A modern approach to creating place

[M II A II R II K]

A modern approach to creating place


Jun 10th, 2010

Read More: http://prairieform.com/blog/?p=1025

Jacques Tati was a master of poking fun at hyper-austere modernist homes, their accompanying landscapes, and their followers. The infamous scene in “Mon Oncle” of his accidental pruning of two espaliered trees that had been depressingly planted along a blank wall is so pleasantly memorable in its deadpan-slapstick critique of modernism. It pokes fun not only at the excessive austerity and fussiness of the landscape, but also at the generic placelessness of it – particularly when juxtaposed with the rather hodgepodge, roughhewn landscape of the older part of town. In part what we love about “Mon Oncle” is not simply how funny it is, but how prescient it was. To this day, card-carrying modernist designers continue to create prototypical Mon Oncle landscapes, apparently unaware of the comically uncanny similarities they hold with the landscape of the film.

Our beef with the modernist landscape of gravel, concrete, and a few toped-out arbor vitaes, extends beyond pure aesthetics, however. It is rooted equally as much in modernism’s insistence on erasing the sense of place within a landscape. The landscape shown above could be almost anywhere; there is simply nothing flora- or material-wise that gives any indication of where it is, other than that it clearly isn’t located in the tropics, which doesn’t give us much to go on.

Uber-modernist house and grounds, in “Mon Oncle”






New Mon oncle landscape outside modernist house in Minnesota