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C. Ronzani and A. Freytet
7.2.2 The Landscape Designer: A Landscape “Reader”?
Landscape designers do indeed willingly refer to themselves as landscape “readers”.
“Read” the landscape? “You should scan the entire site and surrounding areas in every
direction, observe and record each and every configuration and thing right down to
the slightest and least significant; you must not miss the slightest element on this
page of writing”
5 recommends Michel Corajoud, one of the founding fathers of the
profession, to students at the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles.
This comparison with reading metaphorically likens landscape to text, a metaphor
now well established in both land planning and landscape design
6 . In one respect,
it is legitimate: it expresses the ambiguous nature of the landscape concept, i.e.
the objective subjectively perceived. Therefore, a landscape designer’s exercise not
only involves perceiving, taking in and recording like everyone else, but perceiving
“better”, grasping the visible shapes of the landscape and beyond, the structure or
significant shapes at work in the landscape. In so doing, the comparison with text also
reflects awareness of the illusory character of perceptive omniscience, awareness that
the sight we see is in fact a space built and theatrically portrayed by the structure of
our body and mind. Awareness that its stimuli closely depend—from an objective
point of view—on the elements and factors specific to space, its structure and its
laws. Because, from this perspective, isn’t the fabulous feeling of giddiness and
strength we experience when contemplating a gigantic mound of rocks ultimately the
unexpected result of interaction between very precise fragments of matter? Linked to
a particular geology? Pawns now frozen that could also be described as the result of
movements determined by implacable physics, for which geologists and geographers
would find a mathematical explanation by reducing them to simple numbers? The
metaphor of text and reading introduces the idea of units, letters, words and phrases,
assembled according to known rules of grammar which, if we know how to “read”,
we can understand by identifying all those relations—provided we have broken
down and isolated each piece. Many official guidelines, professional training courses
and ministerial orders have, both in landscape design and “space management”,
undertaken to teach landscape designers to “read”, by identifying and interpreting
the “landscape units” that make up the immense landscape text. Failing a consensus
in this scramble for precious units, each learner-reader uses the methods and tools
he has chosen or acquired during training, with varying results. Units are identified
in space, underscored, pinned on maps and used in planning, but are they really
“pieces of landscape”? Even if zones are marked out, limits established between
mapped areas and elements of the visible space possibly photographed and retained
for typology purposes, this is not necessarily a definition of the landscape, i.e. an
area as perceived. And there is no certainty that landscape and perception can be
5 Michel Corajoud, “Le projet de paysage: lettre aux étudiants”, in Jean-Luc Brisson, Le Jardinier,
l’artiste et l’ingénieur, Éditions de l’imprimeur, 2000.
6 See for example the article by B. Folléa “Le paysage comme relation”, in Les Carnets du Paysage
no 21, Actes Sud, Arles, 2011.
C. Ronzani and A. Freytet
7.2.2 The Landscape Designer: A Landscape “Reader”?
Landscape designers do indeed willingly refer to themselves as landscape “readers”.
“Read” the landscape? “You should scan the entire site and surrounding areas in every
direction, observe and record each and every configuration and thing right down to
the slightest and least significant; you must not miss the slightest element on this
page of writing”
5 recommends Michel Corajoud, one of the founding fathers of the
profession, to students at the École Nationale Supérieure du Paysage de Versailles.
This comparison with reading metaphorically likens landscape to text, a metaphor
now well established in both land planning and landscape design
6 . In one respect,
it is legitimate: it expresses the ambiguous nature of the landscape concept, i.e.
the objective subjectively perceived. Therefore, a landscape designer’s exercise not
only involves perceiving, taking in and recording like everyone else, but perceiving
“better”, grasping the visible shapes of the landscape and beyond, the structure or
significant shapes at work in the landscape. In so doing, the comparison with text also
reflects awareness of the illusory character of perceptive omniscience, awareness that
the sight we see is in fact a space built and theatrically portrayed by the structure of
our body and mind. Awareness that its stimuli closely depend—from an objective
point of view—on the elements and factors specific to space, its structure and its
laws. Because, from this perspective, isn’t the fabulous feeling of giddiness and
strength we experience when contemplating a gigantic mound of rocks ultimately the
unexpected result of interaction between very precise fragments of matter? Linked to
a particular geology? Pawns now frozen that could also be described as the result of
movements determined by implacable physics, for which geologists and geographers
would find a mathematical explanation by reducing them to simple numbers? The
metaphor of text and reading introduces the idea of units, letters, words and phrases,
assembled according to known rules of grammar which, if we know how to “read”,
we can understand by identifying all those relations—provided we have broken
down and isolated each piece. Many official guidelines, professional training courses
and ministerial orders have, both in landscape design and “space management”,
undertaken to teach landscape designers to “read”, by identifying and interpreting
the “landscape units” that make up the immense landscape text. Failing a consensus
in this scramble for precious units, each learner-reader uses the methods and tools
he has chosen or acquired during training, with varying results. Units are identified
in space, underscored, pinned on maps and used in planning, but are they really
“pieces of landscape”? Even if zones are marked out, limits established between
mapped areas and elements of the visible space possibly photographed and retained
for typology purposes, this is not necessarily a definition of the landscape, i.e. an
area as perceived. And there is no certainty that landscape and perception can be
5 Michel Corajoud, “Le projet de paysage: lettre aux étudiants”, in Jean-Luc Brisson, Le Jardinier,
l’artiste et l’ingénieur, Éditions de l’imprimeur, 2000.
6 See for example the article by B. Folléa “Le paysage comme relation”, in Les Carnets du Paysage
no 21, Actes Sud, Arles, 2011.