Flows, Patterns and Topographies

Abstract

Our lived landscapes are repositories of messages, of decisions taken by generations of cultural activity on the land. We can study the landscape to read our given world. But can we undertake this “landscape reading” in reverse, using its techniques to structure space, and “write” a way of living on the land

The “Open City” of Ritoque has no urban structure, and yet is named ‘City’. It is a potent example of a place in which techniques of making drawn intuitively from Landscape serve in the ordering of the site. The territory, which appears to carry a random scattering of individual structures, can be shown to be carefully, and indeed minutely defined through a series of overlapping perceptual orders; orders which emerge, as landscape’s orders do, through the inhabitation, use and participation in the City.