Space in landscape design

Space in landscape design refers to theories about the meaning and nature of space as a volume and as an element of design. The concept of space as the fundamental medium of landscape design grew from debates tied to modernism, contemporary art, Asian art and design- as seen in the Japanese garden, and architecture.

Elizabeth K. Meyer cites Claude-Henri Watelet’s Essay on Gardens (1774) as perhaps the first reference to space in garden/architectural theory.Andrew Jackson Downing in 1918 wrote “Space Composition in Architecture”, which directly linked painting and gardens as arts involved in the creation of space.

The origins of modern northern European thought is a German aesthetic philosophy of the 1890s. By the 1920s, Einstein’s theories of relativity were replacing Newton’s conception of universal space. Practitioners such as Fletcher Steele, James Rose, Garrett Eckbo, and Dan Kiley began to write and design through a vocabulary of lines, volumes, masses and planes in an attempt to replace the prevalent debate, centered around ideas of the formal and informal, with one that would more closely align their field with the fine arts.

According to Adrian Forty, the term “space” in relation to design was all but meaningless until the 1890s. At that time two schools began to develop. Viennese Gottfried Semper in 1880 developed an architectural theory based the idea that the first impulse of architecture was the enclosure of space. Camillo Sitte extended Semper’s ideas to exterior spaces in his City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889). Concurrently, Friedrich Nietzsche built on ideas from Kant which emphasized the experience of space as a force field generated by human movement and perception. Martin Heidegger would later contradict both of these schools. In his 1927 Being and Time and 1951 “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” he claimed that space was neither a construct of the mind nor a given, but was “that for which a room has been made” and was created by the object within a room rather than the room itself. Henri Lefebvre would call all of this into question, linking designers’ notions of themselves as space-makers to a subservience to a dominant capitalist mode of production. He felt that the abstract space they had created had destroyed social space through alienation, separation, and a privileging of the eye.

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