Course Description

This three-credit course explores the modern designed landscape as a distinct mode of cultural production while underscoring landscape architectural theory's interconnections with changing societal constructions of nature, environmentalism and the modernizing city. The lectures and readings examine late 19th-21st century design treatises, manifestos and contemporary theoretical writings from outside the design fields as well as designed landscapes that are motivated by, or that motivate, those writings. The course recovers the theory (and practice) of modern landscape architecture from its marginalization as an anti-urban aesthetic of open spaces. Instead, it reveals how landscape architects re-imagined the modern city-as-landscape and landscape-as-infrastructure.

Unlike the narrow and limiting way that landscape practices were characterized in much mid 20th century historical narratives and theoretical texts, the actual theory and practice of modern landscape architecture was not anti-urban, passive or open, but engaged in creating new hybrid forms of urbanism/suburbanism and new modes of expression located at the intersection of scientific (19th c geology /20th c ecology) and artistic discourses.

By examining this hybrid design language and its resultant full spaces, students will expand their understanding of what constituted modernity. Since recent criticism of mid-twentieth century modernism has focused on the ethical and aesthetic limitations of those mainstream concerns, knowledge of these “marginal” late 19th and 20th century landscape theories and practices is germane to design, history and planning students who are interested in green urbanism, landscape urbanism, operations and process, ecology and technology, and sustainability as well as feminist theory and criticism.

The course lectures are supplemented by a weekly discussion section lead by a graduate student. Sections include reading discussions, visits to the Special Collections library to examine rare landscape treatises and manifestos and film screenings (around mid-semester reviews and final reviews).

Requirements

Lexicon Project For LAR 4140 (50%) and 5140 (50%). Weekly summaries of the required reading, organized as a lexicon of keywords related to the modern landscape. In=progress drafts submitted two times during the semester, and at semester’ end for grades. Close reading, critical analysis and graphic analysis of one modern designed landscape. LAR 4150 (50%) and LAR 5140 (35%). Attendance and active participation in weekly discussion sections LAR 5140 (15%).

Readings

journal/book excerpt readings on Toolkit. The required texts are at the UVA Bookstore: Corner. Recovering Landscape; Foster, The Anti-Aesthetic; McHarg. Design with Nature; Swaffield. Theory in Landscape Architecture. A Reader; Thompson. Rethinking Landcape. A Critical Reader; Worster. Nature's Economy. The History of Ecological Ideas; Wylie. Landscape Recommended texts, a few copies of which are available at the UVA Bookstore: About Landscape. Essays on design, style, time and space (Topos, 2002); Birnbaum, Pioneers of American Landscape Architecture (out of print) and Shaping the American Landscape (2009); Cosgrove. Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape; Harvey. The Condition of Postmodernity; Jensen. Siftings; Merchant. The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History; Miller. The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening; Nolen. New Towns for Old; Williams. Keywords, A Vocabulary of Culture and Society; Waldheim. Landscape Urbanism