![]() For example, it is possible to picture the High Line in New York City (a Corner project) re-created with any number of theoretical binaries: a nostalgic re-creation of its past, an objectified pictorial image, a bucolic respite from the city, or even demolished to prioritize the street grid below. Through critical acts of landscape architecture-drawing, writing, or constructing landscapes- we can read and interpret them like texts, uncovering infinite new potentials within the binaries. Corner proposes that instead of trying to understand landscapes as self-evident objects, their complexity requires interpretation. Hermeneutics is a practice, borrowed from the social sciences, of understanding the world through a historical interpretation of texts. In the next essay, “Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory” (1991), Corner proposes a hermeneutical approach to landscape architecture theory to overcome the lack of meaning in our repetitive, formulaic, and prosaic world. For example, “Sounding Depths-Origins, Theory, and Representation” (1990), explores several dichotomies limiting landscape architecture while addressing why new theory is critical to the field. Since there are now built works influenced by the ideas found in these essays, we can better understand Corner’s writing by assessing its translation to practice. These essays build a case for the landscape imagination as the great confounder, able to transcend limiting binaries by finding infinite potentials within them. It mediates between the local and global, between recovery and invention, and between past inheritance and future potential. Corner argues that these are not actually dichotomous, but related-fundamental, even, to the landscape imagination. The landscape imagination is both interpreter and mediator, both informer and popularizer, both conversational and circumstantial, both dialogue and contemplation. In each essay, the landscape imagination confronts and deconstructs the simplistic binaries hindering landscape architecture: art versus science, culture versus nature, city versus landscape, theory versus practice, technique versus motivation, imaginary versus built, phenomenology versus technology, tradition versus modern. Therefore, he says, “It can renew the common and banal and reconcile our modern estrangement from place.” But the landscape imagination is needed to liberate landscape from its “devolved place as scenic object, subjugated resource, or scientific ecosystem.” This collection is a conversation about tools to unleash the landscape imagination, exemplified through Corner’s own journey. Corner argues that landscape is the great mediator between nature and culture, since it invokes natural processes over time but is fundamentally a cultural construct. Each section builds upon the previous, linking theoretical aspects of the medium to practice through what Corner calls “the landscape imagination.” Described as a critical agent and a form of social action, the landscape imagination’s goal is to make landscapes that provoke and challenge society’s relationship to the natural world. Although many of the essays were written years ago, their sequencing in the collection renders them fresh. The Landscape Imagination is organized more thematically than chronologically, with essays parceled out according to areas of Corner’s ongoing investigations: Theory Representation and Creativity Landscape Urbanism and Practice. Though his iconic designed works (for example, The High Line in New York City) eclipse his written works-particularly outside academia-we gain access to a rich and penetrating assessment of landscape’s profound role in culture when we wander through Corner’s sprawling wordscapes. In the twenty years between these two books, Corner wrote the essays collected here while simultaneously composing a celebrated portfolio of built landscapes. The Landscape Imagination is the first written project composed exclusively of Corner’s own essays since Taking Measures Across the American Landscape, published in 1996. As one of the most prominent landscape architects of our time, his writing is as much a means of advancing the field as is his built work. James Corner’s prolific writing from the past two decades invites readers on a journey to discover the elusive medium of landscape. A review of The Landscape Imagination: The Collected Essays of James Corner 1990-2010, by James Corner.
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