Reviving the Sublime

“When you rely on emotional [design] language like nostalgia or enchantment, you can’t create work that has a broad relevance,” explained landscape architect Robin Winogrond, co-founder of the Swiss firm Studio Vulkan, in a recent lecture at Harvard GSD (In Search of Geographical Re-Enchantment). “That’s why I pursue re-enchantment.”

What differentiates enchantment from re-enchantment? Winogrond draws from myriad sources, including poetry, visual art, anthropology, and phenomenology (specifically Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception). For the architect, enchantment speaks to the emotional, even metaphysical sensation of encountering a natural space for the first time. There is no perception of oneself in this interaction; the viewer is fully absorbed in the experience of encountering something other (what the Romantics called the Sublime or the “agreeable horror”). With re-enchantment, the viewer still experiences the arresting qualities of the space but stays rooted in his body the second time around—more importantly, he is keenly aware of his own self experiencing the space. Winogrond calls this a “marriage between what is happening inside and outside ourselves” and it leads to the “catalyst for imagination.”

With that catalyst, Winogrond deftly alchemizes projects that are as beautiful as they are philosophical—a series of flagstones with embedded fossils at the St. Gallen Natural History Museum’s garden; a sound barrier on the side of a Zurich highway made from etched glass; a manufactured hill with a gravel base and a polished terrazzo summit serve as subtle statements of deft and purposeful aesthetics. “The point of re-enchantment is to suss out the poetic potential of a site, to fascinate, and to defy expectation,” says Winogrond.