Notebooks Out Paysagistes!

An interview conducted with "field architect" Tildy Junco in 1998 for WOOP-Jersey City's Perry Grimm Hour. Transcript presented with permission.

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One hindrance to a real ecological understanding is this tendency to infer from working maps a simple generation of geometric forms from a unified ground. That the map has presented you with all the necessary information, the bare contours, and already excluded all the unnecessaries between. You need a sense of interpenetration. If your work is hooked into the larger site, if the site is too hooked into the region to even count as a site anymore, if you're hooked enough into the site to be inseparable from that--then!

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Well, it's about breaking the habit of perception, of setting aside the picture in front of you, no matter how much you're into it. So, in regard to use, you could make some new typological prototypes, prototypes based less on those imperatives, places made from familiar words--park, or garden, or preserve, or yard. In the new prototypes, you would focus more on imaginative extents, places you can't put aside because you can't get a read on them. Really demonstrate that it's possible to apply precedents, to extend them, rather than follow them, or abandon them altogether. To start a project and, when I propose, to be able propose wholly, but without constraints--less for a lack of contexts, you understand, than a lack of inhibitions.

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Superstructures can be made to fail--to lapse after the fact into a visible trace, a palpable trace. So you could intervene, create a particular form, and then leave it to spread out from that starting point. The nice thing is that it can grow halfway between you and "them".



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We've made great efforts, but so far we've failed to derive any reasonably correct predictions of that interplay between plan-driven forms and intrinsically unstable material. So instead you see this history of wasteful hydrological, chemical heroics. I think we should try instead to deprecate those coherent borders, and work within better sureties--like stochastic regions.

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How can you challenge static representations without abandoning a common visual language? And how do you extend a representation in time without imposing narrative sequence?

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I think that a better bridge between ecological planning and individual initiatives can be found in middle terms between gardening and landscape practice.

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So make landscapes with intermittency and ways out, where the focus can wander, shift, and lapse. Miniaturize those points, intersperse them across a fabric, and you'll get ornament--natural or no.

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If you want to make infrastructure worth preserving, quote infrastructure in a preserve, and the preserve in infrastructure.

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Writing on a wall is just the first stage of making a haven. It's a mistake to think less of people who want to index their presences, or stake their claims, in the gentlest way possible.

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I'd say do less and indicate more. Imply the armatures you need to make, precisely to enable free action.

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It helps to watch the local conditions expressed in form--like the manifestation and incarnation of a soil in particular plant life.

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I don't retrofit out of constraints, but to have the benefit of constraint.

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I recognize the stipulated ethics of my profession: wealth in harmony, social peace, and the robust health of ecological process. If you can't practice them, you should at least represent them.

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Borderlessness and facelessness are the prime assets of my profession.