Reception Theory and Landscape Architecture
In literature, the interaction between text and reader occurs within a framework that controls and limits the interaction, through genre, tone, structure, and the social conditions of the reader and author, whereas in landscapes the interaction occurs through movement and viewing, framed by typology instead of genre and tone. Instead of an “implied reader,” reception theory of landscapes assumes an “implied visitor,” who is an abstracted concatenation of responses of many visitors at different times.
The theory recognizes that there is no single reading of a landscape that fulfills its entire potential, and that it is important to examine the motives of visitors and the factors influencing their visits (whether they read guidebooks about the place before visiting, or had strong feelings about the place or the designer, for instance).
One key difference between reception theory in literature and reception theory in landscape architecture is that while literary works are accessible only to the imagination, physical landscapes are accessible to the senses as well as to the imagination. However, purely mythological gardens (such as the Garden of Eden and the gardens of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) are accessible only to the imagination, and extant historical gardens form a middle ground, with their reception influenced by sensory experience as well as readings of historical accounts of visits to those gardens.
Reception theoretical analysis of landscapes differs from typical writing on the history and analysis of landscapes, which tends to focus on the intentions of the designers, the conditions leading to the creation of the design, and the building process. Reception theory also tends to de-emphasize commonly used terms of description like 'formal' and 'picturesque,' unless those terms were known to have meaning to landscape visitors themselves.
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Famous quotes containing the words reception, theory, landscape and/or architecture:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“In the theory of gender I began from zero. There is no masculine power or privilege I did not covet. But slowly, step by step, decade by decade, I was forced to acknowledge that even a woman of abnormal will cannot escape her hormonal identity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“they hear the tolling bell
Reaching across the landscape of hysteria,”
—Stephen Spender (1909–1995)
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)