What is Landscape? PDF
Preview What is Landscape?
WHAT IS LANDSCAPE? Traditional if now bewildered landscape: an old dike fronting reclaimed land sliced with gutters, bordered by afforested dunes, and opening on estuarine tides and coastal sky. JRS WHAT IS LANDSCAPE? JOHN R. STILGOE The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Trajan Pro 3 and Adobe Garamond by the MIT Press. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available. ISBN: 978-0-262-02989-6 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Jack M. Stilgoe Contents PREFACE IX INTRODUCTION 1 1 MAKING 17 2 CONSTRUCTS 55 3 ECHOES 83 4 HOME 101 5 STEAD 121 6 FARM 143 7 WAYS 165 8 FIELD 195 9 AWAY 215 NOTES 221 BIBLIOGRAPHY 241 Quintessential 1900 Frisian/Dutch landscape: a path-topped dike, a tide gate, reclaimed pasture pumped by a windmill, a farmstead, all beneath a tremendous sky. (Author’s collection.) Preface Landscape is a noun. First. It designates the surface of the earth people shaped and shape deliberately for permanent purposes. Oceans, polar ice, glaciers, rocky islets, and—even today—parts of steppes, deserts, tropical forest, and similar places seemingly untouched (or at least uninhabited, per- haps seldom if ever transited) are properly wilderness. A soda can tossed from an airplane mars the polar ice just as it mars the ocean, but the dropped can converts neither spot into landscape. As an adjective, “landscape” names a genre of painting and other representational art more or less cen- tered on views of the solid surface of the earth. Now used loosely to include wilderness other than the deep sea (sea- scape exists for that), among art historians and amateur photographers the word raises the issue of proportion: over- whelming background converts portrait or still life into landscape image. As an adjective, “landscape” also desig- nates types of architecture and building: landscape architec- ture and landscape gardening find core identities in ground
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