"Recovering Landscape
as a Critical Cultural Practice"
28 Landscape and Irrigation May 2014 www.landscapeirrigation.com
T
he following is an excerpt of the essay
"Recovering Landscape as a Critical Cultural
Practice" by James Corner. Originally pub-
lished in Recovering Landscape: Essays in
Contemporary Landscape, edited by James Corner
(Princeton Architectural Press, 1999). Published again in
The Landscape Imagination: Collected Essays of James
Corner 1990-2010, edited by James Corner and Alison
Bick Hirsch (Princeton Architectural Press, 2014).
Reprinted here with permission of the publisher.
The landscape idea
The power of the landscape idea must not be underestimated
or severed from physical space. Landscape is both a spatial milieu
and cultural image. As such, the construction of landscape space
is inseparable from particular ways of seeing and acting. In this
sense, landscape is an ongoing medium of exchange, a medium
that is embedded and evolved within the imaginative and mate-
rial practices of different societies at different times. Over time,
landscapes accrue layers with every new representation, and
these inevitably thicken and enrich the range of interpretations
and possibilities.
Furthermore, the landscape idea is neither universally
shared nor manifested in the same way across cultures and
times; its meaning and value, together with its physical and
formal characteristics, are not fixed. To assume that every
society shares an American, English, or French view of
landscape, or even that other societies possess any version
of landscape at all, is to wrongly impose on other cultures
one's own image. Indeed, there have been societies and times
wherein the notion of landscape simply did not exist. Even
in European history, landscape is a relatively recent develop-
ment. As Kenneth Clark observed:
Until fairly recent times men looked at nature as an assemblage of iso-
lated objects, without connecting [them] into a unified scene...It was
[not until] the early sixteenth century that the first "pure" landscape
was painted [and thus conceived].
Moreover, it is clear that Eastern conceptions of landscape
differ significantly from those of the West, which have tradition-
ally been more scenic and stylized. And, as architecture scholar
Stanislaus Fung has pointed out, there is an important aspect of
mutuality and inclusion to Chinese ideas of landscape as distinct
from the binary dualism characteristic of Western conceptions.
But whatever the precise origin, coding, and intensity of the lens,
the landscape idea arises as an eidetic filter through which differ-
Landscape Architecture
The Landscape Imagination: Collected Essays of James Corner 1990-
2010 addresses critical issues in landscape architecture and
reflects on how Corner's writings have informed the built work
of his thriving New York-based practice, Field Operations. This
book will be available everywhere books are sold, starting May
27. Visit papress.com for details.
