Portraying the Urban Landscape: Landscape in Architectural Criticism and Theory, 1960-Present
Christopher Hight
Summary
By Marcelo Rivera Leyton

The Ethos of Landscape.
For Hight Landscape urbanism is not a theory of design but could be an innovate design practice. He says that it’s a design ethic meaning not a moral code, a legal standard or a mantra but an ethos, a way of doing and a mentality of values, norms assumptions and methods and most importantly the way in which questions are asked. It’s a mode of operation. He analyses Michel Foucault’s “disassembly of the self” and Deleuze and Guattari’s “Thousand Plateaus” to explain the particular ethos that landscape urbanism seems to require. Both were speaking of the identity of the self in society which could be applied also to the transdisciplinary project of landscape urbanism and the identity of disciplines: while architecture operates through an ethics of stasis, truth, wholeness and timelessness. Urban planning via control, determinism and hierarchy. Landscape design offers an ethics of temporal, complexity and soft-control. Finally landscape urbanism, as “another potential” (referring to Foucoult’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s disassembly by becoming other) that must be understood as an attempt to constitute a kind of aesthetics of existence.

Landscape as Simulation: The colonial Gaze of Architecture.
There was an odd relationship between architecture and landscape design in the XX century. Landscape was something to either provide relief from urban congestion, humanize it{s rationalism or to soften the cold, hard logic of the architects. It appeared uncultured and wild without rules, logic and methods.
The author analyses Teyner Banham{s iconoclastic example of hawksmoor-the-architect versus Wren-the-nonarchitect and how a designer depicts architectural order but doesn’t operate as an architect at the level of order. For Banham, landscape design was not an art, neither a discipline nor even a profession. He says that it is the mode of operation that defines a discipline, rather than any quality of beauty, function or other such criteria.

The Operative Landscape.
Landscape design has attempted to purge its pastoral and pictorial referents. Alex Wall says that it invokes the functioning matrix of connective tissues that organized not only objects and spaces but also the dynamic processes and events that move through them. And that this approach should be shift, one reason landscape is useful is its emphasis on the plan and the horizontal as an ordering surface. this will allow to access to the reality or new nature or essence of the city and it will recover landscape from its pictorial and pastoralism, while leaving architecture and planning´s underlying assumptions.

Landscape as General Theory.
Waddington´s “epigenetic landscapes”, Kaufman´s “fitness landscapes”, Thom´s “catastrophe landscapes”, Uexhil´s “environmental capture”, etc. These references to these sciences offers an ethos of landscape in which it becomes possible to formalize different types of existence. These conceptualization and specific configuration of concepts, conditions and cross-disciplinary practices makes landscape possible as a mode of urban design. The two cuts described by Walter Benjammin´s analysis of the world´s substance, the longitudinal cut of painting and the transversal cut of certain graphic productions. Could be thought also in landscape design. Again Deleuze and Guattari talk about this distinction modalities, the verticality aligned with the portrait, the face or the mode of representation they call faciality, a mode to be copied. Houses, towns or cities, monuments or factories, they function like faces in the landscape they transform. If the vertical face is aligned with the humanist subject, then the horizontal landscape is the mode for all their processes. If mechanical reproduction and graphic concepts were central to the advent of transversal paintings, the use of digital visualization and information technology in landscape urbanism should be understood as similar transversal operations in design, ones that may perhaps no longer be limited to these two axes and instead suggest as yet authorized as mode of operation. The proposition of landscape urbanism thereby attempts to rotate architecture out of its vertical alignments as a model of order, to deterritorialize in the first instance not the physical space of the city but the discipline’s precepts and ethos.