Lecture One Some Definitions of Landscape

Hermetic:her·met·ic adjective \(ˌ)hər-ˈme-tik\: closed tightly so that no air can go in or out

Inflection:

Inflection in architecture is the way in which the whole is implied by exploiting the nature of the individual parts, rather than their position or number. By inflecting toward something outside themselves, the parts contain their own linkage. Inflected parts are more integral with the whole than are uninflected parts.

Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture

Dialectic:

di·a·lec·tic noun \ˌdī-ə-ˈlek-tik\philosophy : a method of examining and discussing opposing ideas in order to find the truth

M.C. Escher, Night and Day

Alvar Aalto , Villa Mariea, 1938

Landscape Painting

Jan Vermeer, “View of Delft” 1661

Winslow Homer, “The Life Line” 1884

VILLA SPORLANDA 80 B.C.

ALVARO SIZA ARCHITECT, LECA SWIMMING POOL, 1966

Rene Magritte, ”The Human Condition 1”,1934

Rene Magritte in 1938 lecture: “ We see it as being outside ourselves even though it is only a mental representation of what we experience on the inside” “What lies beyond the windowpane of our apprehension, says Magritte, needs a design before we can properly discern a form, let alone derive pleasure from it’s perception. And it’s culture, convention, and cognition that makes that design; that invests a retinal impression with the quality we experience as beauty.

Simon Schama Landscape and Memory

Claude Nicolas Ledoux, “Theater of the Eye” 1804

Wynn Bullock “Tide” 1951

Gaspard-Félix Tournachon a.k.a. Nadar 1820-1910,

First Photo of Earth from Space 1946

“After a seven days' march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.”

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Vicarious:vi·car·i·ous

Adjective : experienced or felt by watching, hearing about, or reading about someone else rather than by doing something yourself

Visceral:vis·cer·al  

AdjectiveOf or relating to the viscera.Relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect: "the voters' visceral fear of change".

Robert Smithson, “A Heap of Language” 1966

Landscape as a Metric

“The word itself tells us much. It entered the English language, along with herring and bleached linen, as a Dutch import at the end of the sixteenth century. And landschap, like it’s Germanic root, Landshaft, signified a unit of human occupation, indeed a jurisdiction.”

Simon Schama Landscape and Memory

Figure/Ground

Claude Lorraine, “Landscape with Aeneas at Delos” 1672

Jennifer Bartlett, “House” 1994

Richard Diebenkorn, “Ocean Park 54” 1968

Andrea Palladio, “Villa Barbaro” 1560

Big Architects, “Mountain Dwellings” 2009

Renzo Piano, “San Francisco Science Academy”, 2004

Patrik LeBlanc, Herzog and De Meuron “CaxiaForum, 2007

Cave Paintings at Chauvet, 32,000 B.C

Jackson Pollack, “Autumn Rhythm”, 1950

Landscape: Noun and Verb

“A landscape is a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature. As Eliade expresses it, it represents man taking upon himself the role of time”J.B. Jackson

“Landscape like architecture has become a force for political and cultural change. Rather than exerting it’s presence as a ground or back-round, to the architectural foreground , landscape design is pushing itself into the foreground of the design experience.” James Corner

“No one denies that as we become more uncertain of our status we need more and more reenforcement from our environment. But we should not use the word landscape to describe our private world, our private microcosm, and for a simple reason: a landscape is a concrete, three-dimensional shared reality.” J.B. Jackson

“A German landschaft, for instance, can sometimes be a small administrative unit, corresponding in size to our ward . I have the feeling that there is evolving a slight but noticeable difference between the way we Americans use the word and the way the English do. We tend to think that landscape can mean natural scenery only, whereas in England a landscape almost always contains a human element.”J.B. Jackson

“Nevertheless the formula landscape as a composition of man-made spaces on the land is more significant that it first appears, for if it does not provide us with a definition it throws a revealing light on the origin of the concept. For it says that a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land, functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve a community – for the collective character of the landscape is one thing that all generations and points of view have agreed upon. A landscape is thus a space deliberately created to speed up or slow down the process of nature.”J.B. Jackson