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THE HERMENEUTIC LANDSCAPE (1991)
JAMES CORNER
The landscape is itself a text that is open to interpretation and transformation. It is also a
highly situated phenomenon in terms of space, time, and tradition and exists as both the
ground and geography of our heritage and change.
Landscape is distinguished from wilderness in that it is land which has been modified by humans. But it is more than this. Landscape is not only a physical phenomenon, but is also a cultural schema, a conceptual filter through which our relationships to wilderness and nature can be understood.
It is the well-formed world of occupied places as opposed to the world outside of that-
the unplaced place. In other words, prior to language, "landscape” is a phenomenon
beyond immediate comprehension; it is not until we choose a prospect and map what we
See, marking some aspects, ignoring others, that the landscape acquires meaning} Such interventions include paintings, poems, myths, and literature, in addition to buildings and other
interventions upon the land. These works are the encodings that set and enframe human situations. They are the posts that map out a “landscape.”
As time passes, this marked landscape weathers, ever subject to the contingencies of nature. Other points of view are chosen as circumstances change and new ways of marking are overlaid upon the old, producing collagic and weathered overlays. Residua in this topographic palimpsest provide loci for the remembrance, renewal, and transtiguration of a culture’s relationship to the land. Such are the familiar and unexpected places of authentic dwelling.
As a human—made projection, landscape is both text and site, partly clarifying the world and our place within it. The textual landscape is thus a hermeneutic medium. Landscape
architecture might therefore be thought of as the practice of e-scaping and rescaping our relationship to nature and the “other” through the construction of built worlds. In the desire to reflect both on our modern context and on our inheritance, landscape architecture might
practice a hermeneutical plotting of the landscape-a plotting that is as much political and strategic as it is relational and physical. The landscape architect as plotter is simultaneously critic, geographer, communicator, and maker, digging to uncover mute and latest possibilities in the lived landscape. With every “projection" there might follow a rebirth: the artifact of culture and the enigma of nature rendered fuller with every pass. To plot, to map, to dig, to set: Are these not the fundamental traditions of landscape architecture
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