The contribution of landscape culture to art and science is writ large
in the Danish Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale Venice, where a blend of artificial natures – bark on walls,
pine needle floors aesthetics contrast with technocratic papers covering Danish
Building Law, Housing Law, Planning Law and the Danish Environmental act. The Danish
Pavilion charged with both Koolhaas’s ‘Absorbing Modernity’ and Denmark in the
year 2050 both looks at Modernist legacies for overwhelming factual
information, legislation and scientific data and the need for a more
complimentary future vision that curator Stig Andersson, ‘can open up yet again
the missing dimension of aesthetics as an important aspect when we make our
decisions’. For Andersson , Director of Landscape Practice SLA based in
Copenhagen, ‘aesthetics and rationality are actually two radically different
paths to knowledge and recognition. One way, the aesthetic, is empirical
knowledge and experience through sensory experiences. The other way is common
sense, the deductive practice in which conclusions are logically obtained,’
citing the Golden Age (1800 -1850) where the two views were interwoven in one
culture. In this way they mimic the United Kingdom where the term ‘culture’
also referred to farmland, where cultivation of the land enabled a person to
become cultured and the eighteenth century estate was also understood as a key
moment when nature and culture were interdependent in meanings of the term
‘landscape’.
