ANDRÉS ORJUELA

“It is not only terrain that changes with time but also the way people perceive it. This is why design is about ideas as much as it is concerned with material and space.” George Descombes, “Shifting Sites” in Recovering Landscape

 

This is a counterpart to Urban Studies: The American Urban Landscape. Where that course traced the twinned development of American urbanization and American landscape architecture, this course focuses on landscape architecture theory and practice as a form of cultural production. For the purposes of this study, culture is defined in part by the internal discourse of landscape architecture, in part by the discourse of related fields like architecture, gardening, ecology, art, and philosophy, and in part by broader, seismic shifts in general culture such as the rise and fall of postmodernism.

 

This study focuses on one contemporary built landscape, The Metropolitan Water Park. There were two primary aims to the examination. The first was to describe this project as a work of landscape architecture — that is, its relationships to the site, materials, spatial qualities, trajectories over time, and affects. The second was to elucidate relationships between the terrain constructed and the discourse of ideas in the field of landscape architecture — in other words, the relationship between theory and practice.