore possible interpretations of contemporary
culture, the hypothetical musings became reality as designs were executed.
Bruce Thomas warned of the implications of these ideas being realised:
When Peter Eisenman boasts that he is able to make the average person
physically ill through his new manipulation of space and Lebbeus
Woods hypothesizes an urban landscape in which people are compelled
to inhabit the bombed ruins of war-torn cities, the New Spirit in design
should be questioned as to its intentions.
(Thomas, 1997, p.254)
The core issue, Thomas argued, was a break-down in the idea of empathy, as
the humanity of the human presence in the built environment was removed.
Instead, the idea of ‘empathy’ became distorted, and the recognition of a
correspondence between the self and the other – in this case the built
environment – simply became a ‘weary recognition of abuse’ (Thomas, 1997,
p.261). The despair and indignation that Berger referred to become accepted,
such that there is in the work of the New Spirit a ‘surrender of humanism’
(Thomas, 1997, p.262). There are echoes between this recapitulation and the
experience of ‘compassion fatigue’ (Moeller, 1999), the ‘waning of empathy’
(Kligerman, 2007a) and the ‘exhaustion of empathy’ (Kleinman and Kleinman,
Empathy 45
1996) experienced as a consequence of the overloading of individuals with
trauma and tragedy. The danger is that such numbing, surrendering, becomes
expressed in the form of the built environment – as with the New Spirit –
thereby amplifying a de-humanised existence.
The New Spirit exemplifies the significance of empathy in design, and the
corollary of adopting principles which deny a human connection with place.
Without ‘in-feeling’ – whether as a perception of a landscape’s embodied
emotional content, or through the indirect connection with its occupants –
designers run the risk of a ‘failure of empathy’, and the resultant ethical
disasters. Inflicting inhuman environments on people can, in the worst case,
be a form of torture, and in a lesser situation may simply be a trivialising of
the other, for example in an approach such as ‘datascapes’ which mine data
to produce designs, sometimes overlooking the intersubjectivity of a designer’s
relationship with the landscape, and with others. MVRDV’s ‘Datatown’
project illustrates this method of conceptualising design, imagining a city
which is ‘based only upon data. It is a city that wants to be described by
information: a city that knows no given topography, no prescribed ideology,
no representation, no context. Only huge, pure data’ (Maas, 1999, p.58). The
distance from ‘in-feeling’ resonates in this description.
Even the 2000 Venice Architecture Biennale, which was promisingly
entitled ‘Città: Less Aesthetics More Ethics’, apparently overlooked
empathetic considerations. Sanda Iliescu criticised curator Massimiliano
Fuksas’ ‘heroic disregard for the past, along with what may be described as
a nostalgia for an information-driven future’ (Iliescu, 2009, p. 17). This
information-generated design was reflected in Fuksas’ preference for
‘constantly mutating urban magmas’ and ‘virtual architecture and its
shapeless, liquid masses’ which Iliescu considers evinces the ‘buttressing of
an aesthetic style with unrelated moral claims’ (Illiescu, 2009, p.17).
Buildings which make visitors ill or aesthetics of war, and landscapes made
from data or mutating urban magmas, might resonate with melancholy on
some levels, but it is an abject melancholy rather than an empathetic one,
and the consequences of such aesthetic agendas are profound: ‘Choices
made in the making of the landscape are tangible and long lasting’ (Thomas,
1997, p.262).
The humanistic tradition in design is the antithesis of objectified approaches
like the New Spirit or datascaping. Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of
Humanism is the core of an empathetic approach to architecture. First
published in 1914, Scott’s work reflects the legacy of Vischer, traced through
psychologist Theodor Lipps’s Aesthetik (1903–1906), and developed by
British writer Vernon Lee,1 who is sometimes credited with introducing
empathy into the English language. As part of a circle who resided in Italy,
Lee shared her ideas on empathy with the American art historian Bernard
Berenson, subsequently influencing Geoffrey Scott. In The Architecture of
Humanism, Scott wrote that the ‘whole of architecture is, in fact,
unconsciously invested by us with human movement and human moods….
We translate architecture into terms of ourselves’ (Scott, 1980, p.213,
emphasis in original). This resonance between self and architecture is not,
Scott explains, ‘mere metaphors’ (Scott, 1980, p.214), not simply describing
one thing in terms of another, but transcribing it – that ‘architectural art is
the transcription of the body’s states into the forms of a building’ (Scott,
1980, p.216). This projection of the self into the world beyond is ‘ancient,
common and profound’, and something of beauty (Scott, 1980, p.217).
Scott’s humanism echoes with the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard in
his detection of resonances between the house and the self. Bachelard finds,
for example, in the poem ‘Melancholy’ by O.V. de Milosz a uniting of mental
images of mother and house: ‘I say Mother. And my thoughts are of you, oh,
House. / House of the lovely dark summers of my childhood’ (in Bachelard,
1969, p.45). Further, in Henri Bosco’s Malicroix, Bachelard conveys how the
house emanates virtues and offers protection beyond mere shelter; there is a
feeling of reciprocity which parallels the idea of empathy.
Art critic Adrian Stokes’ negotiation of his relationship with his childhood
landscape of London’s Hyde Park illuminates ideas of empathy that resonate
with Bachelard’s embodying of the self in site. Empathy and psychoanalysis
are familiar companions, since the practice of psychoanalytical therapy is
founded upon the building of an empathetic connection between therapist
and analysand. For Stokes the psychoanalytical connection is, on one level,
with the landscape itself. Stokes’ grappling with the melancholy of the park
is founded in part on an empathetic relationship as an imbuing of emotion
within the landscape. Building upon Stokes’ psychoanalytical explorations,
in association with his own therapy under Freudian therapist Melanie Klein,
the park takes on a type of sentience. Stephen Kite proposes that, for Stokes,
Hyde Park is the broken ‘mother-object’ that he is driven to re-create, to
restore, and this is the source of his angst.
In Hyde Park, Stokes found a melancholy which is embedded within
certain times of day – the ‘gardens at dusk when noises are so distinct and
park keepers so noticeable’ – and in the monuments of the park, as in Sir
Christopher Wren’s Marlborough Gate, in which he found a ‘kind of ethical
ugliness in the use of a classical form, particularly the cruel denial of shadow
or depth in the proportion of height’ (in Kite, 2009, p.19). Recalling his
childhood perceptions of the park from the early twentieth century, Stokes
labels these forms within the park as having a ‘blindness’, which is both an
aesthetic commentary on their inability to make a connection, and an ethical
commentary in the context of a landscape which is deeply divided in socio-
economic terms. The park railings form a focus for his critique, in their
division of the ‘parkees’ – the homeless park-dwellers – from the well-to-do
of the surrounding residential areas. This dimension of the empathetic
connection echoes the ‘heartless picturesque’ of the conflicted struggle
between the appreciation of an aesthetic scene and the reality of its occupants.
Stokes’ relationship with Hyde Park illuminates the co-dependence of
aesthetics, ethics, emotion, and empathy, and the circling of all of these
Empathy 47
around melancholy. In making a direct connection between Stokes and the
legacy of empathy in architectural thinking that culminated in Scott’s The
Architecture of Humanism, Kite emphasises the relationships between the
psychoanalysis and empathy, and the intertwining of landscape experience,
embodiment and the dream-theories of Freud. Kite draws a direct parallel
between Freud’s theorising of the thematic significance of water and passages
in dreams, of their association with ‘phantasies of intra-uterine life, of
existence in the womb and of the act of birth’ and Stokes’ description of
walking home through the darkening park, through the passage under the
Serpentine Bridge, where the
dirty echoing tunnel with its lingering airs was cold at all times of the
year. It was as if the passage lay beneath the dark water, here at its
deepest…. A dog would be barking like Cerberus…. I think to this
obscene hole I attributed the home of the animus that tore the body of
the park to shreds; the parkee spirit that made the park poor, hungry,
desolate.
(In Kite, 2009, pp.27–28)
Through focusing on his relationship with early twentieth-century Hyde

Park, Stokes explored the multiple dimensions of empathy, from the reading
of landscape as body, to the concern over a landscape’s occupants. These
threads of a humanistic affiliation with architecture and landscape provide
a significant locus for an aesthetic of melancholy. According to Juliet Koss,
empathy has waned as a concept over the last century, but is experiencing a
revival in some areas (Koss, 2006). Mark Jarzombek suggests that the
declining interest in empathy within philosophy in fact made it more
available in other spheres, and ‘empathy could expand its horizons to
become an essential formation of an advanced twentieth-century bourgeois
culture trying to take control of its own modernity’ (Jarzombek, 2000,
p.65). While Geoffrey Scott’s book dates from nearly a century ago,
humanism retains a presence in architecture and landscape architecture as
an expression of empathetic forms and protection against misanthropy.
Jarzombek highlights the writings of Bruce Allsopp as a more recent
empathetic position in architecture. Allsopp opens Towards a Humane
Architecture (1974) with the passage:
Modern civilization has loosened our contact with the earth, made us
less aware of our dependence, which is still entire, and inflated our pride
which can be seen as a corruption of the spirit, for pride has no
substance: it is a spiritual condition. But the earth is still under our feet
and it is upon the earth that we build architecture.… We first feel
architecture with our feet.
(In Jarzombek, 2000, p.248, n.157)
Empathy is implicit in the conception of ‘weak architecture’ or ‘fragile
architecture’, a perspective which eschews the muscular insistence of a
dominating approach to design. Pallasmaa traces the idea of fragile architecture
through Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo’s idea of ‘weak ontology’ and
‘fragile thought’, which echo Goethe’s ‘Delicate Empiricism’: ‘to understand a
thing’s meaning through prolonged empathetic looking and understanding it
grounded in direct experience’ (in Pallasmaa, 2000, p.81). A fragile architecture
is one which is contextual and responsive, echoing Allsopp’s position of
connecting to the place. Fragility, and even weakness – a term which could
easily have negative connotations – are inherently humanistic approaches to
design. Pallasmaa suggests that fragility embodies the practices of listening
and dialogue, and where ‘Geometry and formal reduction serve the heroic and
utopian line of architecture that rejects time … materiality and fragile form
evoke a sense of humility and duration’ (Pallasmaa, 2000, p.82).
The empathetic dimension of fragile architecture extends from the city
scale, such as the idea of ‘weak urbanism’ in the theories of Ignasi di Sola-
Morales, through to the intimate setting of the garden. It is the garden which
embraces the idea of fragility, almost by default, because of the dimensions
of time and change. Pallasmaa points to ‘the Japanese garden, with its
multitude of parallel, intertwining themes fused with nature, and its subtle
juxtaposition of natural and man-made morphologies’ as a key example of
the aesthetic potential of ‘weak’ approaches (Pallasmaa, 2000, p.82). Other
exemplars of sensitivity include Dimitris Pikionis’ Acropolis footpaths and
Lawrence Halprin’s Ira’s Fountain in Portland, Oregon. These works,
Pallasmaa argues, transcend the domineering approach of a singular concept
or image, and instead are grounded in place, and self-effacing in so far as
they diminish the designer’s presence. Pikionis’ work is so intricately
contextual, in spatial and temporal terms, that it appears anonymous, while
Halprin presents a work which is a ‘man-made counterpoint to the geological
and organic world.’ Further, in describing Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea,
Pallasmaa writes how it demonstrates ‘An architecture of courtesy and
attention, it invites us to be humble, receptive and patient observers. This
philosophy of compliance aspires to fulfil the humane reconciliatory task of
the art of architecture’ (Pallasmaa, 2000, p.82).
Anne Whiston Spirn’s contribution to the collection Landscape Theory
amplifies the continued significance of empathy in landscape architecture. In
words resonating with Vischer’s formulation of the term, as ‘the projection
of one’s own consciousness into another living being and other life forms’,
Spirn emphasises the necessity of reading and telling landscape, of
understanding connections and responding appropriately. She states that
‘Such dwelling invokes a sense of empathy, prompts reflection on the
continuity of human lives with other living things and with the places we
inhabit’ (Spirn, 2008, p.62). Scott, Allsopp, Pallasmaa and Spirn share the
imperative to maintain a connectivity with the landscape, with architecture,
and not to objectify them into distant and inanimate others. Entwined
Empathy 49
within this humanistic approach is not simply an ‘architecture of happiness’,
but an overarching ethos of wellbeing, which encapsulates the full spectrum
of emotional colouring, both in the self and in the other.
The resonances of emotion are perhaps nowhere more profound than in
landscapes of memory, and of the melancholy which inheres within.
However, what are the limits of empathy when we are faced with memorials
that we cannot relate to? What happens when the events, the culture, the
individuals are distant from us, and we struggle to make a connection? In his
essay ‘Monuments and Melancholia’, Rico Franses raises this question of

the meaningfulness of memorials to strangers, specifically memorials based
upon lists of names, and what the names might mean if the beholder knows
none of the dead. As with the iconic example of Maya Lin’s Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, the emotional effect is in part due
to the sheer number of names, and the consequential summoning of the
sublime, the realisation of the overwhelming dimension of the event. Franses
argues that this is only half of the story, and with reference to the AIDS
Quilt memorial, he illustrates how powerful emotions are brought forth by
the depiction of the dead not only via their names, but also other symbolic
elements. He observes that ‘The quilt makes manifest a desire for the
elicitation of the core subjectivity of the dead, the desire to ‘touch’ them
emotionally, to have access to something constituted as their individuality,
their ‘humanity’, through a series of metonymies of objects and thoughts
related to their lives’ (Franses, 2001, p.100). The intimacy of the symbols
depicted on the AIDS Quilt contradicts the distance and detachment of a
total stranger contemplating the deaths. Yet, it is not that straightforward;
the beholder does not simply feel at one with the dead, but, Franses contends,
there is an accentuation of the ‘sensation of non-acquaintanceship’ – an even
stronger feeling of the sense of being a stranger, and a realisation that one
has only ‘met’ them because they are dead. This ‘relationship’ between the
self and an other is problematic; without getting to know the individual, ‘all
that is left in circulation is the jolting sensation of unearned, unwarranted
intimacy, carrying in its wake the empty places that should be occupied by
its causes’ (Franses, 2001, p.100). Arguably, it is empathy which is at work
here, which allows for the suspension of estrangement, the coming together
with an unknown individual through their death. But that is not all. As
Vischer wrote of empathy, there is an exchange which occurs, a ‘magical
transformation into the other’, and this is true of an encounter of a ‘stranger
memorial’. One cannot genuinely grieve someone one did not know, it is not
the ‘normal’ mourning of Freudian theory. Franses suggests that what
happens instead is that part of the ‘ego’, a portion of the self, becomes
attached to the ‘object’ – the dead person. Through this the self is ‘tricked
into believing that one has suffered a loss, and then provokes melancholia as
the reaction to that event’ (Franses, 2001, p.101). There are therefore strong
resonances with the hybridising of self and other that occur through
empathy, and a genuine investment of one’s self in the landscape.
Related to this is the tension between the collective and the individual in
the practice of remembering, and the need to overcome not only the distance
of the ‘stranger’ but the potentially dehumanising effect of a mass memorial.
How can empathy be sustained in the face of a nameless multitude? Donohoe
argues that both totalitarian memorials and ‘democratic’ memorials erase
the individual, where war memorials or memorials to heroic events ‘[i]n
their attempt to make us secure in our own society, and in their valorization
of the war hero … create idols that provide the illusion that death is not
individual’ (Donohoe, 2002, p.237). And within the totalitarian regime,

Karsten Harries explains, monuments ‘promise to liberate the individual
from the burden of his or her individuality, which means also from the fear
of death, as it is in keeping generally with the appeal of totalitarianism’ (in
Donohoe, 2002, p.237).
Empathy is a vital corrective for a melancholy landscape architecture,
providing an ethical safeguard in the design of the built environment. It
provides a counter to the disinterestedness of conventional aesthetics, an
antidote to the detachment of the ocularcentric tradition, and a resistance to
non-humanistic design approaches. Empathy is also the conduit by which an
authentic attachment might be formed with strangers and multitudes in the
landscape of memory, of committing part of one’s self to the arc of tragic
memories. The built environment as an art form differs from the fine arts in
that it provides humanity’s habitat. While an individual can choose whether
or not to view an image in an art gallery, or even to look at photographs of
war on television or in a newspaper, architecture and landscape architecture
are, in their most essential form, not optional. Empathy and ethics provide
the moral compass for aesthetics, and while a reinvigoration of the emotional
is an essential component of melancholy, it is imperative that the distinction
between the artistic depiction of trauma and tragedy is sharply defined
against the creation of an emotionally rich context for dwelling.
Note
1 Vernon Lee is the pseudonym of the eccentric writer Violet Paget.
References
Bergdoll, Barry (2000). European Architecture, 1750–1890. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Berger, John (2003). ‘Photographs of agony’, in Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography
Reader. New York: Routledge.
Donohoe, Janet (2002). ‘Dwelling with monuments’. Philosophy and Geography,
5(2): 235–242.
Empathy 51
Escalas, Jennifer Edson and Stern, Barbara B. (2003). ‘Sympathy and empathy:
emotional responses to advertising dramas’. The Journal of Consumer Research,
29(4): 566–578.
Iliescu, Sanda (2009). ‘Introduction’, in Sanda Iliescu (ed.), The Hand and the Soul:
Aesthetics and Ethics in Architecture and Art. Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press.
Jarzombek, Mark (2000). The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and
History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kaplan, E. Ann (2005). Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media
and Literature. Rutgers: Rutgers University Press.
Kite, Stephen (2009). Adrian Stokes: An Architectonic Eye, Critical Writings on Art
and Architecture. London: Legenda.
Kleinman, Arthur and Kleinman, Joan (1996). ‘The Appeal of Experience: The
Dismay of Images – Cultural Appropriations of Suffering in Our Times’,
Daedalus, 125(1): 1–24.
Kligerman, Eric (2007a). Paul Celan: Specularity and the Visual Arts. Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter.
Koss, Juliet (2006). ‘On the limits of empathy’. The Art Bulletin, 88(1): 139–157.
Maas, Winy (1999). Metacity Datatown. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers.
Marinelli, Robert P. and Dell Orto, Arthur E. (1999). The Psychological and Social
Impact of Disability. Dordrecht: Springer.
Moeller, Susan (1999) Compassion Fatigue: How the Media Sell Disease, Famine,
War and Death. New York: Routledge.
Murphy, Alexander B., Johnson, Douglas L. and Haarmann, Viola (2000). Cultural
Encounters with the Environment: Enduring and Evolving Geographic Themes.
Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (2000). ‘Hapticity and time: notes on fragile architecture’.
Architectural Review, 1239: 78–84.
Pamuk, Orhan (2005). Istanbul: Memories of a City. London: Faber and Faber.
Scott, Geoffrey (1980). The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of
Taste (first published 1914). London: The Architectural Press.
Spirn, Anne Whiston (2008). ‘“One with nature”: landscape, language, empathy,
and imagination’, in Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins (eds), Landscape
Theory. New York: Routledge.
Thomas, Bruce (1997). ‘Culture, merchandise, or just light entertainment? New
architecture at the millennium’. Journal of Architectural Education, 50(4):
254–264.
Thoreau, Henry David (1995). Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Walden originally
published 1854). New York: Dover Publications.

Part II
The places of melancholy

8 The places of melancholy
Attention is turned now from the arguments for a melancholy aesthetic

towards the places in which it might be found. When considering possible
routes for navigating the terrain of melancholy, several courses are possible.
The first and perhaps the most obvious is typological, an exploration of
types of melancholy landscapes – memorials, ruins, post-industrial
landscapes. Yet, rather than be limited by the route governed by pre-existing
categories of landscape, the approach here is to leave the beaten track, and
locate the places of melancholy by means of suggesting an array of evocative
qualities or conditions. The proposed qualities do not exist independently,
and coalesce with each other like the imbricated circles of a Venn diagram.
There are many points of commonality and crossing, yet at the same time
there are unique qualities which are brought forward, exhibited, offered.
The places of melancholy is therefore a guide of sorts – in both senses of
the word, as a source of recognition and of instruction – enhancing the
beholder’s engagement with the landscape, and offering the possibility of
amplifying the condition of melancholy in the design of landscapes. Through
drawing attention to the range of conditions, the aspiration is towards
creating a forum for melancholy, a shared understanding of melancholy as
an aesthetic. The following chapters are presented as a means of
‘melancholising’, to resuscitate a now obsolete term used by seventeenth-
century melancholy theorist Robert Burton. To melancholise was to think in
a melancholy way, including seeking out voluntary solitude and to muse on
the imaginary. Landscape provides the ideal setting for melancholising. As
John Dixon Hunt argued of melancholy’s ally, commemoration, ‘certain
long-standing characteristics of landscape architecture afford special
resources to the art of commemoration, whether in its deliberately elegiac
mode or in lending it elegiac tonality’ (Hunt, 2005, p.20).
As well as sites of an elegiac beauty, places of melancholy are also the
locus of slowness, countering the seeming urgency and relentlessness of the
contemporary condition. In the same way that slow food imbues the
everyday practice of eating with a greater sense of engagement, so too do
landscapes which cannot be apprehended at a glance. Photographer Alfredo
Jaar wrote of his approach to photography: ‘it is imperative to slow down,
to contextualise and frame properly each image so it makes sense, so it
cannot be dismissed’ (in Schweizer, 2007, p.11). Slow landscapes, too,
demand of the beholder a certain commitment, and in return provide
enduring repositories of emotion. Slowness embeds an awareness of space
and time, and melancholic places are both retrospective and prospective.
Milan Kundera observed that
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed

and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is

walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall
something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows
down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident
he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if
he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in
time. In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two
basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the
intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the
intensity of forgetting.
(Kundera, 1997, p. 34)
Contemplation of time in association with submersion, weathering, and

fragmentation bring about reflection upon life’s fleetingness, but also a
resistance of the nihilistic free-fall towards the end of things. The
contemplation of mortality brings a vivid authenticity to existence, as
expressed in Martin Heidegger’s statement that we should not ‘darken
dwelling by blindly staring toward the end’ or to make death the goal of
living (in Donohoe, 2002, p.236). Donohoe explains that both options deny
the ‘death of death’, instead of engaging with the unease of finality, and
this anxiety draws us away from our constant concern with the mundane
activities of everyday life. Our familiarity with things is interrupted, our
reliance upon the common understanding of the world is disrupted and
each of us must face our own death.
(Donohoe, 2002, p.236)
This melancholy inspection of existence finds a setting within the places and
conditions outlined in the following chapters. Through attention to those
sites and works which are attuned to the anxiety and authenticity of
existence, there is the possibility of deepening an engagement with landscape.
Becoming attuned to the sensing of space, and of melancholy in particular,
is a way to ‘become better placed to appreciate the emotionally dynamic
spatiality of contemporary social life’ (Davidson and Milligan, 2004, p.524).
Within the void and in the uncanny, in a certain light or in shadow,
attended by aura and liminality, the fragmentary and the left behind, the
submerged, the weathered and the camouflaged, and in the state of intimate
The places of melancholy 57
immensity … these melancholic moments grace architecture and landscape.
What is offered here is a compendium of places, images, buildings,
landscapes, in which a suffusion of melancholy gathers – a melancholy
terrain, a map of a landscape of affection, a ‘pays du tendre’.1
Note
1 Pays du tendre is Madeleine du Scudéry’s phrase for a terrain of emotions. See
Bruno (2002).
References
Bruno, Giuliana (2002). Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film.
New York: Verso.
Davidson, Joyce and Milligan, Christine (2004). ‘Editorial: embodying emotion
sensing space: introducing emotional geographies’. Social & Cultural Geographies,
5(4): 523–532.
5(2): 235–242.
Hunt, John Dixon (2005). ‘“Come into the garden, Maud”: garden art as a privileged
mode of commemoration and identity’, in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.),
Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design.
Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Kundera, Milan (1997). Slowness (trans. Linda Asher; originally published 1995).
New York: Harper Perennial.
9 The void
Melancholy’s agency is in part derived from its resistance to closure. From

the ache of unrequitable love to the open wound of Freudian melancholy,
the holding of the end at bay establishes a condition of intense emotion. For
landscapes of memory, the melancholy of the void is a conundrum. It is
often presumed that landscapes designed for the commemoration of tragedy
must be attentive to healing and closure. To re-frame memorials as sites for
melancholy sets in place an entirely different attitude towards our relationship
with memory. Melancholy is not directed towards the overcoming of
grief, but rather the intensification of the contemplative and existential
planes of memory.
The void is both an absence of things and an absence of meaning. In the
first, the void is vividly invoked in the presence of an empty chair. A chair,
something which is at once so directly a sign of presence, a place for sitting,
when empty becomes a vessel of loss. Charles Dickens’ empty chair
epitomises the ways in which the void of absence carries an emotional cargo.
When performed as a tableau, the ‘replica of Dickens’ library at Gad’s Hill,
with an empty chair beside the study cabinet’ was described as ‘one of the
most affecting of the many tableaux’ at the Coliseum in London when actors
paid a tribute to the author after his death in 1870 (Wallace, 1912, p.117).
Dickens’ illustrator, Luke Fildes, painted a watercolour of the empty chair,
which was published in the magazine The Graphic, and captures the
melancholy of the void. Fildes’ empty chair painting finds an uncanny echo
in the paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Vincent’s Chair and Gaugin’s Chair,
both from 1888. The resemblance is not a coincidence, as Gilles Soubigou
explains – Van Gogh was known to have owned a copy of the illustration of
Dickens’ empty chair, and knew his work well. The pipe and tobacco on
Vincent’s Chair emphasise the connection, as Van Gogh wrote in his letters
about taking up smoking after reading Dickens. He had great empathy for
Dickens’ work, even to the extent of following his ‘remedy against suicide’,
as he described in a letter to his sister Willemien in 1889: ‘a glass of wine, a
piece of bread and cheese and a pipe of tobacco. It isn’t complicated, you’ll
tell me, and you don’t think my melancholy comes close to that place,
however at moments – ah but …’ (in Soubigou, 2013, pp.164–165).
The void 59
Empty chairs embody a sense of departure, abandonment. Like the
residues explored in Chapter 16, they are remains, leavings. Helen Jaksch
gathered together images of empty chairs left in the wake of Hurricane
Katrina. She described how ‘The chairs have also witnessed. They have seen.
The evacuation. The flood. The return’ (Jaksch, 2013, p.105). Referring to
designer Akiko Busch, Jaksch writes about the empty chairs, that, ‘“we
persuade inanimate objects to be our partners in experience,” and by doing
so we transform the everyday object of the chair into an extraordinary place
for the potentiality of memory, of memorialization, of haunting, of ghosts’

(Jaksch, 2013, p.105). A chair is unquestionably a human trace, bearing
imprints from sitting, holding memories from its use. When captured in an
image the chair is what Roland Barthes calls a punctum, that detail or
element of a photograph which triggers a connection. Barthes describes the
punctum as that which ‘pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’,
expressing that emotional moment of connection with an image (Barthes,
1981, p.27).
Images of empty chairs, like those of Dickens, Van Gogh and Gaugin, and
the Hurricane Katrina chairs, invoke the void of absence. This palpability of
memory has been expressed in physical form in empty chair memorials in
Oklahoma (2000), Leipzig (2001), Krakow (2005), Santiago (2006),
Christchurch (2011), and New York (2011). The Oklahoma memorial
commemorates the loss of 168 lives in the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah
Building in 1995, and was designed by the Butzer Design Partnership. The
memorial includes 168 empty chairs, in nine rows to represent the nine
floors, with the chairs identical in form but with 19 smaller chairs to
recognise the children lost in the bombing (Figure 9.1).
Despite their similarity in form, the chairs are imbued with individuality
through the inscription of the names of the dead, one on each chair. Hans
Butzer described how the empty chairs were about ‘someone not being
there’, so that ‘Like an empty chair at a dinner table, we are always aware
of the presence of a loved one’s absence’ (in Linenthal, 2001, p.218). Harriet
F. Senie points to the likely inspiration for the empty chair component of the
memorial, the work by Karl Biederman, Der Verlassene Raum (‘The
Abandoned Room’), Berlin, Germany (1988–1996) (Figure 9.2).
The Butzers, she notes, were working in Berlin at the time of the Oklahoma
bombing, and it is likely that they would have been aware of this piece,
which features ‘a bronze table and two empty chairs, one overturned, it is
situated in the middle of the Koppenplatz, a quarter where Eastern European
immigrants once lived and Jewish institutions co-existed with their Christian
counterparts’ (Senie, 2013, p.85).
The Abandoned Room in Berlin was part of the memorialisation of
Kristallnacht, and in Leipzig another memorial to this widespread attack on
Jews on 9 November 1938, The Night of Broken Glass, also enlists empty
chairs. The memorial, designed by Anna Dilengite and Sebastian Helm,
marks the spot where a synagogue was burnt to the ground by the Nazis.
Figure 9.1 Butzer Design Partnership, Field of Empty Chairs, Oklahoma City
National Memorial, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA, 2001. Photo by
Ken Lund, 2004.
Figure 9.2 Karl Biederman, Der Verlassene Raum (‘The Abandoned Room’), Berlin,
Germany, 1988–1996. Photo by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, 2011.
The void 61
The ground plan of the synagogue forms the memorial’s base, and 140
bronze chairs stand in pew-like rows above it (Figure 9.3).
The empty chairs in Krakow are not ordered into rows, but are distributed
around the Plac Bohaterow Getta (‘Ghetto Heroes Square’). Seventy empty
chairs, including 33 steel and cast-iron chairs (1.4 m high) and 37 smaller
chairs (1.2 m high) stand on the edge of the square and at tram stops.
Designed by Piotr Lewicki and Kazimierz Latak, the memorial remembers
Jews of the Jewish ghetto who had no choice but to live in this place, where
they feared for their lives, living in overcrowded conditions, where people
starved to death, were murdered or sent to concentration camps. The chairs
represent loss and absence as the ghetto in Krakow was cleared and all the
residents’ possessions were strewn across the streets. As a symbol of the
domestic interior there is a strange disruption when the chairs are displayed
in the public landscape.
In Santiago, Chile, the three chairs represent three members of the
Communist Party who were abducted and murdered in 1985, during the
Pinochet regime. Santiago Nattino, Manuel Guerrero and Jose Manuel
Parada were the victims of what was known as the Caso Degollados (‘Slit
Throat Case’), a brutal murder which had widespread political repercussions
with arrest of two colonels, a major, two captains and two police officers,
and the resignation of the general director of the Carabineros (national
police force). The memorial was designed by two architects, Rodrigo Mora
and Angel Muñoz, and an artist, Jorge Lankin, and differs from the other
empty chair memorials described here in terms of their larger-than-life scale,
at 10 metres tall (Figure 9.4). Rather than a chair which has an immediate
Figure 9.3 Anna Dilengite and Sebastian Helm, memorial at the site of the former
Great Synagogue in Leipzig, Germany, 2001. Photo by Heinrich Stürzl,
2014.
Figure 9.4 Rodrigo Mora, Angel Muñoz and Jorge Lankin, A Place for Memory,
monument to the victims of the Caso Degollados (‘Slit-Throat Case’),
Santiago, Chile, 2006. Photographer unknown, 2009.
sense of humanity through its scale, the chairs making up the ‘Place for
Memory’ are enormous, perhaps to ensure their presence within the vast
landscape where just three chairs might be overlooked.
Christchurch’s work, by Peter Majendie, is a temporary memorial (Figure
9.5). The poignancy of this temporality is expressed in the text displayed
next to the site: ‘this installation is temporary, as is life.’ The Christchurch
empty chairs differ from those in Oklahoma, Leipzig, Krakow and Santiago
in that every chair is distinctive. The chairs are not named, as they are at
Oklahoma, but the poignancy of individual lives is apparent in the chairs’
variability. Throughout the memorial’s life, Majendie tended the chairs,
painting them and in some cases replacing them, so there is an ethics of care
and ongoing change that underpin the memorial’s melancholy.
The melancholy of the void and temporality came together too at Bryant
Park, New York. Marking ten years after the World Trade Center attacks,
the lawn that is usually a place for having lunch and enjoying the sun became
an ephemeral memorial, with 2,753 of the empty iconic Bryant Park chairs
lined up to face south towards the fallen towers – one to honour each person
who died in the attacks.
While the empty chair memorials intentionally enlist the emptiness of the
chairs as a melancholy trope, memorial benches have their own atmosphere
of pathos. Not designed to be empty, memorial benches set up what Avril
Maddrell calls a ‘Third Emotional Space’ – a space that is neither a funerary
The void 63
Figure 9.5 Peter Majendie, Empty Chairs Temporary Memorial for the Christchurch
Earthquake, New Zealand. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2014.
landscape nor a domestic landscape, but is a mediation between (Maddrell,

2009, p.46). The melancholy of the void enlists the emotional potency of
space itself, a space implied by that which indicates absence. Referring to the
work of Hockey et al., Maddrell adds that ‘significant “objects and spaces
have their own agency” and are capable of animating the presence of the
deceased’ (Maddrell, 2009, p.46). This hovering between domesticity and
the formality of the funerary space, and between presence and absence,
imparts both the melancholy of the void, and of liminality, offering a kind
of ‘passage landscape’ – a term coined by Carola Wingren for those spaces
‘which physically support “threshold rites” like the rites of passage … in
which the ritual subject crosses over from one state to another’ (Petersson
and Wingren, 2011, p.62).
At Mullion Cove in Cornwall, John Wylie describes coming across the
memorial benches, the many seats that have been placed there ‘in loving
memory’. Looking, in their emptiness, at the view of the sea – literally at the
‘vanishing point’ as Wylie puts it – these benches embody ‘Absence at the
heart of the point of view. Just as they are about landscape, the benches at
Mullion Cove are about absence and love – and in this sense more widely
about memory’ (Wylie, 2009, p.278). But the benches are not just places to
look at the landscape from, their existence as seats in the landscape is
complex as they are also something to be looked at. Were they simply to be
benches in the landscape they would not invite this gaze, since they are in
themselves unremarkable. It is because of their role as markers of
absence that the benches are to be looked at – of staring at a void, at a loss.
Wylie explains:
The benches operate according to a logic of displacement and absence,

at once unsettling and yet serene, as the precondition of their articulation
of viewer and viewed, gaze and landscape. They displace self into
landscape, landscape into self. They can only ever present, here and
now, an absence.
(Wylie, 2009, p.282)
The empty chairs and empty benches lay bare absence, with the landscape
becoming an expression of the void. Memorial landscapes which enlist the
melancholy of the void are arguably more ethical and empathetic in their
approach to grief than those sites which might be considered a form of
denial. Writing about Rachel Whiteread’s project House, 1993, Doreen
Massey contrasted the sculptural cast of a terraced house with a classic
‘heritage site’:
[w]hile House is a prompt and a disturbance to the memory, the classic

heritage site fills in those spaces and restricts the room for interpretation
and imagination. Instead of questioning memory and pre-given
understandings of the past, the classic heritage site will provide them
readymade. Instead of defamiliarizing the supposedly familiar, it is
meant as an aid to further familiarization. It is, by design, an
understandable rather than an unsettling space, a comfortable
rapprochement with another space-time.
(Massey, 1995, p.43)
The void 65
In landscapes of memory the classic heritage site works against melancholy,
through its attempts at resolution, familiarity and easy understanding.
An event which is truly tragic requires not resolution or closure, but an
opening towards the emotional, a fully present engagement. Through
confronting the void there is a challenge to connect with the subjective, and
confront the depth of existence. The void is constituted through a bypassing
of the symbolic. As opposed to a landscape providing a ‘readable’ script, or
what Kevin Robins calls a ‘protective illusion’, the melancholy of the void
aspires towards providing the conditions for contemplation (in Massey,

1995, p.45). Opposing Curl’s ‘emotional anaemia’ (Curl, 1980, p.359),
Keenan’s ‘automatic machinery of remembrance’ (Keenan, 2003) and
Massey’s ‘restricted imagination’, the void aspires to the state of Agamben’s
‘unforgettable’ (Godfrey, 2007, p.243). Even in the context of a memorial
as seemingly symbolic as the AIDS quilt, the irresolvability of coded elements
means that the beholder is marooned within the void. Franses explains that
the very unknowability of the victims – the ‘strangers’ – means that those
who view the memorial cannot mourn them, and thus enter into the state of
Freudian melancholy (Franses, 2001, p.102).
Resisting symbolism and courting the void runs counter to an enduring
desire to ‘understand’ art and design. Abstract art defies the tendency for
interpretation, providing the challenge to the viewer to look within
themselves for a reaction, rather than to seek an external explanation. Two
examples serve to illustrate this tension, one a painter and one a filmmaker.
The paintings of René Magritte are typified by an ostensibly emblematic
quality, with animals, clouds, rocks, candles, figures and so on all suggestive
of a ‘meaning’. However, Magritte vehemently opposed symbolic
interpretations of his paintings, and writer Suzi Gablik, who carried out an
ongoing dialogue with him, described how ‘People have always looked for
symbolic meanings in Magritte’s pictures, and in some cases managed to
find them. Nothing caused him greater displeasure’ (Gablik, 1985, p.11).
Magritte himself declared that the search for explanations is an attempt to
avoid the possibility that things cannot be explained, and that viewers
hunt around for a meaning to get themselves out of a quandary, and

because they don’t understand what they are supposed to think when
they confront the painting ... they want something to lean on, so they
can be comfortable…. They want something secure to hang onto, so
they can save themselves from the void.
(In Gablik, 1985, p.11)
A further example of the aspiration to arrest definitive symbolic

interpretations is found in the work of filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.
Pallasmaa describes how Tarkovsky’s films are ‘saturated with certain
repeated images, such as water, fire, earth, wind, fog, trees, horses, dogs,
mirrors, candles and hair. These are all images that are densely charged with
symbolic connotations deriving from mythological and religious
iconography’ (Pallasmaa, 2001, p. 67). These images, however, resist
interpretation through a device of ‘short-circuiting’, which ‘pushes the
viewer off the path of conventional reading and placid acceptance of
meaning into a state of intense curiosity and yearning’ (Pallasmaa, 2001,
p.68). The ‘short-circuiting’ is a kind of poetics, which presents that which
might seem familiar in ways which require a different apprehension, where
what seems straightforward resists closure, and instead becomes a riddle.
Rather than maintaining a distinct set of connotations and meanings,

‘Tarkovsky’s images keep opening and branching out to an expanding field
of associations and possible meanings. Tarkovsky creates interacting clusters
of poetic images which constitute an invisible rhizome of feeling and
association’ (Pallasmaa, 2001, p.68).
Designed landscapes negotiate this same symbolic dilemma, where there
is a seemingly inexorable pull towards finding meaning in memorial sites. As
Davis noted in her work in Rwanda and Cambodia, the seductive power of
information acts as a diversion from confronting the horrors of the sites
visited by Western tourists (Davis, 2009). And for locals, the encoding of
narratives within memorials offers a different kind of security, bound up
with aspects of evidence, identity and place. Gillis describes how in this
context ‘anti-monuments’ – those memorial designs which rebel against
conventional expectations – are criticised for ‘manufacturing oblivion’ and
eroding the content of the event. However, he claims that through the
dematerialising of memory in anti-monuments, memory can be stripped of
an assumed objectivity, ‘thereby forcing everyone to confront her or his own
subjectivity, while at the same time acknowledging a civic responsibility to
not let the past repeat itself’ (Gillis, 1994, p.17).
Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, DC is an iconic
exemplar of the melancholy of the void, eschewing pure representation and
instead abstracting the task of memory into the simple form of black granite
walls listing the names of the dead. The memorial provides a resistance to
the potential for the loss of empathy that can occur with the dehumanising
effect of mass memorials. Rather than erasing the individual, the memorial
works to maintain their presence. Although the mass of names is, on one
hand, beyond the comprehension of an individual, it is significant that the
dead are not listed alphabetically like a ‘telephone directory’, as Maya Lin
pointed out, but in chronological order of death, like an ‘epic poem’ (in
Hagopian, 2005, p.351). The polished black granite surface draws the
visitor into the memorial, placing them in a dialogue with the names, but
without insisting on an interpretation. Lin aspired to create a memorial that
viewers ‘could relate to as on a journey, or passage, that would bring each
to his own conclusions’ (Donohoe, 2002, p.238).
One of the most controversial aspects of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
was the pressure to create a figurative statue, as a corrective to the perceived
absence of recognisable figures or symbols. Donohoe highlights how the
The void 67
addition of the statue of the three soldiers to the wider setting of the memorial
shifts it from something abstract, and therefore open, to an ideological
reading. Through providing an image of the ‘war hero’ it transcends the
possibility of individuals’ deaths, replaced by a universal generic image: ‘a
mere representation in the form of nameless, ideal soldiers’ (Donohoe, 2002,
p.238). The difference between the potential to leave tokens to an individual
at the black granite walls, and the seeming impossibility of doing so at the feet
of the statue of soldiers, is pointed out by Donohoe as a confounding of the
possible connection with death as an individual, human dimension.

The void of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial allows for the visitor to
engage fully with their self as part of the experience, and Donohoe notes
that silence comes naturally at the site, rather than having to be requested by
means of a sign, as at other memorials like the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier in nearby Arlington Cemetery. She says that ‘Monuments that do
not present idols, or unified totalizing meaning, challenge us to be mindful
of our own mortality and do not allow us to become comfortable in the
mundanity of our everyday existence’ (Donohoe, 2002, p.238). The
presentation of a void rather than a representation of soldiers also allows for
the melancholy of the stranger memorial. While it is possible to read the
names on the wall, for many of the visitors it is impossible to know those
individuals; they are strangers and always will be. What Franses called the
‘sensation of non-acquaintanceship’ is intensified, that feeling of only having
become acquainted with these people because they are dead. Yet, the feeling
of loss is irresolvable, normal grieving is foiled by not being able to fill in all
the details. While the meaningfulness of these individuals is apparent in the
tokens laid at the memorial and the sense of reverence emanating from the
hush of visitors, there is also the impossibility of closure. In Freudian terms,
then, melancholia results, as part of the self, part of the ego, becomes
attached to these lost objects, these many individual deaths.
Lin’s memorial reveals the melancholy of the void as both a spatial
expression and an aesthetic one. The void is formed through the depression
into the earth, as well as in the resisting of representation. The Memorial to
the Martyrs of the Deportation on the Île de la Cité in Paris echoes this dual
move, creating a negative space at the tip of the island as well as offering
almost nothing by means of ‘readable’ elements (Figure 9.6).
It is not surprising to learn that Maya Lin became familiar with this
memorial during time spent in Paris (Young, 2015). Designed by Georges-
Henri Pingusson and constructed in 1953–1962, the memorial is essentially
invisible from the surrounding context. The memorial performs an ‘edit’ of
the Parisian landscape, where, after descending into the void space nothing
is visible but the sky and the void itself. All of Paris disappears. The focus
shifts to the individual and their own presence within the space, their
heightened sense of self, the sky, and the water which is hinted at where the
Seine passes below a metal grille. Inside a crypt which leads off the void is a
passage lined with seemingly infinite small lights.
Figure 9.6 Georges-Henri Pingusson, Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation

(‘Memorial of the Deportation’), Paris, France, 1962. Photo by Groume,
2010.
Adrian Forty argues that the Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation is
a success partly due to its
inversion of the conventional memorial form of the monument. Not a

protrusion, but a declivity; not an object, but a void – and when you are
in the void, there is nothing there to look at apart from yourself, the sky,
the water, and the unbroken surface of the concrete wall.
(Forty, 2005, p.92)
The fragility of memory is maintained, Forty observes, as opposed to

becoming bound up in the massiveness of the concrete structure. He cites the
words of the designer, Pingusson, who expresses a deeply melancholy
reflection on memory: ‘It is in the law of all living creatures, beings and
things to one day disappear … everything will fade away, everything will
pass, and to want anything to last is a big challenge’ (in Forty, 2005, p.92).
Another aspect of the success of the memorial, in Forty’s critique, is the
use of concrete, and its resistance to apparent ageing. In contrast to the
indices of weathering and decay inducing a melancholy evocation of time’s
passage (see Chapter 18), here it is the very antithesis of that which heightens
the memorial’s emotional potential. Forty explains:
The void 69
The concrete surroundings do not invite any kind of reflection on
history, or even on the passage of time; memory, if there can be such a
thing, is of the moment, it cannot be captured or preserved, and this the
permanent newness of the concrete seems to acknowledge.
(Forty, 2005, p.93)
Pingusson’s memorial has resonances with Whiteread’s House, both in the

use of concrete as a monolithic material, and in the amplification of the
complex nature of memory through resisting the temptation to explain

everything. These monolithic resistances create melancholy voids through
establishing a physical absence – Pingusson through creating a negative
space set down into the earth, and Whiteread through making mass out of a
void. These formal manoeuvres resonate too with the enigmatic landscape
of Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.
Defying the interminable efforts to ‘explain’ the memorial, to find the
meaning behind it, the field of stelae offer a poignantly opaque mnemonic
marker. Undeniably phenomenologically rich, with an undulating ground
surface covered with the rippling terrain of vertical elements, the memorial
remains abstract and open to interpretation. Through purely experiential
means, free from any interpretative support, emotion is elicited from visitors.
It is a landscape which appears to create an empathetic force field, a place
where contemplation – that most melancholic of acts – is facilitated. Perhaps
it is merely the knowledge that this is a memorial, and that it represents a
loss that is beyond comprehension, that provokes reflection and a depth of
feeling. Nothing more needs to be said.
A further example pushes the nature of memorial design into an interior
realm – of a monument constructed within a gallery setting. Photographer
Alfredo Jaar’s works on the Rwandan tragedy echo the corresponding
engagements with landscape ‘content’ as in the design of memorials, and
subsequently shed further light on the nature of the void. After taking
thousands of photographs of the atrocities in Rwanda, Jaar chose to place
the images away from the public gaze in his exhibition ‘Real Pictures’. The
photographs were instead contained within black, linen-covered, archival
boxes, and the boxes in turn were aggregated into forms reminiscent of
tombs; large, solid and immutable. Each of the archival boxes had a text in
white lettering on the top, describing the photograph inside. In all, 550
prints of 60 images were contained within the archival tombs, installed
within a low-lit gallery, a liminal atmosphere evocative of melancholy.
These descriptions included:
Ntarama church,
Nyamata, Rwanda, Monday,
August 29, 1994.
This photographs shows Benjamin Musisi, 50, crouched low in the
doorway of the church amongst scattered bodies spilling out into the
daylight. 400 Tutsi men, women, and children who had come here
seeking refuge were slaughtered during the Sunday mass. Benjamin
looks directly into the camera, as if recording what the camera saw. He
asked to be photographed amongst the dead. He wanted to prove to his
friends in Kampala, Uganda that the atrocities were real and that he had
seen the aftermath.
(Jaar, no date)
Ruzizi 2 Bridge
Bukavu, Zaire – Cyangugu, Rwanda Border
Sunday, August 28th, 1994
The Ruzizi 2 Bridge is one of two bridges across the Ruzizi River that
separates Rwanda from Zaire on the Southwest border. At the peak of
the violence, refugees fled Rwanda at the rate of 35,000 people per day.
Now this bridge has been closed for six days, the banks of the river are
swelling with people waiting to cross.
(In van de Vall, 2008, p.1)
The solidity of the boxes, and their monumental forms, paradoxically took
on the quality of an absence. Forced to imagine rather than simply look, the
‘Real Pictures’ monuments amplified the beholders’ emotional engagement
at the same time as promoting a sense of empathy. Far from the compassion
fatigue of media saturation, or the apathy born of inundation with images
of tragedy, the effect of Jaar’s monuments was to deny a passive response.
The beholder needed to become actively engaged, through the seat of their
own imagination, through locating the tragic within their very self. In
contrast to Roland Barthes’ comments on how ‘shock photos’ tend to be
‘over-constructed’, Jaar’s monuments are under-constructed. Barthes
observed that numerous images of horror results in the construction of an
‘intentional language of horror’, yet it is one which fails to touch us because
‘we are in each case dispossessed of our judgement; someone has shuddered
for us, reflected for us, judged for us; the photographer has left us nothing
– except a simple right of intellectual acquiescence’ (Barthes, 1997, p.71).
Instead of giving everything, Jaar gives almost nothing, and this intensifies
the melancholy of the void. As Jaar explained, ‘I wanted to work in reverse,
I wanted to start with an absence in the hope of provoking a presence’ (Jaar,
no date). The beholder is not able to find a resolution, as the images remain
elusive; the void sets up a strongly melancholic situation that has resonances
with the liminal, described in Chapter 14. As in liminality, the melancholy
of the void is related to a condition of deferment, resistance and imprecision.
Another photographic example illustrates this, as in Renée de Vall’s
recollection of images of the 2004 tsunami, recalling how one in particular
stood out, an ‘apparently peaceful scene of two children running to a sea
line that was slowly retreating’. She explains that what made these pictures
different was that ‘they mobilize the empathy of the spectator as they require
The void 71
an imaginative ‘filling in’. And that is also how they acquire their ‘slowness’:
they entrench themselves in one’s memory, because they ask for the
spectator’s active engagement’ (van de Vall, 2008, p.6).
The void is a condition that promotes an empathetic and ethical
melancholy. Rather than vicariously feasting upon the tragic, the void
replaces the particular with the abstract, and therefore turns emotion back
onto the beholder themselves, grounding it within their own subjectivity.
Robert Ivy observes that: ‘Following the immediacy of loss, when grief has
thinned or disappeared, we inevitably begin to appreciate the monument or

the memorial for its more abstract qualities’ (Ivy, 2002, p.84). With time,
the numbing saturation by images of violence, or the easy consumption of
data, is replaced by an expression of the ineffable. With reference to abstract
objects in the context of an architecture of the tragic, Robert Maxwell
observes that they are enigmatic, and because of this ‘resist ... being emptied
of meaning’ (Maxwell, 2000, p.11). Further, Pallasmaa explains, ‘Abstraction
is not a synonym for the lack of meaning, but its opposite. Abstraction is a
condensation of meaning or imagery, a pregnant symbol’ (in MacKeith,
2005, p.80).
References
Barthes, Roland (1981). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (trans. Richard
Howard). New York: Hill and Wang.
Barthes, Roland (1997). ‘Shock photos’, in The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
(trans. Richard Howard; originally published 1979). Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Curl, James Steven (1980). A Celebration of Death: An Introduction to Some of the
Buildings, Monuments, and Settings of Funerary Architecture in the Western
European Tradition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
Davis, Shannon (2009). ‘Ma[r]king memory’. Unpublished PhD thesis, School of
Landscape Architecture, Lincoln University, New Zealand.
5(2): 235–242.
Forty, Adrian (2005). ‘Concrete and memory’, in Mark Crinson (ed.), Urban
Memory: History and Amnesia in the Modern City. Oxford: Routledge.
Gablik, Suzi (1985). Magritte. London: Thames and Hudson.
Gillis, John R. (1994). ‘Introduction’, in John R. Gillis, Commemorations: The
Politics of National Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Godfrey, Mark (2007). Abstraction and the Holcaust. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Hagopian, Patrick (2005). ‘The commemorative landscape of the Vietnam War’, in
Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.), Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity
and Landscape Design. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library
and Collection.
Ivy, Robert (2002). ‘Memorials, monuments and meaning’. Architectural Record,
190(7): 84.
Jaar, Alfredo (n.d.). Lecture for the series La Generazione delle Immagini. www.
undo.net/cgi-bin/openframe.pl?x=/Pinto/Eng/fjarr.htm, 27 December 2015.
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of memory in post-Katrina New Orleans’. The Drama Review, 57(1): 102–115.
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November, 2003.
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Massey, Doreen (1995). ‘Space-time and the politics of location’, in James Lingwood
(ed.), Rachel Whiteread: House. London: Phaidon/Arts Council England.
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10 The uncanny
The familiar made strange – the uncanny – is inherently melancholy. The

distancing of the familiar loads it with an intangible poignancy, the sensation
of something disturbing yet strangely appealing in an aesthetic sense. The
uncanny is associated with a palpable unease and Freud places it in ‘the
realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread’ (Freud, 2003,
p.123). So compelling is the strange pull of the uncanny that Freud notes it
as one of the rare moments when a psychologist takes an interest in aesthetics.
Defining the uncanny vexed Freud, and as he traced its etymology
he observed that in many languages there was no word for this special
type of the frightening, finding parallels in the eerie and the haunted. The
most potent sense of the uncanny was located within two apparent antonyms
– the German words heimlich and unheimlich – the homely and the
unhomely. There are times, Freud notes, when these terms merge, with
homely and unhomely occurring simultaneously, creating the strange
sensation of the uncanny.
From a Freudian perspective, the engine for both melancholy and the
uncanny is repetition. Melancholy revolves around an eternal repeating or
revisiting of loss, resisting the passage out of this loop via the pathway of
mourning. The uncanny is also produced via repetition and return,
particularly in the phenomena of doubling and mirroring. Déjà-vu is an
instance of the uncanny, a strange sensation of repetition, yet an irresolvable
one; as Freud puts it: ‘what is looked for is not remembered.’ Melancholy
and the uncanny are aesthetic conundrums, where it is seemingly perverse to
find aesthetic pleasure in something so troubling to the psyche.
Anthony Vidler locates the uncanny emphatically within the architectural
– both in the residential scale of the house, perhaps haunted, in which
there is a vulnerability to terror, and also in the urban which has been
cut through by the incursions of modernity. Vidler explains that in these
two situations
the ‘uncanny’ is not the property of the space itself nor can it be provoked
by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension,
a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the
boundaries of the real and the unreal in order to provoke a disturbing
ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming.
(Vidler, 1992, p.11)
Vidler draws attention to different species of the uncanny as exemplified in

their cinematic expression, each one evoking melancholy landscapes in
different ways. He shows how Wim Wender’s Wings of Desire draws upon
Benjamin’s historical uncanny, a metropolitan melancholia infused with the
poignancy of post-Second World War Europe. By contrast, David Lynch’s

Blue Velvet, for example, presents the uncanny of contemporary suburbia,
a landscape of claustrophobia and darkness, amplified further in his
television series Twin Peaks. Looking into the future, William Gibson’s
Neuromancer expands the melancholy related to the loss of the sense of the
body – one of the key qualities of the uncanny – into the field of science
fiction. Cinematically, this aesthetic was seen in Ridley Scott’s film Blade
Runner, based on Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
– a cinematic vision which exhibited not only the ‘peculiarly contemporary
sense of haunting’ that Vidler saw in Neuromancer, but arguably also the
Benjaminian historic uncanny, a melancholy of the temporal embedded with
ruins and dereliction.
The melancholy of uncanny architecture and landscapes lies in part within
the resistance to closure, the wound kept open. Eric Kligerman writes of the
‘Holocaustal uncanny’, a quality he locates within Daniel Liebskind’s
architecture, including his Jewish Museum in Berlin, works that
incessantly attempt to sabotage any sense of comfort in relation to this

past; the epitaphic spaces of his museums continually unwrite themselves
in order to destabilize any position on behalf of the spectator to fulfil a
work of mourning within its halls.
(Kligerman, 2007, p.246, n.4)
The same resistance to closure is found in the paintings of Anselm Kiefer

and the landscapes of Alain Resnais’ films, where the blurring of the paint
or the desolation of the cinematic scene is a subversion of the subject’s
wish to empathise with what is seen – these works estrange the self,
denying engagement and placing the beholder outside the work at a
melancholy distance.
This strange stranding between the real and the unreal – or the surreal – is
supported by the aesthetic practice of ostranenie, or strangemaking, a key
strategy of the Russian Formalists. Through making things strange via the
uncanny, the Russian Formalists achieved a retardation of perception,
therefore slowing down experience. Making something strange is taking the
familiar and making it unfamiliar, or defamiliarisation, a practice which
echoes the strategy of repetition, of re-presenting something known in a way
which makes us re-see it as unknown, or to use Freud’s term, ‘novel’.
The uncanny 75
Frederic Jameson states that art is a renewer of perception and is ‘a way of
restoring conscious experience, of breaking through deadening and
mechanical habits of conduct, and allowing us to be reborn to the world in
its existential freshness and horror’ (Jameson, 1972, p.52). Heidegger’s
conception of the poetic view of dwelling reflects this position in the idea of
revealing the things that are common in uncommon ways, and as Donohoe
suggests, this is a ‘way of being mindful of the world around us in an open
way’ (Donohoe, 2002, p.237).
Uncanny landscapes revolve around repetition and making strange. Not

only are the landscapes in themselves strange, but they reflect that strangeness
back onto the beholder to induce melancholy feelings. Jonathan Flatley
writes of a literary version of uncanny melancholy, where works might be
seen as ‘machines of self-estrangement’. Flatley used this term to describe
three novels at the centre of his investigation into melancholy, where he
sought to illuminate the way in which the books were devices which ‘allow
one to see oneself as if from the outside’ (Flatley, 2008, p.80). There are
moments – aesthetic experiences – that place one outside of the world as we
know it, beyond the conventions of the spatial and the temporal. While
Flatley’s observations are grounded in literature, he also points to those
moments where this estrangement takes place in the landscape, citing the
examples of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Donald Judd’s
polished aluminium boxes, where ‘one finds oneself in a world that does not
exist, or that only exists in this space at this moment’ (Flatley, 2008, p.81).
However, the experience of estrangement does not strand the beholder
outside of place and time, but must occur alongside a datum of sorts –
something that ‘brings one back from the work into the world’ (Flatley,
2008, p.82).
Andy Goldsworthy’s Garden of Stones at the Museum of Jewish Heritage
in Manhattan, New York hovers within this space between the work and
the world, of moving outside place and time and back to the quotidian space
of the city (Figure 10.1). The melancholy of the Holocaustal uncanny is
evoked in the work’s resistance to closure, and the estrangement of the self,
all of which is complicated here by the tension between abstraction and
symbolism. Goldsworthy’s Garden lies between these poles, with, on one
hand, an overt narrative and script being offered, but on the other the
possibility of succumbing to the strangeness of the site. And, in the context
of the Holocaust, making strange is exactly what is needed, as a means of
averting the possibility of an easy reading. An interpretation of the Garden
of Stones via the frame of the uncanny is therefore a means of rescuing it
from the automatised and numbing memorial language that invokes an
orthodox set of symbols, and has recourse to attempting to explain or heal.
A means of being mindful of the world is possible through finding the
uncanniness of form, through the realisation of the strangeness of the form
– as in the work of the Russian Formalists.
Figure 10.1 Andy Goldsworthy, Garden of Stones, Museum of Jewish Heritage,

New York, USA, 2003. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2008.
Boris Eichenbaum signalled formalism as a freedom from ‘the traditional

idea of form as an envelope, a vessel into which one pours a liquid (the
content)’ (Eichenbaum, 1965, p.112) and described the need, therefore, to
show that ‘the perception of form results from special artistic techniques
which force the reader to experience form’ (Eichenbaum, 1965, p.113).
Victor Shklovsky’s essay Art as Technique described the way in which
defamiliarisation in literature is a means of overcoming the automatism of
perception that comes with habitualisation. Shklovksy refers to Tolstoy’s
technique of ‘pricking of the conscience’, where something is made strange
The uncanny 77
by being described but not named, or there is an unexpected narrator for a
story, such as in the story ‘Kholstomer’ which is narrated by a horse. Such
techniques produce an uncanny effect, adopted by the modernist avant-
gardes, as a way to deal with the sense of exile from reality that came with
the trappings of modernity, ‘as if a world estranged and distanced from its
own nature could only be recalled to itself by shock, by the effects of things
deliberately “made strange”’ (Vidler, 1992, p.8). Georges Descombes
alludes to the landscape parallel of this in his description of constructing a
landscape intervention in such a way that it ‘jolts its context, scrapes the
ordinariness of a situation, and imposes a shift on what seems the most
obvious’ (Descombes, 1999, p.76).
Working with the familiar elements of trees and stones, Goldsworthy
makes them strange. The trees are taken out of context, and planted in the
stones. The stones also are arrayed in a way which is almost formal in its
structure, but also has a strange sense of being stranded, as though the earth
has suddenly been moved away from them, leaving them standing in space.
These visual effects are what the Russian Formalists called ‘baring the
device’ – making apparent the construction and scaffolding of a work rather
than obscuring it in effects. Mukarovský called it ‘foregrounding’, a pushing
of the formal devices to the front of our perception, and through doing this,
raising the consciousness of engaging with the work. This foregrounding
impedes an ‘automatic’ reading of the work, it is not easy to engage, and this
leads to a more profound experience. At the Garden of Stones there is no
easy reading. The devices are foregrounded, bared, and it is in this retardation
and this strangeness that ‘any sense of comfort in relation to this past’, to
use Kligerman’s phrase, is not possible (Kligerman, 2007, p. 246, n. 4).
The familiarity of trees and stones is unsettled by Goldsworthy’s work,
intensifying the emotional weight of otherwise simple elements. They echo
the strange familiarity of the empty chair, as Jaksch explained: ‘It is in that
uncertain space between absence and presence, between empty chair and
missing body, that ghosts appear’ (Jaksch, 2013, p.106). The Judenplatz
Holocaust Memorial designed by Rachel Whiteread, and unveiled in 2000,
also uses seemingly familiar domestic elements in a way which makes them
strange (Figure 10.2).
Whiteread’s modus operandi evokes the melancholy of the uncanny, with
her castings repeating and re-presenting entire rooms and houses,
transforming voids into solids. The resonances with the melancholic ‘lost
object’ are profound, as the works make visible the very absences themselves.
At the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial a library is cast, from the inside out,
so that the books themselves are evident only as an ‘impression’. The specific
titles cannot be seen, and instead there is a caesura, an unclosable hole. On
one hand it looks strangely familiar, it looks like a library. On contemplating
the memorial, however, it becomes clear that here is something profoundly
uncanny, a mirror, a double.
Figure 10.2 Rachel Whiteread, Nameless Library: The Judenplatz Holocaust

Memorial, Vienna, Austria, 2000. Photo by Spencer Means, 2009.
For her work Ghost (1990), Whiteread described how her casting of a room
would be a process of ‘mummifying the air in the room and making it solid’
(in Carley, 2008, p.26). Rachel Carley categorises Whiteread’s Ghost as a
‘fetch’, a particularly liminal species of ghost, of someone about to pass
from life into death. Like Jorge Otero-Pailos’ Ethics of Dust (described in
Chapter 16), Whiteread’s Ghost recorded the almost invisible traces of
human dwelling, revealing the subtle palimpsest of the most ordinary of
surfaces. Carley described how Whiteread’s casting ‘recovers the particular
maculations left on the interior over time, such as the ash deposits embedded
on the fire grate and the traces of yellowing wallpaper stained by nicotine’
(in Carley, 2008, p.29). Or, as Richard Noble poetically evokes the idea of
traces, ‘[i]n imagining what has gone before in a space one has access to
small bits of information, a sort of fossil record on the walls and floors and
ceilings of the space’ (Noble, 2005, p.67). The uncanny of haunting is
invoked, of the after-images of absences, of remanence.1
Making casts, or effigies, also underlies the uncanny monumental
architecture of Etienne-Louis Boullée. A defining moment for Boullée was
the revelation of seeing his shadow cast by moonlight, describing how his
‘effigy produced by its light excited my attention [and] by a particular
disposition of the mind, the effect of this simulacrum seemed to me to be one
of extreme sadness’ (in Vidler, 1992, p.169). Through finding the copy of
himself within the landscape, and the realisation of ‘the mass of objects
The uncanny 79
detached in black against a light of extreme pallor’, Boullée set about
translating these impressions into architecture (in Vidler, 1992, p.170). This
architecture would ‘express the extreme melancholy of mourning by means
of its stripped and naked walls’, and draw on the effigy of the self to construct
an architecture of shadows (Vidler, 1992, p.170). Vidler draws attention to
the way in which the shadow of the self was about the body disappearing
into darkness, but also an alternative view of the body as a model for
architecture. Rather than the body’s perfect form as a proportional guide,
here it was something of the self’s darker side, the shadowy silhouette,
haunting. Boullée, Vidler observes, ‘prefigured the nineteenth-century
preoccupation with the double as the harbinger of death, or as the shadow
of the unburied dead’ (in Vidler, 1992, p.171). The architectural invention
is therefore one of ‘experienced spatial uncertainty’, an echo of Caillois’
investigations into ‘legendary psycasthenia’, explored further in Chapter 20.
The melancholy of the uncanny is evoked not only by particular physical
elements of architecture or other spatial interventions, but also through the
way in which the landscape is experienced. As Vidler observed above, the
uncanny is a kind of projection, a mental state which creates ambiguity and
slippage. Through mirroring, doubling and repetition, the pleasurable pain
of the uncanny suffuses movement through the landscape. The sensation of
being lost often brings with it a feeling of déjà-vu, of having been there
before. Wandering through Venice, a city in which becoming lost is
compulsory, one encounters similar scenes over and over again. There is an
elusiveness at play, an ambiguity between that which is sought and that
which is encountered. The weirdness of finding a seemingly parallel version
of the city, or indeed of returning to the same spot again and again, is
uncanny and melancholy in its sense of becoming distanced from the world,
from the point of origin or destination. The French term dépaysement unites
the uncanny precisely with the state of being disoriented in the landscape, as
it literally means out of the country (pays). The aesthetic potency of this
feeling of being lost or displaced was mined by the Situationists, creating
intentional disorientation that oscillated between familiar landmarks and
making them strange through defining random routes within the city based
upon games of chance. The related practice of the dérive, or drift, was
suffused with the melancholy of disorientation, based upon the dislocation
and detachment made possible by being a ‘man of the crowd’. The strange
poignancy of this drifting and the uncanny experiences it produced were
woven through surrealist works, including André Breton’s Nadja (1928)
and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938). Breton wanders through a mostly
vacant Paris, the ordinary landscape made strange. Photographs are included
within the book, including the scene of a dinner outside the City Hotel,
which is poignantly deserted; the image which relates to a remembered walk
through the Tuileries Gardens together is similarly desolate. Sartre’s
character Roquentin evokes the ambiguous slipping between the real and
the imagined, of wanting to disappear into the crowd, evoking the ennui of
the twentieth-century urban experience.
The melancholy uncanny of the landscape is also found in the writing of
Jorge Luis Borges and Edgar Allan Poe. The works of both authors offer
modi operandi for landscape experience which invokes the poignancy of
strangeness. In Borges the effect of copying and mirroring create a sense of
unease. The Library of Babel contains everything ever written or said – i.e.
an exact parallel of the world – and In Exactitude in Science describes a map
of the world at one-to-one scale. These exact doublings of reality create a

sense of the uncanny, undoing our certainty about the boundaries of
existence and dissolving the assurance of what is real and what is just a
version of the real. The unease rooted in the uncanniness of reflection was
fundamental to Borges’ relationship with the world, describing how he
was always afraid of mirrors. I had three large mirrors in my room

when I was a boy and I felt very acutely afraid of them, because I saw
myself in the dim light I saw myself thrice over, and I was very afraid of
the thought that perhaps the three shapes would begin moving by
themselves … I have always been afraid … of mahogany, of crystals,
even of limpid water.
(In Boulter, 2001, p.359)
Borges’ evocation of the library, the map and the mirror as uncanny allude
to potential perspectives on an experience of the landscape, suggesting the
possibility of succumbing to the unnerving relationship between our selves
and the world, and finding the aesthetic appeal of such disorientation.
In Poe’s stories, extreme attention to detail in order to create atmosphere
summons a sense of the strange in the familiar. In The Domain of Arnheim
and The Fall of the House of Usher, the landscape and buildings are
described in such exacting detail, an extreme verisimilitude, that they possess
a sense of forensic documentation. The resonances with detective stories are
not coincidental, as Poe is considered one of the inspirations for this genre,
and with this comes a constant shuttling between certainty and ambiguity.
Also, within the exactitude, the landscape so closely observed, there is the
constant implication of something sinister which is at the same time
seductive. The landscape becomes hermetic, claustrophobic. Hoffman
describes Poe’s technique as one of creating ‘mood-invested space’, of
‘making the atmosphere visible’; in terms which might be drawn from a
landscape architecture text, he points to how through
change of close and distant perspective with the impact on the observer
remaining constant, Poe derives one of his most important effects for
building an uncanny atmosphere. On the objective side, form, color,
magnitude, and situation of concrete objects are expressive by nature:
they cause things to appear strange or normal, threatening or familiar,
The uncanny 81
uncanny or idyllic. Tones and sounds, light and shadow, brightness and
darkness are additional phenomena which create atmosphere.
(Hoffman, 1979, p.3)
One of the particular moments where melancholy and the uncanny coincide
is when the narrator in The Fall of the House of Usher views the scene
reflected in a lake. The narrator has already recognised the pathos of the
scene, as he ‘had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly
dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the
evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher’. Curious
as to whether the effect of the scene was a product of ‘combinations of very
simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us’ or if this
power ‘lies among considerations beyond our depth’, the narrator pulled his
horse alongside a ‘black and lurid tarn’ to view the reflection. Here he
experienced ‘a shudder even more thrilling than before – upon the remodelled
and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the
vacant and eye-like windows’ (Poe, 1966, p.178). The uncanny repetition of
the landscape in the reflection served to intensify the melancholy, emphasising
the manner in which the mode of experiencing the landscape might be
drawn into the amplification of emotion.
And, if reflection is the visual evocation of an uncanny melancholy, then
echoes resonate aurally. The repetition of sound is productive of poignancy,
bringing to mind Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, invoked
above as a site of the Holocaustal uncanny. Within the Memory Void,
visitors walk across the surface of an artwork by Israeli artist Menashe
Kadishman, 10,000 metal faces with screaming mouths (Figure 10.3).
The installation, Shalechet (Fallen Leaves), produces an eerie sound as the
metal shapes knock together and echo within the abyss of the Memory Void,
a sound of melancholy. The uncanniness of sounds that echo those of
humans also produce a particular poignancy, as Henry David Thoreau
noted of the call of the owl. In Walden, Thoreau described the hooting owl
as ‘the most melancholy sound in nature’, drawing parallels with a human’s
dying moans or sobs, a sound of ‘swamps and twilight woods’ (Thoreau,
1995, p.66).
While echoes suggest an uncanny aural manifestation of melancholy, so
too does the absence of sound. Freud concluded his seminal essay on the
uncanny with a reminder that ‘solitude, silence and darkness’ are residues
from infantile anxiety, dark presences that continue to haunt our
apprehension of the world (Freud, 2003, p.159). It seems no coincidence
that these three qualities are also quintessentially melancholy.
Figure 10.3 Menashe Kadishman, Shalechet (Fallen Leaves), at Jewish Museum,

Berlin, Germany, 2001. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2014.
Note
1 In physics the term ‘remanence’ refers to the magnetic traces that remain in a
material after the external source of magnetism is removed. In metaphysics it is a
term used by dowsers to refer to psychic remains within ruins.
The uncanny 83
References
Boulter, Jonathan Stuart (2001). ‘Partial glimpses of the infinite: Borges and the
simulacrum’. Hispanic Review, 69(3): 355–377.
Carley, Rachel (2008). ‘Domestic afterlives: Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost’, Architectural
Design, 78: 26–29.
Descombes, Georges (1999). ‘The Swiss way’, in James Corner (ed.), Recovering
Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture. New York:
Princeton Architectural Press.

5(2): 235–242.
Eichenbaum, Boris. (1965). ‘The theory of the “formal method”’, in Lee T. Lemon
and Marion J. Reis (trans.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays (original
essay published 1927). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Flatley, Jonathan (2008). Affective Mapping. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Freud, Sigmund (2003). ‘The uncanny’, in The Uncanny (trans. David McLintock;
original essay published in 1919). New York: Penguin Books.
Hoffmann, Gerhard (1979). ‘Space and Symbol in the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe’
(trans. Elizabeth G. Lord). Poe Studies, 12(1). www.eapoe.org/pstudies/ps1970/
p1979101.htm, 27 December 2015.
Jameson, Fredric (1972). The Prison-House of Language. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Kligerman, Eric (2007). Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual
Arts. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Noble, Richard (2005). ‘The meaning of what remains’, in Eckhard Schneider (ed.),
Rachel Whiteread. Köln: Kunsthaus Bregenz.
Poe, Edgar Allan (1966). ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, in Complete Stories and
Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (story first published 1839). New York: Doubleday.
Thoreau, Henry David (1995). Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Walden originally
published 1854). New York: Dover Publications.
Vidler, Anthony (1992). The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern
Unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
11 Silence
Silence is productive of contemplative melancholy, the removal of noise and

distraction to carve out a restful zone. In his lecture on the love song, Nick
Cave declared, ‘Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence’, aligning the
sensation of slowing time with that of tranquillity and sadness (Cave, 2007,
p.8). Silence and the contemplative potency of melancholy come together in
the quiet spaces of monasteries, churches and cemeteries. At different times,
and at different places, silence can take on an eerie quality, as though
something is missing or affected by unseen presences. This, too, is melancholy,
uncanny, the familiar made strange through the removal of sound.
The falling of silence at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, according to
Donohoe, as described in Chapter 9, comes naturally, as though part of the
design itself. No signs are needed to enforce contemplation. The condition
of silence is an aural dimension of the aesthetic of melancholy, reinforcing
the interpretation of aesthetics as encompassing the full sensory domain.
Rousseau, in searching for places of happiness, dismissed those which were
either totally calm or had too much movement. Although in Rousseau’s eyes
the opposite of what he was seeking, he advised that ‘Complete silence
induces melancholy: it is an image of death’ (Rousseau, 2004, p.47).
Silence creates an aural void, distinct from but often in parallel with the
representational void outlined in Chapter 9. The coming of silence creates a
temporal ‘space’, a palpable moment into which contemplation and sadness
can pour unabated. There are moments in the aural landscape which are
sculpted as explicit absences of sound, notably the tradition of two minutes
of silence on Armistice Day, introduced on the first anniversary of the end
of the First World War. The observation of silence at 11 a.m. on 11
November was held throughout the British Empire, with all activity coming
to a standstill: trains were delayed, no telephone calls were made, and even
court proceedings were suspended momentarily. A newspaper report from
the time described how the effect was magical, with people pausing and
bowing their heads, and
The hush deepened. It had spread over the whole city and become so
pronounced as to impress one with a sense of audibility. It was … a
Silence 85
silence which was almost pain … And the spirit of memory brooded
over it all.
(Manchester Guardian, 12 November 1919 in Dyer, 1994, p.20)
The silence of the Armistice Day observance was anchored at the Cenotaph
in Whitehall, London. The memorial was a marker which was seen to
‘record – to hold that silence – the silence that was gathered within it and
which would, therefore, emanate from it’ (Dyer, 1994, p.24). With the
annual observation of the two-minute silence, the monument was, as Dyer

puts it, ‘recharged’. He notes also that over the ensuing years the silence has
diminished, and the absoluteness of the arrested moment has been diluted
by the clamour of the city, and the ‘silence is becoming inaudible, fading’
(Dyer, 1994, p.25). Yet, silence as a space for melancholy, remains a
possibility. The loss of 29 miners in the Pike River coal mine on the West
Coast of New Zealand’s South Island was marked by two minutes’ silence
at 2 p.m. on the day of national mourning, 2 December 2010. Even within
the noise of contemporary life, as alluded to by Dyer, the two minutes of
silence was palpable, as people stopped in their tracks, buses pulled over to
the side of the road, sports teams paused in the middle of their games and
stood side by side with heads bowed, and urban squares were momentarily
stilled. Against the angst that had followed first the waiting and then the loss
of hope following the first mine blast on 19 November, the silence created
an aural hole into which memories, grief and empathy could flow. The
observation of silence was repeated in the memorials to the 185 victims of
Christchurch’s 2011 earthquake, as it is for many commemorative events
throughout the world. And through this, an awareness that some of the
most powerful landscape gestures are not spatial but acoustic.
With reference to the possibility of expressing tragedy following the
Holocaust, Terry Eagleton searched for some means of expression. As with
the numbing by numbers in the ‘automatic machinery of remembrance’
(Keenan, 2003) there is a need to transcend the noise of information, of
attempts at quantification, of striving to understand something that exceeds
our capacity for understanding. Eagleton lamented how, having ‘supped too
full of horrors’ even the ‘tragic’ has become too shallow a signifier, and
therefore there can be ‘no icons of such catastrophes, to which the only
appropriate response would be screaming or silence’ (Eagleton, 2003, p.64).
Silence is an acoustically sculpted space within sound, a hollowing out
within the mass of sound. The silences within sound shape the works of
Luigi Nono, a composer who inspired architect Carlo Scarpa. The composer
and architect were friends, exchanging ideas about their two fields. Federica
Goffi-Hamilton relates how in Nono’s compositions, ‘Silences become
“visible” in the “voids” left in the score between sound blocks’ – a quality
which is echoed in Scarpa’s architecture where silence/void becomes the
spatial expression of gap/reveal (Goffi-Hamilton, 2006, pp.292–293). In
Scarpa’s work the reveal was clearly articulated between his insertions into
an existing structure and the pre-existing form, allowing for an emphasis of
time’s passage. Like silence, the reveal heightens awareness, enhancing
listening and observation, slowing time, and fostering a melancholy
contemplative state.
Pallasmaa infuses architecture with silence, creating a House of Silence on
Siikajärvi Lake in Finland as a retreat for a musician. Robyn Beaver describes
how the House of Silence gained its name during the process of construction,
as ‘it became evident that the interplay of nature and architecture enabled
the dweller to recover the precious silence of his/her soul’ (Beaver, 2006,
p.167). Further, Pallasmaa made silence one of his six themes for the
millennium, stating:
The silence of art is not mere absence of sound, but an independent

sensory and mental state, an observing, listening and knowing silence. It
is a silence that evokes a sense of melancholy and a yearning for the
absent ideal. Also great architecture evokes silence. Experiencing a
building is not only a matter of looking at its space, forms and surfaces
– it is also a matter of listening to its characteristic silence. And every
great architectural work has its unique silence.
Further, Pallasmaa ends his proffering of themes with a plea: ‘We need an
ascetic, concentrative and contemplative architecture, an architecture of
silence’ (Pallasmaa, 1994, p.79).
References
Beaver, Robyn (2006). A Pocketful of Houses. Mulgrave, Australia: The Images
Publishing Group Pty Ltd.
Cave, Nick (2007). ‘The secret life of the love song’. In The Complete Lyrics 1978–
2007. London: Penguin.
Dyer, Geoff (1994). The Missing of the Somme. London: Phoenix Press.
Eagleton, Terry (2003). Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic. Malden, MA:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Goffi-Hamilton, Federica (2006). Carlo Scarpa and the eternal canvas of silence.
Architectural Review Quarterly, 10(3/4): 291–300.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (1994). ‘Six themes for the next millennium’. Architectural
Review, 196(1169): 74–79.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (2004). ‘Reveries of the solitary walker’ (originally published
in 1782), in Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, The Emergence of Modern
Architecture: A Documentary History from 1000 to 1810. London: Routledge.
12 Shadows and darkness
Darkness and the play of shadows are saturated with melancholy. Time’s
passage is written in the world of shadows, and resonates with the estranging
sensations of the uncanny. To darken has a double meaning: optically it is
the loss of light or increase in pigment; emotionally it refers to a mounting
gloom or sadness. Both senses are at play in melancholy’s affinity with
shadows. And, like silence, there is a pervasive sense of absence which
defines the condition.
The move from shadows into darkness, blackness, brings melancholy
close to the edge of the sublime, the point at which an emotional regime of
contemplation and sadness is overtaken by awe. Kant found the melancholy
moment within the sublime, with the ‘deep ravines and torrents raging there,
deep-shadowed solitudes that invite to brooding melancholy’ (in Casey,
2002, p.70). Edmund Burke, in his On the Sublime and the Beautiful, also
plotted this shadowy domain, highlighting the delicate boundary between a
pleasurable feeling of apprehension and an all-consuming fear. Blackness,
he observed, could have painful effects to begin with, but we can become
accustomed to them so that the initial terror abates. With this familiarity
comes a softening of the ‘horror and sternness’ of the original impression,
but the brooding blackness is indelible. Burke stated: ‘Black will always
have something melancholy in it, because the sensory will always find the
change to it from other colours too violent; or if it occupy the whole compass
of the sight, it will then be darkness’ (Burke, 1764, p.285). In darkness lies
the constant possibility of encountering the unknown, of walking into
dangerous obstructions or falling off precipices (Figure 12.1). The edge
between melancholy and fear is a line that must be negotiated carefully.
The effect of darkness is profound, as in the description by the psychiatrist
Eugène Minkowski:
Dark space envelopes me on all sides and penetrates me much deeper

than light space, the distinction between inside and outside and
consequently the sense organs as well, insofar as they are designed for
external perception, here play only a totally modest role.
(In Caillois, 1987, p.30)
Figure 12.1 The shadowy melancholy of darkness, Monaco, France. Photo by

Jacky Bowring, 2008.
Shadows and darkness 89
Minkowski’s description of melting into darkness, of merging with it, echoes
the uncanny’s unease in the loss of the body, something which is in turn
related to the melancholy of camouflage (Chapter 20). Roger Caillois
expands on Minkowski’s evocation of the power of darkness, adding that
while light space is eliminated by the materiality of objects, darkness is

‘filled,’ it touches the individual directly, envelops him, penetrates him,
and even passes through him: hence ‘the ego is permeable for darkness
while it is not so for light’; the feeling of mystery that one experiences at
night would not come from anything else.
(In Caillois, 1987, p.30)
The Burkean darkness and Caillois’ and Minkowski’s evocation of the

enveloping spatial field find form in the project by Polish artist Miroslaw
Balka. As the tenth invited project for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall,
Balka’s work, How It Is, invokes the weighty melancholy that descends with
a depth of shadow, of darkness, ‘a space for contemplation’ (Brown, 2009).
Kester Rattenbury described the experience of moving from the outside of
the huge form into the interior as one of defamiliarisation, in that although
you already know from the outside how large the form is, on the inside the
darkness takes away this knowledge. He sees it as a ‘pure operation of
spatial awareness, a realised absence’ and as much as the darkness is a
‘formal’ device, it is also weighted with content. There are evident references
to ‘recent heavy Polish history, with the entrance ramp likened to the trucks
which took Jews away to concentration camps in Treblinka and Auschwitz’
(Rattenbury, 2009, p.110). As with the echoing void in Libeskind’s Jewish
Museum, it is the poignancy of sound which adds to the association with a
dark past, where walking beneath the container-like form visitors could
hear the sound of disembodied footsteps echoing from above.
Cultural darkness and optical darkness combine in Balka’s project,
intensifying melancholy. The coincidence between darkness and sadness
echoes with Robert Burton’s observation that ‘the night and darkness makes
men sad; the like do all subterranean vaults, dark houses in caves and rocks;
desart [sic] places cause melancholy in an instant, especially such as have not
been used to it, or otherwise accustomed’ (Burton, 1838, p.158). In darkness
the pupil dilates, and this provides a parallel effect to emotional stimulus, in
particular sadness. Psychologists studying empathetic reactions found that
images of faces with larger pupils were more likely to evoke an emotional
response (Harrison et al., 2007). Further, sustained pupil dilation is
associated with depression, and the tendency to ‘ruminate’, or consciously
think about one’s depressive symptoms (Siegle et al., 2001).
The blackened space brings to mind a camera obscura – literally meaning
dark room. In Balka’s dark room no light enters, but in a camera obscura a
pinhole allows light through in the same way as a lens. The inverted image
is projected upon the floor or wall, opposite the aperture, almost like a
‘real-time’ video link, but here it is unmediated by technology, it is real, or
more precisely surreal, with its otherworldly quality and preternatural light.
Camera obscuras were popular during Victorian and Edwardian times, as a
spectacle, and can still be found in various places, including in the
Observatory in Bristol, England, and on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh,
Scotland. A contemporary camera obscura was created in the ‘Garden of
Australian Dreams’ at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra,
designed by landscape architects Room 4.1.3. It is also an echo of darkness
of a different kind, as it resembles the helmet of the outlaw Ned Kelly.

Étienne-Louis Boullée, the visionary eighteenth-century French architect,
sought the darkness of death in his designs. His ‘architecture of shadows’ was
not so much a play of dark against light, but dark against darker; he aspired
to ‘the black picture of an architecture of shadows depicted by the effect of
even blacker shadows’ (in Vidler, 1992, p.170). As discussed in Chapter 10,
this effect had occurred to him when walking in the woods, when he was
struck by the sadness in nature, and he wanted to express the ‘extreme
melancholy of mourning’ through the creation of a ‘buried architecture’.
Boullée set out his ideas in his Architecture: Essay on Art, with a specific study
of melancholy in architecture and how to achieve it. He declared:
It does not appear to me to be possible to conceive anything more

melancholy than a monument formed by a plane surface, plain and
unornamented in a material which absorbs light and is absolutely devoid
of all detail, whose sole decoration is the play of shadows against even
blacker shadows. No, no other scene as sad as this exists, and, if we put
aside the beauty created by art, it would be impossible not to see in such
a construction a melancholy picture of architecture.
(Boullée, 2004, p.474)
Extending his experience of shadows in the forest, Boullée contemplated

how he could work with light and darkness in design. He speculated that an
architecture of melancholy would mean working with ‘nothing but the
effects of darkness’ (Boullée, 2004, p.472). Through obscuring the source of
any light entering the space, he felt he could inspire ‘tranquil meditation,
penitence and even religious awe’.
References
Boullée, Étienne-Louis (2004). ‘A treatise on architecture’ (originally published
1793–1799), in Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis, The Emergence of Modern
Architecture: A Documentary History from 1000 to 1810. London: Routledge.
Brown, Mark (2009). ‘Tate Modern puts void in Turbine Hall’. Guardian, 12
October. www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/oct/12/tate-modern-turbine-
hall-balka, 27 December 2015.
Burke, Edmund (1764). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful. London: R and J Dodsley.
Shadows and darkness 91
Burton, Robert (1838) The Anatomy of Melancholy: What It Is, With All the Kinds,
Causes, Symptomes, Prognostics, and Several Cures of It : In Three Partitions.
With Their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections, Philosophically,
Medicinally, Historically Opened and Cut Up. London: B Blake.
Caillois, Roger (1987), ‘Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia’ (trans. John Shepley;
original essay published 1935). In Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas
Crimp and Joan Copjec, October: The First Decade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Casey, Edward S. (2002). Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Harrison, Neil A., Wilson, C. Ellie and Critchley, Hugo D. (2007). ‘Processing of
observed pupil size modulates perception of sadness and predicts empathy’.
Emotion, 7(4): 724–729.
Rattenbury, Kester (2009). ‘A limited yet boundless sensory explosion in darkness’.
Architectural Review, 226(1354): 110.
Siegle, Greg J., Granholm, Eric, Ingram, Rick E. and Matt, Georg E. (2001).
‘Pupillary and reaction time measures of sustained processing of negative
information in depression’. Biological Psychiatry, 49(7): 624–636.
Vidler, Anthony (1992) The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
13 Aura
Aura is vulnerable and fragile, with an always imminent sense of fading that
is suggestive of a melancholy aesthetic. As an intangible quality, aura is
often described in terms of its absence, its impending loss, and it is inherently
elusive and fugitive. Even the very definition of aura is mysterious. Walter
Benjamin, the pre-eminent theorist of aura, wrote of it in a variety of ways,
each suggestive of a distinctive emphasis. The pivotal point was aura’s
association with authenticity and originality, something which was under
threat from mass production. This in itself was a paradox, a conflict, as it
meant at once the loss of the uniqueness of an object and at the same time
the achievement of egalitarian access to art: ‘For the first time in world
history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its
parasitical dependence on ritual’ (Benjamin, 1969, p.226).
Defining the nature of aura extended beyond debates over the politics of
mass consumption and into the aesthetic quality of what is beheld. For
Benjamin, aura is the perception of ‘distance’, however close something may
be. And, it also relates to a phenomenon – a painting, a landscape, a tree, the
sky – ‘looking back at us’, returning our gaze. These two core threads of
Benjamin’s theory of aura are fundamental to our experience, our sensing of
the world. The power of aura was invoked in his explanation in The Arcades
Project, distinguishing between
Trace and aura. The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far

removed the thing that left it may be. The aura is appearance of a
distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain
possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.
(Benjamin, 1999, p. 447)
The perception of distance, however close something may be, sets up an

unrequitable relationship, an unbridgeable remoteness akin to loss. Auratic
distance is inherently melancholy, within our sights yet unattainable.
The sense of presence – of the gaze returned – and the feeling of distance
rest upon the experience of an original or authentic image or place. Benjamin
anchored aura in the coordinates of existence, stating that ‘[e]ven the most
Aura 93
perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking one element, its presence in
time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’
(Benjamin, 1969, p.220). For the landscape this presents a potent resonance
between melancholy and aura, appealing to heritage, sense of place, memory
and identity. The fragility of these presences in the landscape invests them
with a sense of poignancy, bound up with our fears of losing them – and it is
their very aura which endows them with such significance. Like the mass-
produced artwork, the placeless landscape loses the unique presence of the self
in that which is beheld; it becomes a manufactured experience. In the original

lies the possibility of memory, identity, authenticity – the possibility of our
communing with the landscape, of empathising with what we experience.
Karsten Harries glosses Benjamin’s aura as ‘an experience of spirit
incarnate in matter’ occurring at those times where something appears as
‘more than just mute matter’ (Harries, 2009, p.12). The loss of that aura
therefore has profound consequences for our experience of the world.
Benjamin identified the mass-production of art as the thief of aura, pointing
to the collateral damage associated with the objectification of life. As Harries
puts it, ‘The loss of an experience of aura threatens the loss of our humanity’
(Harries, 2009, p.18). For design, this becomes significant in the preservation
of singularity, as opposed to mass-produced generic forms. The critical
distinction is between artifice and ‘what is given’ – the original forms with
their infinite complexity, as ‘the simplest thing say a rock or a leaf, is
infinitely complex, a unique given that resists full comprehension and
therefore reproduction’ (Harries, 2009, p.18). Harries concludes that: ‘A
successful work of art should have something of the enigmatic presence we
experience in the face of a person. That … is a test that architecture too must
meet if it is to continue to provide us with spiritual shelter. At stake is
nothing less than our humanity’ (Harries, 2009, p.18).
Harries’ invocation of the auratic as fundamental to our humanity
highlights the connection between aura and empathy. Aura resists the
consigning of the other to a detached and objectified distance, and is instead
grounded in a union of observer and observed. Recalling Vischer’s conception
of empathy, where ‘I seem merely to adapt and attach myself to it as one
hand clasps another, and yet I am mysteriously transplanted and magically
transformed into this other’, aura reinforces this idea of a two-directional
gaze (in Koss, 2006, p. 139). This rapport with that which is encountered is
most intently felt in places with a depth of history, as in Peter Zumthor’s
discerning of aura where there is a sense of time’s passage. Reflecting on
how good architecture ‘must be capable of absorbing the traces of human
life and thus of taking on a specific richness,’ Zumthor suggests that it is
necessary to move beyond the physical associations. Through closing his
eyes he finds a ‘different impression, a deeper feeling’, and at ‘these moments,
architecture’s aesthetic and practical values, stylistic and historical
significance are of secondary importance. What matters now is only this
feeling of deep melancholy’ (Zumthor, 2006, pp 25–26).
Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko finds aura in architecture, in the desire to
commune with it. In his passage ‘The Aura’, Wodiczko narrates an
experiential architectural encounter, where
Crossing the monstrous shade of its elevation, we are halted by the blow
of a cool wind which is cruising around the corners of its lofty massif.
As we approach its body, we are confronted by an intimate protective
warmth radiating through the walls, wings, and open doors, confused
with the heavy breath of the air conditioning ventilators.

(Wodiczko, 2003, p.1066)
In emphatically empathetic terms, Wodiczko describes the desire to

identify with the building, to become part of it, as we ‘recognize the
familiarity of our body and that of the building…. We sense that there is
something about us which is incomplete, and which can only be completed
by a full integration with the building’ (Wodiczko, 2003, p.1066). For
Wodiczko there is a need to address this innate longing to be subsumed by
the building, as at the same time this might be perceived as a submission to
authority. Proposing the use of projections at night – when the building is
sleeping and thus unable to counter the effect – Wodiczko saw the possibility
of undoing the mesmerising impact that architecture can have, countering
the sedation of the self. At the same time as Wodiczko describes the desire
to subvert the building’s dominion over the beholder, there is an intensely
melancholy relationship with experienced space. Within all of this there is
the possibility of succumbing to aura, which is bound up with feelings of
imminent loss, in this case of the self through ‘collaboration’ with the
building’s authoritarian identity.
Benjamin’s study of aura was grounded in photography, an art which
resonates with the potency of landscape experience. While photography
might be argued to be a fundamentally visual art, rather than fulfilling the
full sensory scope of aisthesis, it also offers insight into the non-visual
intuiting of the world. Photographs can become spatial, as in Anne Noble’s
conception of works being ‘sliced from blocks of sheer light’ (in Paton,
2001, p.9). And they can evoke the metaphysical, the world beyond the
merely visual, like Michael Kenna’s images which ‘insist on the existence of
a phantom presence within reality, a world we cannot see’ (Bennell, 2002,
n.p.). Photographs are not simply something to be looked at, they are
physical in themselves, a quality made clear in Hubert Damisch’s declaration,
It is no accident that the most beautiful photograph so far achieved is

possibly the first image Nicephore Niepce fixed in 1822, on the glass of
the camera obscura – a fragile, threatened image, so close in organization,
its granular texture, and its emergent aspect, to certain Seurats – an
incomparable image which makes one dream of a photograph substance
Aura 95
distinct from subject matter, and of an art in which light creates its own
metaphor.
(Damisch, 1978, p.72)
Photographs are not simply pictures of things, but imprints of the invisible
made visible. This resonates strongly with Jean-Luc Marion’s revelations
regarding the painter of ‘authentic’ images: ‘He deepens a seam or fault line,
in the night of the inapparent, in order to extract, lovingly or more often by
force, with strokes and patches of color, blocks of the visible’ (Marion,
2004, p.25). As an analogue of landscape experience, the photographer
shapes space phenomenologically, working with light, as in Noble’s
photographs where: ‘black the extreme absence of light evoking the darkness
of suspicion, doubt, despair … white the overwhelming presence of light,
announcing revelation, exaltation, bliss’, and that white is apprehended as a
‘spiritual value’ (Keith, 1983, p.24).
As a parallel of landscape experience, photography manifests the qualities
of becoming imbued with place, of being open to the auratic. Benjamin’s
writing on photography is in part contradiction and in part paradox in its
relation to aura. While photography is the very manifestation of mass-
production and therefore the erasure of the original, it is also for Benjamin
a significant site of auratic presence. Photography highlights how such
qualities are embedded in the moment, allied to the idea of a photograph as
an imprint, an impression. Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky made Polaroid
photographs of landscapes, a medium which is intensely auratic in that each
image is an original, a unique impression of that moment. Actor Tonino
Guerra remembers the moment when Tarkovsky photographed him on their
travels through Italy, writing that he could
remember when we entered the little church on the edge of the water-
filled square, where the mist rising from the water gave a sense of
distance to the landscape of ancient houses. The warm light that
morning streamed through the dusty windows and came to rest on
faded decorations on a wall. He surprised me, sitting on a pew, as
though I were just the right shadow to accentuate the caress of the sun
beyond my dark body. These images leave with us a mysterious and
poetic sensation, the melancholy of seeing things for the last time.
(Guerra, 2004, p.9)
The heightened experience of place and time brought about by the

photograph draws in a number of melancholic qualities, evoking the liminal,
the play of shadows, the partial presence of the fragment. Yet all of these
things must come in their own terms rather than being manufactured. As
Noble cautioned about photography, one should not ‘hurry an image into
pathos’ (in Paton, 2001, p.15). This was the case with Jugendstil photographs,
as Vidler explained, where photographers used ‘“penumbral” tones to try to
simulate the aura of an earlier time’ (Vidler, 2001, p,12). In cinematic terms,
filmmakers have turned to techniques which intentionally counter mechanical
perfection. By working against the grain in terms of technique, the
individuality of the film-as-artwork is re-achieved, in the same way that
existed prior to mass-production, and certainly before digital imaging. As
Marks explains, ‘as images decay they become unique again’ (Marks, 2002,
p. 94). Like landscapes and architecture, photographs are physical as well as
merely visual. The hapticity of photographs is so easily overlooked, just as
our experience of landscape can neglect a full phenomenological engagement.

Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart aspire to the reinvesting of the ‘“aura”
of thingness existing in the world’ to photographs, a desire which infuses an
aesthetic of melancholy too, the striving for sensation, longing for feeling
(Edwards and Hart, 2004, p.9). Kerry McCarthy describes the auratic
quality of photographs of Antarctica in the Ernest Edwards Mills Joyce
collection – a range of images from the ‘heroic’ era of exploration – noting
how the hapticity of the lantern slides in particular imbues them with a sense
of their maker’s presence. Many of the negatives and lantern slides would
have been made in Antarctica – using the onboard facilities on the exploration
ships, or in the huts on the ice. These acts of making emphasise aura through
the confirmation of these artefacts as originals, carriers of the actual
fingerprints of the photographers, and even the nuance of the Antarctic
atmosphere. Some of the images rescued from the sinking vessel, the
Endurance, were returned to London still hermetically sealed in cases, such
that opening them released the Antarctic air trapped within (McCarthy,
2010). McCarthy suggests that if the photograph says ‘“I was here”, the
fingerprint says “And I still am”’ (McCarthy, 2010, p.204).
One of the most potent facets of an analogy between aura in photography
and in landscape is that of memory. Photographs embed memory within,
both as content in terms of what is represented, and as form, as an artefact
in themselves. Landscapes do this too, exhibiting the same vulnerability and
potency that arises from the magnitude of the task of memory. Aura
reverberates within memory as content and as form. This auratic presence
relates strongly to memory. Molodkina describes this manifestation within
the domestic setting, in her evocation of the phenomenology of ‘home Aura’
– the ‘[s]eparate household items such as period furniture, crockery, clothes,
paintings etc.’ are the ‘carriers of Home’s memory’ (Molodkina, 2009,
p.213). As with photography, these things cannot be manufactured, a
falseness of the memory of a place is soulless, unconvincing. Landscape and
architecture cannot be ‘hurried into pathos’, aura can’t be extracted wilfully,
as in Benjamin’s words, to ‘pry it from its shell’ is to destroy aura.
Communing with photographs and landscapes brings about the
empathetic exchange that Benjamin alluded to, the looking back of things.
Feeling them, rather than merely seeing them, opens out the phenomenological
presencing of aura, the invisible atmosphere which is associated with an
artefact, a place. Aura, like aisthesis, has its origins in extravisual experience
Aura 97
– in Greek and Latin aura meant breath or breeze, and is synonymous with
zephyr. It is strongly related to smell, as in the Oxford English Dictionary’s
defining the second sense of aura as ‘A subtle emanation or exhalation from
any substance, e.g. the aroma of blood, the odour of flowers, etc.’ (Oxford
English Dictionary, s.v. ‘aura,’ 2.a). Also, there is the notion of aura as a
metaphysical manifestation, an emanation from the body, echoing the
uncanny presence of haunting and remanence.
The intuiting of presences, of sensing aura, ripples through those sites in
which the ‘looking back’ can be experienced. At Maya Lin’s Vietnam

Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, the gaze returned is our own.
Staring into the polished black granite, the beholder becomes aware of their
own reflection cast upon the liminal surface, the otherworldly domain of the
names of the dead. The metaphysical connotations of this move us toward
the ineffable, in the fleeting, ephemerality of the reflective surface. The aura
that emanates from the wall precisely coincides with Benjamin’s ‘distance’,
in that despite its physical proximity – the fact that the visitor can physically
touch the wall – it retains at a strange distance, an enigmatic remoteness that
emerges simultaneously from the overwhelming number of names, the
reflection on the surface, and the sensation of being in the earth.
At the nearby Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial, designed by Lawrence
Halprin, aura inheres in the hapticity of the elements. Halprin aspired to a
memorial which would have the ‘magic’ imbued in places like the Forbidden
City in China, the Acropolis, the Sanctuary at Delphi and Gunnar Asplund’s
Woodland Crematorium in Stockholm (Rainey, 2005, p.396). Grounding
the memorial design in the precedents from the past approaches the aura of
melancholy in a distinctly different way to the ‘new’ language developed in
Maya Lin’s memorial. The ancient precedents of stone, metal and water are
not simply copied, however, and to do so is to succumb to the dilution
through mass reproduction which Benjamin warned of. The green patina of
the various sculptural elements throughout the memorial was also an
allusion to age and arguably aura, aspiring to a ‘“dug up look” that works
in concert with the rusticated stones to enhance the primordial effect of the
memorial’ (Rainey, 2005, pp.404–405). Added to this is the hapticity of the
elements, with the surfaces of the stones and metal components inviting
touching, including Braille messages, and relief panels. Empathy is apparent
in the nature of the sculptural expressions of Roosevelt, emphasising his
humanity as opposed to a manufactured superhuman-ness. Shown in his
wheelchair, with his dog, and also including a statue of his wife Eleanor,
Roosevelt is portrayed throughout in a language which is in stark contrast
to the scale and symbolism of the nearby Lincoln, Jefferson and Washington
monuments. There is a melancholy, a poignancy, in the depiction of life in
this way, one which engages the emotions and transcends the shorthand of
the generic gesture of an obelisk or temple.
References
Benjamin, Walter (1969). ‘The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’,
Benjamin, Walter (1999). The Arcades Project. (ed. Ralph Tiedemann; trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin). Boston: Harvard University Press.
Bennell, Peter C. (2002). ‘Introduction’, in Michael Kenna, Peter C. Bunnell and
Ruth Bernhard, Michael Kenna: A Twenty Year Retrospective. Tuscon: Nazzraeli
Press.
Damisch, Hubert (1978). ‘Five notes for a phenomenology of the photographic
image’. October, 5: 70–72.
Edwards, Elizabeth and Hart, Janice (eds), (2004). Photographs Objects Histories:
On the Materiality of Images. New York: Routledge.
Harries, Karsten (2009). ‘The need for architecture’. Environmental and Architectural
Phenomenology, 20(3): 11–18.
Keith, Sheridan (1983). ‘Anne Noble’s Wanganui’. Art New Zealand, 27: 24–25.
Koss, Juliet (2006). ‘On the limits of empathy’. The Art Bulletin, 88(1): 139–157.
Marion, Jean-Luc (2004). The Crossing of the Visible. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Marks, Laura U. (2002). Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media.
McCarthy, Kerry (2010). ‘Thinking with photographs at the margins of Antarctic
exploration’. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Canterbury, Christchurch,
New Zealand.
Molodkina, Ludmila (2009). ‘Utilitarian-aesthetic dynamics of nature’. Analecta
Husserliana, CI: 213–229.
Paton, Justin (ed.) (2001). Anne Noble: States of Grace. Dunedin: Dunedin Public
Art Gallery; Wellington: Victoria University Press.
Rainey, Ruben M. (2005). ‘The garden as narrative: Lawrence Halprin’s Franklin
Delano Roosevelt Memorial’, in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.), Places of
Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design. Washington, DC:
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Vidler, Anthony (2001). ‘Staging lived space: James Casebere’s photographic
unconscious’, in James Casebere, James Casebere: The Spatial Uncanny. New
York: Sean Kelly Gallery.
Wodiczko, Krzysztof (2003). ‘Public projection’, in Charles Harrison and Paul
Wood (eds), Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas.
Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Zumthor, Peter (2006). Thinking Architecture (second edition). Basel: Birkhauser.
14 Liminality
Melancholy inhabits the liminal, the times and spaces of transition, threshold
places. Anthropologist Victor Turner theorised liminality as core to
developmental stages, especially in the context of rites of passage in tribal
culture. Moving through each of the stages of life involves a period of
transition – a liminal phase – when an individual is ‘betwixt and between’
the more definite phases either side. As a type of cultural limbo, liminality in
time and space expresses an indefinite character, a suspension of certainty.
Turner wrote: ‘Liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the
womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to
an eclipse of the sun or moon’ (Turner, 1969, p.95).
The passage across thresholds, through indefinite zones, occurs in the
landscape at places like the seashore, in shadows, on the horizon, and in the
temporal interludes of dawn and twilight, spring and autumn. In the late
afternoon, in the illumination of dust motes by a ray of glancing sunlight, or
the long shadows cast across a square, there is the intangible, ephemeral
melancholy moment. Or a winter’s day when the grey light falls through a
rain-spattered window, time seems slowed almost to a standstill, a palpable
poignancy hangs in the air. For Giorgio de Chirico it was the liminal
seasonality and time of day that were particularly evocative, ‘the melancholy
of beautiful autumn days, afternoons in Italian cities’ (de Chirico, 1994, p.
61). Martin Barnes links the gloaming, the twilight time, to feelings of
transience, a time which facilitates the subverting of normality, and he says
that the liminal time is the threshold when ‘hard facts become elusive, and
an evocative obscurity begins’ (Barnes, 2006, p.10). At twilight there is an
indistinct quality of the light, almost as though it is emitted from somewhere
other than the sun, as Steven Connor describes, ‘an eerie kind of “earthlight”,
as though objects themselves were giving out their own illumination, stored
during the day and given off as day retreats’ (Connor, 2006, p.26).
In one of the seminal texts of landscape architectural theory, Henry
Vincent Hubbard’s An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design,
melancholy is included among the catalogue of landscape effects. Hubbard
describes the melancholy effect as ‘peaceful, restful, suave’ and links it in
part to conditions of liminality, ‘atmospheric conditions, such as approaching
darkness or drizzling rain’ (Hubbard, 2010, p.82). Temporal liminality is
also invoked with reference to the melancholy which might arise from
associations sparked by ‘a ruined building, a churchyard, an old and
decaying tree, or anything which suggests the end or destruction of something
once beautiful and prospering’ (Hubbard, 2010, p.82). The invocation of
death in a beautiful landscape heightens feelings of liminality, of passages
and thresholds. The artistic theme of Et in Arcadia Ego encapsulates the
conflicted condition of the presence of death in paradise, and is often
translated as ‘Even in Arcadia I (death) am.’ Ruins and old trees are part of
this Et in Arcadia Ego tradition, transcending a scene which is simply
beautiful to one which has that gravitas of death’s presence.
Ruins and decay sit at the intersection of temporal and spatial liminality
– the passage from one domain into another. The threshold condition where
architecture bleeds into landscape was the foundation for Walter Benjamin’s
magnum opus, The Arcades Project. The spaces of arcades were transitional
zones between the interiors of shops and the wider city spaces – at once
‘landscapes’ and ‘rooms’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.10) – and those that strolled
through them, the flâneurs, were also liminal in their place in society,
inhabiting the edges of the new world of the metropolis, but pulled by the
domain of the middle class. In his notes, Benjamin described the feeling of
passage experienced at this point of threshold: ‘At the entrance to the arcade,
a mailbox: the last chance to make some sign to the world that one is leaving’
(Benjamin, 1999, p.88). Divining the network of threshold spaces that
weave through the city – ‘those lines that, running alongside railroad
crossings and across private owned lots, within the park and along the river
bank, function as limits’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.88) – Benjamin amplified their
significance through his description of the arches such as that of Scipio that
stood in isolation at the city limits. With a quotation from Ferdinand Noack,
Benjamin highlighted how the arches were ‘for the … Romans a conception
of the sacred as boundary or threshold’ (Benjamin, 1999, p.97).
At the moment of threshold it is possible to look forwards and backwards
simultaneously, and Hunt identifies this quality as underpinning the elements
of landscape architecture that ‘augment its commemorative functions
beyond the opportunities of the other arts’ (Hunt, 2005, p.20). Noting the
frequency with which gardens are used as places of burial, Hunt identifies
the importance of gardens as intermediate zones, ‘liminal enclaves between
outside and inside, town and country, social space and private space’ (Hunt,
2005, p.20). As in the liminal passages of the Arcades, or the arches on the
city limits, gardens as commemorative spaces place us in a transitional
space. Gardens are temporally liminal too, in their backward-looking gaze
towards the Arcadian and Edenic ideals as much as their prospective
qualities. As Pallasmaa observes, ‘Melancholy is the recognition of the tragic
dimension within the moment of bliss. This mental state combines happiness
and sadness, understanding and bewilderment, into a heightened experience
Liminality 101
of being. Melancholy is the sorrow accompanying the comprehension of
limits’ (in MacKeith, 2005, p.316).
The threshold qualities are not only confined to the horizontal realm, in
the manner of a crossing over, but also in the boundary of the terrestrial and
celestial, as Hunt explains: ‘The placement of memorials in open space is
mediatory in one final way: sited on the earth, in human space, they are
nevertheless under the open sky, in the eye of God’ (Hunt, 2005, p.20).
Liminality is a potent zone for the evocation of memory. The passing
between life and death, between the real and the imaginary, between the
immanent and the transcendental, are threshold terrains, lingering, obscure.
Exploring this in a hypothetical memorial to road workers who died during
the construction of improvements to an alpine pass, I drew upon both the
horizontal liminality of passage and the vertical threshold of earth and sky
(Figure 14.1).
Two workers died during work to improve the safety of a treacherous
stretch of road through the Southern Alps in New Zealand’s South Island.
Being killed while making the road safer for others is a poignant paradox,
worthy of a memorial gesture. The men were working on huge structures,
including a viaduct and ramparts to protect motorists from rocks falling
from cliffs above. The rampart is manifested in the landscape as a strong
horizontal line, an emphatically ordered gesture in a landscape alive with
geomorphological unease, a stone’s throw from the active seismic zone of
the alpine fault line.
The hypothetical memorial draws on the horizontal’s moment of order
within chaos, enlisting it into a new form. Resonating with the sublimity of
the landscape and the monumental scale of the road safety interventions, I
proposed a huge steel I-beam, over 40 metres high, to be inserted beside the
road, into the river bed below. This is the sole addition to the landscape, an
economic gesture, but one that works on alchemical principles. Through the
illusory powers of juxtaposition and parallax, this single vertical insertion
becomes first a cross and then a gate, or vice versa depending on the
motorist’s direction of travel. The vertical visually fuses with the existing
horizontal of the rampart to form an enormous cross, echoing the small
roadside crosses which are scattered along highways as memorials to
accident victims. Through parallax the vertical and horizontal pull apart, as
the road curves around the cliffside, plunging the motorist through a gate of
sorts. The vertical is inscribed with the names of the two roadworkers, a
simple and humble writing into the landscape, a statement of vulnerability
and loss. The gate form echoes the brooding landscapes of Colin McCahon,
where the haunting melancholy of his curious geometries sit within the
sublime landscapes of New Zealand’s high country. McCahon saw his gates
as ‘a way through’, a passage, a journey (Brown, 1984). His work is suffused
with a sublime poignancy, in the use of dark and light, of emptiness,
fragments and absences.
Figure 14.1 Jacky Bowring, Otira Roadworkers’ Memorial, 2000.

Liminality 103
The melancholy liminality of connection, of the way through, is found
too in the memorial designed by Walther Grunwald on the site of Schloss
Ettersburg in Weimar, Germany. The memorial is a spare gesture – the
clearing of a hunting path – but the intervention speaks volumes. This
landscape is one which Victor Burgin calls upon to reveal how ‘[e]mpathetic
identification with others from within the flesh of the world may be felt not
only through such fabricated things as photographs, buildings and garments,
but also through the natural environment’ (Burgin, 2009, p.322). Burgin
experienced an ‘uncanny sense of familiarity’ when visiting Schloss

Ettersburg, recognising it as the setting for Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s
Elective Affinities (1809). Goethe was the administrator for the Duchy of
Saxe-Weimar, and the ducal seat was at Schloss Ettersburg. At one point in
the novel, Ottilie, one of the key characters, sketched a vision for a future
addition to the landscape, a pavilion which would suggest ‘a new and
different world’ (in Burgin, 2009, p.322). However, what eventuated on
that site in 1937 was not Ottilie’s optimistic vision, but the Buchenwald
concentration camp. The camp unwittingly referenced the previous history,
including echoing Ottilie’s vision of a hilltop structure, and also overlaying
a key axis of the camp over the former network of hunting paths which had
been laid out in the traditional form of a star – where animals were driven
down paths to be ambushed by hunters where the paths intersect. Grunwald’s
spare gesture was the clearance of one of these paths, bringing form to an
eerie ley line, connecting Goethe’s Court of the Muses to the site of the
Buchenwald concentration camp. As Burgin observes, the walk
is physically arduous; no less difficult is the task of covering the

emotional and intellectual ground between the two sites. The woods are
now much as they were then: the space is the same, as one moves down
the path the knowledge of where one is in time is subject to an irrational
and dreadful doubt. Certainly this ‘empty’ space between provides more
effective an occasion for remembrance than the inert monuments that
border it.
(Burgin, 2009, p.323)
Some of the most potent exemplars of the melancholy of liminality are

islands, geographical threshold spaces, zones where emotional cargo often
exceeds physical capacity. As microcosmic mnemonic worlds, Hart Island
(New York, USA) and Cockatoo Island (Sydney, Australia) represent the
shadowy patches on the psyche that drift at the margins of existence. Hart
Island’s melancholy is intensified by its almost mythological existence. Out
of bounds to the public, it is the locus of some of the darkest dimensions of
New York’s psyche. Although it is home to the United States’ largest
cemetery, with some 800,000 interments, no visitors are allowed, apart
from in exceptional circumstances. As in Franses’ analysis of the melancholy
of the ‘stranger memorial’, landscapes commemorating the death of strangers
promote an irresolvable form of grief, an empathetic engagement with place.
Artist Melinda Hunt has made many visits to Hart Island as part of her
ongoing project which seeks, in part, to reconnect family members to loved
ones buried on the island. She expressed how ‘It is hard to describe the
overwhelming sense of anonymity and timelessness that comes from standing
next to an open burial trench twenty feet wide, seventy feet long and six feet
deep’ (Hunt, 1998, p.26). As a cemetery without public access, Hart Island
is perhaps one of the most melancholy places of all, a denial of the ‘normal’
processes of mourning and grief, it is the open wound made manifest.

Very far removed from the image of the enigmatic gowned figure crossing
the water by boat in Arnold Böcklin’s (1880) Isle of the Dead, or Venice’s
San Michele, where special funeral barges are part of the watery ritual of an
island burial, Hart Island resonates with death and water in other ways,
invoking the crossing of the River Styx (Hunt, 1998). The water crossing
takes place each day, with inmates from Riker’s Island prison travelling to
Hart Island to bury the dead. The island has been home to a potter’s field
since 1896,1 a place of burial for the destitute and the unknown. The liminal,
marginal location of the potter’s field on Hart Island, removed from the city
of New York, reflects a ‘deeper social pattern of hiding that which is socially
undesirable in the undeveloped fringes of the city’ (Hunt, 1998, p.20).
Hart Island’s dark history is explored in the ongoing project by Melinda
Hunt. Beginning with a project with photographer Joel Sternfeld, Hunt has
plumbed the depths of Hart Island, unearthing the range of institutions
which have been housed on the island, including the burial ground and a
range of penal institutions where ‘the punishment is mild but the backdrop
is haunting’ (Hunt, 1998, p.22). Hunt and Sternfeld were intrigued by how
the natural landscape of Hart Island ‘seems to completely mask almost 140
years of burials’ (Hunt, 1998, p.2). As though to reinforce the broader
concern with hiding things in the margins, the island is complicit, and each
of the vast mass graves takes only a season to disappear into the landscape,
with the white concrete marker posts barely visible. Instead the island is
almost mute, quietly brooding in the Long Island Sound, echoing the theme
of Et in Arcadia Ego with its beautiful yet tragic landscape.
Not only is a cemetery concealed in the out-of-bounds zone of Hart
Island, but a number of other activities have also been based there, beyond
the radar of daily life. Following the island’s purchase in 1869, ‘an extension
of the House of Refuge, the prison workhouse for delinquent boys on
Randalls Island, opened’; later, victims of the yellow fever epidemic were
housed on the island, as well as a women’s insane asylum (Hunt, 1998,
p.20). The procession of marginal activities continued, with a reformatory
school for boys as well as institutions for the mentally ill, the tubercular, the
homeless, criminals, drug addicts and alcoholics. By contrast, an amusement
park was established in 1925, but was forced to close because of potential
compromises to the security of the other institutions on the island. Later, a
Nike missile base was built on the island in 1955, as part of the network of
Liminality 105
ground-to-air missile launchers developed to shoot down aircraft. The
missile base, known as NY-15, housed 20 supersonic missiles; it was later
abandoned and has succumbed to the forces of nature, slowly transforming
from the pinnacle of military technology to another of the fragments of this
island’s repository of shadowy memories.
Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour also houses a sequence of marginal
activities. The sandstone of the island has been sculpted and shaped to
accommodate these uses, including the first jail, built in 1839, using prison
gangs from nearby Goat Island, followed in 1841 by the sculpting of the stone
to construct grain silos and water reservoirs, and docks and other naval
facilities in the late 1850s. Even some of the prison cells themselves were
excavated directly into the sandstone, a detention space which, it is suggested,
‘would not have been approved had it been submitted to the Inspectors of
Prisons at the Home Office in London’ (Kerr, 1984, p.17). A prison continued
on the island, alongside shipyards, until 1869, when the prisoners were
re-located to the mainland jail in Darlinghurst, Sydney; in 1871 the facilities
found a further use as an industrial school for girls, and a reformatory for girls
who were convicted criminals. It was at this time that the name was changed
to Biloela in an effort to remove the connotations of the previous prisons. One
last prison phase began in 1888, housing petty criminals, such that ‘the evil
[was] more seeming than real’ (Kerr, 1984, p.11).
Shipbuilding continued on the site until 1992, with its name eventually
reverting to Cockatoo Island. Heavily modified and burdened by its history,
Cockatoo Island is a shadow within the bright, sparkling Sydney Harbour.
An ideas competition held in 1996 yielded such visions as a return to
incarceration,2 to maritime industry3 or a grid of fig trees which would
slowly engulf the entire island and provide a habitat for bats.4 Instead of any
of these dark possibilities, the island is undergoing a transformation which
involves an ordered re-working of the site, a cleaving of the mess and
complexity of history. Developed as an urban park, Cockatoo Island became
described as ‘big, surprising, entertaining’ (Cockatoo Island, 2010) and
additions include a camping ground, a café and a bar. The island’s
melancholy, its place as a liminal refuge, is being replaced by a usage which
in many ways overlooks the dark history. This is one of the conundrums of
sites where the heritage is ‘difficult’ – like Cockatoo Island’s history of
prisons and reform schools, or Christchurch’s Sunnyside Lunatic Asylum.
These past uses, with their heavy baggage, make them challenges for the
heritage ‘industry’. The legacy of danger and discomfort, sadness and
isolation, can become suppressed as part of moves to create pleasant places.
Islands like Hart and Cockatoo persist as liminal zones very close to
major settlement areas. Rather than remote oceanic locations, these islands
lurk near the land and resonate with other prison islands like Alcatraz in San
Francisco Bay, and Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town in South
Africa. These islands are loaded with symbolic cargoes, heavy with the
burdens of society. Despite Hart Island’s proximity to one of the world’s
biggest cities, and its role as home to that country’s largest cemetery, it is, in
effect, written out of the everyday consciousness. And Cockatoo Island,
although within Sydney’s populous harbour, represented a remote location
for undesirables, so that in many ways it might as well have been in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean; the litany of problems included the non-arrival
of the basics of bread, lighting oil, and, the lament that ‘Neither candles nor
onions have come as expected’ (Parker, 1977, p.6).
Their condition as an edge zone, a threshold state, casts islands as the
ultimate terrains vagues. Found at the city edges, or on left over and
abandoned sites, terrains vagues are spatially and socially marginalised
landscapes. Their imprecision is both spatial and temporal, often existing at
points of transition, where places which were previously assigned to a
particular category of occupation – residential, industrial – have, with
abandonment, drifted into a state of vagueness. These spaces become
stranded in a different time, outside of the city’s normal activities. The
‘Zone’ of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker expresses the spirit of the terrain
vague, a mysteriously imbricated space which seems to inhabit a different
time frame. The marginal qualities of the terrain vagues landscape are also
found in Bill Henson’s photographs, depicting what the New Yorker
described as ‘battered landscapes and fragile, wispy youths’ (in Spens, 2005).
The imagery of Tarkovsky and Henson makes the melancholy of terrains
vagues palpable, and embodies the description of such places as
conspicuous pauses amidst a landscape homogenized to the point of

indiscernability. The voided, abandoned spaces resonate with what
Solà-Morales refers to as ‘our strangeness in front of the world’; they
empathize with our feelings of placelessness and dislocation within our
cities.
(Daskalakis and Perez, 2001, p.80)
Liminality, or ‘in-betweeness’, in conditions such as these is also a conceptual

indistinction. Falling outside of the clearly classifiable, terrains vagues resist
the objectification of the world. Using terms from Richard Rorty, Daskalakis
and Perez propose that the ‘terrain vague leaves a vital gap in “knowingness”
that can be activated’, and that it has
inspirational value; it has the capacity to produce ‘shudders of awe’,

that strange mingling of dread and wonder that can move our intellect
and our emotions…. Its sheer magnitude, pervasiveness, and otherness
forces us to recontextualise what we thought we already knew.
(Daskalakis and Perez, 2001, p.84)
The intervention in such places offers the opportunity to engage with the
melancholy of liminality, one that might be intensified by visiting the site at
only the liminal times of day or seasons. Such temporal bracketing is a
Liminality 107
means of designing with time, that as much as landscape architects shape
space, they also have the possibility of structuring time, drawing visitors at
times of emotional potency, and resisting them when the light is flat.
Gardens, memorials, islands, arcades and terrains vagues emphasise the
poignancy of passage, the melancholy of that which is near yet lingers on the
edge of the unattainable. Vast lands such as Antarctica possess their own
liminal melancholy. Undergoing sustained twilight during the spring and
autumn of each year, and even the year through there are lingering periods
of half-light, the Antarctic is also a threshold place that exists just over the
horizon of the tangible world, a place of thwarted expeditions, death and
longing. Beyond these terrestrial and even quotidian examples, the moon
hovers as a further liminal location par excellence. The lunar landscape is
particularly evocative of literally other-worldly beauty, the intangible sense
of loneliness and desolation. Following the intense interest throughout the
1970s and even the 1980s, the moon has more recently receded from the
radar. Yet the images remain in the mind’s eye. The photographs of the
moon produced from the early voyages, the Apollo missions, had the frisson
of aura, and also the yearning for discovery, for finding ourselves out there.
Astronomy in general is a melancholy pursuit, such is the vastness of the
endeavour, and this is made more so by the desire to make some kind of
connection. If ‘landscape’ is conceptualised as extending beyond our familiar
terrain on earth, to the moon, and even beyond, perhaps the most melancholy
of objects might be the Voyager spacecraft. Launched in 1977, the spacecraft
set out in search of life, departing our solar system in December 2004. On
board Voyager is a Golden Record which contains a range of audio tracks,
including what Ry Cooder has called ‘the most soulful, transcendent piece
in all American music’: Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Dark was the Night, Cold
was the Ground’ (in Cresswell, 2006, p.73).
Notes
1 ‘Potter’s fields’ are cemeteries for the unknown or destitute. The origin of the
term is as an area of land for the burial of strangers, as in Matthew 27: 7: ‘And
they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in.’
A potter’s field would have been a place to dig for clay, with the terrain of ditches
and excavations providing places for burials.
2 Jason McNamee’s commended entry (see Simpson 1996).
3 Ross Ramus and students from University of New South Wales, first prize (see
Simpson, 1996).
4 Richard Weller’s commended scheme (see Simpson, 1996).
References
Barnes, Martin (2006). ‘The gloaming’, in Martin Barnes and Kate Best, Twilight:
Photography in the Magic Hour. London: Merrell Publishers in association with
the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Benjamin, Walter (1999). The Arcades Project. (ed. Ralph Tiedemann; trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin). Boston: Harvard University Press.
Brown, Gordon (1984). Colin McCahon, Artist. Auckland: Reed.
Burgin, Victor (2009). ‘Monument and melancholia’. In Victor Burgin, Situational
Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin (essay originally published in
2008). Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press.
Cockatoo Island (2010). Promotional website. www.cockatooisland.gov.au/about/
index.html, 12 March 2010.
Connor, Steven (2006). ‘A certain slant of light’, in Martin Barnes and Kate Best,
Twilight: Photography in the Magic Hour. London: Merrell Publishers in

association with the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Cresswell, Toby (2006) 1001 Songs: The Great Songs of All Time and the Artists,
Stories and Secrets Behind Them. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.
Daskalakis, Georgia and Perez, Omar (2001). ‘Projecting Detroit’, in Georgia
Daskalakis, Charles Waldheim and Jason Young (eds), Stalking Detroit.
Barcelona: Actar.
de Chirico, Giorgio (1994). The Memoires of Giorgio de Chirico. New York: Da
Capo Press.
Hubbard, Henry Vincent (2010). An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design
(originally published 1917). Alcester: Read Books.
Hunt, John Dixon (2005). ‘“Come into the garden, Maud”: garden art as a privileged
mode of commemoration and identity’, in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (ed.),
Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design.
Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.
Hunt, Melinda (1998). ‘The nature of Hart Island’, in Melinda Hunt and Joel
Sternfield, Hart Island. Zurich: Scalo.
Kerr, James Semple (1984). Cockatoo Island: Penal and Institutional Remains.
Sydney: National Trust of Australia.
Parker, R.G. (1977) Cockatoo Island: A History. Melbourne: Thomas Nelson.
Simpson, Rod (1996). ‘Edge conditions’. Architecture Australia, January/February.
Spens, Michael (2005). ‘New work by Bill Henson’. Studio International, 24 March.
www.studiointernational.com/index.php/new-work-by-bill-henson, 28 December
2015.
Turner, Victor (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago:
Aldine.
15 Fragments
Fragments tremble at the threshold between wholeness and partialness; the

fragment engages the mind in imaginative reconstruction. Of ruins, which
are a species of fragment, Tim Edensor writes how they ‘function like
Rubin’s vase/profile illusion, allowing the viewer to see the intact object and
its disappearance at the same time’ (Steinmetz, 2008, p.232). This liminal
manifestation, lurking within a space of indefinability, lends fragments an
aesthetic of fragility. Fragments exist not only at a spatial threshold, but also
temporally. Delicate, yet persisting in time and space, fragments, ruins, as
pieces of a whole, are suspended within the ambivalence of melancholy. As
George Steinmetz observed in German Namibians’ apprehension of the
ruins of their country, ‘The ruins’ intermediate location between culture and
nature resonates with melancholia, which is analogously poised between life
and death’ (Steinmetz, 2008, p.232).
The fragment provokes melancholic contemplation, as the beholder
mentally reconstructs that which is no longer whole. Images of New York’s
World Trade Towers after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 evoked an avalanche
of responses, from raw despair, to beholding the sublime. The events of 9/11
and their aftermath generated a vast discourse, from politics to structural
engineering, from ideology (Leach, 2003) to trauma theories, and aesthetics,
including a revisiting of the ‘heartless picturesque’, as questions of the
morals of a fascination with the imagery of terror were raised. The reduction
of the once monolithic, muscular, towers to mere fragments provoked a
complex array of reactions, including a feeling of the incomprehensibility of
the event, of it being beyond representation, literally awe-ful.
Makeshift shrines of photographs, candles and mementos spread across
Manhattan, as well as at sites such as the few spindly trees near the Pentagon
which were laden with photo IDs, poems and toys. Both the beholding of
the ruins of the buildings and the memories of the victims evoked the
fragmentary at a vast scale. Imagery not just of the ruins, but of the pre-9/11
New York skyline became imbued with melancholy, fragments of the past
which persisted beyond the event, the wound kept open. As Barbara
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explains, ‘What were once souvenirs or logos or
useful maps have become mementos. They have acquired a strange aura, a
penumbra of sadness. They seem to defy the loss’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett,
2003, p.13).
Phenomenologically, the fragmentary extended beyond the physical
artefacts, the insistence of the visual traces of the event and the mementos of
the time before, and into the sonic realm. The mobile phone calls from the
flights and the crews’ voices on the black box flight recordings became the
ruins of sound. The Sonic Memorial Project gathered together:
tapes of weddings atop the World Trade Center, recordings of the

buildings’ elevators and revolving doors, home videos made by a lawyer
in his 42nd floor office, sounds of the Hudson riverfront, recordings of
late night Spanish radio drifting through the halls as Latino workers
clean the offices, an interview with the piano player at Windows on the
World sharing his recollections, video e-mail greetings that tourists sent
from the kiosks on the 110th floor, voicemail messages from people
who worked in the World Trade Center.
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 2003, pp.29–30)
The symbolic potency of the black box flight recordings as fragments of

wholes informed the design I developed with Room 4.1.3 for the Pentagon
Memorial Competition, one of the final six selected from over 1,100
international entries (Weller, 2005). Recognising the poignant resonance of
the designation of the black boxes as the plane’s ‘flight memory’, we
proposed one black box for each victim at the Pentagon site. Black boxes
are, we discovered, orange, ‘to aid in their recovery’. This phrase was imbued
with a double-meaning – both locational and therapeutic – and we therefore
retained the orange colour for a small box which would be placed within the
large black box for each individual as a container for mementoes. The
surface of the black boxes held a shallow pool of water which was shaped
to appear to defy perspective when looking directly into it. This water
surface would act as what Steven Holl refers to as a ‘phenomenal lens’ (Holl,
2006, p.79), with water being a means of amplifying the movement of air
and the passing of clouds and even the starry sky above.
Within the melancholy aesthetic, the fragmentary hovers at the edge of
the sublime, ‘largely because it also indicates or represents what eludes
representation and conveys a sense of limitlessness that cannot be reduced
to a concrete, finite or present object’ (Thomas, 2008, p.22). This threshold
between melancholy and the sublime is alluded to by Harries in his discussion
of ruins. The sublime appears at the moment of terror, where there is a
feeling of ruins as a signal of things ‘sliding out into space’, at which point
the hint of the familiar which is tethered to melancholy is lost, and there is
‘not so much a domestication as a liberation of space which means also of
time. The terror, or rather the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of time, is
awakened rather than banished’ (Harries, 1997).1
Fragments 111
The ruins of Rome are the quintessential fragmentary landscape, where the
beholder floats within an indeterminate topography and an ambiguity of
time, adrift from the certain datums of past and present, or the spatial
absolutes of inside and outside, building and landscape. Byron’s Childe
Harold described Rome as a skeleton of ‘Titanic form’, a place containing
‘Wrecks of another world, whose ashes are still warm.’ This lingering presence
of a past time presents the ruins as a riddle, something unresolved, and the
mental assembly of fragmentary evidence makes Rome a ‘long-explored but
still exhaustless mine / Of contemplation’ (in Thomas, 2008 p. 71).

So enticing is the melancholy cachet of the ruin that the building of ruins
became very fashionable during the Picturesque period, and as Karsten
Harries explains, ‘Artificial ruins speak of a desire to return to nature, to
become part of it, not to master it’ (Harries, 1997, p.243). The Picturesque
aspired to a blending of architecture and nature, and it was within the
ambivalence of the fragmentary, and specifically the ruined, that this was
most effectively realisable. Added to the perversity of building ruins was the
planting of dead trees, intended to lend an aged feel to the landscape.
William Kent, a ‘mere man of canvas’, was one of the ‘wrongheads’ criticised
for the absurdity of planting dead trees, a practice which took to an extreme
the translation of the paintings like those by Salvator Rosa into the actual
landscape (Marshall, 1795, p.158).
The invasion of the ruin by vegetation is part of the melancholy of
submersion, moulded and mouldered architecture into landscape, a
transformation explored further in Chapter 17. This aspiration towards an
ambivalent relationship with nature amplifies melancholy’s love of longing,
of always yearning, craving that which is just beyond the possible.
The ambiguity of the fragmentary is further amplified when it is not clear
whether what is beheld is a ruin or a building which is incomplete. The
Magdalenenklause was one of the first built ruins, created as a hermitage in
1728 in the park of the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich. Elizabeth Wanning
Harries describes how ‘the building can be seen either as emerging from or
as receding into the ground; this ambiguity is part of its power’ (Harries,
1994, p.64). The potency of this paradox was also expressed decades later
at Ermenonville, near Paris, where the Temple of Philosophy was constructed
in a manner that suggests a ruin. Significantly, however, the temple was
imagined by René de Girardin not simply as a ruin, but as an incomplete
building. Within the temple is inscribed, in Latin, ‘Be this temple (Unfinished
like the science [philosophy] whose name it bears)’ (in Girardin, 1982,
p.80). This allegory of the imperfection of human understanding is further
represented by the fact that although six whole pillars of the temple bear the
names of philosophers (Newton, Descartes, Voltaire, Montesquieu, William
Penn and Rousseau), a further column lies in the grass, bearing the phrase
which asks ‘Who will complete it?’ (in Girardin, 1982, p.81). A further three
uninscribed columns lie on the ground, also evoking the sense of a temple
under construction.
The idea of the non-finito, or intentionally incomplete ruin, applied to
a work which the artist intended to leave unfinished, like a torso or

sketch…. Such a work is … recognized to be a particular form of
expression in its own right, challenging and motivating its audience to
creative co-operation – to fill in and find out by empathy and association.
(Rothstein, 1976, p.308)
It is a conundrum which persists as an unsolvable riddle in the landscape, as

in the circular dance of fragment, ruin, and the incomplete in the observations
of Robert Smithson, who in September 1967 undertook a field trip to
Passaic, New Jersey. The ambiguity of the fragment is an idea which occurs
within Smithson’s field trip; when looking at a highway being constructed in
the distance he had become perplexed at the site of things being both
bulldozed and constructed, of a ‘unitary chaos’, and then realised that it was
not something under decay he was seeing, but ‘ruins in reverse’ (Smithson,
1967, p.50). This was the construction yet to be built, the opposite of a
romantic ruin, he believed, as ‘the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are
built but rather rise into ruin before they are built’ (Smithson, 1967, p.50).
As a poised and uncertain state of being, Smithson’s highway lingers in time,
like Girardin’s Temple.
Louis Kahn’s project for the Capitol of Bangladesh is, arguably, a
constructed ruin, a melancholy building–landscape hybrid, suspended in an
immemorial time. Scully traces a thread which connects Kahn’s Capitol back
to the ruins of Rome (Scully, 2003, p.313). One of Kahn’s sources of inspiration
was Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and he owned every book of his that he could
find. In turn, Piranesi drew insights from his visits to the ruins of Rome. The
fragmentary, liminal fusions of the built and the natural, filtered through the
lens of Piranesi, found their expression in Kahn’s project in Bangladesh. This
legacy of the ruin was borne out in the 1971 war of Bangladeshi (then East
Pakistan) independence. Rather than it becoming a primary target, as a seat of
government would be expected to be in such a conflict, the enemy pilots
bypassed the Capitol, thinking it was an ancient ruin.
Ambiguous states of completion or ruination present what Victor Burgin
calls ‘monuments of melancholy’. Drawing on Pierre Nora’s description of the
lieux de mémoire, Marc Augé’s notion of the non-lieu and Tristan Landry’s
non-lieux de mémoire, Burgin clarifies the distinction between ‘monuments of
mourning’ and ‘monuments of melancholia’. Monuments of mourning are
Nora’s lieux de mémoire, official sites of remembrance, literally ‘places of
memory’ or memorials. Nora distinguished these from the traditional milieu
de mémoire, where collective memory was accumulated in a place, rather than
being formally designed for the purpose of remembering. An extension of the
shifting relationships between memory and place came with Augé’s non-lieu,
or ‘non-place’, an expression which encompassed the anonymity of the
environments of ‘supermodernity’ – the landscapes of highways, airports and
Fragments 113
shopping malls. The subsequent conception of non-lieux de mémoire is that
which Burgin calls ‘monuments of melancholy’, as inconclusive and unresolved
sites – ‘as a building site is virtually indistinguishable from a ruin’, ‘the
enigmatic fragments of a rebus’ (Burgin, 2009, p.326). The idea of imagining
a building’s future as a ruin appears in a range of architectural visualisations
through the past few centuries, but the specific theory of ‘ruin value’ was
developed by Adolf Hitler. Inspired by his visit to Rome in 1938, and
impressed by the enduring forms of the Colosseum and other muscular ruins,
Hitler directed that all German buildings would be made from marble, stone
and brick – all materials which would ruin well – rather than concrete and
steel. Nazi architect Albert Speer’s drawings of the marble colonnade at the
Nuremberg Zeppelin Field showed it as an ivy-clad ruin.
Beyond specific buildings is the fragmentary applied to a landscape scale,
as in Gustave Doré’s engraving The New Zealander, 1873. A Maori, the
‘New Zealander’, sits on a ruined arch of London Bridge drawing the
remnants of St. Paul’s in his sketchbook (Figure 15.1).
Figure 15.1 Gustave Doré, The New Zealander, 1873.

The city is in ruins and Doré’s image is an evocation of the words of
Thomas Babbington Macaulay, poet, historian and politician, from 1840.
Macaulay imagined this visitor, the ‘New Zealander’, sitting amidst the
‘vast solitude’ of the ruined city and making his sketch. Doré’s image
resembles a vanitas, a symbolic image of life’s transience. The ruins of
London take the place of the usual domestic scale vanitas, the more familiar
décor of clocks, hourglasses and skulls. Time is marked among the ruins by
the visitor’s presence, this apparition from far away, from an untrammelled
paradise, from an Antipodean Arcadia. The fragmentation of what might be

considered immutable subverts conceptions of the inevitably of progress,
and instead highlights the vulnerability of even the great cities, captured in
Susan Buck-Morss’ observation with reference to Benjamin’s Arcades
Project:
The debris of industrial culture teaches us not the necessity of submitting

to historical catastrophe, but the fragility of the social order that tells us
that this catastrophe is necessary. The crumbling of the monuments that
were built to signify the immortality of civilisation becomes proof,
rather, of its transiency.
(Buck-Morss, 1991, p.170)
The melancholy of the fragment is allied with the melancholy of the collector.
The art of collecting is recognised as one of the most melancholy of tasks,
profoundly contemplative, and filled with persistent longing. The collector
is always searching for items, yet at the same time seeking to elude
completion. Like a lover’s melancholy which rests upon unrequited love,
collector’s melancholy is built upon an eternal infinity, the prospect of the
collection never being complete, a perpetual non finito. In this context the
partial nature of a fragment is everything, it is the core of melancholy,
gesturing to the impossibility of completeness, to the passing of a prior
entirety. For the time of modernity this can be conceptualised as a forever
backwards contemplation, to that time before that was, perhaps, complete,
and subsequently fell into ruin. The poignancy of these ruins derives from
the unattainability of the past, that ‘[w]e may kneel to gather a fragment,
but it stays a fragment and can speak to us only of a beauty which is lost
forever’ (Rella, 1987, p. 35).
The collector is a ‘pearl diver’, one who lowers themselves into ‘dizzying
sea depths to gather pearls and coral in which even death has become
something “rich and strange”’ (Rella, 1987, p.32). The pearl diver is, as
Franco Rella explains, ‘saturnine, melancholic’, challenged by the
‘unreachable totality’ implied by collecting (Rella, 1987, p.33). The vastness
and impossibility of completeness is such that
In order for the collector’s gesture to truly impart salvation, he would

have to collect the whole world. This is his secret dream. And this is the
Fragments 115
desperate aspiration of the race which accumulates things, objects,
images, ideas, deliriums, and monsters.
(Rella, 1987, p.33)
The potency of the fragment is therefore bound up within the impossibility of

completion, the partial element within the immensity, the remnant, which as
poet Emil Cioran observed, ‘fascinate[s] with the illusion of touching the edge
of darkness, the borders of our nocturnal destiny’ (in Rella, 1987, p.35). Rella
relates this melancholy relationship with the world of things to the experience
of the labyrinth, ‘a place without exits, or better yet, a place with thousands
of exits, none of which lead outside’ (Rella, 1987, p.31), and draws parallels
with Kafka’s description of the world as a collection, and Bellow’s perception
of the world as the ‘province of the collector of ruins’ (Rella, 1987, p.34). The
melancholy of exits, of departures, as well as the fragmentary, leads towards
the dual losses bound up in the poignancy of leavings.
Note
1 The phrase mysterium tremendum et fascinans is Latin for ‘fearful and fascinating
mystery’, and is used by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy to name the awesome
mystery common to all forms of religious experience.
References
Buck-Morss, Susan (1991). The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (illustrated edition). Boston: MIT Press.
Girardin, R.L. (1982). An Essay on Landscape (trans. Daniel Malthus; originally
published in French in 1783). New York: Garland Publishing.
Harries, Elizabeth Wanning (1994). The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment
in the Later Eighteenth Century. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Harries, Karsten (1997). The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Holl, Steven (2006). ‘Water: a phenomenal lens’, in Alberto Perez-Gomez, Juhani
Pallasmaa, Steven Holl, Questions of Perception: Phenomenology of Architecture,
San Francisco: William Stout.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara (2003). ‘Kodak moments, flashbulb memories:
reflections on 9/11’. The Drama Review, 47(1): 11–48.
Leach, Neil (2003). ‘9/11’, Diacritics, 33(3/4): 75–92.
Marshall, William (1795). A Review of ‘The Landscape, a Didactic Poem’, also of
‘An Essay on the Picturesque’, Together with Practical Remarks on Rural
Ornament. London: G. Nicol, G. G. and J. Robinson, and J. Debrett.
Rella, Franco (1987). ‘Melancholy and the labyrinthine world of things’, Substance,
53: 29–36.
Rothstein, Eric (1976). ‘“Ideal Presence”, and the “Non Finito”, in Eighteenth-
Century Aesthetics’. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 9(3): 307–332.
Scully, Vincent (2003). Modern Architecture and Other Essays, Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Smithson, Robert (1967) ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, ArtForum, December: 48–51.
Steinmetz, George (2008). ‘Harrowed landscapes: white ruingazers in Namibia and
Detroit and the cultivation of memory’. Visual Studies, 23(3): 211–237.
Thomas, Sophie (2008). Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle.
New York: Routledge.
Weller, Richard (2005). Room 4.1.3: Innovations in Landscape Architecture.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
16 Leavings
‘Leavings’ are melancholy doubled. First, leavings are poignant actions:

departures, abandonments, desertions. And second, leavings are those things
which are left, the remnants of something previously whole: detritus, residue.
Each has their own sense of desolation, and in some cases both the action
and the remainder are intertwined in a narrative of displacement. There is
implied in the residue – whether it be a note, a trace, an object now lost – a
tender violence. Ruptures and cleavings are the subplots of leavings. The
departure of things, of wholes, of lives, of loves, leaves the pain of residual
stains, of that which remains. The melancholy tracings of things inhere in
dust, and in sediments. Like the ‘residues of the day’ which, according to
Freud, infuse our dreams, leavings are fragmentary and incomplete. Yet
within these debris inhere melancholic imaginings, or as Joseph Cornell
wrote of the ‘sweepings’ that he gathered up from his studio floor, they
contain those things that fly under the radar, ‘the rich crosscurrents
ramifications etc that go into the boxes but which are not apparent (I feel at
least) in the final result’ (in Schwenger, 2006, p.144).
Complete absence, total emptiness, is an aesthetic other than melancholy.
Daunting, desolate, inhumane, a complete absence may instead enter into
the sublime. It is the hint of presence which moves a scene, an image, into a
melancholy state. The intimation of things being left, or having departed,
opens the door into the realm of melancholy. Like fragments and ruins,
leavings is the state of things no longer whole. The leftovers that persist, the
remnants which endure, hint at other realms beyond the place of the present.
As triggers for involuntary memory, leavings can sabotage the most innocent
of gazes. When the eye rests upon an element in a scene, something out of
place, out of time, a reverie opens out, a recollection, a recall of departure
and loss. As Trigg explains, ‘The phenomenology of involuntary memory
resounds with melancholic fascination as we encounter an object that, while
still persisting in space and time, is displaced from its narrative context and
so points to an elsewhere that is no longer’ (Trigg, 2006, p.29).
The condition of leavings as departures is bound up with nostalgia, the
conflicted emotion associated with retrospection. Nostalgia was coined by
Johannes Hofer, a Swiss medical student in the late seventeenth century, a
hybrid of the Greek words for returning home (nostos) and pain or longing
(algos), to describe the condition experienced by Swiss mercenaries who
spent long periods away from home, with the symptoms including ‘persistent
thoughts about home, melancholy, insomnia, anorexia, weakness, anxiety,
lack of breath, and palpitations of the heart’ (Wilson, 2005, p.21). Like
melancholy, nostalgia is also characterised by paradox, where the anguish
of being apart from one’s place in the world is at the same time a condition
which is desirable. Bound up in nostalgia is the pathos and pothos1 of
leavings, the sadness from being apart and the inexplicable pleasure of the
pain of separation.
The loss of landscape, the leavings from it (departures), and the leavings
behind (residues), are a source of melancholic contemplation for refugees.
Displaced from their homelands, refugees will sometimes carry with them
small mementos of place, items which form armatures for mourning. Such
extended, prolonged, even permanent, mourning becomes melancholy
proper, in Freudian terms – the wound is kept open and the subject does not
seek closure but instead longs for longing, pursuing the pain of loss. The
fragments of a former existence are bearers of identity, of the seat of one’s
self, for the nostalgic refugee. Landscapes are powerfully evocative of
identity and connection, and for displaced Latvians the fragments were
representations of the countryside, providing a portable means to tie them
back to their homes. In paintings, songs and pastoral narratives, the
landscape was the core of an emotional repertoire, even though that very
same landscape was also the place of the darkest of memories. Soviet control
from 1944 created a climate of fear, and the forests were a place of refuge
for Latvians. The imposition of collective farming, heavy taxation, and the
deportation of one-tenth of the rural population to Siberia, saw a dramatic
change to the Latvian countryside. As Vieda Skultans laments: ‘Those who
survived deportation and exile often had no homes to go to and their return
to the homeland could also be painful’ (Skultans, 2001, p.30). For Latvians,
landscape imagery was intensely melancholy. Skultans describes this
irresolvable connection to place: ‘descriptions of the pastoral embody a
contradiction: they hold out hope and yet they contain a fear lest the
landscape will speak of the brutalities it has witnessed’ (Skultans, 2001,
p.38). This conflicted relationship with memory is what Svetlana Boym
terms ‘reflective nostalgia’, in distinction from ‘restorative nostalgia’ which
tries to recreate the past. For the reflective nostalgic, the past cannot be
recreated, it is irrevocable, unrequitable, and will remain as a wound that
can’t be healed. This melancholy irresolution reflects on a past that is not as
it was, but as a creative reinterpretation, ‘not a property of the object itself,
but a result of an interaction between subjects and objects, between actual
landscapes and landscapes of the mind’ (Boym, 2001, p.354).
The melancholy of leavings is connected to the poignancy of the souvenir.
As a trace of a memory the souvenir is the ultimate ‘stranded object’, isolated
forever from its origin. Susan Stewart describes how the potency of souvenirs
Leavings 119
rests upon the fact that the event which they are connected to cannot be
repeated. The connection between the object and its origin is lost, but the
relationship remains as an ethereal trace. Stewart explains how souvenirs
are the means by which nostalgics nurture their desire for the past. Although
the souvenir exists in the present, the nostalgic wants to push it into the past,
to find that distance between what is here now, and what was. This distance
is something which must be maintained for the nostalgic’s desire to be able
to continue, it must remain at an unattainable arm’s length, a fragment from
the past, a wound that can’t heal. Distance also resonates with aura, and the
cult value of objects, all that is tied up within elements persisting from the
past. ‘The souvenir involves the displacement of attention into the past’,
Stewart observes, adding that it is ‘not simply an object appearing out of
context, an object from the past incongruously surviving in the present;
rather, its function is to envelope the present within the past. Souvenirs are
magical objects because of this transformation’ (Stewart, 2005, p.151).
The abandoned fragment falls outside time and space – becoming a
‘stranded object’,2 a ‘melancholy object’ where ‘through death, the most
mundane objects can rise in symbolic, emotional and mnemonic value
sometimes outweighing all other measures of value’ (Gibson, 2004, p. 292).
Inhering within remnants, these are the phantom presences that prevent
closure. Strandings exhibit the familiar, making them strange, amplifying a
melancholic out-of-placeness, where their awkwardness induces pangs of
poignancy. The traces left by a prior inhabitation, abandoned belongings, a
child’s swing which hangs forlornly, a shoe, the mark on a wall where a
picture once hung – the leavings left by those who have departed magnify
the presence of absence, desertion is palpable. Leavings are the intensification
of loss. Leavings are also represented not by the fragments but the holes
where they should be. Melancholy pours into the lacunae, gaps and holes in
history. That which is missing somehow persists, a ghostly presence. The
phenomenon of the ‘phantom limb’ is one well-documented within
psychology, the ache that resides in an absent arm or leg after amputation.
The phantom limbs of landscapes ache in all places of departures, of lands
abandoned, of downfalls and aftermaths. It is what Jan Morris calls the
‘Trieste effect’, a sense of being ‘taken … out of time to nowhere’ (Morris,
2001, p.17). And, as Morris reflects, this feeling is founded upon ‘an
unspecified yearning [that] steals narcotically over me – what the Welsh
language, in a loved word, calls hiraeth’ (Morris, 2001, p. 16).
The poignancy of leavings is amplified in the landscapes of exiles,
departures, diasporas. As Edward Casey writes in paralleling Freudian
mourning with a loss of landscape, ‘We mourn places as well as people’, and
as such the same emotions
may be extended to apply to the abandonment of places with which we

have become bonded and which we have been forced to leave, often so
abruptly that we have not been able to anticipate the consequences in
any salutary way.
(Casey, 1993, p.198, emphasis in original)
The wrenching from place experienced in sudden departures is intensified by

subsequent returns, where the losses, the absences, appear multiplied.
François-René, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, who survived his family in the
Revolution, but returning from exile to Paris in 1800 found the Place de la
Concorde, dating from 1755, ‘had the decay, the melancholy and deserted
look of an old amphitheatre’ (in Woodward, 2002, p.19).
A sense of loss stems from eviction, exile and also from change beyond
one’s control. The landscape historian W.G. Hoskins expresses such
melancholy in his reflection on the marks of progress on the English
landscape, creating – the ‘England of the Nissen hut, the “pre-fab”, and the
electric fence ... England of the by-pass ... England of the bombing-range
where there was once silence ... England of battle-training areas.... Barbaric
England of the scientists, the military men, and the politicians’ (in Cloke et
al., 1994, p.29). Hoskins’ lament evokes the observation of the sixth-century
philosopher Boethius, that ‘The beauty of things is fleet and swift, more
fugitive than the passing of flowers’ (in Eco, 1986, p.9). This recognition of
the beauty of things about to disappear, of the intensification of beauty at
the approach of death, is the melancholic species of ubi sunt, Latin for
‘where are?’. The beauty of the ubi sunt moment is a nostalgic yearning and
backwards-looking wonder at the fragility of what comes to pass, and is
usually presented as a list of what has been lost – something which Hoskins
does in reverse in his ‘Nissen hut’ lament. Meditation upon the passage of
things induces contemplation, the melancholy of reflection, as in
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 64, ‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / That time
will come and take my love away’ (in Harries, 1994, p.97).
Thoughts of loss are associated with the sense of transience, of the passage
of all things. Reflection upon transience spans a polarity, with the ubi sunt
contemplation of the beauty of passing at one extreme, and desolation and
despondency at the other. Freud’s essay ‘On Transience’ described his walk
through ‘smiling countryside’ with an aloof friend and a young poet. This
young poet, while admiring the scene for its beauty, could take no joy in it,
being ‘disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated to extinction,
that it would vanish when winter came, like all human beauty and all the
beauty and splendour that men have created or may create’ (Freud, 1997,
p.197). This seemingly perverse anti-joyful perspective in the face of beauty
echoes what Žižek called the ‘old racist joke about Gypsies’, that ‘when it
rains they are happy because they know that after rain there is always
sunshine, and when the sun shines, they feel sad because they know that
after the sunshine it will at some point rain’ (Žižek, 2001, pp.661–662). For
both the Gypsies and Freud’s young poet, the relationship with the transience
Leavings 121
of nature is one of melancholy, of a constant awareness of the fragility of
things, of the inevitability of leavings.
The Irish Diaspora of the potato famine underpins an affective topography
of leavings. In 1845–1852 the devastation of the Irish potato crop, followed
by an inhospitable political response, resulted in the mass abandonment of
agricultural lands and a death toll of over 1.5 million. The Diaspora saw the
Irish leave their homelands and head to new homes around the world,
including New York and Sydney, both of which have sites which memorialise
An Gorta Mór, the Irish Hunger. New York’s memorial was opened in July
2002, and is located in Battery Park City, towards the southern tip of
Manhattan Island (Figure 16.1).
Designer Brian Tolle recreated the countryside of County Mayo, including
the local flora and a ruined cottage donated by his extended family. The slab
of countryside is held aloft on a podium of fossilised Irish limestone, striated
with lines of illuminated text, selected from accounts of the famine. Tolle
describes how this is ‘a landscape supported by language’. Passing through
the tunnel in the podium, written text is amplified by the sound of the
spoken voice. Here, the references depart from the specific context of the
Irish famine, and extend into a discourse on famine at large. These are tales
of leavings, set against the affective scene of a deserted landscape.
At the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, Australia, another memorial to the
Irish Potato Famine effects a sense of abandonment and pathos, designed by
Hossein and Angela Valamanesh (1999) (Figure 16.2). With a table and
shelves with the most spare of possessions – a few books, a basket – there is
a profoundly melancholy air. An empty plate sits on the table. These
remainders hold within them small universes of loss. Inhering within these
remnants are the phantom presences that prevent closure, with the paradox
that it is absence which becomes palpable. The humble domestic elements
left behind echo the ‘straw bag, filled with balls of wool and an unfinished
piece of knitting … her blotting paper, her scissors, her thimble’ that Simone
de Beauvoir described in the memoir of her mother’s death, observing:
‘Everyone knows the power of things: life is solidified in them, more
immediately present than in any one of its instants’ (de Beauvoir, 1985,
p.98). Like the books, basket and empty plate in Sydney, the shoes on the
bank of the Danube that form the memorial to Jews shot into the river in
Budapest are achingly melancholy. The memorial, designed by Gyula Pauer
and Janos Can Togay, is ‘To the memory of the victims shot into the Danube
by the Arrow Cross Militiamen in 1944–45. Erected 16th April 2005’ (in
Taylor-Tudzin, 2011, p.40). Taylor-Tudzin describes how the memorial
came about through one of the designers’ ‘childhood memories of seeing
people being marched at gunpoint’ and how the shoes could become a
prompt for remembering (Taylor-Tudzin, 2011, p.40).
Figure 16.1 Brian Tolle, Irish Hunger Memorial, Manhattan, New York, USA,
2002. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2004.
Leavings 123
Figure 16.2 Hossein and Angela Valamanesh, Irish Famine Memorial, Sydney,
Australia, 1999. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2006.
Leavings take on a further poignancy when they become petrified, fossilised,

stranded in time. In the Cretto, a memorial on the former site of the town of
Gibellina in Italy, the double poignancy of leavings is palpable. An
earthquake of magnitude 6.4 struck the town in 1968, with a death toll of
over 1,000 in the surrounding area of inland Sicily, and nearly 100,000 lost
their homes. Twelve towns were lost, including Gibellina, a town of 6,000
in which the cemetery was the only thing not destroyed. Gibellina was not
rebuilt on its original site as the other towns were; instead, it was relocated
20 kilometres away. The remaining rubble sat until 1981, when artist
Alberto Burri visited the town and proposed the Cretto memorial, a ‘sudden
solidification of a mass in fluid state: a large waving surface, cracked with
passable fissures and rifts which roughly reproduced the layout of the old
town’ (Grinda and Moreno, 1999, p.56).
The memorial is the entire town set in concrete, where the departure, the
leavings, of the residents is expressed as an absence that resonates with the
eerie emptiness of a de Chirico painting (Figure 16.3).
The haunted uncanniness is underscored in Virginia Maksymowicz’s
evocation of the place, in ‘Walking through the stark whiteness, weeds
poking through the seams, one can almost hear the voices of the dead in the
wind that whips along these narrow corridors’ (Maksymowicz, 1997, p.25).
Efré García Grinda and Cristina Díaz Moreno describe the experience of a
Figure 16.3 Alberto Burri, Il Cretto (‘The Crack’), Earthquake Memorial, Gibellina,
Italy, 1984–1989. Photo by Andrea Lodi, 2008.
nocturnal visit, when the ‘Cretto offers an eerie presence: its white surfaces
dimly lit but clearly reflect the moonlight and stand out against the absolute
darkness of its surroundings’ (Grinda and Moreno, 1999, p.55).
There are 122 blocks around 1.5 metres high making up the concrete
form, a ‘discontinuous archaeological landscape’ containing ‘the remains of
walls, roofs, personal effects: the material possessions of a population which
has moved its homes to a distance of some kilometres’ (Maksymowicz,
1997, p.25). Like Rachel Whiteread’s castings, the Cretto presents a death
mask, a record of lives lost. The site is now held in stasis, petrified, and
the concrete matrix holds the residue within it, the remnants entombed.
Trigg’s commentary on the mourning of the loss of place resonates with the
Cretto memorial:
An explicitly uncanny border, located in the discrepancy between place

and time, instils the creation of a new place from the ruins of the old
one. In the return, we do not witness the death of place, now present as
a dead zone of motionlessness. Instead, the old place morphs, often
uneasily, into what it has since become.
(Trigg, 2006, p.123)
Leavings 125
Grinda and Moreno explain that the Cretto memorial ‘does not seek to
understand forgetting by accumulating memories, by a nostalgic operation
that challenges the passing of time, that evokes and perpetuates irretrievable
images’, and instead it provides an alternative vision, one which ‘will
manipulate time to give memory and place an abstract, unallusive image,
thereby creating an artificial landscape of maximum intensity in this desolate
spot’ (Grinda and Moreno, 1999, p.58). In eschewing the nostalgia and
sentimentality that are implicated in efforts to sustain particular memories,
il Cretto approaches the melancholy of the void. In its aspirations and its
form, Burri’s memorial anticipates Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered
Jews of Europe two decades later, and both sites emphasise how melancholy
is sustained by forms which are abstract, and suggestive of absence,
departures, residues.
The memorials to the war dead are also markers of absence. While
memorials can be criticised as glorifications of war, a mind receptive to the
affectivity of loss reads them as surrogate tombs. These are the places which
intensify absence, the substitute graves for those who died on the battlefields
far away. In places like New Zealand and Australia, the war memorials
remember the losses on the battlefields of Europe, of the many who never
returned home. To recognise the melancholy of the dead, rather than the
adoration of heroism, in such sites is to appreciate the beauty of sorrow in
the human condition. The memorials stand as metonymic markers,
synecdoches of the hundreds of thousands.
While the obelisks of the conventional language of memorials can become
clichéd, the taken-for-granted forms are undone when they too become
subjected to leavings. The spatial vacuum of an empty plinth quickly fills
with emotions which can be more intense than the statue itself invoked. As
Forty (1999) observes, the iconoclastic removal of 50 of the 60 Lenin statues
in Moscow left empty plinths which were charged with more memories than
the statues had ever been (Forty, 1999).
The melancholy potency of an empty plinth is explored in Rachel
Whiteread’s project for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. The
plinth in Trafalgar Square, designed in 1841 by Sir Charles Barry, has
always been empty. The original intention was to display an equestrian
statue, but it was never completed due to issues with funding. The Fourth
Plinth Commissioning Group, under the auspices of the Greater London
Authority, runs the programme of selecting temporary sculptures to be
exhibited on the empty plinth. Whiteread’s sculpture, Untitled Monument
(2001), was a cast of the empty plinth itself made in clear resin, and exhibited
on top of it in the manner of a figurative sculpture. Here, though, the figure
was a doubling of absence, creating a sense of leavings ‘squared’, a heightened
melancholy
This sense of absence is evoked through a very different materiality in
Martha Schwartz’s Field Work installation for the Spoleto Festival in
Charleston, South Carolina. Lines of white sheets flapped in the breeze,
poignant ciphers of loss and departure. Pegged onto the steel wires with
wooden pegs, the white sheets evoked domesticity, and also made connections
within the landscape, between the lines of slave cottages and the fields
beyond. John Beardsley remarked on how the project
registered the natural phenomena on the site: it took on distinct

attributes in different weather conditions and at various time of day. On
a still morning it resembled sheets hung out to dry. On a windy day, the
panels – which were tethered at one side – evoked a fleet of sailboats. In

the mist, they suggested row upon row of canvas tents, like some
abandoned Civil War encampment.
(Beardsley, 2005, p.192)
The combination of the sheets and white-painted grass created a series of

smaller compounds within the broader setting, what Beardsley refers to as
‘ethereal spaces’ where visitors ‘experienced a sense of solitude … but also
an awareness of a ghostly presence … [a] consciousness of the missing
persons in plantation history’ (Beardsley, 2005, p.192).
The memorial to Walter Benjamin at Portbou in Spain also keys into
natural phenomena as a means of expressing the melancholy of leavings.
Designed by Dani Karavan and completed in 1994, the Passages memorial
is located high on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean. Leavings
resonate strongly with Benjamin’s fate in this seaside village, the end point
in a journey across Europe to escape Nazi Germany. Leaving his homeland
and ultimately his life, Benjamin is alleged to have committed suicide in
Portbou in September 1940, although even this final fact of death is not
certain. The whereabouts of Benjamin’s body is not known. Although a
cemetery niche was secured by one of his travelling companions, when
Hannah Arendt visited Portbou some months after his death she could find
no grave, no sign of where he was laid to rest. As is the case with cemetery
niches, the period of occupancy is only five years, and after that remains are
re-interred in a communal grave. In this case there appears to have been
confusion over Benjamin’s identity, and his remains had already been moved
to the communal grave by the time Arendt arrived. There is a ‘fake’ Walter
Benjamin grave in the cemetery, with a rock serving as a tombstone,
providing a locus for the rituals of visiting the dead in Jewish culture –
leaving stones on the grave.
The Passages memorial is often described in terms of only one of its three
elements, a dramatic steel shaft which runs down from the area in front of
the cemetery towards the sea below. Rather than a meditative, reflective
view of the sea, the framed view is towards the swirling zone where the
waves come close to the shore. This tumultuous view is heightened by the
vertiginous plunge the visitor makes when walking down through the shaft.
Affording only enough space for one person to enter at a time, the shaft is
without handrails, and in the rain on my first visit, the feeling of plunging
Leavings 127
towards the sea was palpable as the wet steel steps were terrifyingly slippery.
The sound of your own footsteps clang on the steel and echo eerily within
the shaft, a form compared by Germain Viatte to a railroad tunnel (Viatte,
1997). The only barrier preventing a fall towards the sea is a thick glass
panel, inscribed with Benjamin’s own words in German and English, and,
unnervingly, cracked. The shaft is spatially tethered to the land by what
appear to be two rails embedded into the cemetery forecourt, leading to a
stone inlay in the bank. The rails continue a motif of Karavan’s, who has
used railroad tracks in a number of preceding works. Here they gain a

heightened significance through their reference to the leavings and passages
of Walter Benjamin, and to the wider references of the Jewish Holocaust.
One of Karavan’s sketches for the memorial shows a drawing of rails and a
text in Hebrew which reads:
The rails
From far away I heard the noise of the station, the frontier, the railway
clanking, and the sound of the cattle trucks on their way to the death
camps.
(In Omer, 1997, p.69)
From the memorial site, the Portbou railway station is a constant presence,
underscoring the references to travelling and departures. Although only a small
village, Portbou is an important node on the rail network as it is the point at
which the rail gauges change to those traditionally used in Spain. The activities
associated with the gauge changes accentuate the presence of the railway, and
obliquely infuse the Passages memorial with sounds and sensations.
A second fragmentary element of the memorial is a set of steel steps that
seemingly lead to nowhere. Gesturing, perhaps, towards the olive tree that
stands outside the cemetery, the steps also allude to a feeling of senselessness
and loss. One of the most poignantly powerful moments in Karavan’s
memorial work is the plinth, high up and secreted away behind the cemetery.
The steel platform is topped by a simple cube, immediately triggering
thoughts of absence (Figure 16.4).
This element is serenely melancholy in contrast to the sublime terror of
walking down the steps leading to the sea. It is possible to enter this space
of absence and sit upon the cube. As an experience it is a necessarily solitary
one, and in my own encounters with this site it seems that this is quite
possible – there are no queues or milling masses, one can simply ‘be’. Seated
upon the cube, the view is out to the Mediterranean beyond, a prospect
which is mediated by the chain link fence running along the top of the
cemetery, preventing falls down the heavily banked sides. Mordechai
Omer suggests the cube is both an empty chair and a memorial stone, and
together with the presence of the fence ‘barring passage, the wanderings and
hardships of Benjamin’s last days are conjured up with great poignancy’
(Omer, 1997, p.67).
Figure 16.4 Dani Karavan, Passages, Memorial to Walter Benjamin, Portbou,

Spain, 1994. Photo by Jacky Bowring, 2009.
An ocean prospect is also the focus of another place of melancholy, Mullion

Cove in Cornwall, England, part of the melancholy of the Void, introduced
in Chapter 9. The natural topography is already productive of emotion,
with John Wylie relating the phenomenological epiphany he felt on arriving
at the cove: ‘The overall impression of the scene … transcended all
particulars. The outlines and shadowed depths of the cliffs seemed
archetypal: in all the transience of things, somehow this moment revealed
the true and original textures of the landscape’ (Wylie, 2009, pp.275–276).
Beyond the contemplative potency of the natural setting, the traces of human
presence infused the scene with a poignant presence. Dotted around the cove
were many memorial benches, each one with its own dedication, each one a
memento, a manifestation of the melancholy of leavings. Wylie writes that
he knew before even looking that each seat would be ‘in memorium’, that
‘They would be sites set aside for looking and remembering, and in so being
they would vex together in complex fashion landscape and gaze, visible and
invisible, presence and absence, blindness and flight, love and loss’ (Wylie,
2009, p.277). Each seat echoes the Walter Benjamin memorial’s visual
trajectory to the sea, in opposition to the usual gesture of mourning, to look
Leavings 129
downwards at the earth, at a grave. Of the benches, Wylie describes how
their feeling of movement was centrifugal as opposed to the centripality of a
cemetery; they spin the gaze out to the horizon, literally to the ‘vanishing
point’. Resisting the orthodox approach of seeking to ‘know’ the individuals
memorialised by the seats, Wylie instead engages with their ‘untethered
quality’ suggested in part by their location perched high on the hillside. The
seats suggest a phenomenology not of touching and feeling, but of absence
and haunting, the sensation of leavings which persists, their ‘spectral gazes’
observing the landscape beyond.

The melancholy leavings of Ground Zero extend beyond the amputated
skyline, to the site to which the remains were taken: the Fresh Kills landfill
on Staten Island. Carolyn Malcom’s critique of the Groundswell exhibition
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York identified the powerful
resonance that operates between these two sites. Fresh Kills is currently
being developed into a park and, Malcom argues, like many of the projects
within the Groundswell exhibition this aspiration towards ‘recovering’ a
site conscripts mourning as a means of reconfiguring collective identity.
Therefore, sites such as Manchester City’s renewal following the IRA
bombings and Beirut’s Garden of Forgiveness share a duplicitous relationship
with memory, on one hand building on sites of trauma, but on the other
enlisting the community’s desire to heal a wound along with the general
aspirations towards ‘progress’ to rework, or even erase that history. These
are perhaps ‘normal mourning’ responses, the wish to heal and ‘move on’.
Yet, at the same time, there is a risk of forgetting. The relationship between
Fresh Kills and Ground Zero presents something different, in the exhibition
at least, since the images were not simply about reworking the ground into
something new, as here on this site were both the remains from 9/11
(including the emotionally charged traces of victims), and the view towards
the amputated skyline. Rather than the overlaying of a new park, new city
centre, new garden, here is a focus directly on an open wound. The proposed
memorial replicates the form of the twin towers, echoing their dimensions
as horizontal earth mounds, absorbing the image of the lost object(s) into
the landscape. And, Malcom adds, ‘that the affective resonance goes beyond
local and national affiliation and attributes to the fact that viewers are
forced to consider another space in dialogue with the landfill – that of
Ground Zero itself’ (Malcom, 2006, p.238).
The dilemmas of the Fresh Kills site and its tragic cargo of human remains
are reminders of the ethical freight that is carried by even the smallest trace.
Even a photograph is a trace, a small place of melancholy – not ‘in’ the
landscape as such, but of it. Some of the most ethically burdened photographs
in all of history are those taken by inmates in Auschwitz. Victor Burgin
describes how these photographs are central to debates over whether the
Holocaust can be represented in images … or should be. The arguments
against looking at the photographs are grounded in the belief that they, like
every other image, are seen as inadequate in the face of ‘the literally
unrepresentable horror of the Shoah’ (Burgin, 2009, p.320). The counter-
argument is that not to look is to be complicit with the Nazi ideal that the
machines of extermination should ‘leave no trace’ – these photographs are
traces, the leavings, the fragile objects that endure. Burgin refers to the views
of Georges Didi-Huberman, who wrote that these traces are
miniscule samples, taken from an extremely complex reality, brief

moments from a continuum that lasted at least five years. These moments
nevertheless constitute – in relation to the view we have upon the facts

today – the truth itself, that is to say a relic of this truth, a pitiful
reminder of it: all that still remains of the visible of Auschwitz.
(In Burgin, 2009, p.320)
The melancholic meditation over loss is expressed in works which record

states of absence. Leavings, abandonments, departures are intensified by
that which is left behind. The traces of former presences appear magnified,
their poignancy inflated. Dionne Brand, writing of immigrants living in
Toronto in the book What We All Long For, describes the moment when
Carla returns to the apartment where her mother Angie committed suicide,
and reflects:
Doesn’t a life leave traces, traces that can attach themselves to others
who pass through the aura of that life? Doesn’t a place absorb the events
it witnesses; shouldn’t there be some sign of commemoration, some
symbol embedded in this building always for Angie’s life there?
(In Hua, 2009, p.142)
The revealing of auratic traces is realised in Jorge Otero-Pailos’ project The

Ethics of Dust: Doge’s Palace, Venice 2009. Latex was poured over an
unrestored wall of the Palace, producing a cast which captures the palimpsest
of the wall’s history. Like a print lifted from a lithographic stone, or a death
mask, the cast is an impression, in all senses of the word, and brings to mind
a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids
Brigge, of that which is embedded within an abandoned space:
Most unforgettable of all … were the walls themselves. The stubborn

life of those rooms had refused to be stamped out. It was still there; it
clung to the nails that were left in the walls; it stood on the remaining
hand’s-breadths of floor, it had crept under the corner joists where there
was still a little of the interior. You could see it was in the paint, which
had gradually changed, from year to year: blue into mouldy green, green
into grey, and grey into an old, stale putrescent white. But it was also in
the fresher spots that had survived behind mirrors, pictures and
wardrobes; for it had traced the outlines of these things, over and over,
and had been with its spiders and dust even in these hidden-away places,
Leavings 131
now exposed to view. It was in every flayed strip, it was in the damp
blisters at the lower edges of wallpaper, it flapped in the torn-off shreds,
and it sweated out of the nasty stains made long ago.
(Rilke, 2009, pp.30–31)
The slow metamorphosis of deserted buildings and abandoned landscapes

reveals the index of time. Through the inevitable incursions of nature,
culture slowly becomes submerged.
Notes
1 Pothos is a term used by E.B. Daniels in his discussion of nostalgia (Daniels,
1985). The term ‘pothos’ refers to the mythological character Pothos who was
either the brother or son of Eros, and was associated with longing and the
unattainable, and ultimately with death.
2 ‘Stranded objects’ is Eric Santner’s term, who in turn attributes it to a colleague
who provided it unknowingly (Santner, 1990).
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17 Submersion
The intensification of melancholy in the landscape inheres in the eternal

dialogue between nature and culture. Weathering, patina, ruination, are all
traces of this conversation, transcripts of the exchange. A further dimension
to these traces is the profoundly poignant submersion of culture by nature.
Inundation is an ephemeral condition, where culture and nature melt
together, not necessarily ruined, nor complete. Submersion confounds
boundaries, inverting, eroding, removing the datum. The condition of
submersion is ambivalent and poignant. Volcanic eruptions, sand, silt,
water, colonisation by plants – all of these incursions erode the edges,
blurring thresholds of containment. The drowning of culture by nature
disturbs the certainty of existence.
Inundation can occur suddenly, as with Pompeii, marooned in a matrix
of volcanic matter when Mount Vesuvius erupted in ad 79. Suspended in
time, frozen at the moment of the eruption, the city was petrified as an
enormous diorama. The eighteenth-century description of Pompeii by Mr
Kelsall captures the impression of the scene arrested by volcanic eruption:
It should seem that at the time of the dreadful shower of ashes which
overwhelmed the City, the family took refuge in the cellars, and there
perished from suffocation, for here were found 24 skeletons, which
remain to this time. In another house we were conducted into the cook-
room, where there are several vessels and the skeleton of a woman in
the very posture in which she died. In the prisons were found skeletons
with fetters on their leg bones. In short, it was pleasing, and at the same
time melancholy, to view this monument of antiquity and to reflect on
the devastation of a volcano!
(In Nicholls, 1822, p.628)
The melancholy spectacle of Pompeii confounded the tidy division of life

into domestic space and the landscape beyond. The volcano did not
discriminate between buildings and landscape, and lava engulfed everything,
erasing spatial boundaries. Over time the dissolution of thresholds has
become even more apparent, as the site continues to succumb to nature. A
recent series of collapses at Pompeii, including the House of the Chaste
Lovers, the Schola Armaturarum and a segment of the tufa garden wall
which gave way after torrential rain, continue the ongoing melting of
architecture into landscape through submersion. The Schola Armaturarum
was a frescoed house which gladiators used for their combat preparations.
Frescoes and murals which had shown exterior scenes, as though windows
looking out on a landscape, have now become part of that external world, a
seamless composition. Nature and culture have melded together, and the
scene is appreciated aesthetically, with the violence of the eruption replaced

by melancholic reflection and curiosity. As Jean Starobinksi put it, ‘for a
ruin to appear beautiful, the act of destruction must be remote enough for
its precise circumstances to have been forgotten: it can then be imputed to
an anonymous power, to a featureless transcendent force – History, Destiny’
(Starobinski, 1964, p.180).
While Pompeii’s inundation was sudden and tragic, there is also
submersion by stealth. More slowly dust and sediment accumulates, bringing
a subtle sense of submersion. The layering of small particles provides an
index of time’s passage, poignantly evoked in Dickens’ Miss Havisham from
Great Expectations. In denial of the passing of time after being abandoned
at the altar on her wedding day, Miss Havisham had all the clocks in the
house stopped at that exact moment, and everything left as it was. The
otherwise civilised domestic space became organic, external, taking on the
character of a garden more than a dining room:
Certain wintry branches of candles on the high chimneypiece faintly

lighted the chamber: or, it would be more expressive to say, faintly
troubled its darkness. It was spacious, and I dare say had once been
handsome, but every discernible thing in it was covered with dust and
mould, and dropping to pieces. The most prominent object was a long
table with a tablecloth spread on it, as if a feast had been in preparation
when the house and the clocks all stopped together. An épergne or
centrepiece of some kind was in the middle of this cloth; it was so
heavily overhung with cobwebs that its form was quite undistinguishable;
and, as I looked along the yellow expanse out of which I remember its
seeming to grow, like a black fungus, I saw speckled-legged spiders with
blotchy bodies running home to it, and running out from it, as if some
circumstances of the greatest public importance had just transpired in
the spider community. I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels,
as if the same occurrence were important to their interests.
(Dickens, 2006, p.83)
Submerged beneath dust and mould, the wedding scene is a poignant

prospect. Everything that interiority connotes – hygiene, civilisation, order,
control – has melted and mouldered away. The interior becomes uncannily
exterior, strange and melancholy. The prospect of an absolute transformation
Submersion 135
to an organic static is intimated by Georges Bataille in his essay ‘Poussière’
or dust, where he wrote of how the
sad blankets of dust endlessly invade earthly dwellings and soil them
uniformly: as if attics and old rooms were being arranged for the
imminent entrance of obsessions, of ghosts, of larvae fed and inebriated
by the worm-eaten smell of old dust. When the big servant girls arm
themselves, each morning, with big feather dusters, or even with vacuum
cleaners, they are perhaps not entirely unaware that they are contributing
as much as the most positive scientists to keeping off the evil ghosts who
are sickened by cleanliness and logic. One day or another, it is true,
dust, if it persists, will probably begin to gain ground over the servants,
overrunning with vast quantities of rubble abandoned buildings,
deserted docks: and in this distant epoch there will be nothing more to
save us from nocturnal terrors.
(In Vidler, 2003, p.4)
Signalling abandonment, dust tugs at the liminal landscape, at the marginal

and unkempt. The tension with ‘cleanliness and logic’ adds to feelings of
melancholy, destabilising the sense of certainty, confounding and unsettling
the conditions of existence. The temporary erasure of the datum places the
experience of the world outside the normal shape of existence. That which
is familiar becomes reconfigured, obscured, poignantly adrift. The intrusion
of water, sand, ash, or the burying by earth, or the slow accretion over the
years, alters the fixed point of the plane upon which we exist. The layers of
cities like Bath or Rome reveal the sedimentary submersion, through
processes which are both natural and cultural. Standing in the Roman baths
in Bath, the surrounding city is some five metres above, and there is a feeling
of being in a hole through time, dislocated from the familiar, quotidian
horizon above. The interior is pushed down into the landscape, implanted,
its datum undone.
In Rome the beholder floats within an indeterminate topography and an
ambiguity of time, adrift from the certain datums of past and present, or the
spatial absolutes of inside and outside, building and landscape. Nature and
culture become intertwined, drawing into question the boundaries between
landscape and building, the weathering of the built form begins to parallel
geomorphological processes. When Charles Dickens visited the ruins of the
Roman Colosseum in 1846, he was captivated by the ‘walls and arches
overgrown with green … the long grass growing in its porches; young trees
of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit; chance
products of the seeds dropped there by birds’ (Dickens, 2009, p.152). Percy
Bysshe Shelley’s wanderings in the ruins of the Roman baths of Caracalla
bring forth the assimilation of culture by nature; in a letter to his friend
Thomas Love Peacock he describes the ‘sublime and lovely’ desolation as a
hybrid of building and landscape,
The perpendicular wall of ruin is cloven into steep ravines filled up with
flowering shrubs, whose thick twisted roots are knotted in the rifts of
the stones. At every step the aerial pinnacles of shattered stone group
into new combinations of effect, and tower above the lofty yet level
walls, as the distant mountains change their aspect to one travelling
rapidly along the plain. The perpendicular walls resemble nothing more
than that cliff of Bisham wood, that is overgrown with wood, and yet is
stony and precipitous.… These walls surround green and level spaces of
lawn, on which some elms have grown, and which are interspersed
towards their skirts by masses of the fallen ruin, overtwined with the
broad leaves of the creeping weeds. The blue sky canopies it, and is as
the everlasting roof of these enormous halls.
(Shelley, 1845, p.125)
At Ravenna the landscape slowly changed, from a coastal edge to a marshy

and lagoon-like condition, as the water filled with sediment. All along the
Romagna Coast, coastal advance – the pushing out of the beachline into the
sea – had been common up until about 1915. Shelley also wrote about his
observations of Ravenna, describing its desolate submersion in a letter to
Mary Shelley in 1845:
This city was once of vast extent, and the traces of its remains are to be
found more than four miles from the gate of the modern town. The sea,
which once came close to it, has now retired to the distance of four
miles, leaving a melancholy extent of marshes, interspersed with patches
of cultivation, and towards the seashore with pine forests, which have
followed the retrocession of the Adriatic, and the roots of which are
actually washed by its waves. The level of the sea and of this tract of
country correspond so nearly, that a ditch dug to a few feet in depth, is
immediately filled up with sea water. All the ancient buildings have been
choked up to the height of from five to twenty feet by the deposit of the
sea, and of the inundations, which are frequent in the winter.
(Shelley, 1845, p.151)
Slow inundation of architecture by landscape produced the very strange

beauty of Kolmanskop, Namibia, a diamond town from the early twentieth
century, made in a vision of Germany. And then the diamonds dried up. In the
late 1950s the town was abandoned and the surrounding sand lands slowly
invaded the settlement (Figure 17.1). The painted walls had somehow
anticipated their fate, providing ethereal backgrounds to the interior deserts,
echoes of the murals of Pompeii. Like an architectural Ozymandias, ‘Nothing
beside remains: round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
/ The lone and level sands stretch far away’ (Shelley, 2008, p.552). There is a
silent, poetic yielding of culture to nature. Yet, it is not an erasure, not a
usurping of culture by nature. Rather, it is a slow dance, a melting, a merging.
Submersion 137
Figure 17.1 Kolmanskop, Namibia. Photo by Damien du Toit, 2006.
The vision of architecture engulfed by flowing sand or water is mysterious,

evocative, melancholy. Squint Opera’s recent project, Flooded London, was
included in the 2008 London Festival of Architecture. Throughout the
flooded city the datum dissolves, thresholds are eroded. A figure is about to
dive off the ledge of St. Paul’s Whispering Gallery into an interior which is
filled with the rising flood water. Another image shows people fishing from
within the ruins of Canary Wharf, with the side of the building completely
open to the landscape beyond; a further image is at St. Mary Woolnoth,
where the view is shown from below the water, looking up to the church
above. Squint Opera’s imagery provides a strange echo of Gustave Doré’s
engraving of The New Zealander from 1872 (see Chapter 15).
Another vision of a submerged London is found in one of the projects
from the Bartlett’s Unit 15 explorations, and also exhibits this strange post-
apocalyptic melancholy. In an echo of Max Ernst’s Europe After the Rain,
Ben Marzys’ short film London after the Rain shows the submerging of the
city, and is described by course leader Nic Clear as ‘melancholy yet intensely
beautiful, and consciously references the Arcadian paintings of Claude
Lorrain and the compositional ideas and techniques of “picturesque”
landscape design’ (Clear, 2009, p.63).
Squint Opera’s scenarios for a flooded London and Ben Marzys’ oneiric
scenery find echoes too in J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. Ballard’s
London is also flooded, swamp-like, and invaded by peculiar flora and fauna
that exhibit various chilling mutations. Scientist Kerans, involved in mapping
and monitoring the mutating environment, had taken over the state-rooms
of the deserted Ritz hotel, and in the decaying decadence found himself
‘savouring the subtle atmosphere of melancholy that surrounded these last
vestiges of a level of civilisation now virtually vanished forever’ (Ballard,
2008, p.10). Beyond the hotel, the city was a network of creeks and lagoons,
with a ‘strange dream-like beauty’ that was interrupted only by the unsettling
presence of wolf spiders and iguanas preying on bats and other creatures.
The buildings were covered in moss and loomed like ghosts in the city, and
overwhelming heat had created almost unbearable living conditions.

Fantasies of submersion infuse the imagery of James Casebere, an artist
who creates haunting architectural models, often floods them, and
photographs them. Vidler describes how Casebere’s photographs ‘present us
with the image of the “just abandoned,” or perhaps also the “about to be
inhabited,” that is so characteristic a moment in the Caseberian uncanny’
(Vidler, 2001, p.11). The desolate interiors, the flooded horizons, create
microcosmic melancholy mise-en-scènes. Abelardo Morrel inverts interiors
too, submerging them not in water but in light. Using a camera obscura he
floods rooms with views from the exterior, where the low light creates
otherworldly spaces of contemplation and reflection. Submersion is attended
by feelings of dissolution, of the impending melting of substance, with the
self becoming suspended in time and space. Scenes of landscapes under
water in films also exhibit the melancholy atmosphere of inundation – for
example, Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping (1987), Theo Angelopolous’ The
Weeping Meadow (2002) and the dripping and flooded scenes of Andrei
Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). Inundation undoes the orthodox relationship of
things with the world. As water makes its way through homes and landscapes,
everything is made strange, stilled.
George-Louis Le Rouge’s 1785 drawing of the Broken Column at the
Désert de Retz near Paris and Sir William Chambers’ design for a mausoleum
for Prince Charles, who died in 1751, both showed the practice of depicting
seemingly immutable structures covered by vegetation. Chambers’ drawings
resulted from his visit to Italy in 1750–1755, where he was inspired by
Piranesi and Clérisseau, and their visions of architecture in ruins. David
Watkin suggests this illustrates the Picturesque’s desire to overthrow
architecture (Watkin, 2005, p.382). Hubert Robert’s 1796 pair of drawings
showing a proposal for reconstructing the Grande Galerie of the Louvre
depicted an ‘after’ image of the gallery in ruins, open to the sky, taking on
the appearance of a landscape complete with plants. Joseph Gandy’s 1798
portrayal of John Soane’s design for the Bank of England also showed it in
ruins, invaded by vegetation. There are resonances with Dylan Trigg’s recent
recounting of exploring an abandoned mental asylum in North Wales, and
finding an incursion of vegetation where a roof has caved in. He was
momentarily unsure about whether he was viewing an interior or exterior
scene: ‘You are still inside. It is not that you have made your way outside but
that the outside has made its way in’ (Trigg, 2006, p.249).
Submersion 139
The colonisation of ruderal vegetation invading abandoned structures is
one of melancholy’s traces, a revelation of time, a type of submersion. The
structure might not, necessarily, be in a state of ruin per se, but merely
relieved of its utilitarian function. The transformation from architecture
into landscape is part of the melancholy aesthetic, and Christopher
Woodward laments the spraying of weeds at the Colosseum, creating a
‘bald, dead and bare circle of stones’. He also regrets the removal of
vegetation at the Baths of Caracalla, suggesting that if the archaeologists
intent on sterilising the scene had arrived at the site before Shelley, there
would have been no Prometheus Unbound, as it was the scene of the baths
becoming assimilated into nature that was the source of his inspiration.
Woodward continues:
Archaeologists will argue that flowers and ivy on a ruin are just
Picturesque fluff, curlicues to amuse an artist’s pencil. What Shelley’s
experience shows is that the vegetation that grows on ruins appeals to
the depths of our consciousness, for it represents the hand of Time, and
the contest between the individual and the universe.
(Woodward, 2002, p.69)
At Nature Park Schöneberger Südgelände in Berlin (front cover) the slow

incursions of vegetation have colonised a former railway yard. After its
closure following the Second World War, the Tempelhof railway yard
became submerged under a melancholic mantle of plants, a poetic image of
nature and culture in a gentle battle. Careful editing of the site to amplify
remnant railway tracks as walking routes and preserve some of the
infrastructural elements evokes a temporal landscape of transition, a place
to become immersed, submerged.
Abandonment of a site to nature was anticipated as a possible future for
the ruins of Detroit by Camilo José Vergara, imagining that
We could transform the nearly 100 troubled buildings into a grand

national historic park of play and wonder, an urban Monument Valley….
Midwestern prairie would be allowed to invade from the north. Trees,
vines and wild flowers would grow on roofs and out of windows; goats
and wild animals – squirrels, possum, bats, owls, ravens, snakes and
insects – would live in the empty behemoths, adding their calls, hoots and
screeches to the smell of rotten leaves and animal droppings.
(In Trigg, 2006, pp.145–146)
In his book American Ruins (1999), Vergara describes how he is drawn to

‘themes of exile, lost wars, sickness, failure, decay, and death. These works
move me sometimes to tears and fill my mind with images of great power
and terrible loss; yet for all their sadness they also give me pleasure’ (Vergara,
1999, p.23). Tracing the spread of decay in cities, Vergara saw vegetation as
Figure 17.2 James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, The High
Line, Manhattan, New York, 2009 (showing graffiti before being
painted over, and the replaced ballast and railway tracks). Photo by
Jacky Bowring, 2009.
Submersion 141
the index of neglect, where submersion by nature signals the shifting
condition. His time sequence photography over a number of years shows the
slow dissolution of the forms of buildings and infrastructure, becoming
replaced by semi-wilderness.
Another photographer documented the submersion of the High Line in
Manhattan beneath a mantle of vegetation. Originally an elevated railroad
serving the industrial area of Lower Manhattan, it had gone wild, deserted,
and was in a state of decay; it was the epitome of the aesthetic of melancholy.
The ruderal vegetation, the graffiti, the rust, the decay, formed an impression
of a place outside of time, like Tarkovsky’s mysterious ‘Zone’ in his film
Stalker. Joel Sternfield’s compelling photographs showing the High Line
across the seasons contributed to interest in the abandoned railroad, and
helped inspire the formation of the Friends of the High Line, who set about
saving it. A competition was held, and the winners, Field Operations and
Diller Scofidio + Renfro, developed the design of the High Line as an elevated
park. But with its transformation into an urban park, the melancholy of
submersion was eroded. While Vergara embraced the incursions of nature in
his vision of an ‘urban Monument Valley’ for Detroit, at the High Line
decay was arrested. The High Line was tidied up, the graffiti was painted
over; the infrastructure of rails and ballast was replaced, and the vegetation
was ‘corrected’ to represent those plants which should grow in this setting,
rather than those which had (Figure 17.2).
It became something cadaverous – like landscape taxidermy – the wild
landscape hunted, killed, stuffed and then given the semblance of life, but
with glassy eyes and groomed fur. This silences the aura at the heart of
melancholy, the authentic, original and vulnerable version of reality. The
transformation of the High Line from a wild and unkempt plateau into a
smart urban plaza prompts reflection on the place of melancholy within the
landscape. A billboard adjacent to the site depicted the High Line as part of
the reinvented, chic and trendy vision for this part of Manhattan. The
imagery was bathed in the glow of conspicuous consumption, and seemed a
universe away from the poignant photography of the High Line’s prior state
of abandoned beauty.
References
Ballard, J.G. (2008). The Drowned World (originally published 1962). London:
Harper Perennial.
Clear, N. (2009). ‘London after the rain’. Architectural Design, 79(5): 62–65.
Dickens, Charles (2006). Great Expectations (originally published 1861). Clayton,
DE: Prestwick House Inc.
Dickens, Charles (2009). Pictures from Italy (originally published 1846). Sydney:
ReadHowYouWant.com.
Nicholls, John (1822). Illustrations of the Literary History of the Eighteenth Century:
Consisting of Authentic Memoirs and Original Letters of Eminent Persons; and
Intended as a Sequel to the Literary Anecdotes, Volume 4. London: Nichols.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1845) Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and
Fragments (edited by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley). London: E. Moxon.
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (2008). Poems of Shelley (Ozymandias originally published
1818). Alcester: Read Books.
Starobinski, Jean (1964). ‘Melancholy among the ruins’, in The Invention of Liberty,
1700–1789. Cleveland: Sikra.
Trigg, Dylan (2006). The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the
Absence of Reason. New York: Peter Lang.
Vergara, Camilo José (1999). American Ruins. New York: Monacelli Press.
Vidler, Anthony (2001). ‘Staging lived space: James Casebere’s photographic

unconscious’, in James Casebere, James Casebere: The Spatial Uncanny. New
York: Sean Kelly Gallery.
Vidler, Anthony (2003) ‘Fantasy, the uncanny and surrealist theories of architecture’,
Papers of Surrealism, 1(Winter): 1–12.
Watkin, David (2005) A History of Western Architecture. London: Laurence King.
Woodward, Christopher (2002). In Ruins. London: Vintage.
18 Weathering and patina
Patina and weathering are analogues for memory, traces of time’s passage,
and are important facets of a melancholy aesthetics. One step removed from
the dilapidation of ruins and fragments, weathering and patination register
on surfaces as a cumulative process, like Ruskin’s ‘golden stains of time’.
Weathering is an index of age, evocative of a sentimental, affective
connection, and a manifestation of aura. As Mădălina Diaconu explains,
‘because the patina materialises, i.e., makes visible, a repeated touch over a
long interval of time, it encodes an own story of the object and therefore
implies temporality and narrativity’ (Diaconu, 2003, p.8). Patina resonates
with melancholy’s inherently paradoxical quality. At once individual and
universal, the markings show the patterns of a person’s hands, their passing,
but we do not know exactly who: ‘the patina – designating the traces on the
surface of a repeatedly touched object – is both anonymous yet utterly
personal insofar as it involves fingerprints, which are unique’ (Diaconu,
2003, p.3). The phenomenologicality of patina charges it with tactility, the
intimacy of touch, even its own anthropomorphic sensibility, in Georg
Simmel’s words, like a ‘growth of skin’ (in Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow,
1993, p.69).
Allen S. Weiss traces the connections between patination and the Japanese
concept of mono no aware, the ‘melancholic sense of things lost and time
passed’ (Weiss, 2010, p.91). Central to the idea of mono no aware is serenity
in the face of impermanence. Rather than time’s passage inducing existential
anguish, it is embodied as an aesthetic pleasure, a Japanese version of
lacrimae rerum, the classical conception of the ‘tears of things’. Patina
develops at the very intimate scale of the tea ceremony, where, as Murielle
Hladik explains, ‘[t]he traces left by the passage of time, signs of wear and
use and the traces of finger marks (teaka) offer so much micro-information,
mini-histories for us to reinterpret’ (in Weiss, 2010, p.91). The resonances
between the intimacy of the touch and the immensity of temporality inform
this dimension of the melancholy aesthetic, and Hladik observes that ‘these
traces of time and use confer a superior degree of beauty upon things, one
which transcends quotidian beauty within an aesthetic of contemplation’ (in
Weiss, 2010, p.91). Within the landscape weathering introduces this
reflective, melancholic quality, reducing contrast and bringing a sense of
continuity between surfaces. Lowenthal and Prince observe how ‘[o]ld
things are apt to be wrinkled, variegated, accidented; above all, weathering
has harmonized them with the rest of the landscape’ (Lowenthal and Prince,
1965, p.196). This is appreciated as part of the picturesque aesthetic, and
the romantic melancholy that underlies it.
While patination relates to the cumulative effect of surface marking, time
can also register through more substantive changes such as cracking and
decay. The appearance of a crack in a surface induces a polarisation of

aesthetic responses. At one extreme, echoing the embracing of the patina
within the tea ceremony, a crack in a pottery vessel is valorised within the
melancholy sensibility, through the convention of wabi sabi. Andrew Juniper
describes how wabi sabi ‘is an expression of the beauty that lies in the brief
transition between the coming and going of life, both the joy and that make
up our life as humans’ (Juniper, 2003, p.1). In the context of the aesthetics
of wabi sabi and mono no aware the crack is considered in itself as a thing
of beauty. Weiss describes how this is emphasised through the ways in which
repairs are made to Japanese pottery, where rather than attempting to
obscure the imperfection, the crack is highlighted through mixing the urushi
lacquer with 23-carat gold dust. In a traditional Japanese garden or niwa,
the gradual shifting of texture and tone that develops with patina is embraced
as a significant aesthetic. The use of natural elements allows for the process
of gently melting together with weathering. Davey conveys how the
weathering of moss and stone and other natural materials leads to a sense of
dissolution, ‘and this too is incorporated into the niwa, hence the melancholy
appeal of sabi’ (Davey, 2003, p.48).
The polar opposite to an aesthetic appreciation of the marks of time is the
perception of weathering as a tragic fate for modernist buildings. Mostafavi
and Leatherbarrow explain how the manifestation of weathering on
modernist buildings was a contradiction of the aspirations of the age.
Against the purity, the objectivity, the whiteness, was the constant threat of
dirt, staining and patination. While weathering as a revelation of age
enhanced traditional buildings and elements made of stone, the negative
perception of weathering as deterioration is a lament of modern architecture.
Modernist buildings are affected by ‘functional deterioration’ in terms of the
breaking down of their components, as well as being afflicted with ‘aesthetic
deterioration’ – the ‘modification of surfaces through the accumulation of
dirt from weathering – staining – which is a physical fact that carries ethical
implications’ (Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow, 1993, pp.31–32). This
negative sense of weathering was a subtext in Le Corbusier’s When the
Cathedrals were White, whereas Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow explain,
‘For Le Corbusier whiteness was a matter of health, beauty, morality’
(Mostafavi and Leatherbarrow, 1993).
The aesthetic which develops in the weathering of modernist landscapes
and architecture has its own melancholy sensibility. At the same time as
Weathering and patina 145
such incursions might register as a failure within the strict manifestoes of
modernism, compromising the aesthetic of purity and efficiency, they are
also intensely poignant. Recalling a visit to Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House
in Utrecht, the Netherlands in the early 1990s, the most enduring impression
I have is not of the pure geometries and solid colours of the De Stijl
movement, but of the traces and signs of human habitation, the lives which
had been lived within the house, the marks from cutting on the kitchen
bench, the dents and scratches on the wooden surfaces. While these subtle
signs are barely apparent in photographs of the building, in reality they

presence themselves through the hapticity of engagement. This same
melancholy of a surface patinated and distressed by the small violences of
domestic life is revealed in Whiteread’s casts of mortuary slabs. Eschewing
the pure, smooth finish that would emphasise a machinic aesthetic and
reference Minimalist sculpture, Whiteread’s surfaces instead ‘carried the
indexical signs of the knife and surgical instruments that carved the body on
the slab’ (Bird, 1995, p.123).
Tacita Dean’s films of decayed structures illuminate the affective aesthetic
of weathering, especially of modernist structures. Focusing on modern and
seemingly durable buildings, Dean probes the shift which occurs as their
mutability becomes apparent. Large concrete discs on England’s south coast
were the subject of her film Sound Mirrors (1999), the decaying infrastructure
of wartime surveillance. Sitting forlornly within fields, the sound mirrors
like those at Denge (Figure 18.1) were abandoned, their usefulness having
been suddenly superseded with the invention of radar. Prior to the
technological leap to radar in the 1930s, the acoustic mirrors had performed
the task of ‘listening’ for approaching enemy planes, the massive concave
forms concentrating the incoming sound waves to allow for monitoring, like
concrete ears. No longer of any use, the sound mirrors slowly fell into ruin.
Dean’s film captures both the visual spectacle of decay and the aural
emanations of the eerie ears.
Another abandoned and superseded structure was explored in her film
Delft Hydraulics (1996), documenting an obsolete machine for measuring
wave impact. In Bubble House (1999), Dean filmed the weathered shell of a
futuristic-looking house that she came across in the course of working on
another project. The flying saucer-like house was abandoned, and only the
shell remained, exposed to the weather and with its elliptical windows
offering views out to the ocean beyond. Attracted to the ‘space-age,
Barbarella-style, utopian-model architecture’, Dean reflected on how the
structures she seeks out are often from the decade of her birth – ‘the 1960s
was a time of great optimism and innovation and the failure of that within
my own lifespan is quite interesting’ (in Trodd, 2008, p.384). Further
emphasising the tension between the modern and the past is Dean’s use of
16 mm film as opposed to digital media. The film itself becomes an object,
it has aura, and its own vulnerability to the vicissitudes of time resonates
with the processes of weathering and patina at work on the sites she films.
Figure 18.1 Abandoned sound mirror, Denge, England. Photo by Paul Horsefield,
2015.
Enigmatic weathered fragments instilled a sense of the sacred for W.G.

Sebald on his long walk through the south-east of England. In The Rings of
Saturn, Sebald relates his encounter with a landscape that resonated with
time immemorial, invoking suggestions of burial mounds and sacred
temples. What Sebald had encountered was not an ancient religious site, but
the bunkers and infrastructure associated with military research at
Orfordness, including the ‘Pagodas’, which served as testing labs for secret
research into developing the atomic bomb (Figure 18.2).
From a distance the pagodas resemble the ‘tumuli in which the mighty
and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and
utensils, silver and gold’ (Sebald, 1999, p.236). For Sebald the number of
buildings which resembled temples or pagodas (but were in fact testing
facilities) gave him the sense of being on sacred ground. In the same way
that the weathered and battered acoustic ears take on an air of antiquity,
suggestive of the enigmatically attentive Easter Island figures, the
infrastructure of Orfordness appears as something from a much more
ancient past than the early twentieth century.
The descent from visions of a perfect future utopia to one of ruin provides
the armature upon which a melancholy aesthetic can become attached. The
machinic aesthetics of modernism and military installations, and the rational
impulses of De Stijl, inevitably yield to the traces of humanity. That they
were originally designed as timeless, or even futuristic, further enhances this
poignant denouement. Pallasmaa’s conception of ‘fragile’ architecture, an
empathetic approach to design, rests in part upon this inexorable slippage:
Figure 18.2 Orford Ness – Landscape with Pagoda. Photo by Amanda Slater, 2014.
The strength of architectural impact derives from its unavoidable
presence as the perpetual unconscious pre-understanding of our
existential condition. A distinct ‘weakening’ of the architectural image
takes place through the processes of weathering and ruination. Erosion
wipes away the layers of utility, rational logic and detail articulation,
and pushes the structure into the realm of uselessness, nostalgia and
melancholy. The language of matter takes over from the visual and
formal effect, and the structure attains a heightened intimacy. The
arrogance of perfection is replaced by a humanizing vulnerability.

(Pallasmaa, 2000, p.82)
References
Bird, Jon (1995) ‘Dolce Domum’, in James Lingwood (ed.), Rachel Whiteread’s
House. London: Phaidon Press.
Davey, H.E. (2003). Living the Japanese Arts & Ways: 45 Paths to Meditation &
Beauty. Berkeley: Stonebridge Press.
Diaconu, Mădălina (2003). ‘The rebellion of the “lower” senses: a phenomenological
aesthetics of touch, smell, and taste’, in Chan-Fai Cheung, Ivan Chvatik, Ion
Copoeru, Lester Embree, Julia Iribarne and Hans Rainer Sepp (eds), Essays in
Celebration of the Founding of the Organization of Phenomenological
Organizations. Published online: www.o-p-o.net.
Juniper, Andrew (2003). Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. Boston:
Tuttle Publishing.
Lowenthal, David and Prince, Hugh C. (1965). ‘English landscape tastes’. Geography,
55(2): 187–224.
Mostafavi, Mohsen and Leatherbarrow, David (1993). On Weathering. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Pallasmaa, Juhani (2000). ‘Hapticity and time: notes on fragile architecture’.
Architectural Review, 1239: 78–84.
Sebald, W.G. (1999). The Rings of Saturn (originally published in 1995). New York:
New Directions Paperbacks.
Trodd, Tamara (2008). ‘Lack of fit: Tacita Dean, modernism and the sculptural
film’. Art History, 31(3): 368–386.
Weiss, Allen S. (2010) ‘On the circulation of metaphors in the Zen garden’. AA Files,
60: 89–93.
19 Ephemerality and transience
Weathering and patina are an aesthetics of accumulation, the slow

transformation of places and things by the passage of time. Ephemerality
and transience present a complementary facet of melancholy aesthetics,
which is not about accretion but about the transitory. Hovering at the
liminal passage between states are poignant, fleeting moments. The
conditions of ephemerality and transience have a bittersweetness, where a
momentary presence can intensify emotions. Wabi sabi, the Japanese sense
of time’s passage mentioned in Chapter 18, enlists the beauty of
impermanence. Juniper describes how wabi sabi ‘can be found in the
arrangement of a single flower, the expression of a profound emotion in
three lines of poetry, or in the perception of a mountain landscape in a single
rock’, and ‘suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry,
and imperfection’ (Juniper, 2003, p.2).
As with many dimensions of a melancholy aesthetic, ephemerality and
transience can be paradoxical in the context of landscape architecture. For
many designers and artists the permanence of a work is an unquestioned
aspiration, and the Western art tradition is characterised by enduring works.
Perhaps this is nowhere more pronounced than in the design of memorials,
where permanence embodies the marking of lives lost. In recent decades
ephemeral and transient memorials have become familiar responses to
tragedy. While the fugitive nature of these memorials is contrary to the
conventions of Western memorial design, there are precedents in the
memorials of, for example, the Malagan carvings in Papua New Guinea,
which are made only to be burnt, or left to rot. Or the burning of paper
effigies at funerals in many Asian countries, with the fleeting presence of the
effigy given over to the vastness of time.
The melancholy nature of ephemeral art draws on a tension with
mortality. Mary O’Neill describes ephemeral memorials which use ‘decay as
part of their communication of the extreme grief associated with untimely
death’ (O’Neill, 2009, p.149). O’Neill suggests that creating and
accumulating durable objects is a denial of mortality, and underscores the
role permanence has in the Western art tradition. She asks, ‘Why would an
artist make ephemeral art when there is considerable cultural and economic
pressure to make permanent art?’ (O’Neill, 2009, p.152). The same question
could be asked of landscape architecture, where often massive investment is
required in the realisation of a design. What is the place of the ephemeral in
this context? But in the face of contemporary culture’s predilection for the
instantaneous, for the immediate, there is a paradoxical retardation of time
with the ephemeral. Although it is a fleeting moment,
The slowed time of ephemerality offers the time of grief and gives
permission to mourn in a time when we are encouraged to ‘move on’.

These [ephemeral] works do not ask us to forget or to ‘get over’ pain
but to accept it and find a way of living with it.
(O’Neill, 2009, p.157)
Resonating with the ethic of wabi sabi, O’Neill concludes: ‘Our lives, and
the lives of those we love, are chancy and short. This is the lesson of these
works of art – the knowledge of what it is to be lost’ (O’Neill, 2009, p.158).
Spontaneous shrines and temporary memorials enlist the melancholy of
transience. Never intended to be permanent, these momentary memorials
tend to be very quickly created in response to trauma, at the sites of disasters,
road crashes, killings. Slowly giving way to time’s influence, the memorials
wilt, fade and eventually disappear. There are parallels to life itself, in their
appearance, endurance and ultimately disappearance. Writing on roadside
memorials, Robert M. Bednar shares how one experience in particular filled
him with melancholy (Bednar, 2015). He realised that one memorial he had
studied for his research was transforming. The memorial to four young
children was ‘growing up’, with the mementos left at the site being updated
from time to time to reflect time’s passing, moving from baby dolls to
grown-up girl dolls, for example. The transformation of this roadside shrine
is like a constantly deferred ephemerality, where rather than fading and
disappearing, each of the phases of items becomes newly transient. Drawing
attention to the palpability of time’s passage echoes the ancient melancholy
idea of lacrimae rerum, the tears of things. When Aenid was reflecting on the
murals of battles in Virgil’s Aenid, he was struck by how much had passed,
and said ‘sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangent,’ – there are tears
for misfortune and mortal sorrows touch the heart (Virgil, 1986, p.273).
There are echoes, too, of another melancholy concept, ubi sunt, or the
‘where are?’ lament. Ubi sunt is usually expressed as a listing of the things
that have passed, and in this memorial to four young children there is a
sense of the lamenting of where they are, and through constantly renewing
the toys and childhood items this question is asked over and over as they
‘grow up’.
Ephemeral memorials, like roadside shrines, are counter to Western
convention not only in their transience, but also in the public display of
grief. Erica Doss’ research on ephemeral memorials challenged the traditional
Western distinction between grief as a private behaviour, and mourning as
Ephemerality and transience 151
the public face of death. She suggests that the rise in ephemeral memorials
sees a shift in this way of thinking, and further that these memorials foster
an ongoing link between the living and the dead. Doss points to how Freud’s
own experiences of grief challenged his ideas on melancholia, and echo
broader ideas on the continuing bonds with those who have passed on.
As in O’Neill’s work, Doss highlights how the ephemeral memorial
emphasises the importance of this continuity and that mourning is part of a
changed but ongoing relationship with the deceased, and ‘mourning is …
often endless, although it need not be endlessly obsessive or pathological’

(Doss, 2008, p.21).
References
Bednar, Robert M. (2015). ‘Placing affect: remembering strangers at roadside crash
shrines’, in Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell and Robert Hudson (eds),
Affective Landscapes in Literature, Art and Everyday Life. Farnham, Surrey:
Ashgate, pp. 50–66.
Doss, Erica Lee (2008). The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials:
Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press.
Juniper, Andrew (2003). Wabi-Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence. Boston:
Tuttle Publishing.
O’Neill, Mary (2009). ‘Ephemeral art: the art of being lost’, in Mick Smith, Joyce
Farnham: Ashgate.
Virgil (1986). Virgil: Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid 1–6 (trans. H. Rushton Fairclough;
Aeneid written first century bc). Boston: Harvard University Press.
20 Camouflage
Weathering, submersion and fragmentation undo the tidy containers that

separate the constructed from the natural. As the boundaries break down
there is a gradual contamination, a marking of one by the other. Over time
it may be impossible to discern the blurred edges between the built and the
natural. In this way a kind of camouflage is achieved, as one realm takes on
the qualities of the other, and two entities meld together. Camouflage sets up
a spatial relationship between an object and its context that resonates with
the melancholy of the uncanny. Implied within camouflage is a doubling, a
mirroring of one by the other. Melting into its milieu an object, a person,
one’s self, sacrifices the status of being an entity. Self-effacement resonates
with the ideas of ‘weak’ architecture or ‘fragile’ landscape, where the
muscularity of the formal gesture is traded for a more empathetic engagement,
and an emotional tie is formed. While at once uncanny and strange in the
effects of mirroring, camouflage is also an assumption of intimacy.
Camouflage was related to psychasthenia – a psychological disorder
characterised by phobias and obsession – by sociologist Roger Caillois, who
drew attention to the lack of a rational connection between camouflage and
survival. Caillois pointed out that the adaptation hypothesis of camouflage
is flawed in numerous ways. For example, insects which are unpalatable
anyway are still camouflaged, as are insects which are hunted by smell,
which makes any efforts at visual disguise redundant. Some insects are so
well camouflaged that they are pruned by gardeners, or the ‘even sadder’
case of the Phyllia, who ‘browse among themselves, taking each other for
real leaves’ (Caillois, 1987, p.67) or cannot find each other when it comes
time to mate. The enigma of disguise as display is evident in the Oxyrrhyncha,
or spider crabs, who ‘haphazardly gather and collect on their shells the
seaweed and polyps of the milieu in which they live … deck[ing] themselves
in whatever is offered to them, including some of the most conspicuous
elements’ (Caillois, 1987, p.70).
Surrealism’s explorations of camouflage exhibit the exchange and
absorption that takes place between things and their milieu. Rosalind Krauss
drew on Caillois’ writings in her analysis of Man Ray’s photographs, noting
how in the image Return to Reason (1923) the ‘nude torso of a woman is
Camouflage 153
shown as if submitting to possession by space’ (Krauss, 1985, p.74). Man
Ray’s explorations of the dissolution of the body into space are echoed in
René Magritte’s paintings, such as Discovery (1927), where the shadows
cast on the nude form are transfigured into patches of wood-grain veneer.
These images from Man Ray and Magritte evoke ideas of camouflage
through the surface patterning of the female form, the sense of what happens
when an ‘object fuses with another object’ (in Meuris, 2004, p.51).
The fusing of object with object, or self with environment, is apparent in
the surrealistically inflected works of Huysmans, Flaubert and Sartre.

Huysmans’ character des Esseintes, Flaubert’s ‘I’, and Sartre’s Roquentin, all
want to disappear, to become camouflaged, and exhibit the melancholy ploy
of not wanting to be seen (Blackman, 2003). Roquentin’s nausea ‘grabs you
from behind and then you drift in a tepid sea of time’, and wandering the
streets of Paris brings on the conundrums of existence, of presence and the
desire for absence. Flaubert’s narrator struggled with the ‘restless surge of
wicked, cowardly, idiotic and ugly men’, and being part of this crowd
brought him anguish, the feeling of being ‘like a piece of seaweed swept
along by the ocean, lost in the midst of the numberless waves that rolled and
roared on every side of me’ (Flaubert, 2005, pp.24–25). This tension of
being part of the masses, yet not wanting to be there, or being like seaweed,
echoes Caillois’ psychasthenia, with particular resonance with his observation
of the ‘the fish Phyllopteryx, from the Sargasso Sea, [which] is simply “torn
seaweed in the shape of floating strands”’ (Caillois, 1987, p.20).
The absorption of the self into one’s environs haunts camouflage’s
melancholy conception of space. When Rachel Whiteread made her sculpture
Ghost she described a sensation of transmutation, a shift in state, realising
that through casting the interior of a room as a solid, she had in fact become
the surrounding form – ‘I’m the wall. That’s what I have done. I’ve become
the wall’ (in Schneider, 2005, p.9). Whiteread’s sense of derealisation, or
state-shifting, is seen too in the work of Francesca Woodman, whose
photographic explorations of the self in space show her at times ‘becoming
the wall’. In her photographs, which are often self-portraits, Woodman
often appears to be merging into the house itself, as though camouflaging
herself. Neil Leach’s book Camouflage is illustrated solely with Woodman’s
photographs, and he describes how many of these
depict her seemingly absorbed by her environment. These capture

precisely the main theme of the book – the desire in human beings to
identify with and become part of their surroundings. But they also
convey very delicately the way in which this desire might be met through
a certain sensitivity and openness to the environment.
(Leach, 2006, p.x)
At New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Ken Smith’s roof garden
is an ironic commentary on landscape architecture’s predilection for hiding
things. The profession’s involvement in mitigating infrastructure, often
through vegetative screens and veils, suggests that landscape architecture is
founded on the practice of camouflage. Smith’s camouflage garden ‘outs’
this practice of disguise, and puts it on display. Peter Reed suggests that the
garden is a ‘subversion of camouflage’s function to hide or conceal’ (Reed,
2005, pp.21–22). Adding to the play of mimicry is the construction of the
garden in materials which are fake versions of nature – mock rocks and faux
foliage. Using a caricature of camouflage derived from iconic camouflage
patterning used on fabrics, the garden is, in fact, incredibly obvious when
seen against the background of the surrounding rooftops. It as though in
having the camouflage garden on its roof, MoMA has become like Caillois’
Oxyrrhyncha, or spider crabs, who made themselves more conspicuous in
their gathering of materials from their environment and displaying them on
their shells.
The paradoxical use of camouflage as display is inherent in the theories
used by the ‘camoufleurs’ – the artists, designers and architects who
developed the various ‘disruptive patterns’ for military use, including Franz
Marc, Arshile Gorky, László Moholy-Nagy and Ellsworth Kelly. Norman
Wilkinson developed the unlikely ‘dazzle’ camouflage to be used at sea,
creating a series of patterns based on Cubist principles. Rather than
attempting to disguise the ship by means of blending in, the dazzle approach
breaks up the surface through the use of line and colour, accepting that
within the constantly changing conditions of sea and sky, to attempt a
perfect colour match was not possible. Instead, patches of bright or
contrasting colours and lines were used to counter the actual shape and size
of the craft, for example taking a dark colour around the bow, from port to
starboard, to create a sense of ambiguity about the length of the ship. While
the ships were made to appear quite visible in an absolute sense, they were
deceptive in terms of their form, scale, speed and direction, and thus the
dazzle scheme underscores the paradoxical relationships between self and
other that underlie any philosophy of camouflage.
Bernard Lassus echoes these observations on the apparent incongruity of
camouflage. Recalling a 1969 stroll along a quay in Stockholm, he says how
he was
suddenly pulled up short. Emerging from the vegetable mass of building

sections I thought I saw in the distance, on the port’s horizon, there
materialized before me the shape of a long and powerful warship. It had
remained hidden thanks to its camouflage. Until then I had thought that
camouflage was reserved for the land army. But here the pattern of a
paratrooper’s battledress, mainly green but also strewn with maroon
and streaked with some black, represented a design that had grown to
envelop the whole of the boat.
(Lassus, 1998, p.24)
Camouflage 155
The absurdity of a sea-going ship painted in the colours of the land is
perplexing, and not unlike the vision of a camouflage garden marooned on
the roof of MoMA.
But the garden is even more uncanny than making itself obvious through
the practice of camouflage, since it is not even visible from the gallery itself.
Because it is on the roof, and out of bounds, it is only visible from the
surrounding high-rise buildings. Within MoMA itself, the camouflage garden
is a haunting, an absent presence, a telltale heart in the art gallery. There are
curious traces of the garden in the gallery as MoMA holds some of Andy
Warhol’s Camouflage series, which also present an ironic interpretation of
camouflage patterning. The garden therefore becomes doubly melancholy,
and much more than a simple statement about artifice in landscape architecture.
Curiously, Julia Kristeva, a key theorist of melancholia, uncannily anticipated
the camouflage garden a decade earlier, writing:
I am picturing a sprawling metropolis with glass and steel buildings that

reach to the sky, reflect it, reflect each other, and reflect you – a city
filled with people steeped in their own image who rush about with
overdone make-up on and who are cloaked in gold, pearls, and fine
leather, while in the next street over, heaps of filth abound and drugs
accompany the sleep or the fury of the social outcasts.
This city could be New York; it could be any future metropolis, even
your own.
What might one do in such a city? Nothing but buy and sell goods
and images, which amounts to the same thing, since they both are dull
shallow symbols. Those who can or wish to preserve a lifestyle that
downplays opulence as well as misery will need to create a space for an
‘inner zone’ – a secret garden, an intimate quarter, or more simply and
ambitiously, a psychic life.
(Kristeva, 1995, p.27)
References
Blackman, Melissa Rowell (2003). ‘Elitist differentiation: melancholia as identity in
Flaubert’s November and Huysmans’ A Rebours’. Journal of European Studies,
33(3–4): 255–261.
Caillois, Roger (1987), ‘Mimicry and legendary psychasthenia’ (trans. John Shepley;
original essay published 1935). In Annette Michelson, Rosalind Krauss, Douglas
Crimp and Joan Copjec, October: The First Decade. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Flaubert, Gustave (2005). November (trans. Andrew Brown; first published as
Novembre in Oeuvre de jeunesse, 1910). London: Hesperus Press Limited.
Krauss, Rosalind (1985). ‘Corpus delicti’, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone,
L’Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism. London: The Arts Council of Great
Britain.
Kristeva, Julia (1995). New Maladies of the Soul (trans. Ross Mitchell Guberman).
New York: Columbia University Press.
Lassus, Bernard (1998). The Landscape Approach. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Leach, Neil (2006). Camouflage. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Meuris, Jacques (2004) René Magritte: 1898–1967. Köln: Taschen.
Reed, Peter (2005). ‘Beyond before and after: designing contemporary landscape’, in
Peter Reed, Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape. New
York: Museum of Modern Art.
Schneider, Eckhard (2005). ‘Constructing the ephemeral’, in Eckhard Schneider
(ed.), Rachel Whiteread. Köln: Kunsthaus Bregenz.
21 Monochrome
A subdued scene, a narrow range of colours, twilight, dawn, dark passages,

shady bowers. The minimal palettes of monochrome landscapes are
evocative of melancholy, with their gentle tonality and restful monotony.
There are echoes of the condition of camouflage, allowing for elements to
fuse into the background. It seems no coincidence that the term grisaille,
which refers to a painting in grey monochrome, is also a French word for
melancholy, tethering together the sense of a muted, uniform scene and a
pervasive sadness.
Aestheticians Emily Brady and Arto Haapala recognise the melancholy
qualities of a landscape’s muted colours, directing the reader to
Imagine that you are walking across a desolate moor. The land that
stretches out into the distance is empty and spacious, coloured by
subdued shades of brown and green against the grey backdrop of the
sky. The air is still and mild with a refreshing mist. A reflective mood
descends as you settle into the rhythm of a quiet pace. A feeling of
longing forever to be in the pleasurable solitude of the moor combines
with pangs of loneliness. Specific memories and thoughts may come into
play; perhaps memories of living near that place long ago. There is some
pleasure felt in recollecting the good times, but along with it, almost in
equal measure, comes sadness from missing the place itself. The desire
to prolong the emotion is strong, and you indulge in the rich feelings by
cultivating the mood and lingering in it.
(Brady and Haapala, 2003)
This call to become immersed in subdued shades, dissolved into a reduced

palette, resonates with melancholy, a quality shared with Picturesque
landscapes. While a joyous landscape is a brightly and variously coloured
scene, a melancholy landscape is often one of quiet colours, a monochromatic
and restrained composition. For the aesthetic convention of the picturesque,
the use of muted colours drew upon the varnished and darkened images of
artists like Claude Lorrain, whose work was appropriated as a template to
be realised in the landscape. The desire to perceive the landscape as a
composition of muted tones is intriguingly illustrated by the use of a Claude
Glass, a dark-coloured, convex-shaped glass that could be held in the hand.
As Porteous explains, ‘this tinned convex mirror performed two functions.
First, it put a frame around the landscape, and second, it tinted the view to
resemble the golden-brown monochrome of a Claude painting’ (Porteous,
1996, p.66). The Claude Glass is therefore a device which vividly expresses
an aesthetic desire to reduce bright colours in the landscape and subdue the
scene, and has strong parallels with the evolution of photography. The
relevance to landscapes of melancholy is amplified when one of the

alternative terms1 for the device is used – a ‘dark glass’ – reverberating with
themes of shadow and introspection.
The translation of the aesthetics of the picturesque into the landscape
meant finding means of transferring the effects of the varnished Claudes into
reality. In his 1801 Observations on Modern Gardening, Thomas Whatley’s
passage on the architecture of ruins draws on the intersection of the
picturesque and melancholy, and how a monochromatic colour scheme is
critical for the desired effect. He advises that the architecture of ruins should
be Grecian, and that while entire there is nothing more cheerful, but ‘so
scarce any thing strikes with a more pleasing melancholy, than such a
building in ruins: its once gay condition making its present state much more
mournful’ (Whately, 1801, p.149). Whatley focuses his advice on how to
achieve this mournfulness on the use of colour, and how it needs to be very
different from their original ‘dazzling white’, and needs to be of a darker
colour or concealed by ivy or moss growing over them. He further suggested
that the planting around it should be very close together to produce a
‘melancholy whistling of the wind’, while the river needs a solemn silence
and should be made to run smoothly. Whatley also describes the creation of
a melancholy scene through the ‘exclusion of all gaiety’ and at least ‘through
a tinge of gloom upon the scene’ (Whatley, 1801, p.62). This is achieved
through the use of objects ‘whose colour is obscure’ and
those which are too bright may be thrown into shadow; the wood may be
thickened, and the dark greens abound in it; if it is necessarily thin, yews
and shabby firs should be scattered about it; and sometimes, to shew a
withering or a dead tree, it may for a space be cleared entirely away.
(Whatley, 1801, p.62)
Whatley’s observations on reducing the colour palette to create solemnity

are extended by filmmaker and gardener Derek Jarman. In his meditation on
colour, as he looked towards the Dungeness power station in the twilight,
he reflected on the advice of Wittgenstein:
Look at your room in the late evening when you can hardly distinguish
the colours any longer – turn on the light and paint what you saw in the
twilight. There are pictures of landscapes or rooms in semi-darkness,
Monochrome 159
but how do you compare the colours in such pictures with those you
saw in the semi-darkness? A colour shines in its surroundings. Just as
eyes only smile in a face.
(Jarman, 2000, p. 1)
Jarman connected this comment to Alberti’s observation that ‘shade makes

a colour dimmer…. Colour is swallowed by the dark’ (Jarman, 2000, p.2).
Transmuting the landscape into a monochrome palette is a process which,
as the Picturesque theorists emphasised, happens naturally over time.

Weathering and patina, as in Chapter 18, show the index of time, and from
a Picturesque perspective, patina was seen as having a ‘harmonising’
influence (Lowenthal, 1985, p.160). As a parallel in photography, Susan
Sontag describes how black-and-white photographs age in a different way
to colour photographs. This quality of the ageing of black-and-white
photographs resonates with the landscape, the ways in which things melt
into time and weather. As Sontag observes, ‘the cold intimacy of color seems
to seal off the photograph from the patina’ (Sontag, 2014, p.140). Paul
Grainge suggests that monochrome photographs – in particular black-and-
white – have a particular power because of their ‘capacity to arrest a sense
of meaning, historical and otherwise: to stimulate slowness in a climate of
speed, to evoke time in a culture of space, to suggest authenticity in a world
of simulation and pastiche’ (Grainge, 1999, p.384).
The monochrome of landscape and photographs is acutely conveyed in
Orhan Pamuk’s evocation of the city of Istanbul. Through his novels,
and especially in his mammoth work on the city itself, the melancholy or
hüzün is evoked in ways which are like an always-present nostalgia. In
Istanbul he writes
to see the city in black and white is to see it through the tarnish of
history: the patina of what is old and faded and no longer matters to the
rest of the world. Even the greatest Ottoman architecture has a humble
simplicity that suggests an end-of-empire melancholy, a pained
submission to the diminishing European gaze and to an ancient poverty
that must be endured like incurable disease; it is resignation that
nourishes Istanbul’s inward-looking soul.
(Pamuk, 2005, p.51)
Landscape compositions with a reduced and subdued colour palette can

impart a sense of melancholy. For Jenny Holzer’s Black Garden in Nordhorn,
on the German–Dutch border, the planting scheme of black plants resonates
with its memorial function. Commemorating war losses of 1870–1871 and
1914–1918, the garden layers symbolise a monastic garden and a target in
its formal concentric arrangement. There are plaques relaying war’s horror
in vivid terms, and stone benches, but it is the planting which is most infused
with sombreness. Udo Weilacher describes how
the garden in the shade of the old park trees gets its name and its
strangely melancholy atmosphere from the fact that the whole of the
slightly sunken site is filled with plants with dark to black foliage and
dark blossoms.
(Weilacher, 2005, p.56)
Black- and copper-leaved plants, dark pink blossoms and a mass planting of
black tulips all contribute to this monochromatic colour scheme. Whereas
landscape is so often shades of green, this uniformly dark garden is

emphatically solemn.
Note
1 A Claude Glass is also known as a Claude Mirror, Landscape Glass or Mirror, or
Convex Mirror (see, for example, Bertelsen (2004).
References
Bertelsen, Lars Kiel (2004). ‘The Claude Glass: a modern metaphor between word
and image’. Word and Image, 20(3): 182–190.
Brady, Emily and Haapala, Arto (2003). ‘Melancholy as an aesthetic emotion’.
Contemporary Aesthetics. http://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/
journal.php?search=true, 18 December 2015.
Grainge, Paul (1999). ‘TIME’s past in the present: nostalgia and the black and white
image’. Journal of American Studies, 33(3): 383–392.
Jarman, Derek (2000). Chroma: A Book of Colour: June ’93 (originally published
1994). London: Vintage.
Lowenthal, David (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Pamuk, Orhan (2005). Istanbul: Memories of a City. London: Faber and Faber.
Porteous, Douglas J. (1996). Environmental Aesthetics: Ideas, Politics, and Planning.
Routledge: London.
Weilacher, Udo (2005). In Gardens: Profiles of Contemporary European Landscape
Architecture. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Whately, Thomas (1801). Observations on Modern Gardening, and Laying Out
Pleasure-Grounds ... &c. To Which is Added, an Essay on the Different Natural
Situations of Gardens. London: West and Hughes.
22 Intimate immensity
The final place of melancholy simultaneously evokes the vulnerability of

that which is delicate and near with the vast incomprehensibility of the
beyond. Just as camouflage represents that paradoxical condition of being
visible yet invisible, the idea of an intimate immensity circles around the
irresolvable poles of nearness and distance. ‘Intimate immensity’ and
‘immediate immensity’ are Gatston Bachelard’s terms, and he positions the
immense within the intimacy and immediacy of the imagination. He states
that ‘Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of
being that life curbs and caution arrests, but which starts again when we are
alone’ (Bachelard, 1969, p.184). Bachelard relates this condition to the
temporal domain too, quoting a passage from Milosz which concludes: ‘Is
this instant really eternity? Is eternity really this instant?’ (in Bachelard,
1969, p.190). There are echoes of Kant’s placing of melancholy within the
Sublime, of the position of the individual within the vastness of the landscape,
and the significance of solitude.
Intimate immensity has the quality of melancholy which the Spanish call
duende, poetically observed by Federico García Lorca:
Each art has, by nature, its distinctive Duende of style and form, but all
roots join at the point where the black sounds of [Flamenco singer]
Manuel Torres issue forth—the ultimate stuff and the common basis,
uncontrollable and tremulous, of wood and sound and canvas and
word. Black sounds: behind which there abide, in tenderest intimacy,
the volcanoes, the ants, the zephyrs, and the enormous night straining
its waist against the Milky Way.
(In Gibbons, 1989, p.39)
The delicate and the vast are bound up in duende, and resonate with Milosz’s
‘concordance of world immensity with intimate depth of being’, where he
writes of standing in ‘contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space’
(in Bachelard, 1969, p.189). Like Lorca, Milosz reflects upon the night as
the bearer of intimate immensity: ‘When you felt so alone and abandoned in
the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in
the night, or the night’s own solitude in a universe without end!’ (in
Bachelard, 1969, p.189). These evocations of the small vessel of the self
adrift in the vast oceans of the cosmos call to mind Pascal’s lament: ‘The
eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread’ (in Chrétien, 2003,
p.52). For Pascal, the dread expresses the existential crisis that such an
imagining can provoke, and the solitary contemplation of the vast and the
eternal resonates with the contemplative qualities of melancholy.
Pascal’s melancholic reflection on the silence of the intangible otherness
of nature resonates, Jean-Louis Chrétien argues, with Caspar David

Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea, a painting in which the diminutive figure
of a capuchin monk is shown on the beach, against a dark ribbon of the sea
and the swirling clouds and sky above. The scene embodies the melancholy
of the liminal, and also of camouflage, as the monk appears to be absorbed
into the sea itself. Chrétien links Pascal’s phrase and Friedrich’s painting
through describing how ‘[in] the deictic “these” a human body makes itself
present, in front of these spaces, showing them, perceiving them, listening to
and bearing their silence…. It is the “these” that gives the scale of the silence’
(Chrétien, 2003, p.52). A scale which is the intimate against the immense,
the eternity in the instant. In Geoff Dyer’s reading of the landscapes of the
Great War he found a vast poignancy in infinity, in places that lay unbounded,
endless. Looking at a photograph by William Rider-Rider of a lone soldier
on the battlefields of Passchendale, Dyer finds the same melancholy infinity
as in Friedrich’s The Monk by the Sea, that image of what Robert Rosenblum
called the ‘hypnotic simplicity of a completely unbroken horizon line, and
above it a no less primal and potentially infinite extension of gloomy, hazy
sky’ (in Dyer, 1994, p.118). In Rider-Rider’s photograph, the
scene is divided evenly between land and sky. A line of blasted trees
separates the shattered foreground from the land-ocean, the sea of mud,
which, as in The Monk by the Sea, reaches to the horizon. Instead of
receding into the distance, these trees disappear beyond the edges of the
frame. There is no perspective. The vanishing point is no longer a more
or less exact point, but all around. A new kind of infinity: more of the
same in every direction, an infinity of waste.
(Dyer, 1994, p.119)
In Friedrich’s painting and Rider-Rider’s photograph, infinity is weighted by

an individual figure – a capuchin monk in the former and a soldier smoking
in the latter. These counterweights pull infinity back from nihilism, drawing
it towards the intimate immensity that is founded upon the datum of the
human form. The monk and the soldier create empathetic wells which
absorb the beholder, ciphers for our selves, for humanity. The presence of
the self in the image brings ripples of uncanny recognition, of a rent in the
infinite. The contemplative quality of melancholy suffuses both images, for
the figures are not merely there, but are evidently buried in reflection, heads
Intimate immensity 163
bowed, paused within the vastness, silent. The seats at Mullion Cove that
captivated John Wylie with their ghostly presence echo the intimate
immensity that is set up between the self and the infinite. Each seat standing
for an absence, offering somewhere to place oneself to view the landscape,
to become acquainted with the intimacy of the loss of a loved one set against
the vast prospect of the ocean beyond. E.M. Cioran’s meditation on
melancholy encapsulates this sensation, reflecting upon the sense of loneliness
and its interior and exterior feelings of infinity, describing how the
interior infinitude and vagueness of melancholy, not to be confused

with the fecund infinity of love, demands a space whose borders are
ungraspable.... Melancholy detachment removes man from his natural
surroundings. His outlook on infinity shows him to be lonely and
forsaken. The sharper our consciousness of the world’s infinity, the
more acute our awareness of our own finitude.
(Cioran, 1992, p.30)
Immensity and intimacy correspond in the arc from the vastness of space or
the depth of the ocean to the detail of the individual, and across the scales
from cities to molecules. The intimate and the immense are yoked together
in the landscape visions of Patrick Keiller’s London (Keiller, 1994) and
Robert Smithson’s The Monuments of Passaic (Smithson, 1967). The first of
these is a film, set in early 1990s London, a bleak and poignant study of
Thatcherite Britain. In the second, environmental artist Robert Smithson
takes a field trip to his home town of Passaic, New Jersey, and presents it as
an illustrated article in an art magazine in the late 1960s. The two pieces
offer parallel visions of landscapes wrought by the processes of modernity,
bearing the scars of progress, with the two artists re-casting their chosen
landscapes into altered states, part fact and part fiction. Both artists re-invent
elements of the ordinary landscapes they encounter as ‘monuments’. In
Smithson’s ‘suburban Odyssey’, the monuments are brought into focus with
his Instamatic camera. The stark monochromes document the banal
landscape, with their monumental decree coming from the text and captions:
the ‘Monument of Dislocated Directions’ (a bridge); the ‘Sand-box
Monument (also called The Desert)’ (a children’s sand-box); ‘The Fountain
Monument’ (six large pipes disgorging water into the Passaic River); and
‘The Great Pipes Monument’ (a long section of steel pile).1 In London, the
static shots linger over the various points in the landscape and the narrator
enumerates the invented monuments within his voice-over, where Leicester
Square is declared a monument to Laurence Sterne; Canary Wharf ‘adopted’
as a monument to Rimbaud; Cannon Street designated a ‘sacred site’ – with
the Number 15 a ‘sacred bus route’; and Telecom Tower is imagined as a
monument to the tempestuous relationship of Rimbaud and Verlaine
(Keiller, no date, line 5.45). Through bestowing upon these ordinary
elements the gravitas of age, Smithson and Keiller re-tune the landscapes of
modernity, inflecting the otherwise impersonal and unfathomable scenes
with the familiar infrastructure of memorialisation.
Bound up in the poignancy of these two visions of the quotidian landscapes
of modernity is the reverberations that are set up between the minute and
the vast, between the individual and the great sweep of time and space into
which we are placed. Keiller’s central character, Robinson, ‘sometimes
sees[s] the whole city as a monument to Rimbaud’ (Keiller, no date, line
2.26) and Smithson identifies the voids of the city of Passaic as monumental
in themselves: ‘Passaic does seem full of “holes” compared to New York

City, which seems tightly packed and solid ... those holes in a sense are the
monumental values that define, without trying, the memory-traces of an
abandoned set of futures’ (Smithson, 1967, p.50). At the other extreme,
Smithson also sees the monumental in the molecular, writing of the Desert
Monument that ‘This monument of minute particles blazed under a bleakly
glowing sun, and suggested the sullen dissolution of entire continents, the
drying up of oceans – no longer were there green forests and high mountains
– all that existed were millions of grains of sand, a vast deposit of bones and
stones pulverized into dust’ (Smithson, 1967, p.51). Echoing this microscopic
monumentality, Keiller’s Robinson ‘believed that if he looked hard enough
he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the molecular basis of
his own sorrowful events, and in this way he hoped to see into the future’
(Keiller, no date, line 2.31, emphasis in original).
The individual within the swirling mass of the modern city is a motif
imbued with melancholy. The intimate world of the self is nested within the
vastness of the urban sphere, a quality that emerges in Georges Perec’s An
Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. Installing himself at a café at the
Place Saint-Sulpice for three days in 1974, Perec observed the minutiae of
the city, recording every detail, the events, the non-events, the ‘infraordinary’
(Perec, 2010). Perec’s hyper-empirical observations are productive of an
aesthetic of melancholy, of being almost completely fused with the
surrounding setting, of the world staring back. Suffused with ennui, Perec’s
recounting of the events is hypnotic, mesmerising in its observation of the
details swirling within the city beyond: ‘A man goes by wearing a surgical
collar / A woman goes by; she is eating a slice of tart / A couple approaches
their Autobianchi Abarth parked along the sidewalk. The woman bites into
a tartlet. / There are lots of children. A man who has just parked his car (in
the Autobianchi’s spot) looks at it as if he doesn’t recognize it’ (Perec, 2010,
p.34). There are echoes of the self drifting within the city, both visible and
invisible, as part of the milieu, as with the camouflaged melancholy of Sartre,
Huysmans, and Flaubert. At times Perec focuses particularly on individuals,
describing their demeanour, what they are eating, carrying, wearing. And at
other times he recounts the movements of buses through the Place Saint-
Sulpice, almost as though a liturgy, ‘A 70 goes by full / A 63 goes by, much
less so / The motorcycles and the mopeds turn on their headlights / Car
signals become visible, as do the taxi lights, brighter when they’re free / An
86 goes by, almost full / A 63 goes by, almost empty / A 96 goes by, nearly
full / An 87 goes by, nearly full’ (Perec, 2010, p.23).
Although verging on the absurd, Perec’s close observation of the Place
Saint-Sulpice limns the aesthetic of melancholy, in both the sense of the
ennui of the modern city and also in the contemplative capacity that such a
setting offers. While meditative potential might be more often aligned with
natural places – mountains, streams – Perec finds in the detail of the city a
seemingly infinite and immense ocean of pensive detail. Even the most subtle
shifts cause him to pause and prompt reflection: ‘I’m drinking a Vittel water,
whereas yesterday I was drinking a coffee (how does that transform the
square?)’ (Perec, 2010, p.30). As Perec’s translator, Marc Lowenthal,
observes, even despite the efforts to ‘exhaust’ place, to describe every detail,
there is so much that escapes the written account, falling outside the process
of documentation. In as much as the focus on detail provides a locus for
pensive contemplation, so too does that which falls outside this study of
minutiae. Lowenthal remarks that ‘[i]t is almost in what it doesn’t say that
this short text, this noble exercise in futility, conveys such a sense of
melancholy’ (in Perec, 2010, p.50).
The ordinariness of intimate life within immensity can be seen too in
memorial design. Set in opposition to architecture which is about excess and
display, Liu Jiakun’s memorial to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake is a place of
humility. Alex Pasternack describes the memorial, with how its
pitched roof and redbrick terrace mimic the makeshift tents and paving
material ubiquitous throughout Sichuan’s recovery. The gray plaster
that coats the brick walls gives the building a universality and solidity,
transforming the survivors’ tent into an earthquake-ready structure. Its
austerity sets off the vital color and beauty within. Warm and rosy, with
Huishan’s ephemera pinned to the walls, the interior is exquisite.
(Pasternack, 2010)
The power of the memorial comes not through an accounting of victims –

which could be a temptation with a death toll of over 58,000 – but to
remembering just one victim, Hu Huishan, a schoolgirl. The memorial
doesn’t narrate the muscularity of heroism, or present a didactic lesson
about disaster preparedness, but is a reflection on the value of every person.
Liu Jiakun explained: ‘Treasuring the value of ordinary lives will be the
foundation of our nation’s revival’ (in Pasternack, 2010). The intimacy of
this one life, a young girl, reverberates against immensity – against the
massive death toll from an earthquake in a vast country. The pink interior
of the memorial, against the grey exterior, embodies this fragility, and is
imbued with a beautiful sadness.
The everyday world of the schoolgirl Hu Huishan is part of the affective
landscape. There are echoes with what Bednar calls the ‘ordinary trauma’ of
road accidents, and their memorialising with roadside shrines (Bednar,
2015). These shrines and roadside crosses evoke the everyday rather than
the spectacular, and their placement within the vastness of the landscape is
profoundly melancholy. Bednar describes how these are places where
Kathleen Stewart’s ‘little world comes into view’ (Bednar, 2015, p.60). The
‘little worlds’ are those places we all occupy, our own familiar constellations
of things, amid the fluxes and flows of life. ‘Little worlds proliferate around
everything and anything at all: mall culture, car culture, subway culture, TV
culture, shopping culture’, Stewart explains, going on to give a litany of the
ordinary dimensions of our lives (Stewart, 2007, n.p.). The little world of a
schoolgirl, or the life of someone suffering the ‘ordinary trauma’ of a road
accident, can become an articulation of intimate immensity, the smallness of
the individual within the vastness of time and place.
Here, in this final condition of melancholy – intimate immensity – is one
of the most profound of paradoxes. In the oscillations between the vast and
the detailed, the far and the near, is the melancholic aesthetic, suffused with
poignancy and contemplation. In Bachelard’s daydreams, Friedrich’s monk
adrift in oceanic space, Dyer’s reflections on the depiction of war, Keiller
and Smithson’s monuments and molecules, and Perec’s Place Saint-Sulpice,
the individual is pitted against the vast milieu of which they are a part. Yet
rather than a nihilistic abandonment, a desolation, intimate immensity
brings forth the depth of being rooted in the very conundrum that it presents.
To end with a paradox is fitting, since the impossibility of resolution is the
knot at melancholy’s core. Melancholy’s complex twists and turns are filled
with contradictions and polarities. This irresolvability presents an enduring
tension of impossible longings, of things eternally delayed. Freud distinguished
mourning from melancholia through this very condition, the resistance of
resolution. ‘The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound’,
Freud observed, in distinction from normal mourning, which reaches closure
(in Ramazani, 1994, p.79). While Freud’s diagnosis defined a pathological
condition, there is a poetry in this abstention from solace, as evoked by
Lorca: ‘With idea, with sound, or with gesture, the Duende chooses the brim
of the well for his open struggle with the creator. Angel and Muse escape in
the violin or in musical measure, but the Duende draws blood, and in the
healing of a wound that never quite closes, all that is unprecedented and
invented in a man’s work has its origins’ (Gibbons, 1989, p. 36).
Space for private contemplation has a precedent in the Dark Ages, where
the monks who were stationed in the deserts of Egypt lived as hermits. They
were required to rise at 4 a.m. for prayers, and to spend their days in solitude.
The regime of the Desert Fathers was one which both promoted melancholy
in a contemplative sense, and produced it in a depressive sense, as it resulted
in a feeling of psychic exhaustion, or even acedia – the melancholy of sloth.
The place for melancholic contemplation requires a balance, and the
provision of a space into which to retire, rather than be condemned to, was
realised in eighteenth-century gardens, reviving the idea of a hermitage.
However, as Hunt points out, these hermitages ‘bore little resemblance to
either the physical or metaphysical rigours of the early fathers’ (Hunt, 1976,
pp.1–2). While the presence of a hermitage in the landscape might evince the
ideal of a place designated for ‘philosophical contemplation’, and act as a
magnet for melancholy, their purpose was not always realised, and in fact
the landowners sometimes employed a hermit in order to achieve melancholy
by proxy.
The insertion of such vehicles for contemplation into the landscape is
echoed also in theologian and counsellor Thomas Moore’s advice to provide
places for Saturn, the planet of melancholy. Such places would echo the
bowers of Renaissance gardens dedicated to Saturn, ‘a dark, shaded, remote
place where a person could retire and enter the persona of depression
without fear of being disturbed’ (Moore, 1992, p.147). And, as Kant put it,
‘Melancholy separation from the bustle of the world due to a legitimate
weariness is noble’ (Kant, 1960, p.56), there is nothing shameful about the
need for silence and reflection, for a slower pace. Moore suggests a need to
acknowledge Saturn within buildings, where ‘A house or commercial
building could have a room or an actual garden where a person could go to
withdraw in order to meditate, think, or just be alone and sit’ (Moore, 1992,
p.147). These places would not be ‘centres’, or places for gathering, Moore
cautions. More likely they would be peripheral rather than central, and, he
avers, just as ‘Hospitals and schools often have “common rooms” … they
could just as easily have “uncommon rooms,” places for withdrawal and
solitude’ (Moore, 1992, p.147). Such a facilitation of what is often seen as
something to be avoided – solitude, introspection, aloneness, even depression
– creates an enhanced capacity for the landscape to be melancholy in a
meaningful way, and reiterates Julia Kristeva’s recognition of the need to
create space for an ‘inner zone’ in a garden or intimate quarter. As an added
dimension of existential being there is potential for an enhanced connectivity
with the affective dimensions of life – that compass of emotion which Shelley
regretted turning away from because of the ‘cold maxims of the world’ –
and this is related to the condition of an intimate immensity. As Moore
writes, ‘Hiding the dark places results in a loss of soul; speaking for them
and from them offers a way toward genuine community and intimacy’
(Moore, 1992, p.148).
Even the most functional room – the toilet – can offer a place for
melancholy contemplation, an intimate space within the vastness beyond.
Jun’ichiroˉ Tanizaki writes poetically of Japanese toilets, ‘surrounded by
tranquil walls and finely grained wood, [where] one looks out upon blue
skies and green leaves’ (Tanizaki, 1977, p.4). The introspective space of the
Japanese toilet is evoked further by Tanizaki:
I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain,
especially if it is a toilet from the Kantoˉ region, with its long, narrow
windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy
to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the
earth as they wash over the base of the stone lantern and freshen the
moss about the stepping stones.
(Tanizaki, 1977, p.4)
As noted in Chapter 1, Bachelard described the house as an ‘instrument to

confront the cosmos’ (Bachelard, 1969, p.46) and this image of the building
within the vastness of existence is echoed in Tanizaki’s toilet, ‘the perfect
place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of birds, to view the
moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of
the seasons’ (Tanizaki, 1977, p.4).
Note
1 Smithson also designated a number of other monuments besides those included in
his short Art Forum article, such as the ‘cube monument’ and ‘small fountain
monument’ (a drinking fountain). See, for example, Roberts (2004).
References
Chrétien, Jean-Louis (2003). Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. New
York: Fordham University Press.
Cioran, E.M. (1992). On the Heights of Despair (trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston;
first published in Romanian in 1934). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dyer, Geoff (1994). The Missing of the Somme. London: Phoenix Press.
Gibbons, Reginald (1989). The Poet’s Work. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hunt, John Dixon (1976). The Figure in the Landscape. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Kant, Immanuel (1960). Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
(trans. John T. Goldthwait; originally published 1764). Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Keiller, Patrick (n.d.). ‘London’, unpublished script.
Moore, Thomas (1992). The Care of the Soul. New York: HarperCollins.
Pasternack, Alex (2010). ‘Forget me not’. Metropolis Magazine, February. www.
metropolismag.com/February-2010/Forget-Me-Not, 24 December 2015.
Perec, Georges (2010) An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (trans. Mark
Lowenthal, originally written in 1974). Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press.
Ramazani, Jahan (1994). The Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy
to Heaney. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Roberts, Jennifer L. (2004). Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Smithson, Robert (1967) ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, ArtForum, December: 48–51.
Stewart, Kathleen (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press (Kindle
edition).
Tanizaki, Jun’chiroˉ (1977). In Praise of Shadows. Stony Creek: Leete’s Island Books.
Conclusion
A landscape of melancholy
In the void and the uncanny, in silence and shadows, in the auratic and the
liminal, the fragmentary and the abandoned, in the monochromatic and the
submerged, the weathered and the camouflaged, an aesthetics of melancholy
emerges. These marginal conditions carve out space on the edge, an emotional
terrain vague, where meaning drifts and contemplation intensifies. It is in
these zones where the intimate and the immense are fused, the self within
oceanic space. For landscape architecture there are challenges and
opportunities, from resisting the temptation to develop any site which appears
vacant and abandoned, to providing spaces for solitude and reflection.
Melancholy landscapes are often ordinary places, everyday landscapes,
Kathleen Stewart’s ‘little worlds’ (Stewart, 2007). Melancholy infuses places
which have been affected by trauma, and places which are the containers of
memory. For post-disaster landscapes there is a melancholy of all that has
been lost, the people, the things, the places. The images of empty chairs from
New Orleans compiled by Helen Jaksch were a vivid ubi sunt litany,
invoking the poignancy of the ordinary, a lament for all of the absences they
represent (Jaksch, 2013). While the inevitable narratives of resilience and
rebuilding are played out in post-disaster landscapes, making space for
sadness is part of attending to wellbeing. The pressure to recover, get over
it, move on, is symptomatic of the broader insistence on happiness in
Western culture. The counter to this is the recognition, as Karen Till has
written, that wounds sometimes need to remain open (Till, 2005; 2012).
Following the emotional turn in allied disciplines like geography,
landscape architecture is ripe for a deepening of emotions. Drawing on the
ancient legacy of the humours, and the emotional colourings of conventions
like the Picturesque, the landscape is a potent setting for memory and
melancholy. Emotion is both personal and collective; it is a means of finding
connections, and expanding the meaningfulness of existence. For a designer,
emotional potential in the landscape is to be carefully navigated, and not
overdetermined. As Peter Zumthor explains, ‘An emotive content is crucial
in architecture as in all arts, but I have the attitude that no one else should
be forced to live my emotions. So, I try to create sensual, emotive and
responsive images – in matter and words – which can receive and reflect
Conclusion 171
anyone’s personal feelings or emotional tendencies. I attempt to make
resonant things’ (in Stott, 2015).
So often references to emotions in design are only about ‘positive’
emotions, about being happy. Wellbeing necessitates not just happiness,
though, there is also the need to design for sadness, and to engage with a
spectrum of emotions. Melancholy also challenges a superficial and one-
dimensional emotional range through its qualities of unrequitedness and
irresolvability. An ‘easy’ emotional landscape might be one which is about
happiness and immediate understanding. Because of its easiness, such a

landscape could be superficial and forgettable. An easy landscape fails to
extend and expand our relationship with the world, to challenge us, to make
us think, and through this to be memorable and thought provoking. As
Bednar concluded in his research on roadside shrines,
I am still looking to find a way that [the melancholia] could be mobilized

– not to settle the questions I have raised here, but to continue to unsettle
them – to demand that we as individuals and as members of collectives
pay attention to the landscapes of automotive trauma long enough and
intentionally enough to begin the slow and confusing work of figuring
out what it means to live through the cars that take us where we want
to go, but also where we don’t.
(Bednar, 2015, p.65)
Franses also pointed to the social role of melancholy, explaining one of the
ways in which stranger memorials function is in creating an irresolvable
melancholia that becomes an agent of social binding (Franses, 2001, p.102).
Melancholy’s irresolvability and unrequitedness can be troubling, but this
very conundrum is critical in keeping alive the human condition. Instead of
quickly papering over the cracks of landscapes of sadness and disaster, an
enhanced appreciation of their place in the landscape deepens connections.
Caution against landscapes which aren’t happy, resolved and easy is echoed
in a fear that places of melancholy might be ugly. But the very core of the
melancholy aesthetic is a beautiful sadness. Some of the most vivid
expressions of the beauty of melancholy landscapes are seen in films and
photography, where the alchemy of the image is a process of strangemaking,
of allowing us to see something familiar with new eyes. Susan Sontag
observes that ‘Bleak factory buildings and bill-board cluttered avenues look
as beautiful, through the camera’s eye, as churches and pastoral landscapes’
(Sontag, 2014, p.78).
Sadness and pain in the landscape can be most palpable in the face of
disaster and trauma. Places which have experienced violence, death and
damage are redolent in melancholy. It is not ethical to enjoy the suffering of
others, but nor is it ethical to overlook what has taken place, to want to
quickly cover it over and replace it with a benign design. James E. Young
reminds us that places like Auschwitz and Falstad are vexing in aesthetic
172 Conclusion
terms, in the cohabitation of beauty and death. At Falstad, the former SS
camp in Norway, murders took place in the forest, because the forest could
hide the events. But now there is a tension with the forest’s beauty, even a
sense that it is somehow complicit in the deaths. In the memoirs of prisoners
at Falstad, there were references to how
incongruous their suffering was with the beauty of the place. Even
Auschwitz had its physical beauty and as hard as that is for us to accept
now, for the prisoners it was very important because this was a
theological question: how could Nature and God be so indifferent to
our suffering? I’m suffering but the sun is shining and the birds are
singing and the blossoms are blooming.
(Young, 2010)
Young goes on to say that the coincidence of suffering and beauty at Falstad
is the thing that makes it such a powerful memorial site, and casts it as a
‘pastoral lament’.
Even in the most simple of landscapes the incongruity of beauty and
sadness evoke melancholy, and heighten emotions. Hart Island’s potters
field cemetery is a place of sadness, where the homeless and destitute are
buried. The beauty of the Long Island Sound setting balances this bleakness,
with new graves taking only a season for the landscape to transmute them
into a place of melancholy beauty. The placement of memorial benches
illustrates how a humble gesture can bring together sadness and beauty, as
Maddrell observes: ‘In many ways benches and other memorials in beauty
spots echo this discursive location of a loved one in an ideal setting that they
previously accessed periodically and temporarily, but was nonetheless highly
significant’ (Maddrell, 2009, p.49).
Melancholy offers a means of finding emotional balance, as in the ancient
idea of the humours, where it was recognised that to be solely sanguine was
not healthy. And with this comes the potential for reflection and embracing a
different pace of engagement with the world, a counter to the predilection for
instant gratification. In drawing together this exploration of the conditions of
melancholy, Melancholy and the Landscape does not seek to be definitive and
exclusive – this book is not about closure. Rather, it points to possibilities,
offers a language for melancholy landscapes, and perhaps even provides some
legitimation for the emotional self. This legitimation comes not from any
presumption of authority, but through a camaraderie, a collective – the
recognition that feeling sad is a critical part of being in the landscape.
References
Conclusion 173
Farnham: Ashgate.
Stewart, Kathleen (2007). Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press (Kindle
edition).
Stott, Rory (2015). ‘Juhani Pallasmaa on Writing, Teaching and Becoming a
Phenomenologist’. ArchDaily, 7 November. www.archdaily.com/776761/juhani-
pallasmaa-on-writing-teaching-and-becoming-a-phenomenologist, 2 December.
Till, Karen (2005). The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Till, Karen (2012). Wounded cities: memory-work and a place-based ethics of care.
Political Geography, 31(1): 3–14.
Young, James E. (2010). Interview during his visit to Falstad, Norway in September
2010. www.youtube.com/watch?v=66O4fd6hob0, 25 June 2011.
Index
Aalto, A. 48 intimate immensity 163; liminality

abstract art 7, 19, 65–7, 69, 71, 75, 100; silence 86; submersion 138;
125 uncanny 76; void 65
acedia 3, 6, 166 asceticism 19, 86
acoustics 85, 145–6 Asia 149
Adorno, T. 26 Asplund, G. 97
aesthetics 5, 8, 13–16, 18, 20–1; aura astronomy 107
92–3, 96; emotion 30–3; empathy Augé, M. 112
42–51; ephemerality 149; ethics aura 16, 56, 92–8, 107, 109; leavings
34–41; fragments 109–10; intimate 119, 130; sadness 170; submersion
immensity 164–6; leavings 117; 141; weathering 143, 145
monochrome 157–8; patina 143–4; Auschwitz 89, 129–30, 171–2
role 23–9; sadness 170–1; silence 84; Australia 90, 103, 121, 125
submersion 139, 141; uncanny avant-garde 77
73–5, 79; weathering 143, 145–6
affect 3–4, 7, 21, 30–3, 57; aesthetics Bachelard, G. 6, 46, 161, 166, 168
26; intimate immensity 165, 167; Balka, M. 89
leavings 121, 125, 129; sadness 170; Ballard, J.G. 137–8
silence 84; uncanny 81; void 58; Bangladesh 112
weathering 143, 145 Barcelona 31
Agamben, G. 5, 7, 13, 16, 65 Barnes, M. 99
AIDS Quilt 49, 65 Barry, C. 125
aisthesis 27–8, 94, 96 Barthes, R. 38–9, 59, 70
Alberti, L.B. 159 Bataille, G. 135
Alcatraz 105 Baudelaire, C. 15, 31
alienation 15, 31 Beardsley, J. 126
Allsopp, B. 47–8 beauty 3, 8, 12–13, 16, 18–22;
anaesthetics 34, 36–7 aesthetics 23, 25, 28; aura 94;
Angelopolous, T. 138 empathy 42, 46; ephemerality 149;
anomie 6 ethics 34–8; fragments 114; intimate
Antarctica 96, 107 immensity 165; leavings 120, 125;
anthropology 99 liminality 99–100, 104, 107; sadness
appearance 23 55, 171–2; shadows 87, 90;
architecture 3–4, 8 submersion 134, 136–8, 141;
Arendt, H. 126 weathering 143–4
Aristotle 25 Beauvoir, S. de 121
arts/artworks 3, 12, 16, 18–19, 25–6; Beaver, R. 86
abstract 7, 19, 65–7, 69, 71, 75, 125; Bednar, R.M. 150, 165–6, 171
aura 92–5; darkness 90; empathy 42, Benjamin, W. 15–16, 74, 92–7, 100,
46, 50; ephemerality 149–50; 114, 126–8
Index 175
Berenson, B. 45 choleric 13, 18, 30
Berger, J. 43 Chrétien, J.-L. 162
Berleant, A. 25 Christians 59
Biederman, K. 59 cinema 5, 12, 32, 65, 74; aura 95–6;
black bile 13 liminality 106; monochrome 158;
blood 13 sadness 171; submersion 137, 141;
Böcklin, A. 104 weathering 145
body 13, 26–7, 30, 34, 39; aura 94–5, Cioran, E. 115, 163
97; camouflage 153; empathy 42–4, Clare, S. 30
46–7; intimate immensity 162; Clarke, H.G. 27

leavings 126; shadows 89; uncanny class 37, 100
74, 77, 79; weathering 145 Classen, C. 27
Boethius 120 Claude Glass 19, 24–5, 158
Bois, Y.-A. 28 Claude Lorrain 19, 24, 137, 157
Borges, J.L. 80 Claudel, P. 42
Bosco, H. 46 Clear, N. 137
Boullée, E.-L. 78–9, 90 Clérisseau, C.-L. 138
bourgeoisie 47 Cockatoo Island 103, 105–6
Boym, S. 118 Coleridge, S.T. 3
Brady, E. 157 colonialism 36
Brand, D. 130 commemoration 39, 55, 58–9, 85, 100,
Breton, A. 79 103, 130, 159
Britain 163 commodification 4
British Empire 36, 84 compassion fatigue 44, 70
Brown, C. 36 composition 24, 36, 157–8
Bruno, G. 8 Connor, S. 99
Buck-Morss, S. 36, 114 constellations 13, 16, 166
Burgin, V. 103, 112–13, 129–30 contemplation 4, 6–7, 19, 30, 56;
Burke, E. 28, 87, 89 empathy 49; ethics 38; fragments
Burri, A. 123, 125 109, 111, 114; intimate immensity
Burton, R. 12, 14, 55, 89 161–2, 165–7; leavings 118, 120,
Busch, A. 59 128; sadness 170; shadows 87,
Butzer Design Partnership 59 89–90; silence 84, 86; submersion
Butzer, H. 59 138; uncanny 77; void 58, 65, 69;
Byron, G. 111 weathering 143
context 4–5, 7, 13, 20–1, 56; aesthetics
Caillois, R. 79, 87, 89, 152–4 28; camouflage 152; emotion 31;
Cambodia 7, 66 empathy 42–6, 48, 50; ephemerality
camera obscura 89–90, 94, 138 149–50; ethics 37; fragments 114;
camouflage 56, 89, 152–7, 161–2, 164, leavings 117, 119, 121; liminality
170 99, 106; uncanny 75, 77; void 65–7,
camoufleurs 154 71; weathering 144
Carley, R. 78 Cooder, R. 107
Cartesianism 25 Le Corbusier 144
Casebere, J. 138 Cornell, J. 117
Casey, E. 119–20 Corner, J. 19
Cave, N. 3, 84 Critical Regionalism 8
Chambers, W. 138 Crouch, D. 4
Cheyne, G. 14 Cubists 154
chiaroscuro 20 culture 3–5, 7, 12, 15, 19–20; empathy
Chile 61 44, 47, 49; ephemerality 149–50;
China 97 ethics 34; fragments 109, 114;
Chipperfield, D. 31 liminality 99; sadness 170
Chirico, G. de 31, 99, 123 Curl, J.S. 7, 65
176 Index
Damer, J. 36 Eisenman, P. 7, 44, 69, 125
Damisch, H. 94 emotion 8, 26–34, 37–8, 42–3, 46; aura
Dark Ages 3, 166 97; camouflage 152; darkness 87;
darkness 21, 32, 74, 79, 81; aura 95; emotional turn 8; empathy 42–51;
fragments 115; intimate immensity ephemerality 149; ethics 34–41;
167; leavings 124; liminality monochrome 157; sadness 170–2;
99–101, 103–5; monochrome uncanny 77, 81; void 58, 62–3, 65,
157–60; shadows 87–91; submersion 68–71
134 empathy 8, 33, 40, 42–51, 58;
Daskalakis, G. 106 aura 93–4, 96–7; camouflage

datascaping 45 z152; darkness 89; fragments
Datatown 45 112; intimate immensity 162;
Davey, H.E. 144 liminality 103–4, 106; silence 85;
Davidson, J. 31 void 64, 66, 69–71; weathering
Davis, S. 7, 66 146
dead trees 19–20, 100, 111, 158 empiricism 48
Dean, T. 145 empty chair memorials 58–62, 64
decay 20, 35, 37–8, 68, 96, 100, 112, England 3, 19, 90, 120, 128, 138,
120, 136–9, 141, 144–5, 149 145–6
defamiliarisation 64, 74, 76, 89 Enlightenment 25
dehumanisation 43, 45, 50, 66 ennui 6, 15, 80, 164–5
déjà-vu 73, 79 entertainment industry 5–6
Democritus 27 environment 3, 8, 24, 43, 112; built 31,
depression 5, 12–13, 37–8, 89, 166–7 44–5, 50; camouflage 153–4;
Descartes, R. 111 designed 4, 37–8; intimate
Descombes, G. 77 immensity 163; natural 103;
Desert Fathers 166 submersion 138
Diaconu, M. 143 ephemerality 8, 62, 97, 99, 133,
diasporas 119, 121 149–51
Dick, P.K. 74 Ernst, M. 137
Dickens, C. 34–5, 58–9, 134–5 Escalas, J.E. 43
Diderot, D. 20–1 ethics 8, 20, 33–42, 45, 50, 62–4, 71,
Didi-Huberman, G. 130 129, 150, 171
Dilengite, A. 59 etymology 3, 24, 73
Diller Scofidio + Renfro 141 Europe 7, 12, 19, 69, 74, 125–6, 159
dimensionality 5, 7, 18, 24, 67, 171 experience 5, 7, 18, 24–5, 56; aesthetics
discourse 14, 26, 36–7, 109, 121 27–9; aura 92–7; emotion 31–2;
disinterest 25–6, 34, 37–8, 44, 50 empathy 43–5, 47–8; ephemerality
Donohoe, J. 50, 56, 66–7, 75, 84 150–1; ethics 35, 38–40; fragments
Doré, G. 113–14, 137 115; leavings 118, 120, 123, 125–6;
Doss, E. 150–1 liminality 100, 103; sadness 171;
dream theory 47 shadows 89–90; submersion 135,
Dürer, A. 3 139; uncanny 74–7, 79–81; void 59,
Dyer, G. 85, 162, 166 67
Eagleton, T. 26, 85 Falstad 171–2

East Europe 59 famine 121
Easter Island 146 Ferguson, H. 15
Edensor, T. 6, 109 Fern, W. 37, 44
Edwards, E. 96 fetishisation 36
effigies 78–9, 149 Field Operations 141
ego 15, 49, 67, 89, 100, 104 Fildes, L. 58
Egypt 166 films 5, 12, 32, 65, 74; aura 95–6;
Eichenbaum, B. 76 liminality 106; monochrome 158;
Index 177
sadness 171; submersion 137, 141; grotesque 19–20, 28
weathering 145 Ground Zero 37, 129
Finland 86 Grunwald, W. 103
First World War 84, 162 Guerra, T. 95
Flatley, J. 31–2, 75 Guerrero, M. 61
Flaubert, G. 153, 164 Gulf War 36–7
foregrounding 77 Gypsies 120
Formalists 74–7
Forsyth, B. 138 Haapala, A. 157
Forty, A. 68–9, 125 Haddad, L. 23–4

fragments 56, 95, 101, 105, 109–19, Halprin, L. 48, 97
127, 143, 152, 170 happiness 5, 7, 30–3, 49, 84, 120,
Frampton, K. 8, 24–5 170–1
France 32 hapticity 8, 96–7, 145
Franses, R. 7, 49, 65, 67, 103, 171 Harcourt, Lord 36
French Revolution 120 Harries, E.W. 111
Fresh Kills 129 Harries, K. 6, 50, 93, 110–11
Freud, S. 12–13, 15, 39, 46–9, 58, 65, Hart Island 103–6, 172
67, 73–4, 81, 117–20, 151, 166 Hart, J. 96
Friedrich, C.D. 162, 166 Harvey, D. 35
Fuksas, M. 45 Heidegger, M. 24, 56, 75
Futurists 36, 145 Helm, S. 59
Henson, B. 106
Gablik, S. 65 heritage 64–5, 75, 93, 105
Gandy, J. 138 hermitages 6, 111, 166–7
Gansky, A.E. 35, 37 Herrington, S. 19, 28
Gauguin, P. 58–9 Hildegard of Bingen 3
gaze 26, 39, 42, 64, 69, 92–3, 97, 100, Hitler, A. 113
117, 128–9, 159 Hladik, M. 143
genocide 7 Hofer, J. 117
geography 8, 30–1 Hoffman, G. 80–1
geometry 36, 48, 101, 145 Holl, S. 8, 110
German Autumn 15 Holocaust 74–5, 77, 81, 85, 127, 129
Germany 103, 113, 126, 136, 159 Holzer, J. 159
ghosts 59, 77–8, 119, 126, 135, 138, homelessness 35, 46, 104, 172
153, 163 Horkheimer, M. 26
Gibson, W. 74 Hoskins, W.G. 120
Gillis, J.R. 66 Howett, C. 24
Girardin, R. de 111 Hubbard, V. 99
Goat Island 105 Huishan, H. 165
Goethe, J.W. 48, 103 humanism 44–50
Goffi-Hamilton, F. 85 humours 13, 16, 18, 30, 43, 170, 172
Goldsworthy, A. 75, 77 Hunt, J.D. 28, 55, 100–1, 166–7
Gorky, A. 154 Hunt, M. 104
Gothicism 14 Hurricane Katrina 59
graffiti 35, 141 Huysmans, J.K. 153, 164
Grainge, P. 159
Grand Tour 19 identity 3, 31, 66, 93–4, 118, 126, 129
gravitas 32, 100, 163 ideology 35, 45, 67, 109
Greece 23, 97 Iliescu, S. 45
Green, M. 14 imperialism 37
grief 15–16, 49, 58, 64, 67, 71, 85, infrastructure 23, 141, 145–6, 154, 164
104, 149–51 intellect 15, 25–6, 44, 70, 103, 106
Grinda, E.G. 123–5 internet 6
178 Index
intimate immensity 8, 56–7, 143, 148, Kurasmaki, A. 32
161–70
introspection 6 Landry, T. 112
Ireland 121 landscape architecture 3–11, 18–22,
Israel 81 55–7, 99, 170–3; aesthetics 23–9;
Italy 24, 45, 95, 99, 123 aura 92–8; camouflage 152–6;
Ivy, R. 71 darkness 87–91; definitions 12–17,
23–4; emotion 30–3; empathy
Jaar, A. 55, 69–70 42–51; ephemerality 149–51; ethics
Jaksch, H. 59, 77, 170 34–41; etymology 3–4; fragments

James, H. 37 109–16; intimate immensity 161–9;
James, L. 25–6 leavings 117–32; monochrome
Jameson, F. 75 157–60; shadows 87–91; silence
Japan 48, 143–4, 149, 167 84–6; submersion 133–42;
Jarman, D. 158–9 transience 149–51; uncanny 73–83;
Jarzombek, M. 47 void 58–72; weathering 143–8
Jay, M. 5, 23 Lankin, J. 61
Jefferson, T. 97 Lassus, B. 154
Jews 59, 61, 69, 74–5, 77, 81, 89, 121, Latak, K. 61
125–7 Latvia 118
Jiakun, L. 165 Le Rouge, G.-L. 138
Judd, D. 75 Leach, N. 36, 153
Jugendstil 95, 145–6 Leatherbarrow, D. 144
Juniper, A. 144, 149 leavings 56, 115, 117–32, 170
Lee, V. 45
Kadishman, M. 81 Lefaivre, L. 8
Kafka, F. 115 Lenin, V.I. 125
Kahn, L. 112 Levin, D.M. 23
Kant, I. 18–21, 25–6, 34, 38, 42, 44, Lewicki, P. 61
87, 161, 167 Libeskind, D. 74, 81, 89
Kaplan, E.A. 43 liminality 56, 64, 69–70, 78, 95, 97,
Karavan, D. 126–7 99–109, 149, 162, 170
Keats, J. 3 Lin, M. 49, 66, 75, 97
Keenan, T. 7, 65 Lincoln, A. 97
Keiller, P. 163–4, 166 Lipps, T. 45
Keller, H. 27 literature 3, 12–13, 26, 31, 75–6,
Kelly, E. 154 79–80
Kelly, N. 90 Long Island 104, 172
Kenna, M. 94 Lorca, F.G. 161, 166
Kennedy, L. 35 Lowenthal, D. 144
Kent, W. 111 Lowenthal, M. 165
Kiefer, A. 3, 74 Lynch, D. 74
Kierkegaard, S. 15
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 109–10 Macaulay, T.B. 114
Kite, S. 46–7 McCahon, C. 101
Klein, M. 46 McCarthy, K. 96
Klibansky, R. 13 MacLean, A. 19
Kligerman, E. 74, 77 Maddrell, A. 30, 62–3, 172
Knight, R.P. 20, 28 Magritte, R. 65, 153
Koss, J. 47 Majendie, P. 62
Krauss, R. 152–3 Maksymowicz, V. 123
Kristallnacht 59 Malcolm, C. 129
Kristeva, J. 13, 155, 167 Manhattan Island 121, 141
Kundera, M. 56 Marc, F. 154
Index 179
Marinetti, F.T. 36 Moholy-Nagy, L. 154
Marion, J.-L. 95 Molodkina, L. 96
Marks, L.U. 96 monochrome 157–60, 163, 170
Marzys, B. 137 Montesquieu 111
Massey, D. 65 Moore, A. 35
Massumi, B. 30 Moore, R. 31
Mather, C. 14 Moore, T. 31, 167
Maxwell, R. 71 Mora, R. 61
media 4, 7, 36, 43–4, 70 Morel, J.-M. 42
medicine 13 Moreno, C.D. 123–5

Mediterranean 126–7 Morrel, A. 138
melancholy 3–11, 18–22, 53, 55–7, Morris, J. 119
170–2; aesthetics 23–9; aura 92–8; Mostafavi, M. 144
camouflage 152–6; darkness 87–91; mourning 1, 15, 39, 65, 90; empathy
definitions 12–17; emotion 30–3; 49; ephemerality 150–1; fragments
empathy 42–9; ephemerality 112; intimate immensity 166;
149–51; ethics 34–41; fragments leavings 118–19, 124, 128–9;
109–16; intimate immensity 161–9; liminality 104; silence 85; uncanny
leaving 117–32; liminality 99–108; 73–4, 79
melancholising 55; monochrome Mukarovský, J. 77
157–60; patina 143–8; shadows Mullion Cove 64, 128, 163
87–91; silence 84–6; submersion Muñoz, A. 61
133–42; transience 149–51; uncanny Museum of Jewish Heritage 74–5, 81,
73–83; void 58–72; weathering 89
143–8 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 129,
memorials 7–8, 32, 39, 55, 58–9; 153–5
empathy 49–50; ephemerality music 3, 28
149–51; fragments 110, 112; Musisi, B. 69–70
intimate immensity 164–5; leavings MVRDV 45
121, 123–9; liminality 101, 103,
107; monochrome 159; sadness Namibia 109, 136
171–2; silence 84–5; uncanny 75, narcissism 15
77; void 61–2, 64–9, 71 National Museum of Australia 90
memory 4, 7, 16, 32, 56; aura 93, 96; Nattino, S. 61
empathy 49–50; fragments 110, 112; nature 4, 18, 20, 24, 32; camouflage
intimate immensity 164; leavings 152, 154; empathy 42, 48; ethics 38;
117–18, 121, 125, 129; liminality fragments 109, 111–12; intimate
101; sadness 170; silence 85; immensity 162–3, 165; leavings 121,
uncanny 81; void 58–9, 62, 64–6, 126, 128, 131; liminality 103–5;
68–9, 71; weathering 143 monochrome 159; sadness 172;
mental illness 5 shadows 90; silence 86; submersion
metaphysics 6, 18, 32, 38, 94, 97, 167 133–6, 139, 141; uncanny 77, 81;
Metz, C. 26 weathering 144
Michasiw, K. 36 Nazis 59, 113, 126, 130
middle class 100 Netherlands 145, 159
military 105, 120, 146, 154 New Spirit 44–5
Milligan, C. 31 New Zealand 85, 101, 125
Milosz, O.V. de 46, 161 Newton, I. 111
Milton, J. 3 Niepce, N. 94
Minimalism 145 Nietzsche, F.W. 25
Minkowski, E. 87, 89 nihilism 32, 38, 56, 162, 166
mirroring 4, 73, 77, 79–80, 152 Noack, N. 100
modernity 5, 15, 27, 36, 47, 73, 77, Noble, A. 94–5
112, 114, 144–6, 163–4 Noble, R. 78
180 Index
Nono, L. 85 103–4, 106–7; monochrome 158–9;
Nora, P. 112 sadness 171; submersion 138, 141;
Norway 172 uncanny 79; void 59, 69–70;
nostalgia 4, 31, 38, 45, 117–20, 125, weathering 145
148, 159 physics 16
Picturesque 6, 8, 14, 18–23, 34–8;
objectification 5, 13, 25, 27, 45, 48, 93, empathy 42, 46; fragments 109,
106 111; monochrome 157–9; patina
ocularcentrism 23, 50 144; sadness 170; submersion 137–8
Omer, M. 127 Pikionis, D. 48

O’Neill, M. 39, 149–51 Pingusson, H. 67–9
ontology 5, 48 Pinochet, A. 61
Otero-Pailos, J. 78, 130 Piranesi, G.B. 112, 138
Other 19, 42–5, 48–9, 93, 162 Plato 25
Ottoman Empire 159 Poe, E.A. 80–1
poetry 3, 12–16, 31, 42, 66, 75, 115,
paintings 3, 20–1, 24, 27, 74; aura 92, 120, 149, 161, 166
96; camouflage 153; emotion 31; Poland 89
fragments 111; intimate immensity politics 15–16, 35, 61, 92, 109, 114,
162; leavings 118, 123; 120–1
monochrome 157–8; submersion pornography 34–5
137; void 58, 62, 65 Porteous, D.J. 158
palimpsests 78, 130 postmodernism 35
Pallasmaa, J. 4, 6, 8, 31–2, 39, 48, Poussin, N. 19
65–6, 71, 86, 100, 146 poverty 32, 35, 38, 159
Pamuk, O. 43–4, 159 Price, U. 20
Panofsky, E. 13 Prince, H.C. 144
Papua New Guinea 149 privilege 25–6
Parada, J.M. 61 projection 46, 48, 73, 79, 94
Pascal, B. 162 Prout, S. 38
Pasternack, A. 165 psychasthenia 152–3
patina 97, 133, 143–9, 159 psychiatry 12–13, 18, 87
Pauer, G. 121 psychoanalysis 13, 46–7
Peacock, T. 32, 135 psychology 5, 13, 42, 45, 73, 89, 119,
Penn, W. 111 152
Pentagon 109–10 punctum 59
perception 26, 43, 45–6, 74–7, 87, 92, Puritans 14
115, 144, 149
Perec, G. 164–6 Randalls Island 104
Perez, O. 106 Rattenbury, K. 89
Pérez-Gómez, A. 8 Ray, M. 152–3
perspective 23–4, 162 reality TV 4–5
perversity 37 reciprocity 42, 46
pharmaceutical industry 5 Reed, P. 154
phenomenology 4, 8, 27–8, 43, 46, 69, reflection 6, 24, 48, 68–9, 80–1, 97,
96, 110, 117, 128–9, 143 120, 162, 166, 170, 172
philosophy 6, 12, 15, 19, 25, 42, 47–8, refugees 70, 118
111, 120, 154, 167 Rella, F. 114–15
phlegm 13, 18, 30 Renaissance 12, 14, 24
photography 7, 16, 19, 24, 27–8; aura Resnais, A. 74
94–6; camouflage 152–3; empathy Rider-Rider, W. 162
43, 50; ethics 34–5, 37, 39; Rietveld, G. 145
fragments 109; intimate immensity Riker’s Island 104
162; leavings 129–30; liminality Rilke, R.M. 130–1
Index 181
Rimbaud, A. 163–4 Shakespeare, W. 3, 120
rites of passage 64, 99 Shelley, M. 136
Robben Island 105 Shelley, P.B. 32–3, 136, 139, 167
Robert, H. 20–1 Shenston, W. 20
Robins, K. 65 Shklovsky, V. 76
Robinson, S.K. 23 shrines 109, 150, 165–6, 171
Roman Empire 37, 100, 111–13, 135 Sicily 123
Romanticism 3, 12, 14, 32 silence 21, 67, 81, 84–7, 120, 136, 141,
Room 4.1.3 110 158, 162–3, 167, 170
Roosevelt, E. 97 Simmel, G. 143

Roosevelt, F.D. 97 Situationists 79
Rorty, R. 106 Skultans, V. 118
Rosa, S. 19, 111 smell 24, 26, 97, 135, 139, 152
Rosenblum, R. 162 Smith, K. 153
Rouault, G. 27 Smithson, R. 112, 163–4, 166
Rousseau, J.-J. 84, 111 Soane, J. 138
ruins 14, 19–21, 35, 37, 100, 109–12, social networking 6
117, 133, 158 social stratification 26
Ruskin, J. 32–5, 38, 42, 143 sociology 35, 152
Russia 74–5, 77 Sola-Morales, I. di 48, 106
Rwanda 7, 66, 69–70 solitude 6–7, 19–21, 38, 55, 81;
fragments 114; intimate immensity
sadness 4–6, 8, 19, 30, 32; empathy 42; 161–2, 166–7; leavings 126;
ethics 34, 37–9; fragments 110; monochrome 157; sadness 170;
intimate immensity 165; leavings shadows 87
118; liminality 100, 105; Sontag, S. 34, 37–9, 43, 159, 171
monochrome 157; shadows 87, Soubigou, G. 58
89–90; silence 84; submersion 139; South Africa 105
uncanny 78 souvenirs 109, 118–19
St Augustine 38 Soviet Union 118
sanguine 13, 18, 30, 172 Spain 126–7, 161
Sartre, J.-P. 79, 153, 164 spectatorship 4–5, 25, 34, 70–1, 74
Saturn 13–14, 31, 146, 167 Speer, A. 113
Saudi Arabia 36 Spirn, A.W. 48
Saxl, F. 13 spleen 13–15
Scarpa, C. 85 Starobinski, J. 134
scenography 25, 28 Staten Island 129
Schwartz, M. 125 Steinmetz, G. 109
sciences 12–13, 16 Stern, B. 43
Scotland 90 Sterne, L. 163
Scott, G. 45–8 Sternfeld, J. 104, 141
Scott, R. 74 Stewart, K. 166, 170
sculpture 125, 145, 153 Stewart, S. 118–19
Seamon, D. 8 Stokes, A. 46–7
Sebald, W.G. 3, 146 strangemaking 6, 15, 49, 61, 73–7;
Second World War 74, 139 camouflage 152; fragments 109,
Senie, H.F. 59 114; leavings 119; liminality 106;
senses 24–8, 34, 56, 74, 84, 86–7 sadness 171; silence 84;
September 11 2001 37 submersion 134, 136–8; uncanny
Seurat, G. 94 79–81
shadows 56, 78–9, 81, 87–91, 170; Sublime 8, 14, 18–23, 38, 87, 109–10,
camouflage 153; intimate immensity 127
167; leavings 128; liminality 99, submersion 35, 56, 111, 131, 133–42,
103, 105; monochrome 158–9 152, 170
182 Index
suffering 6–7, 12, 33–4, 37–8, 42–3, Vall, R. de 70
49, 166, 171–2 values 3–4, 25, 95, 119
supermodernity 112 Van Gogh, V. 58–9
surrealists 74, 79, 90, 152–3 vanishing point 64, 129, 162
Switzerland 32, 117–18 Vattimo, G. 48
symbolism 49, 61, 65–6, 71, 75; aura Venice Architecture Biennale 45
97; camouflage 155; fragments 110, Vergara, C.J. 35, 139, 141
114; leavings 119, 130; liminality Verlaine, P. 163
105; monochrome 159 Viatte, G. 127
Vidler, A. 73–4, 79, 95, 138

Tanizaki, J. 167–8 Vietnam War 36, 49, 66–7, 75, 84,
Tarkovsky, A. 65–6, 95, 106, 138, 141 97
Taylor-Tudzin, J. 121 violence 36–7, 39–40, 70–1, 87, 117,
technology 6 134, 145, 171
terrains vagues 106–7, 170 Virgil 150
Thatcher, M. 163 Vischer, R. 42, 45, 48–9, 93
theology 167, 172 visuality 4, 6, 8, 15, 23–8; aura 94, 96;
Third Emotional Space 62 camouflage 152, 155; ethics 36;
Thomas, B. 44 fragments 110, 113; impact
Thomas, J. 24 assessment 23; intimate immensity
Thoreau, H.D. 42, 81 163–4; leavings 125, 128; liminality
thresholds 64, 99–101, 103, 106–7, 101, 103, 105; shadows 90;
109–10, 133, 137 submersion 136–8, 141; uncanny
Till, K. 39–40, 170 74, 77, 81; weathering 145–6, 148
Titchener, E. 42 void 7–8, 58–72, 77, 81, 84–5, 128,
Togan, J.C. 121 170
Tolle, B. 121 Voltaire 111
Tolstoy, L. 76 voyeurism 5, 34, 38
Torres, M. 161
tourism 7, 23, 37, 66, 110 wabi sabi 144, 149–50
tragedy 4, 7, 32, 37, 58; empathy 45, Wales 138
50; ephemerality 149; leavings 129; warfare 36–7, 43–5, 49–50, 66–7, 84,
liminality 100, 104; silence 85; 125, 139, 145, 159, 162
submersion 134; void 65, 69–71; Warhol, A. 155
weathering 144 Washington, G. 97
transience 8, 99, 114, 120, 128, 149–51 Watkin, D. 138
transition 99–100, 106, 139, 144 weathering 56, 68, 133, 135, 143–9,
trauma 34, 45, 50, 109, 129, 150, 152, 159, 170
165–6, 170–1 Weilacher, U. 159–60
Trigg, D. 19, 117, 124, 138 Weiss, A.S. 143
Tschumi, B. 36 Wenders, W. 74
Tuan, Y.-F. 8 West 25, 32, 66, 149–50, 170
Turner, J.M.W. 38 Whatley, T. 158
Turner, V. 99 Whiteread, R. 64, 69, 77–8, 124–5,
Tzonis, A. 8 145, 153
wilderness 6, 99
ubi sunt 120, 170 Wilkinson, N. 154
Uganda 70 Wingren, C. 64
uncanny 8, 73–83, 124, 134, 152, 162, witchcraft 12, 14, 16
170 Wittgenstein, L. 158
United States (US) 36, 103 Wodiczko, K. 94
Woodman, F. 153
Valamanesh, A. 121 Woods, L. 36, 44
Valamanesh, H. 121 Woodward, C. 139
Index 183
Wordsworth, W. 14 yellow bile 13
World Trade Center 62, 109–10 Young, J.E. 171
Wren, C. 46
Wylie, J. 8, 64, 128–9 Zaire 70
Žižek, S. 39, 120
Yates, F. 13 Zumthor, P. 93, 170–1
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Melancholy and The Landscape Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in The Landscape

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Jacky Bowring’s Melancholy and the Landscape offers a wide-ranging

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Written as an advocacy of melancholy’s value as part of landscape experience,

Jacky Bowring is Professor of Landscape Architecture at Lincoln University,

Routledge Research in Landscape and Environmental Design is a series of

Regions and Designed Landscapes in Georgian England

Landscape and Branding

Contemporary Urban Landscapes of the Middle East

Melancholy and the Landscape

The right of Jacqueline Bowring to be identified as author of this

1 Placing melancholy in landscape architecture 3

8 The places of melancholy 55

9.1 Butzer Design Partnership, Field of Empty Chairs,

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Melancholy is at once complex and contradictory. For some it is an emotion,

Within this expansive and meaning-imbued terrain the landscape holds

Melancholy appears in tension with prevailing cultural attitudes at large,

rather than possessing the subtle timbre of melancholy, becomes a

only if aesthetic spectatorship declines the opportunity to conflate itself

Bound up in the aspirations of reality TV garden makeovers, and in the vast

The illuminating searchlight of modern science, in its rendering history,

monumental banishment of the dark and mysterious within such a

information, an emblemisation of the ‘data’ associated with the tragedy –

Melancholy and the Landscape embraces more than simply an exploration

architecture and geography, and developments in these fields complement

Landscape Architecture, Lincoln University, New Zealand.

Melancholy is elusive. Slipping and sliding between widely disparate fields,

the diversity of interpretations of melancholy characterised contributions

The breadth of subject matter and interpretations of melancholy might be

scientific embraces efforts to define melancholy objectively, to pinpoint its

of diabolical possession’ (Jimenez, 1986, p.31).

Defining melancholy is evidently impossible. The diverse threads of humoral

Alongside the debates over melancholy’s psychiatric, metaphysical and

contemplation. Philosopher Dylan Trigg underscores this:

The awareness of the self and so necessarily the Other is … accentuated

same signs of picturesque decay be found to be aesthetically pleasing in a

RUINATED structures appear to derive their power of pleasing, from

Only those enhancing the effect of solitude and silence should be

muted reverberation of the space, would have sent me shuddering.

Thomas, Sophie (2008). Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle.

Melancholy’s presence within the early development of aesthetic conventions

Haddad’s observation echoes the critique by Catherine Howett, that

The way in which the picturesque contributed to the diminishment of the

allowed painters to represent a three dimensional world on a two

Kenneth Frampton reinforces this point, explaining

According to its etymology, perspective means rationalized sight or

The Claude Glass’s landscape-over-the-shoulder and the ‘loss of nearness’

proceeded along the lines of ‘objectification, dissection and analysis’, and

Nietzsche’s railing against disinterestedness highlights the way in which

It is the traditions of Western philosophical thinking about the senses,

The elevation of vision and hearing in a ranking of the senses privileges

a dense, swarming territory beyond its own mental enclave, threatening

in what I cannot see and in what I sense’ (Soby, 1947, p.14).

The other day I went to walk toward a familiar wood. Suddenly a

Constance Classen responded to this olfactory and sonic moment through

Suppose Keller’s sensations on that day were to be transformed into a

The renovation of aisthesis requires a phenomenological stance. Through

a merely visual, and therefore superficial, aesthetic. Illustrating how aspects

Sublime and Beautiful. London: R and J Dodsley.

If we do away with Saturn’s dark moods, we may find it exhausting

(Moore, 1992, p.146)