The didactic landscape

Abstract

This special issue journal brings together, for the first time, articles that study the didactic landscape as an artefact from broad spatial perspectives with a particular emphasis on the nineteenth-century to the present. The collection originated with a group of design historians who have a common interest in exploring meaning in the design of institutional landscapes. The essays examine how the parks or gardens of institutions express and reinforce their function and agendas. By its very definition, an institution has power over the spaces it inhabits and expresses distinct messages to the users of those spaces—it is a didactic space. The six articles define and explore a typology of institutional gardens and designed landscapes, conceived and designed with agendas, explicit or implicit, to advise, educate or moralise. Scholarship on the designs of institutional spaces is chiefly centred on architecture and has overlooked the role of the garden or landscape in the functioning and experience of the institution. A spatial understanding of an institutional building has enabled a study of institutional power and politics. A study of the institutional garden and landscape expands this knowledge to include the role of nature and the outdoors in its design and uses. While the genealogy of institutional landscapes with their functional and metaphorical allusions to divine order and political power has been traced to antiquity, the institutional landscape, a didactic space, which became more visible and diverse with the growth of social and political institutions such as museums, asylums and factories in the nineteenth century, has not so far been examined comparatively and culturally. These essays contribute to the scholarly literature investigating meaning in landscape and garden design which has proliferated since the 1980s, stimulated by a body of work within cultural and historical geography, landscape archaeology and history. The collection also responds to more recent research from a variety of disciplines, which has extended knowledge of nonelite gardens as ‘sites of cultural contact’. Within this scholarship of multiple perspectives, debates about the relationships between landscape, power and politics loom large, for as Gailing and Leibenath have recently argued, citing Kenneth Olwig, a landscape does not just express a polity’s values, conventions, customs and practices, but above all it is an expression of hegemonic power. Readers of these essays will be very familiar with examples of those in power using landscape design to impose their authority—from the processional routes of antiquity to Louis XIV’s gardens at Versailles, to General Motors' corporate landscape in Detroit. These heroic didactic landscapes are outspoken in communicating their power. To understand the more nuanced layers of meaning contained within the institutional gardens and parks discussed in this special issue, the authors have found not only Michel Foucault’s work on institutional power helpful, but also his theory of gardens as ‘heterotopias’. Foucault’s ideas on heterotopia, discussed in a lecture in 1967 and finally published in 1984 shortly after his death, have been enthusiastically embraced by scholars interested in the contradictions inherent in the spaces of institutions. However, his notion of a garden as ‘a sort of happy universalising heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity’ has been less explored. Two of the essays presented here have linked the idea of didactic to Foucault’s idea of the garden as a heterotopia, to understand our underlying and time-honoured responses to the particular ways that design, objects and planting ‘superimpose meanings’. Marc Trieb in his essay ‘Must Landscapes Mean’ (1995) identifies five ‘roughly framed’ approaches to landscape design, meaning and significance