Across the american landscape

The airplane is the most visible of a great range of modern technologies that have progressively amhilated space by time over the course of this century

• David Matles: "A modern Stream: water, landscape, modernism, and geography"

The streamline implied more than just speed -the latest stage in the conquest of space by time; it also implied rational, scientific efficiency through adjustment to natural flows. Water and air always follow the path of least resistance around obstacles

• Le corbusier: "Aircraft: the new vision 1935"

The eye now sees in substance what the wind could subjectively conceive; (the view from the air) is a new function added to our senses; it is a new standard of measurement; it is the basis of a new sensation. man will make use of it to conceive new aims. Cities will arise out of their ashes

• Mc. Harg: "Design with nature"

Paradoxically, the view from above induces both humility and sense of omnipotent power
*Mc. Harg va utilitzar en el seu estudi -ecological landscape planning- fotografies del planeta terra realitzades des del satèlit Apolo

One must view with skepticism, then, those who claim to art upon the land with confidence and certainly (as might the "master-planner" for example), because such actions (measures) are always predicated upon a particular fiction, a representation (itself measured) that is not only ideologically loaded but also subject to shift and revision over time.

To appreciate the essential character of the American landscape, it is first necessary to understand how its appearance is an envolving expression of American ways of life and other material practices.

The American landscape, like the culture it embodies, is a magnificient paradox.

The aporia of modern measure is characterized by a general confusion of meaning and relationship between art and science, culture and nature, or objectivity and subjetivity.

TRADITIONAL MEASURES

1) The sources of traditional measures were the concrete experinces of everyday life... The movement of the planets, the rhythm of the seasons *Ref. Platón, els trascendentals del ser

2) Its development through the relationship of the human body to physical activities and materials... "day of field", "hands", "a stone's throw away"...

Both the phenomenal and imaginative dimensions of reality were earlier uses of measure and geometry...

Such measures made coherent the relationships between people, place, activity, morality, and beauty.

MODERN MEASURES

Measures assumed an increasingly autonomous and self-referential place in human Knowledge, becoming less and less connected to experiential and culturally situated origins.

• Le Corbusier:

The earth is our clock... One, thirty, three hundred and sixty five, those are the units by wich our undertakings must be measured

Because the human condition is finite and intimately bound to all other life on the planet, such measures belong to a world that is founded upon the values of hope, respect and humility. Poetic and fitting, measures of faith belong to a form of awiting, admitting, and opening that presumes neither closure nor certainly