Fourth Nature
by Edith Katz
"But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence...illusion only is sacred, truth profane."
Feuerbach as quoted in Guy de Bord's The Society of the Spectacle
FOURTH NATURE
The natural environment as modified by man was viewed by Cicero, in ancient times, as a second or another nature: an overlay to the first, original, nature which was untouched and untrammelled earth. "We sow corn and plant trees. We fertilize the soil by irrigation. We dam the rivers to guide them where we will. One may say that we week with our human hands to create a second nature in the natural world." Later, during the Renaissance, the concept of the garden as a recreated or third nature emerged. A synthetic distillation, it was fashioned of man's interventions with the raw material of nature organized, altered and perfected through art.1 Today, our technological culture stands on the threshold of another dimension to this theme. Only the era into which we are entering will explode the notion of third nature beyond anything previously experienced into a fourth mode which will produce results in the built environment and corresponding effects upon all fields of knowledge, reorder our world view and definition of reality. Concealed within recent and future manipulations of the natural world, its processes and appearances by emerging technologies, lies a new view of nature that will continue to alter our relationship to that base line referent which humanity once innocently related to as absolute meaning, measurement and value. Discoveries and applications across diverse fields of knowledge indicate the direction towards which we are moving: reproduction of the real from natural models or the generation of models without origin in simulation.2 The icon of this emergent direction is, unquestionably, cyberspace. But consider also, the growing capacity of biomedical technology to clone, to perform organ transplants, or complete in vitro fertilisation all of which permit dramatic interventions into that most personal of all natural sites, the human body. Complexity and chaos theory are rapidly advancing the ability of researchers to computer model Artificial Intelligence (AI) based upon new sciences of emergent behavior systems. As a result, biotechnology discoveries in robotics and advanced software development will engender a " Brave New World of artificial life."3 Laser holography, one of the most realistic modes of representation ever invented permits the fabrication of a fully believeable, yet virtual, three dimensional image. In tourism, manufactured memories are eliminating all the anxieties and replacing real experience by synthetic travel. The Disney Institute, a resort village in Orlando, will offer faux travels to participants who can tour the world, for example, St. Peter's Basilica, Austria, or Japanese Gardens virtually on the computer. Cruise lines, running out of interesting ports of call are purchasing their own islands where they are manufacturing exotic environments in simulation. Native shops, a sunken airplane, a fake shipwreck provides everything a Caribbean island is supposed to offer.4 Artificial destinations like Phoenix World City, a town that floats, is anticipated to be built by the year 2000. Being planned by a corporation calling itself World City, the vessel will offer the atmosphere of a charming European village plus provide the amenities of an eductional and cultural center. The future is likely to contain other simulistic adventures: high-risk activities such as river rafting or sports car races will build upon current virtual reality experiences. In the built environment, complex technological constructions reproduce natural systems -- Biosphere; or simulate a city -- Disney's Celebration in Florida; or replicate cultural antecents through themed architecture like the proposed development for Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks which will reproduce Cape Cod vernacular in southern Los Angeles; or produce hyperreal fantasy zones of escapism for consumption and leisure in contemporary theme parks or commercial themed environments.
THEMED LANDSCAPE ENVIRONMENTS: LAS VEGAS
Recent phenomena
in Las Vegas exhibit a new orientation of the casino towards a kind of
mega-hotel complex that contains everything within itself -- a mini-city.
This realm is a full, fantasy themed destination where the experience is
just to go inside. Outside, a newly commandeered territory, at the front
of the casino -- along the Strip -- is creating an equally startling new
pedestrian zone with a street presence reminiscent of what Jay Sarno had
constructed in front of Caesars' Palace in the 50's. Today at Caesars,
a three dimensional environment currently entices with rows of clipped
Cypress that line glitzy fountains and large reflecting pools of water
in front of the casino and hotel buildings which, at night, are bathed
in an aquamarine colored light.
Copies of white Classical sculpture gleam amidst triumphal arches, moving
sidewalks and flaming braziers while gold painted fiberglass centurions
stand guard over the imperial realm. The entire ensemble is a fantastic
lure for the public providing them with a preview of the 'grandeur that
was Rome'. New casino/resort complexes are evolving theming into multi-billion
dollar extravaganzas which combine hotel programs with a variety of entertainments
and attractions into a single experience. A vegetal landscape, deployed
as ornament, for screening, buffering, shaping spaces, micro-climate modification
also helps to create an atmosphere, a setting and a background for the
architecture and the activities: housing (hotel rooms), parks, pools, entertainment,
restaurants, chapels, spa and shops. But an elaborate, exterior themed
landscape is frequently the real trope; the first experience the tourist
has of the casino along the Strip and a promise of what they will find
inside. These three dimensional environments, ensembles of structure and
contrived nature, capture the distracted attention of the roving audience
along the Vegas Strip. They are replacing the electrographic sign and the
building-as-sign,5 dematerializing the very presence of
the building while animating a new pedestrian experience in what has been,
the archetypal, auto dominated Strip.
"Las Vegas isn't phony anything: it has its own resounding, relentless identity. And Vegas is arguably the most interesting American city of the moment, the city most informed by the current state of American mass culture. The Las Vegas strip, long shaped by car culture, is now generating sidewalk extravaganzas aimed at a neglected desert species, the pedestrian...The attempt to make the Strip a continuous, mesmerizing wall of marketing has created, without benefit of planning, one of the most pedestrian-oriented urban scenes in the Western U.S."
The sudden inclusion
and expansion of landscape in the new casino formula places it within a
context of leisure, consumption and entertainment in new proportions and
relations. If Las Vegas is an indication of the most concrete manifestation
of the postmodern city then it also is a microcosm for the global processes
of capital which has affected other spatial productions, 
namely
architecture which within the context of leisure, comfort and entertainment
has been termed: 'architainment'. 7 The introduction and
intensification of landscape for entertainment and consumption in Vegas
corresponds to the re-invention and further development of the garden as
spectacle and artifice. Historically, we can find antecedents for the theme
park in gardens,8 for spectacles, for the creation of
elsewhere or ideal worlds, for fantasy, for the recontextualization of
the past in the present. Historically different social, cultural and economic
conditions produced these antecedents and the audience was also different.
The 18th century audience, for example, was formed from a social elite,
educated in the classical allusions to which the garden referred, who was
invited to associate and speculate upon the garden meanings. In the late
twentieth century, the contemporary tourist of mass culture is primarily
a passive spectator prepped by mass media, Disney and the whole edifice
of detached signifiers (images) and their consumption. This audience, which
tours Las Vegas, is locked into a specific social relationship with the
object world, which is to say that of the commodity, and it extends to
the consumption of a built environment like Las Vegas.9
THE ROLE OF LANDSCAPE
Why
do we see landscape becoming more significant in the new casino formats?
Formerly, landscape was either ignored or relegated to the margins, if
considered at all, as decoration on the edges of the casino's site. In
the major new casinos, however, landscape is fast becoming one of the chief
attractions. At the Bellagio, being built by the Mirage consortium, the
theme of northern Italian landscape plus European aristocratic elegance
will encorporate garden elements in dramatically new proportions. An extensive
landscape design of formal gardens, Cypress tree allees, man-made lakes,
water pools, fountains and courtyards will wrap the hotel on three sides,
not just appear at the front along the Strip, and also penetrate the building.
This tendency towards greater conceptual fusion between architecture and
landscape is further suggested by Antoine Predock's (unbuilt) Hotel Atlantis
project.
"This hotel is Atlantis; light emanates from a realm below, fragments of a subterranean culture erupt. The hotel proper ascends from a fractured, tectonic plateau -- established by the patterns of shattered glass...A realm of water carves through the plateau at the base of the hotel. The watercourse leads to a ramp; from there one can climb the building's nautilus spiral. A sixty-foot deep vortex of salt water drills into the earth; divers can explore hidden grottoes and a reef. The light that shimmers from the depths of the vortex implies a connection to a power source below. The view from the casino into the vortex is a further extension of Las Vegas' surrealism."10
Is the significance of landscape in the new casinos to elaborate the theme, to entertain, add excitement, to act as a scenic backdrop? Or, is the role of landscape semiotic, as well? It is in this latter role, arguably, that landscape contributes the most subtle and effective meanings. Nothing naturalizes like 'nature' and a vegetal landscape, for example, grounds our experience in the here and now with living, biological life forms that can make fantasy appear as if part of the natural order. A vegetal landscape also provides context, connotes duration and stability. It provides a terrain which seguays the boundaries of reality and fantasy. Landscape is like connective tissue that makes possible a seamless connection from the reality of everyday life into the fantasy of themed constructions: "... a 'land of illusion' where one is never far removed from nature."11 But since it is a nature far different from the hostile, barren desert actually surrounding Las Vegas, the artificially constructed and maintained nature of the the casinos intentionally and radically totally alters conditions so that you forget where you are and where you have come from. This facilitates total immersion into the fantasy world at the themed destination resort/casino. In theme parks, the vegetal landscape provides a continuous background blending different fantasy events into a single landscape experience. At Las Vegas, themed landscape design strategically eases the threshold between fantasy and ordinary life making the imagined experience more believable within and without. Fantasy constructions acquire greater vivcity as they are embedded within an artificial nature. At Las Vegas, an urban realm, as differentiated from Disney parks, a tourist can wander in and out of the everyday life of the city or enter the invented worlds each casino has to offer. Landscape provides the glue and the cinematic dissolve from one parallel universe to another.
VOLCANOES, GROTTOES, SPECTACLES AND SUCCESSIVE STAGES IN THE SIMULACRA
Two adjacent casinos on the Strip, the Mirage and the Treasure Island are united by variations on a tropical landscape theme. The Flaming Volcano, at the Mirage, can be considered the great ornament in a Polynesian landscape theme complemented by waterfalls, lagoons and grottos. By day an enormous gushing fountain, at night the technological wonder comes alive every fifteen minutes rumbling, shaking the sidewalks, shooting flames 40 feet into the air and simulating flowing lava with a computerized lighting system. Reproducing forms of geologic life through artifice has a long and varied landscape history. Reconstructing, imitating and counterfeiting nature are deeply embedded conventions in landscape architecture which through time have taken shape in artfully constructed artifical formations of jagged rocks, bodies of water, lakes, canals, meandering streams.
Consider a comparison
and contrast of one such geologic construction, the grotto with the Flaming
Volcano. Also based upon a naturally occuring phenomenon, essentially a
water-cave, 
the
grotto was originally considered a sacred spirit place by the ancients
and later came to be a frequent ornament common to the Renaissance and
Baroque garden where it was still associated with the home of mythical
and supernatural beings. Observable in a variety of representations (abstractions
of a basic reality) from realistic imitation to highly stylized architectural
abstraction grotto constructions played with the tension between nature
and art. At the Villa Farnese at Caprarola in 1570, a grotto truly "counterfeited
nature's own."12 The naturalistic details were produced
by tartar and pumice combined with water trickling through the stones which
simulated the natural phenomena. Satyrs and nymph herm figures supported
the rustic vault: the interplay between nature and art plus the suggestion
of spirit life remained intact.
The more realistic the simulacra becomes, obviously, the greater the illusion and correspondingly the less psychological distance there is for contemplation or reflection required from it as a work of art. In our American culture, realism, as a representational strategy, is an obsession for the popular imagination -- especially where fantasy is concerned -- for it "demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake; where the boundaries between game and illusion are blurred."13 At the hotel Luxor, Las Vegas, the replication of King Tut's tomb involved an Egyptologist verifying that all the pieces built there were correct; down to the deer leather which had to be substituted for the original antelope leather for binding pieces together. The Luxor pyramid is not an exact replica of the Great Pyramid -- liberties had to be taken: first it is black glass and has the ambiguous aura of Darth Vadar-like dark presence on the desert combined with a mysterious ancient/future iconic quality. Second, the apex had to be lowered to avoid planes and the Sphinx (twice the size of the original) was enlarged to scale down the bulk of the hotel.
This condition of evocative mixing of historic accuracies with inaccuracies, vagueness and blurred boundaries between the real and the fake is characteristic to contemporary themed environments which depend upon hyperrealistic construction as their principle strategy. The themed environment makes fantasy real in simulation while eliminating the distinction between the representation and its referent. Furthermore, the hyperreal aims to abolish the difference between true and false altogether which is precisely why this mode of experience can seem so threatening to our sense of reality.14
The difference between the representation of grottos from previous centuries and our own Flaming Volcano lies precisely with the distinction between stages of the simulacra.15 The grotto, in Beaudrillard's theory, would be a 'theatrical counterfeit...technique submits entirely to analogy and to the effect of semblance."16 It plays with the metaphysical difference (which comprises the beauty and charm of the abstraction) between Being and appearance; and "never abolished (the) difference. It supposes an always detectable alteration between semblance and reality...art lives entirely off this gap."17 The Volcano, on the other hand, is a tour de force special effects machine which creates an operational double or establishes an equivalent reality (to the one upon which it is based). As a later stage in the procession of the simulacra it "simplifies the problem by the absorption of appearances, or by the liquidation of the real... "18
Down the street from the Mirage, the Polynesian tropical landscape transitions into a Pirate Village that is at once absolutely realistic and absolutely fantastic, at the base of the Treasure Island hotel/casino. "You see a pseudo-Caribbean village, overhung with palms. Stuccoed houses -- sun-faded pink, tan, yellow or seaweed green---sprout ivy from their eaves. Some of the mullioned windows have intricately carved frames, faded and cracked by the sun. The weathered wharf is a jumble of wooden kegs and coiled hawsers. Draped over an upside-down longboat that has been hauled ashore are drying sails. A fire burns in an outdoor hearth. Docked in the harbor is the Hispaniola, a full-size reproduction of a pirate ship, manned by bearded salts wearing ripped breeches and rings in their ears, as nasty a crew as central casting could provide. Every 90 minutes, huge crowds watch a British frigate sail around the hotel and confront the riff-raff on the Hispaniola."19
The
mock battle on Buccaneer Bay at the Treasure Island is pure garden theater
and water spectacle both of which have historic landscape architectural
precedents. Water spectacles existed in ancient cultures and the garden
as theater emerged during the Renaissance where "the search for ways
to transform the real world by creating illusions of indefinitely extended
space, and in the manipulation of symbols for emotional and psychological
purposes..."20 shaped both gardens and theater traditions
simultaneously. The Baroque form of garden spectacle reached hitherto unknown
elaboration at Versailles where among other amazing contrivances for his
elaborate fetes, Louis XIV staged mock battles and elaborate fireworks
on the grand canals of the garden. Antecedents for reconstructed geographies
occurs at Little Tivoli beside the Fountain of Rome, in the Villa d'Este.
The ancient city of Rome was represented in miniature in a large piazza
at the end of the Alley of the Hundred Fountains. A miniature Tiber River
flowed in front of the urban landscape (now destroyed).
By comparison to
Little Tivoli, the diorama -like stage set of Buccaneer Bay presents us
with a powerful, life size three dimensional image which we can enter.
Everything is rendered with the same degree of realism down to the wooden
(concrete imitating wood) piers of the harbor. The buildings which tumble
down the fake rocks of the island where it reaches a juncture with the
imaginary sea are lessons learned from movie sets and Disney imagineers
of which one cannot help but admire the pure and absolute fakery.
The inclusion of a fictional water battle performed by living men in historic
garb increases the levels of illusion for the spectator who finds himself
standing elbow to elbow within the hallucination. By contrast, the stone
tableau of Little Tivoli makes a miniaturized world which arrests time
and offers a "transcendent and simultaneous view ...yet is trapped
outside the possibility of a lived reality of the miniature."21
As some have suggested, Las Vegas is the city from which we can view the most recent trends of our culture in their maximum manifestation then there continues to be reason to learn from it. Emerging phenomena there, in the commercial realm, demonstrate that landscape has moved into a fourth mode or what Beaudrillard would call, an advanced stage of the simulacra which is characterized by hyperrealism and simulation. This should have profound significance for the theory and practice of landscape architecture which traditionally bases its purview on the relationship between culture and nature; on natural phenomena for its material, for its representations either imitative or abstract and upon the natural order, as the reality touchstone. This conception of reality, however, is receding and our world view is being reconceptualized by different operations from new technologies characterised by fabrication, manipulation, and supremely realistic reproduction whose effect is simulation. This augments the domination of nature which began with the Scientific Revolution. It will affect all fields of endeavor. In the built environment, natural space and experience is already disappearing and will be surpassed by artifical zones. More importantly, with the spectre of simulation the play between Being and appearance, art and nature, will be eliminated. Thus, it becomes "no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself..."22 Since simulation does not require an original -- it can be the production of models without origin -- ( as in the Hotel Atlantis) in the future, landscape simulation may or may not take nature as the model. What this will look like is anybody's guess as the vista opens up to possibilities of unlimited imagination for artificial environments but not without corresponding ontological consequences as the reality principle becomes increasingly warped to the curvature of a world of synthesized spatial productions.
Whatever happened to nature? Well, apparently it's still out there. We know because once in a while we see it at the movies." 23
1. Claudia Lazzaro. The Renaissance Garden. pp 8-10. Yale University Press. 1990.
2. Jean Beaudrillard. Simulations. Semio-Texte.
3. Chris Langton as quoted in Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop. Langton further states: "By the middle of this century mankind had acquired the power to extinguish life on Earth. By the middle of the next century, he will be able to create it. Of the two, it is hard to say which places the larger burden of responsibility on our shoulders. Not only the specific kinds of living things that will exist, but the very course of evolution itself will come more and more under our control." p 283. A Touchstone Book. Simon & Shuster. 1992.
4. "We actually built an old Spanish galleon and sank it," says vice president of marketing Rod McLeod, referring to the concrete replica of a 300- year-old ship that Royal Caribbean placed in the harbor so that snorkelers will discover it. The company also sank a small plane. The island is not marred by anything unseemly -- the galleon is cleaned up every few months and the vendors are not allowed to stroll the beach pushing their wares." Quoted from Conde Nast Traveler. p 42. January 1996.
5. Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas. Revised Edition. MIT Press. 1994.
6. Morris Newman. Progressive Architecture. Feb., 1995.
7. Blair Kamin, architecture critic at the Chicago Tribune, has coined this term for the new fantasy hotel/casino in Vegas.
8. One of which is certainly The Parc Monceau that was just outside Paris. First a princely garden then in 1773-1779, Carmontelle is charged to design a picturesque park in which "to reunite in one garden all times and all places". He erects a number of strange fantasies or 'fabriques' and arranges them in a linear sequence along a curvalinear path. An Italian vineyard and a wood of exotic trees, a working farm with stables, Gothic ruins, Temple of White Marble, a Tartar tent and camel, to mention a few. Jardins en France, 1760-1820, Caisse National des Monuments, Historiques et desSites. Paris.
9. Guy de Bord. Society of the Spectacle. Zone Books.1994.
10. Antoine Predock in Antoine Predock Architect. pp. 208-215. Rizzoli, New York.
11. Carmontelle, designer of the Parc Monceau, speaking of the park as quoted in: Jardins en France, 1760-1820, Caisse National des Monuments, Historiques et des Sites. Paris. p 11.
12. Claudia Lazzaro. The Italian Renaissance Garden. p 59. Yale University Press. 1990.
13. Umberto Eco. Travels in Hyper Reality. p 8. Harvest Books. 1983.
14. Jean Beaudrillard. Simulations. " The very definition of the real has become: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction...The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced: that is, the hyperreal...which is entirely in simulation." Quote appears on the book cover. Semio-Texte.
15. J. Beaudrillard. Simulations. p 94. "The Orders of Simulacra."
16. J. Beaudrillard. Simulations. p 92.
19. Richard Wolkomir. "Las Vegas meets la-la land." Smithsonian. Oct. 1995.
20. Wm. Howard Hunt. The French Garden. p 63. New York: Braziller, Inc., 1979.
21. Susan Stewart. On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. p 66. Duke University Press. Durham and London. 1933.
22. J. Beaudrillard. Simulations. p 4.
23. Bernard Welt. "The Nature of Drag." In: Mythomania. p 46. Art Issues Press. Los Angeles.