Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Giovanni Bellini, The Madonna of the Meadow, c 1500
Architecture and landscape are ‘the constant presence’ in this typical example of the Renaissance figure in ‘ground’. The
ground is, however, highly detailed, with minor but ominous traces of discordant potential, such as the trees distorted by
the wind, and nearby a watching black rook. The buildings in the rear ground are medieval and defensive rather than
agrarian or even domestic, as one might expect. The innocence and humanity of the key figures is nonetheless reassuring.
painters’ interest in architecture seems to be related with the
process of the differentiation of the world and individual
consciousness, the birth of the first personal pronoun ‘I’. The
smallest of details suffices to create the experience of
architectural space: a framed opening or the mere edge of a
wall provides an architectural setting. The innocence and
humanity of this painterly architecture, the similarity of the
human and the architectural figure, is most comforting,
touching and inspiring – this is a truly therapeutic
architecture. The best lessons in domesticity and the essence
of home are 17th-century Dutch paintings. In these paintings,
buildings are presented almost as human figures – the
mirrored images of the house and the human body were
introduced into modern thought by the psychologist and
analyst CG Jung and have been expressed by countless artists.
I cannot think of a more inspiring and illuminating lesson in
architecture than that offered by early Renaissance paintings. If
I could ever design a single building with the tenderness of
Giotto’s, Fra Angelico’s or Piero della Francesca’s houses, I
would feel that I had reached the very purpose of my life.
The interactions between Modern art and Modern
architecture are well known and acknowledged, but I have not
yet seen an architecture inspired by JMW Turner, Claude
Monet, Pierre Bonnard or Marc Rothko, for example. Painting
and other art forms have surveyed dimensions of human
emotion and spirit unknown to architects, whose art
conventionally tends to respond to rationalised normality. The
work of numerous contemporary artists – Robert Smithson,
Gordon Matta-Clark, Michael Heizer, Donald Judd, Robert Irwin,
Jannis Kounellis, Wolfgang Leib, Ann Hamilton, James Turrell
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