From Industrial Wasteland to Italian Garden: Peter and Anneliese Latzes' Approach to Postindustrial Landscapes and the Grotesque Language of Bomarzo
Open Access
- Author:
- Saltarella, Michael
- Graduate Program:
- Landscape Architecture
- Degree:
- Master of Science
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- March 11, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Roxi Thoren, Program Head/Chair
Paul Daniel Marriott, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Denise Rae Costanzo, Committee Member
Peter Aeschbacher, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Peter Latz
Bomarzo
Postindustrial Landscapes
Grotesque
Italian Gardens
Anneliese Latz - Abstract:
- Peter Latz (b. 1939) repeatedly cites the Italian mannerist garden, the Sacro Bosco (Sacred Wood) in Bomarzo, Italy (c. 1560-1584) in connection with his masterwork, Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord, (Duisburg North Landscape Park) in Duisburg-Meiderich, Germany (1990-2002). While there are immediate formal similarities between the daunting figures of mythical giants and beasts at the Sacro Bosco to the looming gas towers and rusted blast furnaces at Duisburg, the importance of the Sacro Bosco for Peter Latz goes beyond mere monstrous iconography. For Latz, the Sacro Bosco offered a conceptual language, a way to engage with the misunderstood monsters dwelling in twentieth-century postindustrial landscape. In order to understand the conceptual significance of mannerist Italian gardens for Latz, I argue we need to return to Peter and Anneliese Latz’s (from 1990’ Latz + Partner) earlier project the Hafeninsel (River Port Island) in Saarbrücken, Germany (1985-1989). This thesis looks back into deep landscape history to argue that there is a conceptual parallel between the Latzes’ “Syntactic” Concept for the River Port Island and the use of the mannerist grotesque at Bomarzo. The Renaissance discourse of the grotesque identifies designs that fantastically invent unexpected adjacencies, breaking down the hierarchical dualistic paradigms between the classically beautiful and their mundane other, challenging contemporary canonical paradigms of the beautiful. At the Sacro Bosco, this is manifested in the ways in which its design challenges sixteenth-century paradigms of the giardino all’Italiana found at Villa Lante and Villa Farnese. The Sacro Bosco creates a nexus between garden and bosco, blending designed and vernacular landscape types that break down the hierarchy between the formal orderly garden and the marginal disorderly bosco. Four hundred years later, the Latzes’ design for the River Port Island explores a design syntax that challenges the ‘natural’ picturesque aesthetic of sylvan groves, pastoral open meadows, and meandering paths to transform postindustrial wastelands. The syntactic mingles another disturbing form of nature — found in the vernacular industrial wasteland — with classical geometric languages used throughout historic western garden design. Through the creative transformation of Renaissance landscape design, the Latzes produce a new postindustrial landscape that breaks down the hierarchy between classical geometric garden design and its marginal other found in the postindustrial wastelands of their native West Germany. Ultimately, this thesis asserts the continuing relevance of historical landscapes to contemporary postindustrial landscapes and the grotesque as a way for landscape architects to imaginatively explore and represent marginalized postindustrial wastelands in new unfamiliar ways.