Does architecture create landscape?
Is architecture a vector of landscape transformation?
The relationship between architecture and landscape is both recent and as old as architecture itself.
On the one hand, strictly speaking, since landscape is a modern reality, any relation to the phenomenon in question could only have developed relatively late. Indeed, it was only after several centuries in the history of the landscape genre – that is, painted landscape – namely from the eighteenth century onward, that lived landscape emerged, not only as a possibility but soon as a habitus, that is, as a disposition to engage in the sensory experience of a fragment of nature capable of affecting us.
Whether painted or perceived, landscape thus refers to a typically European tradition, which some have even identified as Eurocentric. This origin implies both its non-universality – some cultures have no term to designate it – and its historicity. First landscape painters, then modern subjects confronted with “real” landscapes, gradually imposed models: the classical ideal landscape, the sublime landscape, the picturesque landscape, or landscape as locus terribilis, an expression of an aesthetics of ugliness, as found, for example, in Red Desert by Antonioni or Stalker by Tarkovsky. The emergence of perspective contributed to ordering perceived things within an imaginary reduced to a collection of objects, and among the represented elements, ruins gradually appeared. Landscape thus reveals itself as a complex cultural construction: it involves both form – presenting itself as a framing of nature, a “fragment” grasped and circumscribed by the gaze – and semantic elements such as rivers, mountains, fields, and so on. Poussin’s painting of the Shepherds of Arcadia (Et in Arcadia ego) speaks to us of an idyllic and sacralized landscape already present in the fresco decorations of Roman houses, composed of trees, rocks, and animals.
On the other hand, it remains legitimate to speak of a relationship to territory, environment, or site as the locus of a universal and original encounter with the non-architectural. Since its emergence and inscription in situ, architecture positions itself and measures itself against what surrounds it; it asserts itself, manifests itself, sometimes even gesticulates: “I am a Monument!” In other words, it always conceives of its presence in terms of spatiality.
Whether in constructions established according to the principles of feng shui, the classical temple occupying a privileged position, or the Villa Rotonda, governed by a scopic logic based on four topographical viewpoints made possible by openings to the outside, all these architectures operate on the basis of a relationship to their environment. Yet this relationship was not conceptualized as such, precisely because what would allow it to be thought – the landscape gaze – was lacking.
Twentieth-century architectural icons – to mention only these – thus participate in both traditions: the ancestral tradition of positioning, and the modern tradition of actively and consciously creating relationships with landscape, a landscape in a sense produced by architecture itself.
“It is I, the building you are discovering, who generated what you see, and it is only through me that these landscapes exist,” these emblematic projects seem to tell us. If the window thus appears as a device for visual and aesthetic control of what is offered to the inhabitant-spectator’s gaze, this framing, placed under the sign of measure and scopic mastery, would eventually give way to more totalizing solutions.
Both the Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, as well as several buildings by Shigeru Ban – notably the Wall-Less House – establish a form of total visibility. Difficult to endure for their occupants, these container–camera lucida push architecture to its limit: when the exterior is everywhere and permanently present, it is as if one were living continuously outdoors.
In contrast to this complete absorption of the external landscape, twentieth-century architecture also offers camerae obscurae that filter the landscape through fissures and openings, containing interior space in order to better frame what lies outside, as demonstrated by Claude Parent’s fractured monolithic forms inspired by Second World War bunkers, which can now be read as the ruins of a landscape of memory.
It is therefore hardly surprising that the relationship between architecture and landscape is played out above all at the level of the pierced wall, in the value of the embrasure (a notion evoked by Derrida in The Truth in Painting), and more precisely in the wall interrupted by the window. This history begins, of course – though always in a non-reflexive manner – in
Antiquity; it becomes manifest first where the dignitas of a building is to be established, that is, in the construction of palaces and villas reserved for princes (cf. Michael Jakob, The Back Landscape. On the Technological Origins of Landscape, Paris, B2, 2019). A paradigmatic example is the great terrace of the Ducal Palace in Urbino, whose five windows function as
true optical devices. Or at Vaux-le-Vicomte, the Prince’s window, positioned above, a window that in a sense “comprehends” the entirety of the project, through the eye of the absolutist subject commanding a totalizing proto-landscape arrangement.
This key example – that of Nicolas Fouquet’s estate – would, in turn, lead to the deconstruction of the single gaze and visual privilege staged at the Désert de Retz, where the famous column-house–false ruin instead generates an indefinite multiplicity of views outward. This development continues in the horizontal window, which appears for the first time as sole protagonist in the Petite Maison and in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, two examples in which the window is notably mobilized as a machine of abstraction. The window – the eye of architecture – thus appears as the privileged site where the relationship to architecture’s “other” is at stake: the garden, nature, the street, the city, the world. As an instrument of framing and staging, it makes possible the exploration of landscape, understood here as the landscape gaze.
Yet this duality does not exhaust all contemporary positions in art and architecture. There are situations in which the human artifact may act as an absorbed presence or as an emanation of context – understood as a territory traversed by uses, rituals, and pathways – or even as a concretion of the tensions and modulations that run through the landscape. In 2013, Faces republished an important article by André Corboz in which the Genevan theorist cited Richard Serra’s work Shift, a 1972 installation occupying a vast meadow flanked by two hills separated by a valley forming a bend in King City, Ontario (Canada). The installation stemmed from the discovery “that two people walking along the sides of a field, while remaining in view of each other despite the change in elevation, determine a defined topological space.” Serra’s work thus served to “establish a dialectic between an individual’s global perception of a place and their relationship to the terrain on which they move” (André Corboz, “Did You Say ‘Space’?”, Faces, no. 72, 2013, p. 75).
Guest editor: Michael Jakob
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