LAR 395K
This seminar explores the complex interrelationships between design, visual representation, process, and practice as a social sphere in landscape/architecture, that is, in both disciplines, architecture and the design of the landscape, as well as in their multiple intersections. A key focus of the seminar is on the specific distinctions between the steps of process drawings and paintings and the steps of finished drawings for the understanding of clients and the larger public. An ultimate goal is to understand the composite and hybrid forms of representation that we use today in representing landscape design, architecture, and their intersections. Covering essential themes and using in-depth historical case studies, we cover the history of visual representation from the time of Leonardo da Vinci ca. 1500 to the contemporary period today.
In the first half of the seminar, we look at the invention of plan, section, and elevation; the rise of the pastoral as a visual genre and the Picturesque as a mode of landscape representation and design; the rise of territorial and geological mapping; and the advent of new kinds of technical drawing and media such as photography in the 1800s and early 1900s, for example for the parks by Frederick Law Olmsted. We consider the extraordinary conundrum that obtained from the Renaissance on, when draftspeople realized that what had been invented for architecture—namely, plan, section, and elevation--did not suffice for landscape representation and for the processes of landscape design. Instead, they reached over the centuries for other genres and modes--painting, drawing, surveying, mapping, aerial views, and geological transects.
In landscape design, we have to cast our net even more broadly than for the traditional conventions of architectural representation. "Ground," from the architectural and the landscape points of view, can mean a multiplicity of things. The second half of the seminar focuses on a detailed analysis of themes and forms in the periods 1900 to 1980, for example, the innovative landscape overlay techniques used by Ian McHarg in the 1960s to 1980s, and especially 1980 to 2023, a digital age. Our goal is to understand the many strands that are woven into contemporary landscape/architectural representation, which is often of composite and hybrid nature, often between digital and hand drawing.
The instructor comes to this material from three points of view in her own experience: as someone who trained to be a painter, as an art historian who has focused on the study of visual arts and images, and as a historian of landscape/architecture deeply interested in the different forms of representation used for the process of design. Drawing and painting exercises, especially with watercolors, are an important part of the seminar work. We treat the rich and varied roles of representation in conceptualization, presentation, and reception by clients and the larger viewing public. Examples range from the initial ésquisse or sketch, to landscape painting, to the map – ranging from territory to geology--, to the printed and digital forms of books and visual records of design that the designer circulates to the client and/or to the larger public in order to diffuse, control, or explore reception. Authors of many representations remain anonymous in history, but there are many specific designers whose work we will explore, from "Capability” Brown, Humphry Repton, Karl-Friedrich Schinkel, Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., to Gertrude Jekyll, Beatrix Farrand, and on to Leberecht Migge, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Roberto Burle Marx, Rosa Kliass, Lawrence Halprin, Cornelia Oberländer, Dieter Kienast, and Günter Vogt; in the contemporary sphere, Martha Schwartz, Kathryn Gustafson, Kongjian Yu, George Hargreaves, Michael Van Valkenburgh, and Kate Orff, among others. The roles of the image itself in design and in society, as well as the current evolving forms of architectural and landscape representation, are of strong topical interest for designers today--for architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and designers of interior architecture. Part of the surge of interest in landscape/architecture representation stems from the availability and diffusion of new media, including digital applications that model 3-D topographical forms, GIS, and other digital mapping techniques specific to topography and landscape forms.
There is considerable meaning to how we represent both the processes and the object/situation of landscape and architectural designs: to borrow Frederic Jameson's words, "the content of the form" (in this instance, the form being the media and techniques of representation) is as important as "the form of the content." Visual representation is on many levels an ideological practice. In the many techniques and media we choose to use in landscape/architecture representations is traceable a set of social and political relationships. By examining landscape/architecture representation from the Renaissance until today, the seminar considers the question: How do landscape and architectural representations operate in the practice of design?