Landscape Cubism: parks that break the pictorial frame

Abstract

Despite advances in theories of landscape and vision, many landscape architects continue to see and relate to physical environment in ways conditioned by the compositional structure of two-dimensional pictorial space. Inherited from the visual arts, that ‘scenic’ analogy projects landscape as a background condition – a perception that implies separation between people and environment. However, the pictorial paradigm adopted by landscape thinking has long since been transcended within the visual arts themselves. A century ago, Cubism pioneered a re-visualisation of the human relationship to space in which point of view was no longer placed objectively outside the picture frame, but subjectively within it. In subsequent decades, that way of seeing had some impact on garden and landscape design, but its larger potential is only now coming to be realised. Cubist principles involving form, space, and time are highly relevant to contemporary practices of landscape architecture. Three contemporary Parisian parks – Parc de la Villette, Parc André Citroën, and Parc de Bercy – demonstrate how strategies of formal complexity engaging the Cubist principles of Simultaneity, Transparency, and Multiple Perspectives can alter the ways in which landscape space is perceived, moving past the limited ‘scenic’ framework and reconfiguring the relationship between humans and environment.