Lorn Clement, J.D., ASLA

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• Lorn Clement, J.D., ASLA
• Landscape Architecture
• Kansas State University

New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston
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Narrative Tropes

• Expanding a conceptual framework
• Narrative theory and figurative language as a
  means of constructing meaning
• Stories (content and expression)
• create impressions,
• organize experience, and
• create memories
• Design strategies
• Naming
• Sequencing
• Revealing concealing
• Gathering
• Opening
• Realms
• Story
• Inter-textual
• Discursive

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Tropes

• Four major tropes in LN (shortlist)
• metaphor
• metonymy
• synecdoche
• irony
• Forms of transference, carrying over meaning
  from one term to another, turning our language
  from the literal to the figurative
• Utility of expanding the list
• more concepts, strategies, ideas
• precision in communication

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Parallels

• Bernstein, The Careful Writer
• Thirty one entries in list of rhetorical figures
  and faults
• allegory and alliteration to zeugma
• Parallels of thought and expression in the visual
  and literary arts
• Layout of slides
• Verbal definition and example
• Visual example and explanation

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Analogy

• Aristotle, Poetics, proportional metaphor
• Comparison of components in parallel,
  relationship is key
• Usually used for explanation
• The garden walls surround space in the same way
  that a parents arms hold a baby.
• Distinguish simile, which uses like, consider
  metaphor to be one implied

Zipper walks at Nelson Atkins Museum Dan
Kiley Functional concern linking major parts
of the spatial composition
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Antithesis

• Juxtaposition of opposites
• Pope The learnd is happy nature to explore
  the fool is happy that he knows no more.
• Hegelian dialectical reasoning
• thesis, antithesis, synthesis

Bloedel Reserve Richard Haag Spatial
sequence (garden of planes) moss garden
reflection garden Intellect gut spirit zen
experience / transcendence
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Irony

• Incongruity between expectations or appearance,
  and reality
• In-betweenness
• Subdivision names (toponyms) for the natural
  resources lost by development

Splice Garden Martha Schwartz Gene splicing,
green plastic questioning traditional
notions manipulation of Nature Discrepancy b/t
ideal and real Greater diversity less
consistency in the interpretive community
ironies abound
Photo by Alan Ward
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Metaphor

• Direct substitution and identity
• Comparison without word like
• Intellectual illumination with emotional response
  
• Fewest parts
• Life is a dream
• Poetic vs. prosaic purpose
• Aristotle, three fundamental categories of
  language
• Logic (to explain, to be clear)
• Rhetoric (to persuade)
• Poetry (to inspire)

Holocaust Memorial in Boston Stanley
Saitowitz Six steam rising glass Krystalnacht
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Metonomy

• Uses concrete or tangible terms to convey
  abstract or intangible states
• the heart for the emotions
• Dominant trope in landscape architecture
• Association by location
• Historic preservation of sites (events, periods,
  people, styles)

Magnolia leaf for Bessie Smith Rosss Landing,
TN S.I.T.E., EDAW, Stan Townsend Double-entendre
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Oxymoron

• Nonsensical or self-contradictory pairing
• Conspicuously absent
• bittersweet or chiaroscuro
• Polarity dynamic equilibrium?
• Humor

Shuttlecocks at the Nelson-Atkins
Clas Oldenburg Scale jump Reflection
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Paradox

• Seemingly contradictory or absurd, but
  well-founded or true
• Dont it always seem to go, you dont know what
  youve got til its gone Joni Mitchell, Big
  Yellow Taxi
• Unity of Opposites?

Gas Works Park, Seattle Richard Haag
Recreational amenity and/or environmental threat?
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Personification

• Endowing lifeless objects or ideas with human
  form or characteristics
• Treib long driven underground by the
  onslaught of urbanity, suburbanity and modern
  technology, the genius loci was a bit hesitant
  to reemerge in the 20th century sunlight, and as
  a result, came out squinting.

Portal Building, Wagner Park, NYC Machado and
Silvetti Embodying a private contemplative
individual with a set of references to the body
to support the inscription of the individual in
the park. Berrizbeitia and Pollack
Drawing by Machado Silvetti
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Synecdoche

• Fragment represents the whole, or vice versa
• hands for workers
• wheels for cars
• indicator species in LN
• Relating individual phenomena into a more
  integral whole versus a literal or reductive
  nature (metonymy)

Walls as moving thresholds, boundaries KSU
campus reflection on the growth of the
institution over time
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Cautionary note

• Bernstein dangers in use of allegory
• Obscurity,
• Unskillful presentation, or
• Obviousness
• Increasingly diverse interpretive community
• Increasingly a-literate culture

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Cautionary note

• Terence Hawkes on the expansion of lists
• Of course it would be possible greatly to extend
  and complicate the list But it is doubtful
  whether much is to be gained from this when it
  comes to the practical application of them
• The distinctions between the categories become
  so finely drawn it becomes impossible to use
  them without a simple-minded reduction of the
  work they are intended to illuminate.

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Conclusion

• More tropes more strategies, concepts, ideas
  stronger critical thought
• more precise communication and
• better criticism
• Places are palimpsests, over-written texts
• Hirsch on reading poetry
• Making, constructing meaning a collaborative
  process between writer and reader
• (Treib, Must Landscapes Mean?)
• Evolution of meaning and inevitable change do not
  preclude a profound experience of place

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Conclusion

• Concentrate on the activity and doing of projects
  versus an array of verbal categories
• Rely on intuition as much as intellect
• Engage design processes fully, freely, with
  numerous iterations, multiple drafts
• Describe, analyze, and interpret carefully, be
  the purpose to
• e x p l a i n
• p e r s u a d e
• i n s p i r e
• _______________________________________

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Literature Cited

• Bernstein, Theodore M. 1968. The Careful Writer
  A modern guide to English usage. New York
  Atheneum. 
• Berrizbeitia, Anita and Linda Pollack. 1999.
  Inside Outside Between Architecture and
  Landscape. Gloucester, MA Rockport.  
• Burke, Kenneth. 1969. Essay entitled Four Master
  Tropes in A Grammar of Motives, Los Angeles,
  U.C. Press. 
• Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse
  Narrative structure in fiction and film, Ithaca
  Cornell University Press. 
• Harmon, William. 2000 A Handbook to Literature,
  8th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ Prentice Hall. 
• Hawkes, Terence. 1972. Metaphor. London Methuen
  Co. Ltd. 
• Hines, Susan. 2004. Back to the drawing board
  Diana Balmori urges landscape architects to
  rediscover the language of ideas, Landscape
  Architecture
• Hirsch, Edward. 1999. How to Read a Poem. New
  York Harcourt. 
• Potteiger, Matthew and Jamie Purinton. 1998.
  Landscape Narratives Design practices for
  telling stories. New York John Wiley and Sons. 
• Saunders, William S., ed. 1998. Richard Haag
  Bloedel Reserve and Gas Works Park, Landscape
  Views I, New York Princeton Architectural Press
  with Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

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Bloedel Reserve Zen Garden that replaced the
Garden of Planes designed by Richard Haag