Scaling the Imagination: The Creation of the Subject-Object Divide in Visual Perception and Landscapes

Abstract

This paper unpacks the history of seeing and the separation of subjectivity from objectivity in order to establish a framework for landscape and architectural design interventions on large scales. As perception shifted from an act of subjective creation of meaning to one operating under the auspices of empiricism, a chasm opened between the observer and the observed. Instead of locating the meaning of the observed object within the subject, perception for Moderns became an act of describing the world as-is. The resulting proliferation of descriptions of large-scale, interrelated ecological and urban systems became unintelligible to the human imagination, becoming metaphorical “giants” in our cultural and artistic realms. In the process, the world has became both more distant and seemingly more conquerable. The author suggests confronting the limits of the imagination through exercises in scales in order to negotiate the increasing distance between subject (human observers) and object (the natural and built world).