On Landscape: A Primer for Expanded Practice

Written By Scott Getz

What is Landscape?  Despite its storied etymology, landscape is widely defined as a “view or vista of scenery on land,” with land referring to the composition of natural elements like mountains, streams, and forests in any particular scene.  Landscape is scenographic, emphasizing visual attributes as the primary identifier in practice, but I believe the described definition above limits design opportunities because of its emphasis on agreeable visual composition while neglecting the tactile, temporal, and emotive capacities of landscape from the outset of the design process.¹    

During the Picturesque movement of the 18th century, Landscape did not refer to a piece of land; rather, Landscape was a picture, or a painting, of it.  This explains the painterly definition still in dictionaries that is now well over three and a half centuries old.  As JB Jackson writes in Discovering the Vernacular: 

“First, it was a picture of a view; then the view itself.  We went into the country and discovered beautiful views, always remembering the criteria of landscape beauty as established by critics and artists.  Finally, on a modest scale, we undertook to make over a piece of ground so that it resembled a pastoral landscape in the shape of a garden or a park.  Just as the painter used his judgment as to what to include or omit in his composition, the landscape gardener (as he was known in the eighteenth century) took pains to produce a stylized “Picturesque” landscape… including certain agreeable features…  The results were often extremely beautiful, but they were pictures, though in three-dimensions.”

The equivalencies and influence of the Picturesque Movement on Western landscape architecture continue today in the predominantly visual emphasis of landscape in practice.  Several mission-driven studios like Arquitectura Agronomia (Barcelona), Estudio Ome (Mexico City), Wagon Landscaping (Paris) - to name only a few - have made significant strides to progress the field from strictly pictorial approaches; yet, the steadfast approach in contemporary practice is similar to Olmsted’s approach of the design of Central Park nearly two centuries ago: a “series of pictorial compositions” translating the qualities of a two-dimensional painting to a three-dimensional space.²

Today, the emphasis of landscape as scenography manifests differently than when Olmsted or Capability Brown were practicing in the 19th century, but I think this text would be incomplete without exploring the effects of social media on the landscape imagination.  Landscape architects are frequently enlisted to re-create landscapes discovered on a variety of social media platforms - or to translate idealized two-dimensional digital photographs into a three-dimensional image.  The lack of sequencing a three-dimensional visual experience present in 18th-century landscape gardens further reduces landscape to image today, where landscape is widely reduced to a highly-edited and distributed photo or post.  Akin to the paintings and landscapes of the Picturesque, these posts are often sterilized embodiments of homogenized ideals via omission, staging, and editing (e.g., Photoshopping).  Considering our built environment is both a register and active participant in our cultural identity, and the widely documented effects of social media as “leading to the erosion of local traditions, languages, and identities,”³ continually distancing us from the landscape.  The same effects social media has on culture at large are inherently transfixed into our landscape.

Broadening the definition of landscape opens up a variety of new approaches to designing the landscape.  Having practiced as a Landschaftarchitect in Berlin for some time after graduate school, I found that their term for landscape, or landschaft, offered a more culturally integrated approach to landscape as described by James Corner in Recovering  Landscapes:

“Both terms connote images, but the latter (landschaft) comprises a fuller, more synaesthetic, and less picturable range than the former (landscape).  Furthermore, the working landscape, forged collectively and according to more utilitarian demands than anything artistic or formal, has been more the traditional domain of descriptive analysis by historians and geographers than of speculation by landscape architects… under such an operational rubric, issues such as program, event space, utility, economy, logistics, production, constraints, and desires… turned through design toward newly productive and significant ends.⁴”


In other words, “landschaft” is a culturally accumulative medium that’s part-of instead of subject-to our collective experience - not entirely imageable but certainly imaginable.  This reframing is useful in expanding our idea of landscape as “a collective sense of place and relationship through work… likened to a kind of mental map, or diagram”⁵ creating the space for landscape architects to play a vital role in construing new forms of consciousness through their expertise in the spatial translation of cultural values.  This approach to landscape distances us from being mere connoisseurs of visual scenery or observers, to meaningfully participating in its transformation.⁶  

Similarly, the “-skab” in the Danish Landskab refers not only to the shape of the land but also to the associations of the land in the cultural imagination.  The French “Paysage” where a landscape architect is called to as a Paysagiste, “carries with it to this day a sense of nationhood and cultural identity.”⁷  In this sense, the landscape architect is tasked with reflecting the ethics of the nation into the constructed landscape.  Expanding our frame of reference for the definition of Landscape confirms that: “To consider landscape in solely visual, formal, ecological, or economic terms fails to embrace the complex richness of association and social structures that are inherent to it.”  

This understanding of landscape through the lens of culture and science allows an expanded form of practice beyond scenographic and utilitarian ends that I embrace on every project.  Although there are certainly pragmatic solutions to engineer in the architecture of landscape like drainage, circulation, and safety, the forms that I arrive at in the design process strive to have meaning and depth beyond visual agreeability and embrace the inherent temporality and interconnectedness within it.  With this perspective, the tools I use to plan and diagram landscape interventions differ from the proverbial painter's brush to a toolkit.  

Landscape Architects have now been equipped with advanced techniques like highly accurate 3d modelling, simulation and experimentation, and machine learning for the last twenty to thirty years in hopes of architecting a landscape that is more holistic and inclusive of contemporary scientific knowledge and cultural imagination.  Before getting too far down the toolbox rabbit hole, which I will write about in another entry, I think Kenneth Clark in Landscape into Painting puts it well.  In describing the fundamental schism between painting, or a strictly scenographic approach, and landscape is that: “We know that by our new standards of measurement the most extensive landscape is practically the same as the hole through which the burrowing ant escapes from our sight.”⁸  Further, Robert Smithson, a mid-century earth artist, states:

“The reason the potential dialectic inherent in the picturesque broke down was natural processes were viewed in isolation as so many classifications, detached from the physical interconnection, and finally replaced by the mental representations of a finished absolute ideal.⁹”

Landscape continues to suffer the same shortcomings as Smithson authored in 1979 regarding the myopic approach to landscape during the Picturesque.   As a practicing  Landscape Architect, my goal and the mission of my studio, Studio Wattle, is to connect people and nature in meaningful and creative ways through design however the continued prevalence of landscape as scenographic continues to stifle creativity only serving to further divide us from nature and meaningful landscapes from the outset of the design process.  Or as Elizabeth Meyer aptly remarks in Situating the Modern Landscape, when illustrating this division:

“Humans became increasingly separated from the non-human world about them.  What had previously been an insider’s relationship to a vitalist, organic world became an outsider’s relationship to a rational, mechanized world….  This emphasis on the visual and recordable reduced landscape to two-dimensional surfaces, either the vertical surface of the picture plane or the horizontal surface of the geographer’s map.  Both facilitated the control of the landscape through abstraction, detachment, and distance.¹⁰”

The landscape being reduced to a surface becomes placeless; void of its temporal and tactile qualities like topography, scents, shadows, and history.  

I do not write this to call for a return to a nomadic life, but certainly a more in-touch one.  And that starts with how to define and approach landscape.  I write to emphasize Landscape as a cultural and reciprocal medium that progresses practice beyond creating scenic imagery.  

At Studio Wattle, design is the practice of connection.  Connecting human and non-human, connecting present and past, connecting people and place, connecting context and site.  We will continue to explore how this manifests in practice to create a more syntropic, meaningful, and beautiful landscape in subsequent writings.

¹  Meyer, 1993, (169)

² Jackson 1984, (3)

³ Balogun, 2024, (Abstract)

⁴  Corner, 1999, (158)

⁵  Ibid.

⁶ Meyer, 1993 (170)

⁷ Corner, 1999, (7)

⁸ Clark, 1949

⁹ Meyer, 1993, (172)

¹⁰  Ibid.

 
Scott Getz

Registered Landscape Architect in North Carolina

https://www.studiowattle.com