1. Lecture One
Some Definitions of Landscape

2. Hermetic:
her·met·ic adjective (ˌ) ər-ˌme
h
-tik
: closed tightly so that no air can go in or
out

4. 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

6. Dialectic:
di·a·lec·tic noun ˌ
dī-ə-ˌ
lek-tik
philosophy : a method of examining and
discussing opposing ideas in order to find
the truth

7. M.C. Escher, Night and Day

9. Alvar Aalto , Villa Mariea, 1938

16. Landscape Painting

17. Jan Vermeer, “View of Delft” 1661

18. Winslow Homer, “The Life Line” 1884

19. ALVARO SIZA ARCHITECT, LECA
SWIMMING POOL, 1966
VILLA SPORLANDA 80 B.C.

20. Rene Magritte, ”The Human Condition 1”,1934

21. 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

22. Claude Nicolas Ledoux, “Theater of the Eye” 1804

23. Wynn Bullock “Tide” 1951

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

25. First Photo of Earth from Space 1946

27. “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

28. 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
Adjective
Of or relating to the viscera.
Relating to deep inward feelings rather
than to the intellect: "the voters' visceral
fear of change".

29. Robert Smithson, “A Heap of Language” 1966

30. Landscape as a Metric

31. “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

33. Figure/Ground

34. Claude Lorraine, “Landscape with Aeneas at Delos” 1672

35. Jennifer Bartlett, “House” 1994

36. Richard Diebenkorn, “Ocean Park 54” 1968

37. Andrea Palladio, “Villa Barbaro” 1560

38. Big Architects, “Mountain Dwellings” 2009

39. Renzo Piano,
“San Francisco Science Academy”, 2004

40. Patrik LeBlanc, Herzog and De Meuron
“CaxiaForum, 2007

41. Cave Paintings at Chauvet, 32,000 B.C

42. Jackson Pollack,
“Autumn Rhythm”, 1950

43. Landscape: Noun and Verb

61. “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

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

63. “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, threedimensional shared reality.”
J.B. Jackson

64. “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

65. “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