ABSTRACT

Compiling nine authoritative essays spanning an extensive academic career, author Kenneth R. Olwig presents explorations in landscape geography and architecture from an environmental humanities perspective. With influences from art, literature, theatre staging, architecture, and garden design, landscape has come to be viewed as a form of spatial scenery, but this reading captures only a narrow representation of landscape meaning today.

This book positions landscape as a concept shaped through the centuries, evolving from place to place to provide nuanced interpretations of landscape meaning. The essays are woven together to gather an international approach to understanding the past and present importance of landscape as place and polity, as designed space, as nature, and as an influential factor in the shaping of ideas in a just social and physical environment.

Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in landscape and beyond, this illustrated volume traces the idea of landscape from the ancient polis and theatre through to the present day.

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

Landscape, philology, and the environmental geohumanities

chapter |16 pages

Are islanders insular?

A personal view

chapter |25 pages

The case of the “missing” mask

Performance, theater, ætherial space, and the practice of landscape/architecture

chapter |11 pages

Performing on the landscape versus doing landscape

Perambulatory practice, sight, and the sense of belonging

chapter |32 pages

Heidegger, Latour, and the reification of things

The inversion and spatial enclosure of the substantive landscape – The Lake District case

chapter |26 pages

Transcendent space, reactionary modernism, and the “diabolic” sublime

Walter Christaller, Edgar Kant, and the landscape origins of modern spatial science and planning