obsessed with landscape. vernacular landscape, landscape studies, the history of the infrastructure state.

Landscape studies, I believe, offers the promise of shaking contemporary thought out of its obsession with textual research, demonstrating the constant power, irreversibility, and deep rootedness of visual and spatial phenomena in social and political life.

Landscape stories and pictures together, I want to suggest, offer a sketch of something historians should find unavoidable: a portrait of what characterizes the modern age of landscape, an age of social interactions, markets, and developments are routinely channeled by preexistent hulks in the landscape as permanent and shaped as they come. The era of modern landscape the era where state infrastructure and capital have made immense and irreversible the effects of building, in the form of corridors, monuments, and waste, channeling everyday paths and interactions into new space. In the era of modern building, the secrets of landscape are constantly hidden in plain sight, indecipherable too all but the closest inhabitants and most skilled interpreters.

landscape.blogspot.com