Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements

by Jane Hutton

How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed? Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements traces five everyday landscape construction materials-fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood-from seminal public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from.

Drawing from archival documents, photographs, and field trips, the author brings these two separate landscapes-the material's source and the urban site where the material ended up-together, exploring themes of unequal ecological exchange, labor, and material flows. Each chapter follows a single material's movement: guano from Peru that landed in Central Park in the 1860s, granite from Maine that paved Broadway in the 1890s, structural steel from Pittsburgh that restructured Riverside Park in the 1930s, London Plane street trees grown on Rikers Island by incarcerated workers that were planted on 7th Avenue north of Central Park, and the popular tropical hardwood, ipe, from northern Brazil installed in the High Line in the 2000s.

Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements considers the social, political, and ecological entanglements of material practice, challenging readers to think of materials not as inert products but as continuous with land and the people that shape them, and to reimagine forms of construction in solidarity with people, other species, and landscapes elsewhere.

Genres: Sustainability, Architecture, Material Culture

240 pages, ebook

Published September 20, 2019

Reviews

[Patty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Important book about how and where materials are sourced and the long-term implications of our globalized system which has become so ubiquitous. I particularly want to follow the set of tools that WWF launched to help designers navigate overwhelming literature in wood selection, in order to find lesser-known timber species. Also quite interested to keep track of the NY Park department’s re-exploration of sewage sludge (processed and referred to as “biosolids”) as a means for tending to the Great Lawn in Central Park.

(A note for myself:
Lastly, I appreciate the format of this book: mapping 5 materials from around the world to their final resting place in NYC, covered in chronological order (starting in 1862 with Guano transported from Chincha Islands to Central Park and ending with Ipe from the Amazon to phase one of the High Line in 2009). Seems that Sutton charted this idea early on and then traveled to these places where the respective materials are sourced and took site photographs and spoke with people on the ground. A systematic model of scholarship to learn from).

[Grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was truly eye opening for me. It was super well organized and written, making a complex topic digestible. The introduction did a great job preparing the reader for the information by explaining the main ideas and introducing each subtopic. Then each of the sections dove deep into a materials and its related landscape within New York. The author picked well known locations to make it easy for the reader to picture, while also including detailed yet beautiful descriptions and images. The book is also narrated in first person, making it easy to imagine yourself in the place, talking to the people, etc. It was clear that the author did an immense amount research, but I never felt overwhelmed by information. My main critique was that at times it felt like the author went on a tangent. I also did not always agree with the organization within the subtopic, as it sometimes skipped around between places. Overall I found this book super interesting, eye opening, and informative.