requires a more complex interpretation. Arnold Berleant, a philosopher and scholar working largely in the field of aesthetics and place, writes, “The most general meaning of place as a static, then, is a particular perceptual environment that joins a distinctive identity in coherence with a memorable character, and with which we actively engage in attention or action.”5 Place is more abstract than its physical location, and it is more tangible than a state of mind; it is rooted in experiencing the essential qualities of a perceivable environment. When architecture is designed with the primary intention to bound or create space, it inevitably shuts out place.
Conventional architecture, as portrayed by Betsky, supplants its
natural context: wall assemblies define boundaries; the space contained within is conditioned for human comfort regardless of – and often in direct opposition to – the local climate; irregular topography is flattened for construction. The physical components of architecture are expected to protect against the elements, isolating the interior experience from the exterior. At the site scale, figure/ground studies polarize and segregate based on the built, portrayed in black, and everything else, represented in white (or vice versa). Linda Pollak, a landscape architect who has written widely on the relationship between architecture and landscape, criticizes this approach in her essay “Constructed Ground”: This persistent blindness is evident in the still common recourse to the figure/ground plan, which fails to engage the material aspects of a site, representing the ground as a void around buildings. This convention of figure/ground is part of a historically embedded oppositional system of thought –other oppositions include architecture/landscape, object/ space, culture/nature, and work/site – which foregrounds and acknowledges the construction of the first paired term while naturalizing the second as unproblematic background. The tendency is to view the second, or what I call environmental term, as an abstract container, separate from the objects, events and relations that occur within it. These second terms often become fused together in some kind of landscape-space5 Arnold Berleant. “Aesthetics of Place.” in Sarah Menin, ed., Constructing Place: Mind and Matter. (New York: Routledge, 2003), 46.
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