Building Nature
This course poses nature as a dimension
of environmental design. It focuses on the history of the built
environment at the scale of landscape architecture and draws on
theory related to the production and representation of nature. We
consider the advent of landscape architecture as a specialized
practice, discuss formal garden design, and the creation of urban
parks. The creation of national parks, ecological preserves, and
post-industrial reclamation projects expand the scope of our study to
examine the concept and experience of nature.
An initial study of significant
seventeenth and eighteenth century precedents will frame the Western
tradition of garden and landscape design. International, national,
and local examples ranging from nineteenth century to the present
will reveal changing conceptions of nature, trace how colonial
geographies and global networks transform the natural environment,
and raise questions about the relation between nature and technology.
We will address aesthetic philosophies
informing landscape design, ideas of power and control over nature,
different conceptions of land, the notions of cultivated or wild
landscape, ecology, and political dimensions of environmental
preserve and land reclamation. The background to these discussions
will include readings related to the concept of “landscape” as a
cultural construct.
Taichung Central Park, Taichung City, Taiwan, Mosbach Paysagistes
with
Philippe Rahm architectes and Ricky Liu & Associates, 2011 - 2020. Photo courtesy Victor Chohao Wu and Mosbach Paysagistes.