Environment: Benton MacKaye
Benton MacKaye, the planner / artist / engineer who conceived of the Appalachian Trail as a terrestrial infrastructure network (Keller Easterling, p. 15) was of the first people to use the word “environment” in its current sense. “For him, environment was an expanded site with physical, temporal and virtual strata. He crafted a set of virtual sites within cultural paradigms and persuasions, developing, primarily through his writing, a means of shifting or inverting perceptions to introduce new values and protocols for development. ... Designing an adjustment to the landscape often involved the identification of a dormant existing condition that might be shifted into a new more effective position, so that the projects involved not holistic prescriptions [classic environmentalism], but partial reversals or adjustments with radiating but not entirely predictable influences.” (p. 17)
His father Steele MacKaye was a theatrical designer and playrwright — huge pageants; experimental time lines; scenography as historiography. First American to play Hamlet in London. The son Benton also saw his work with large-scale environmental design as a kind of theater. (Theatrum mundi??) (pp. 18-19)
MacKaye conceived of watersheds and waysides as “active boundaries.” (p. 55, 58) “Different from a region bounded by ‘fixed lines,’ a watershed was a planar fluvial system that modeled a ‘sphere of influence’ or an area radiating from a point of activity. As the area adjacent to a roadside, the wayside too was an active boundary that affected a larger organization.” (p. 55)
MacKaye was associated with the Regional Planners; Mumford; Geddes. He was also a socialist; interested in Russia; planned an Alaska-Siberia Highway. Interesting dude: artist, engineer, planner, designer, intellectual, with a theater upbringing.
Keller Easterling, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.
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