ABSTRACT
The first body of theory is the area of art and aesthetics. This is a broad, complex, and sometimes contradictory area of thinking, and this chapter aims to provide some navigational aids in picking out the terrain that is useful for exploring landscape architecture criticism. Much of landscape architecture’s DNA derives from the debates over aesthetic theory in the eighteenth century, and its subsequent widespread dissemination, particularly in terms of the picturesque. Perspectives of beauty and messiness tease out the framing of aesthetics into areas especially relevant to landscape architecture. This chapter prefigures theories of meaning and landscape architecture discussed in subsequent chapters, with the contrasting positions of the associative aspect of the picturesque, which in its original formulation was saturated with meaning, and the position of formalism and its concern with formal properties of tone, texture, form, and so on.
