Histories of Landscape Architecture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture
Note, the first meeting on Wednesday, August 31, will take place in Stubbins, room 112, rather than Piper Auditorium.
This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci (see week one) in the histories of landscape architecture. In general terms, it takes the form of a conspectus, a survey of the field, but one in which the underlying nature (made and found), boundaries, contours, and texture of this field—in fact several disparate fields—is made the object of close scrutiny. We will define landscape architecture as we survey it. In pursuing an intermittent chronological narrative, the lectures will place site-specific emphasis on a number of cognate disciplines (hydrology, forestry, geology, agronomy, geography, hunting, inter alia), in the context of endemic and transplanted (see week seven) visual and textual traditions. While inspecting the grounds of villas, cloisters gardens, parks, cities we will be attentive to surrounding formations of discourse (the pastoral, the picturesque, the emblematic, the Adamic and Edenic) that have and continue to imbue them with meaning.
The first meeting of this course, on Wednesday, September 5th, will take place in room 112 (Stubbins) in Gund Hall. The course will meet thereafter in Piper Auditorium.