index

About landscapes and fields

click on images for full-size:

Suburban space divisions

A temporary place and its spatial divisions

A place offers a spatial landscape of action possibilities. We should work to enrich the landscape of possibilities in contemporary places.

-- Much of your discussion uses images of landscapes or fields of possibilities, mixed with images of process or motion, in the hope that each image will work to counteract the problematic features of the other. But the image of a field of possibilities is very questionable, because it is totalizing and overly visual.

-- You are right that I have tried to play off the images against one another, and that there is a real danger of the image of a field or a landscape suggesting a closed totality. I have tried to combat that suggestion by using another image, that of a horizon, and talking about the surrounding excess of meaning.

Your objection also raises the (excess, again) issue of whether "place grammars" exist as pure formal structures.