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Intersections of Landscape Design Studies and Consumerist Arts
Mira EnglerAbstract, Reframing Landscape History session, Society of Architectural Historians, April 2016, Pasadena, Los Angeles, CA. This paper locates landscape studies in the context of visual consumer culture, focusing on the production modes and marketing strategies of three media-savvy trendsetters in landscape and garden design: the eighteenth-century landscape gardener Humphry Repton, postwar townscape designer Gordon Cullen, and contemporary garden designer and host of HGTV garden shows Jamie Durie. Since the 1700s gardens and landscapes have performed like idealized lifestyle commodities via attractive images in mass media as landscape design and consumer markets became increasingly entangled. I examine the work and impacts of these three influential figures and trace the broad diffusion of their work through a representative sample of their “followers.” To promote their products and address the professional market, clients, and mainstream audience, they assumed the roles of tastemaker authority, image maker and educator, and informer and entertainer, respectively. Each laid the foundation for subsequent designers who drew on mixed media to promote not only their work but also the public experience of landscape. Though different in their message and significance, these designers successfully appealed to a growing consumer market within the context of the economy and media technology of their time. Drawing on primary and secondary sources, I show that they persuasively packaged and “sold” their “merchandise” and produced a new sensory-laden and immersive understanding of landscape. Their drive for professional and public appeal led them to bridge theory and practice, use the “art of compromise,” borrow and mix pictorial devices from high- and low-brow art genres, and privilege the perspective technique over others—elements that became identifiable trends in landscape design practice. By using media and consumerist arts perspectives in garden and landscape studies I offer a new interpretive path toward a historical knowledge that incorporates the landscape designer’s modus operandi and explains the broadening appeal and public experience of landscape design.
