The Lawn Game: Programming the Non-Static View

In his article, “Is Landscape Architecture?,” David Leatherbarrow describes a critical transformation in the modern construction of ground away from a tradition of a singular vantage as a constructed image. Leatherbarrow writes, ‘no interpretation has come under more forceful criticism… Instead of images or pictures, contemporary landscapes are intended to offer effects, which are not matters of form, but the visible aspects of operations.” He suggests the practice of landscape as an image was rejected in the modern era because it falsified the “terrain as static…neglecting the fact that it is always inescapably developmental, dynamic or metabolic in character.” Leatherbarrow draws attention to the contemporary critique of the pre-modern landscape designer, whose interest in the pictorial ignored the alive and ever-changing nature of vegetation and earth. Hence the contemporary landscape designer decries the notion that landscape should demonstrate itself as driven by life and death — in the form of ecology on a site, or of social programming that would bring form to design. As such, the discipline of landscape during the modern era formed an indictment on practices of designing through the use of a picture plane and stationary view point in favor of a planometric organizations of ground effects.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.108.29

Volume Editors

ISBN
978-1-944214-26-5