Histories of Landscape Architecture II

Designed gardens and landscapes are cultural artifacts that encompass three main expectations: pragmatic needs, cultural significance, and aesthetic order. Although some landscape narratives often ignore needs (those of the users or the environment’s), reduce cultural meanings to a discourse on style, and focus on order as a problem in aesthetic theory, the fact remains that, almost without exception, one or more of these three criteria—needs, meanings, order—dominates the designed gardens and landscapes of every time and place. However, because gardens and landscapes are ephemeral and subject to many transformations, this course will consider their practical, cultural, and aesthetic aspects as embedded in a palimpsest of changing values. In order to do this, the course will not be structured around landscape architectural styles. Rather, it will examine a selection of topics that bring together thinkers and designers who live/have lived centuries apart. This will allow the class to unfold several issues that have shaped the profession through built work and intellectual inquiry, such as the recent reckoning about the discipline’s role and agenda, questions of race and the implicit violence of white archives and memorials, and the limits of the commonly accepted, tripartite taxonomy of nature—pristine, productive and genteel, with its implicit prioritization of the latter category at the expense of the first two or of anything in between.

Instructor’s talks will address contemporary designs alongside those conceived and implemented by our predecessors. Within this structure, instead of construing history as “the past,” we will consider, with Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, that every history is “contemporary history”: no matter how chronologically remote the facts under consideration may seem to be, in reality the writing of history always reflects, and is shaped by, present circumstances.

All course sessions will be held virtually until Feb 14th, after which they will alternate between in-person and on Zoom every other week. Raffaella will be in residence in Cambridge for the following dates: Feb 14-15, Feb 28- March 1, March 14-15, March 28-29, April 11-12, April 25