Udo Weilacher had the opportunity to work closely with Dieter Kienast from 1993 until his death in 1998. The two landscape architects also conducted an interview together for Udo Weilacher’s first book “Zwischen Landschaftsarchitektur und Land Art”. Unfortunately, the publication is now out of print. With Udo Weilacher’s consent, we are allowed to republish the interview with Dieter Kienast here at G+L.
In the January 2022 issue of G+L on the topic of “Icons of the 1990s”, we published a portrait of Dieter Kienast as one of the leading landscape architects of the 1990s. Udo Weilacher had the opportunity to work closely with Dieter Kienast from 1993 until his death in 1998. The two landscape architects also conducted an interview together for Udo Weilacher’s first book “Zwischen Landschaftsarchitektur und Land Art”. Unfortunately, the publication is now out of print. With Udo Weilacher’s permission, we are allowed to republish the interview with Dieter Kienast here at G+L. In it, Dieter Kienast explains many aspects in his own words, which should be very helpful for a better understanding of his approach. We hope you enjoy reading it.
Text published in: Weilacher, Udo: Between Landscape Architecture and Land Art. Basel Berlin Boston 1999; pp.137-156
For most landscape architects, the question of renewing garden art is reduced to a formal problem. They cling to historical models, reproduce artistic models, develop an eye-catching plan graphic or become entangled in superficial, formalistic design approaches, always in search of their own style in the sense of a trademark with a high recognition value.
For the Swiss landscape architect Dieter Kienast, born in 1945, such tendencies are the symptomatic consequences of an acute lack of theory. Kienast sees the renewal of garden culture primarily as a problem of content. His goal, which he is working to realize in his Zurich office with his wife, the art historian Erika Kienast, and the landscape architect Günther Vogt, is garden architecture as an expression of the zeitgeist, the garden as a carrier of meaning that should heighten awareness and awaken the senses. This requires not only an examination of the history of our culture, but also an open-mindedness for the diverse cultural phenomena of our time in film, video, philosophy, literature, music, advertising and contemporary art, from Peter Greenaway to Sol LeWitt. While many others fear getting lost in the labyrinthine structure of today’s society, Dieter Kienast recognizes this as an exciting opportunity to experiment with thought and action.
Dieter Kienast’s preference for the objectivity-oriented works of Minimal Art is unmistakable. The American minimal artist Robert Morris’ commitment to formal simplicity could just as easily have been taken from one of the Zurich landscape architect’s many treatises: “Simplicity of form does not necessarily mean simplicity of artistic experience. Uniform forms do not reduce relationships, they organize them. When the dominant hieratic nature of the unified form acts as a constant, all particularizing relationships of scale, proportion and so on are not thereby abolished, but rather more firmly and inseparably connected.”(1)
Just as the artistic avant-garde of the 1960s resisted the deterioration of the visual world with its brittle projects, Kienast resists the deterioration of meaning in garden culture and struggles for the authenticity of the place. He only uses the few elements he employs where they promote the legibility of the situation and do justice to the essence of the place. The staging of the seemingly natural to conceal the artificial, such as the textbook wetland biotope on the roof of the underground garage, belongs to the category of those superficial images in the wrong place that the pugnacious planner strictly rejects.
Can this slowly thriving organism, which we call a garden, fulfill the demand for contemporary relevance without becoming a short-lived, fashionable showpiece? The countless designs and many completed projects by the Zurich team in Germany and Switzerland are anything but short-lived fireworks of shapes and colors. On the contrary: the works are characterized by creative clarity that naturally incorporates the ordinary and lends even diversity its unmistakable charm through powerful simplicity. Complexity of content is combined with formal simplicity to create a design that affirms heterogeneity in accordance with the principles of transparency and ambivalence, not only allowing the break, but cultivating it.
What the cultivation of rupture means in a specific project can be clearly seen, for example, in the competition design for the extension of the Günthersburgpark in Frankfurt am Main, which is currently being realized. The relocation of the municipal nurseries at the end of the 1980s opened up the opportunity to double the size of the old Günthersburgpark, a heavily overused landscape park from the previous century, and to develop it into a link between the city center and the future green belt. While the historic park was completely detached from the city and functioned as a green oasis in the chaos of the big city, the new part of the park aims to live with the city, including the contradictions of our time, and dispenses with any structural demarcation from the adjacent urban quarters.
The new part of the park adopts existing elements and structures and uses them to develop a new design language of contemporary independence. Picturesque groups of trees from the historical section crystallize into clear, partly linear, partly flat tree structures that form heterogeneous peripheral areas or condense into a mysterious park forest accentuated by precisely formulated clearings. In the new part of the park, winding paths become linear lines of movement that emphasize the spatial experience instead of trying to define space itself. Plant sculptures, so-called topiarys, populate the entrance area to the park like mythical creatures and hark back to old gardening traditions. In the middle of the new park, however, is the open, free meadow area, leaving it to the city’s residents to animate the center of the clearly conceived framework.
Despite the clear link between the old park and its new counterpart, the break remains palpable. The interface is most clearly bridged by the formerly purely functional gardener’s path, which is now covered by rose arches. It forms the prelude to the romantically ironic picture puzzle at the end of the path: the modern gardener’s house by the water lily pond is overgrown with ivy and transforms into the new Günthersburg, which once existed in the park as a tiny moated castle belonging to the Knights of Bornheim and gave it its name. The new Günthersburg is no longer an introverted fortress, but provides a view of the everyday, changing reality of the city of Frankfurt. “The park tells us about history and stories. It can be experienced on many different levels. It is both a playground and a place of garden culture. It lives, ages and changes with and by its users.”(2)
Udo Weilacher: Mr. Kienast, you learned your trade at an early age in your parents’ gardening business.
Dieter Kienast: As children, we had to work at home, but I wasn’t interested in the profession at all back then. When I was told at some point that I should do an apprenticeship as a gardener, I didn’t really care, because all I really wanted to do was climb. The daily work in the nursery was an inevitable interruption before I finally went climbing again at the weekend. I think that’s typical of me: I always do something completely or not at all.
At the age of about twenty, I realized that I should learn a trade after all. And I started working in the offices of garden architects Albert Zulauf and Fred Eicher. There I basically learned almost everything you need to know to run an office. Fred Eicher is one of the founding fathers of Swiss garden architecture. He taught me basic principles, such as the importance of reducing work to a few essential aspects. Eicher always said, for example, that the most important thing was to put the trees in the right place, and he was really good at that.
After a while, I was finally convinced that I could do everything very well, and all I really needed was some kind of certification of my skills. In Switzerland, it was usual to work for a garden architect in an office for a few years and then set up your own business. But I wanted a diploma and at the age of twenty-four – with my wife and child – I went to the Gesamthochschule Kassel. There I immediately realized that I basically knew very little. The degree course in Kassel was being set up, you had a lot of freedom and had to organize yourself. That suited me well. Because nobody was pushing me to work, I did a lot. Our projects were always the result of hard work, because the problems were always discussed in principle first. In Kassel, it was primarily about the socio-political approach and the planning implementation.
After my intermediate diploma, I realized that a whole series of important basics were missing, such as the basics of design and art history as well as the basics of botany. I therefore decided to devote myself very intensively to just one area, namely plant sociology.
Professor Karl-Heinrich Hülbusch was very committed to the subject and knew how to get me interested in it. I am also a rather chaotic person by nature, and the strict logical structure of the subject area helped me to discipline myself. During the semester breaks, I had to earn a living, as there were now four of us. At first I worked for Fred Eicher and later for a former colleague of Albert Zulauf, Peter Stöckli, who had set up his own small office. During this time, I was already realizing my own projects. I found the combination of theoretical background knowledge from the university on the one hand and the specialist, almost down-to-earth practical experience on the other very favorable. I always liked both parts of my work, the creative and the theoretical part.
After graduating, I had the impression that I still didn’t know enough, so I got a scholarship and did my doctorate under Professors Hülbusch and Tüxen, the old masters of plant sociology. I worked on the topic of spontaneous inner-city plant communities in Kassel. The aim was to prove that the phytosociological approach could be used in planning. In the course of the work, however, it turned out that it was extremely time-consuming to prove that it could be implemented in planning, and so we were forced to limit ourselves to the scientific focus, while planning aspects could only be touched on.
Udo Weilacher: So the systematic planning approach developed during your university studies, but where do the sources of your design work lie?
Dieter Kienast: I am basically a self-taught designer. I hardly learned anything about design from Professor Grzimek, and Professor Latz mainly taught the basics of planning theory. I therefore initially reproduced what I had seen from Fred Eicher, because his work was very different from anything I had seen before.
Udo Weilacher: Your preference for the work of the minimalist Carl André suggests that the art scene at the end of the sixties was of particular interest to you.
Dieter Kienast: I would rather speak of unconscious perception, which obviously left its mark. I remember, for example, the work by George Trakas as part of documenta 6 (3), consisting of a steel and a wooden bridge that were blown up at their intersection. I was very impressed by it, but at the time I never connected it with my work because I was too busy with plant sociology. If someone had asked me back then about my future plans, I would have seen my profession more in scientific and less in creative work.
Udo Weilacher: The plant sociologist obviously didn’t stick with his subject. Why?
Dieter Kienast: It wasn’t very satisfying to think that in future I would only be talking to about ten experts around the world about a specialist area of plant sociology. I went back to Zurich, became a partner in Peter Stöckli’s office and spent a year or two working on a wide range of projects: Designs, phytosociological mapping, degradation planning and so on. I soon realized that I wasn’t developing either in the design field or in plant sociology, and I finally decided to shift my focus entirely to design work. The ambition to achieve more certainly played a role in this, and in 1980 I finally became Professor of Garden Architecture at the Intercantonal Technical College in Rapperswil.
This was the start of an intensive exploration of design issues in collaboration with my colleagues Jürg Altherr and Peter Erni. Altherr is a sculptor with a degree in garden architecture. Peter Erni is an architect by training, taught art history and has astonishing theoretical knowledge, which he has never been able to combine with other disciplines. I tried to combine these different professional backgrounds in garden architecture study projects. Although this was sometimes confusing for the students, they learned that there are always different ideas and approaches when dealing with a project. Collaboration with representatives of other disciplines has always been something crucial for me.
Udo Weilacher: Do the Swiss garden architects Ernst Cramer and Fred Eicher serve as role models, are they still relevant to you today?
Dieter Kienast: At the beginning of the eighties, other things were topical than in 1995, but the work of Ernst Cramer still inspires me today, and I have hardly ever found the pleasant simplicity in the work of Fred Eicher in any other work. The deductive principle, the limitation to the few, but all the more powerful, made a lasting impression on me in both of them. Cramer certainly worked much more decisively, was more innovative and programmatic in his approaches. Fred Eicher’s works have no breaks and are always restrained. You can tell from his plans from the 1950s that he once studied under Hermann Mattern in Kassel. I still consider some of Eicher’s works to be the best that have been created in the last twenty to thirty years. These include the Eichbühl cemetery in Zurich. As a Swiss, both personalities were something like role models for me in the early days.
In contemporary landscape architecture, I consider Bernard Lassus to be of outstanding importance. His work is certainly not free of contradictions, but despite this – or perhaps because of it – it is one of the most exciting things I know at the moment. Lassus’ work is not only about the further development of theory, but also about the attempt at practical and poetic implementation. Ernst Cramer and Fred Eicher left me rather empty-handed in this respect over time, because the formal level played the more important role in their work. But it is precisely the successful connection between content and form that is decisive.
Theory is very important to me, because an important part of landscape architecture cannot be contested from the emotional level. In my opinion, the lamented lack of theory is indeed serious. I am not referring to planning theory, but to general cultural understanding, i.e. knowledge of garden history, art history, social theory and so on. Theory is part of the intellectual part of our work. If it’s just about baking pretty little shapes, then of course I don’t need any theory.
Udo Weilacher: For many landscape architects, the reference to historical garden design plays a particularly important role. How important is this reference to you?
Dieter Kienast: My intensive involvement with garden design was only forced upon me when I started teaching at university in the 1980s. I had to work my way through the history of garden art, so to speak, and in doing so I realized that many historical concepts are not outdated, but are still relevant today. But perhaps it is also outdated concepts that we are still dealing with? For me, however, there is no particularly interesting era in the history of garden design.
Udo Weilacher: How has your self-image changed over time?
Dieter Kienast: Shortly after starting my studies, I already had the feeling that I had mastered landscape architecture. Then in 1973 I won a national competition, and that was absolutely devastating. That was the first time I had the impression that I was really the best. At that time, I judged the work solely on the basis of whether I liked it or not. As you get older, you naturally become more self-critical and put such uncritical views into perspective. Working with students and colleagues helped me to develop my critical faculties. Only then did the first halfway decent designs emerge.
Udo Weilacher: Which projects do you consider to fall into this category?
Dieter Kienast: The Brühlpark in Wettingen is still one of the more successful projects for me today, not least because of its simple design means. The park has some minor flaws, as it was one of my first major projects. For example, I’m still not happy with the children’s play area because it simply doesn’t work well. There is also this narrow strip of ground that connects two adjacent streets, following the course of a main path and even crossing the circular water basin. For a while, I thought this strip was incredibly important in order to cover the entire width of the park. Today, this need is more of a mystery to me, because it only gives the appearance of logic. The need to remember certain things is no longer present today.
Incidentally, the reduction to very simple, almost archaic basic design principles arose back then from the need to make sense of the tight budget. This compulsion has the pleasant side effect that you have to discipline yourself. There are certainly some young colleagues who, in my opinion, had the misfortune of having too much money at their disposal. This sometimes resulted in terrible projects. Under these circumstances, the planning of the Brühlpark even led to a result with creative independence. The earth pyramids are reminiscent of Pückler and Cramer. I didn’t want this relationship, and it almost led to a new formal design with lots of hills, but in the end I left it at that because I felt that the park could only do with a few simple elements. The hills should form a contrast to the flat surroundings and the ridge of the Lägern.
Udo Weilacher: How would you describe your self-image as a landscape architect today?
Dieter Kienast: These are tricky questions. Recently, an architect asked me about my “message”. I replied: “Doing good things.”
Udo Weilacher: I assume that as a landscape architect you have a certain vision of the future quality of our living environment. One suspects a certain basic idea behind your gardens and landscapes.
Dieter Kienast: That’s right. But designing outdoor spaces is initially a relatively simple task. Difficulties only arise when you try to create a special place. For me, this is not a question of a particular style or the fixed use of certain materials and plants. For me, it’s more about dealing with my own possibilities. These arise from the accumulation of the individual cultural sediment that one carries within oneself. Of course, the location and the task at hand also play a decisive role. The combination of these factors always results in surprisingly diverse answers for me. It seems more like a coincidence to me when two works are suddenly constructed according to a similar concept. Sometimes the question of self-understanding arises. At such moments, I ask myself whether I can simply do anything without having to adhere to certain values.
Udo Weilacher: In your opinion, what relevance does garden art have in today’s society, in today’s culture?
Dieter Kienast: I’m not interested in the question of what the current state of garden art is or what garden art should be today. I don’t think it’s the job of the creators to answer this question. This discussion doesn’t take me any further. What do I gain from differentiating between what is garden art and what is not? There is a nice definition by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, according to which everything profane has nothing to do with art. If we want to follow this definition, there is no such thing as garden art. Perhaps we should rather speak of garden culture, as Leberecht Migge did, who avoided the problem quite elegantly. I feel unable to judge individual works according to whether they are art or not art. Let’s leave this discussion to theorists like Lucius Burckhardt, who can talk about it much more competently. Otherwise we run the risk that everyone will only work with a view to going down in the annals of garden art one day.
Udo Weilacher: But many of your projects don’t exactly support the thesis that landscape architecture is just a mundane, simple matter.
Dieter Kienast: When I said earlier that landscape architecture is basically a very simple matter, I wasn’t being coquettish, I was actually stating the facts. Despite the different approaches, solutions and concepts in our work, I can’t rule out that there are some projects that are almost frighteningly simple. Sometimes it really does boil down to the right tree in the right place, the path and perhaps a bench. Combining these things can sometimes be difficult and sometimes very simple, but the situation can always tell us afterwards whether it was a successful intervention. It’s a question of atmosphere, mood, poetry. I don’t want to bring the term beauty into play because it is associated with the alluring word of natural beauty, and this is always about loveliness. The outdoor space, the garden, can be lovely, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be.
I also like places that are commonly said not to be beautiful, because there is also a beauty in ugliness, a beauty that does not lull but frightens. I think it’s a tricky task to capture the character of a place, to preserve its authenticity. That’s why I always judge our work according to whether it captures the character of the place, its atmosphere. Sometimes this has nothing to do with either the formal means or the conceptual content.
Udo Weilacher: I remember a publication in which you described the fact that the profession is without a mission statement. That almost provokes the question of your own mission statement.
Dieter Kienast: I don’t have a mission statement. The fact is that our current social, political and religious situation is in limbo and there is very little we can do about it. The longer this state of limbo lasts, the more we tend to cling to certain principles or guiding principles. However, I find this state of limbo particularly exciting because it offers the opportunity to move freely and try things out. I’m always interested in that. Especially with small works, we often try out new concepts, materials and forms that we may never use again later. So if there is a characteristic approach, then it is constant trial and error.
Udo Weilacher: It sounds as if you don’t have a definitive standpoint in your own work. On the other hand, in publications and lectures you repeatedly formulate an extensive, practice-oriented collection of principles for dealing with open spaces[4]. This indicates a clear idea of what landscape architecture has to achieve.
Dieter Kienast: You know, postmodernism, for example, has often been misunderstood as a program that allows you to do anything. Of course, anything goes, but only in a limited area. I think it was Henry Ford who said that any color for a car was fine, as long as it was black. I believe that we do have clear conceptual ideas about our work, but the application of these concepts and principles is constantly changing and leads to different results that are not only formally different.
Surprisingly, most of our principles are generally supported because they are anything but unusual. For example, everyone will be concerned about the specificity of place. It is a problem that the aforementioned collection of principles contains statements that I would no longer write today, because some of them are so universally valid that everyone would agree without hesitation. Despite this agreement, completely different projects would end up being created. So if you ask me about our point of view, part of it is the realization that our own position has lost its unambiguousness. It has been replaced by ambivalence, simultaneity or ambiguity.
Udo Weilacher: Can you explain how the principles you mentioned have a concrete impact on the project?
Dieter Kienast: In Zurich, for example, we are working on a small house garden. The garden is in the middle of the city and the site is undercut by a railroad tunnel. We asked ourselves about the special character of the location and took up the theme of the earth as a constantly manipulated raw material. The garden had to be spatially enclosed, so we built a wall out of rammed earth that was extracted from the garden. The result was an ambivalent image, composed of the earth as garden ground, as raw material and the wall as a typical urban element. With the wall, the invisible becomes visible, because the earth, which is normally hidden behind the garden wall, becomes an enclosing frame in its typical color. I consider this easy-to-implement measure to be an ecological contribution in several respects.
In our own garden, which for us is a kind of playground for all kinds of experiments, there are large cut hedge figures. Visitors always ask what they are supposed to represent and I reply: “I don’t know either, what do you mean?” Ambiguity, both in the conception of our works and in their subsequent perceptibility, is important to us. We believe that the world in its complex interdependencies is so difficult to grasp as a whole that we can no longer afford to think in only one direction if we want to fulfill the claim of doing something for many. I learned from Bernard Lassus that there are very different levels that you have to read. That is perhaps the part of our principles that not everyone can subscribe to so easily.
Udo Weilacher: Your projects are created in collaboration with your wife Erika Kienast and the landscape architect Günther Vogt. How does this team work?
Dieter Kienast: We work together on completely different levels. I do discuss individual projects with my wife, and she points out any oddities that she thinks are problematic. But the indirect comments are much more important in our collaboration.
I have been working with Günther Vogt for about eight years. We understand each other spontaneously without many words. But we also discuss and argue with each other, pencil in hand. After the talking usually comes the action, the drawing. That’s often my part, but we always develop the basic concept together, if possible. Our projects are not created individually.
Udo Weilacher: Your wife is an art historian, which suggests that art plays an important role in your joint work. Which art do you attach particular importance to in your work?
Dieter Kienast: My preference is for minimal art and the musical concepts derived from it. Many a found object comes from this art movement. What interests me so much about these works is of course the reduction, the limitation to very few elements, the concept of clarity and logic. But because we don’t just work with dead materials such as concrete, steel and glass, but also with plants in a different context, there is no danger of simply adopting minimal art literally. That’s why I much prefer Minimal artists like Carl André and Donald Judd to Land Art artists. I already mentioned that the compulsion to be logical has been helpful for me. On the other hand, I have an innate tendency towards exuberance.
Udo Weilacher: So the reduction to the essentials is also a kind of self-discipline?
Dieter Kienast: There is certainly also a certain sense of order. We don’t have to create chaos because it arises of its own accord. This raises the question of whether I can or should create order. We counter chaos, which nature can provide us with to a certain extent, with order as a sustainable backbone. This requires discipline, including self-discipline. The dual principle of order and chaos naturally also exists in our own thoughts and actions and must be directed. I cannot think and draw at the same time, I have to do both alternately.
This reciprocal relationship certainly shapes the form of the free spaces. But the reduction also has a social background: the enrichment of the space happens by itself, while we have to ensure that we create a sustainable framework. If the shell is already full from the start, it cannot be filled any further, or the unbearable mass becomes a problem. We therefore have to limit ourselves to partially completing the picture.
Udo Weilacher: In addition to restrained austerity, what other ingredients are needed for an open-space design for poetry to unfold?
Dieter Kienast: Rigor alone can be very dogmatic. The design for Augustusplatz in Leipzig, for example, radiates a certain austerity at first glance. Only the targeted use of light brings the poetic moment into play. At night, the square unfolds a fascinating light experience thanks to two-tone floor lights. It is not the room that is illuminated, but the floor. I imagine the immersion in the subdued, colorful sea of lights to be very impressive. In Günthersburgpark in Frankfurt, it is a modern building that enhances the poetry of the situation by presenting itself like a medieval castle. In my opinion, there are different types of poetry. In Günthersburgpark, it is poetry with a romantic tinge.
Udo Weilacher: What is the difference between romanticized poetry and pure romanticism?
Dieter Kienast: Heightened romanticism is determined by indulging in feelings without any objective reflection being involved. Only at second glance do you realize that the supposedly medieval castle is actually a very clear box with a wall one hundred and thirty meters long and six meters high. This breaks the romantic image because the architectural language comes from a different context.
Udo Weilacher: Do you have a penchant for romanticism?
Dieter Kienast: Of course.
Udo Weilacher: You are one of the few who admit this so openly, because many people associate this term with the petty bourgeois, nationalistic or trivial.
Dieter Kienast: We just have different souls in us, and the romantic part is clearly pronounced in me: I climb in the mountains and enjoy the majesty of the Alps. Isn’t that the perfect romanticism? The criticism of romanticism doesn’t bother me at all, because there is another part of me that questions romanticism. I love going to the mountains, and after three days I long for the stench of exhaust fumes. I was mountain climbing on Mont Blanc some time ago and just when the tour became particularly difficult, I felt a great longing to be in the middle of the hustle and bustle, eating a Big Mac, sitting in the warmth and sitting in front of the TV.
Our garden is also romantically enchanted. Nevertheless, you suddenly find a ceramic square that has a completely different expression. I live in this polarity of romanticism on the one hand and the relationship to everyday reality, the rational, on the other. In any case, I believe that the romantic will become more important again in the future. When I think back to the International Horticultural Exhibition in Stuttgart in 1994, Romanticism had its place there too, but it was a different Romanticism to the one we represent. In the romanticism of the garden shows, I simply miss the enlightening part, perhaps even the intellectual approach. The fast-moving and superficial design language presented at the garden shows is just as repugnant to me as common and widespread so-called modern landscape design. The romanticism in our projects is always broken: Just before you dive into indulgence, you are made to think again.
Udo Weilacher: Is it true what was once written about you, that you create gardens for intellectuals?
Dieter Kienast: No, that statement is absolute nonsense. We don’t just want to do something that’s different, exciting and highly publicized, we’re interested in people. People in the city in particular have a right to experience a tree when they leave their house – think of Mr. K. by Bertolt Brecht. I believe that we have to learn again how to deal with these seemingly burdened, supposedly unfashionable elements and aspects.
Romanticism is part of this, as is the sophisticated use of plants, which we have criminally neglected. For a very long time, we enjoyed creating gardens and grounds that were very similar to the architects’ treeless designs. We thought that was terribly progressive. The tendency to appear a little outlandish played far too great a role. It’s not my intention to do anything particularly different. If people still like our designs, I’m pleased and surprised at the same time.
We built a very small garden for a mathematician. I found the plans and the realized project very beautiful and very disciplined. The poetry in this garden comes at best from the arrangement of the plants, which we placed in geometric rows. In the end, the mathematician also liked it very much, but at the beginning we always have the greatest difficulty in finding the necessary acceptance for our designs. The basic structure of our plants is relatively rigid, and it always has a clear dominance at the beginning. It is only later that a certain balance is achieved as the vegetation develops. Vegetation plays a very important role in our designs.
Udo Weilacher: In addition to vegetation, the word also plays an important role as an inscription or as a sculptural element in some of your projects. It seems reasonable to assume that your inspiration also comes from other art movements – I’m thinking of works by Ian Hamilton Finlay, for example.
Dieter Kienast: Yes, of course, Ian Hamilton Finlay is definitely one of my favorites. I find his one-word poems extremely fascinating. But in architecture today we are also experiencing how the absorption of information via words is becoming increasingly important, because people find it easier to deal with the written word than with architectural language. What we would find difficult to achieve with other means in the garden, we can achieve very quickly with the word, for example playing with ambiguity.
The word is legible, can be thought-provoking and we can also use words to put people in a certain mood, which is very important to us in our work. Finlay is sometimes accused of his work being comprehensible only to intellectuals. But I think that such interventions are easy to read, especially for those who don’t have extensive analytical knowledge. For EXPO 2000 in Hanover, we proposed Laurie Anderson’s sentence “Paradise is just where you are” in five-meter-high letters in the entrance area to a parking strip. You don’t need an intellectual flight of fancy to decipher this sentence.
Udo Weilacher: The catalog of your first exhibition is entitled “Between Arcadia and Remnant”. What do you associate with the term Arcadia?
Dieter Kienast: For me, Arcadia is synonymous with the longing to always be somewhere else. This longing to escape all problems is certainly in all of us. But there are always both in our garden designs: the paradisiacal and everyday life. The break is intrinsic. Without the break, we would run the risk of slipping into the banal.
Udo Weilacher: So you’re not interested in harmonizing the breaks at any price.
Dieter Kienast: No, we cultivate the breaks. That’s for sure. My own life is also characterized by fractures that create tension. Sometimes it’s a bit exhausting, but it brings with it the discovery of new horizons of experience and the expansion of sensory fields. The outside space must be a sensual place. These experiences can only be made at breaking points between the poles. The design process is therefore always an oscillation between opposites.
Udo Weilacher: In your projects, you don’t shy away from collaborating with the sister disciplines of architecture, engineering and sculpture, but regard cooperation as a matter of course, from which mutual innovation arises.
Dieter Kienast: That’s right. During the ten years of my apprenticeship in Rapperswil, for example, I never worked with landscape architects, but always with artists such as Jürg Altherr and Esther Gisler. I later realized projects with both of them. Lately, we’ve been working less with artists and more with architects. I really appreciate this collaboration, although working in sync with other disciplines is not always necessary. Sometimes we are quite happy not to be the first on site, because certain framework conditions are then already set and some fundamental problems no longer need to be overcome.
Udo Weilacher: Artists are always envied the fact that, unlike landscape architects, they have a great deal of freedom.
Dieter Kienast: We have this freedom too, for sure. I have noticed that architecture students always have a lot of trouble when they first come into contact with landscape architecture, because there is usually no fixed program that has to be fulfilled. It therefore seems obvious that, unlike other disciplines, we have a lot of freedom.
Udo Weilacher: What about meeting the diverse sociological, ecological and functional requirements of open space?
Dieter Kienast: I’m not saying that we have to take everything into account at the same time and at all times. The ecological approach can also be fulfilled in the smallest projects without it having to be dominant. However, ecology is no longer a separate issue for us because it is now a natural part of every project. This means that we don’t make a big fuss about the ecological qualities of our projects. For example, we use less and less technically refined materials and always think about the infiltration of surface water and so on. That has something to do with ecology, but it’s not the main focus.
I consider purely functional thinking to be much more problematic. Think of urban planning in the former GDR, for example. The functional approach and the attempt to always and everywhere respond optimally to functional requirements and spatial demands led to a loss of coherence between the urban elements, the quality and meaningfulness of the urban space. The result was completely indifferent open spaces. Of course, the same problems also occurred to a lesser extent in large western housing projects. Expediency must not become the measure of all things. Ecology must not become the measure of all things either.
Udo Weilacher: Artistic freedom must not become the measure of all things either?
Dieter Kienast: No. But if you see user participation as the counterpart to artistic freedom, you have to be aware that the results after twenty years of citizen participation are so modest that this approach should also be shelved as quickly as possible. It is now clear that the possibilities for exerting influence are so limited that the results do not differ significantly between participatory projects and purely architectural designs. Although there is the saying that everyone should have the right to have their wishes realized, no matter how wrong they may be, in my opinion this does not apply to public space.
Perhaps the call for more artistic work should be seen as a signal to rely less on majority decisions and more on independent work. Too often, planners have hidden behind the majority decisions of users in discussions. In Switzerland, we know that the majority is not always right. So we are not advocating compliance, but unlimited freedom is not the antipode either.
Udo Weilacher: In the USA and Europe, Martha Schwartz’s daring designs and her claim to freedom are causing a lot of discussion about art and landscape architecture.
Dieter Kienast: Martha Schwartz claims to be an artist. I think she does this because she doesn’t want to be attacked, neither by planners nor by ecologists. Limiting herself to purely aesthetic work is therefore something of a rearguard action. It is perhaps too simple. Nevertheless, there is something very refreshing and liberating about her work. However, I am of the opinion that we work in the public sphere and determine part of people’s everyday lives with our plans. There is a difference between working in a gallery, in the Nevada desert, in a private garden or in a public park. We have a responsibility that we cannot simply keep at bay by referring to artistic freedom or participatory protection.
Rather, it is about constantly examining the quality and validity of our own actions, developing mental alertness and formulating recent answers to Adorno’s old question: How can a certain purpose become space, in which forms and in which material? Architectural imagination would therefore be the ability to articulate space through purposes, to allow them to become space, to erect forms for purposes.
[1] MORRIS Robert, quoted from THOMAS, Karin: Sachwörterbuch zur Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Cologne, 1989
[2] from the explanatory report of the 1991 competition.
[3] “Union Pass”, Kassel 1977
[4] cf. Kienast, Dieter: “Ohne Leitbild” in Garten + Landschaft 11/86, p.34 ff
Also interesting: With his 1992 theses, Dieter Kienast drew attention to the conservative, traditional self-image of his profession and called for it to be critically questioned. A good 20 years later, his appeal has lost none of its topicality. Read more here in the text by Udo Weilacher: Thesen Landschaftsarchitektur.
