Design
DOING MORE WITH LESS |
In conversation with Marc Treib
LA 64 |
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Marc Treib is Professor of Architecture Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. For four decades he taught design studios, a lecture course on Japanese gardens and architecture, and seminars on specialized topics including landscape architecture, criticism, art, and modern Scandinavian architecture. He has authored, edited, or co-authored numerous books including Garrett Eckbo: Modern Landscapes for Living [with Dorothée Imbert; University of California Press, 1997] and A Guide to the Gardens of Kyoto [with Ron Herman, Third Edition, ORO Editions, 2019] that have explored the relationship of nature and culture, in Western and Asian cultures, and the relationship of architecture to landscape.
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Western versus Oriental | Attitudes towards Nature
How do you compare various the landscape cultures of the Western and Asian countries you have studied and researched? Do you see distinct approaches, for example, between the Western, related to scientific and objective way of looking at nature while the Asian, associated more with a philosophical and subjective approach?
This is a very complicated question and several books have been written on the subject, but not by me. There are no simple answers to that question, and it is probably best to avoid proposing dichotomies such as formal vs. informal; rational vs. romantic; or philosophical vs. scientific, or even West vs. East. Approaches and styles themselves are dynamic and evolve with time, at times rapidly, due to forces within the culture or from outside its borders. In addition, I have found that quite often more than one manner has existed within a culture during the same era. For example, we tend to think that the eighteenthcentury landscape garden was the country’s true representative type, but formal garden traditions existed in England before that time, and formal gardens have been made in the years that followed.
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