Sensory deprivation: globalisation and the phenomenology of landscape architecture

Abstract

One of the most insidious influences of globalisation on landscape architecture is the hegemony of the visual. The dominance of visuality is nothing new, having been spawned during the Enlightenment, yet it has rapidly gained momentum under the auspices of globalisation's colonisation of space and time. Design professions have embraced digital media, and as a concomitant of this, have reinforced the already dominant visual aspect of the environment. The scission between sight and the other senses, save for perhaps the aural, is thus emphasised through the dominance of electronic media and information technology. A single-minded focus on tools such as visualising and drafting software has tended to hasten the dominance of visuality. Added to this is the growth of 'visualising culture', where much of the exchange of ideas, and the inculcation of consumerist desires, was via visual sources such as magazines and television. At the domestic level therefore, visual dominance is further embedded in landscape architecture through the clients' craving for particular 'looks' or 'images', in the same way that the fashion industry constantly presents new images for consumption. For landscape sensory reduction is particular potent, as landscape is a domain which is, arguably, necessarily attuned to the subtleties of locale, the very traces and experiences that are found in the full spectrum of the senses, the smell of place, the touch, the feeling of heat and shade, the sounds, even the taste. The phenomenological, haptic dimension of landscape is incredibly rich, yet is almost entirely edited out in many contemporary landscape designs, resulting in an impoverished connection between design and experience. The often temporary or ephemeral nature of fashion-driven imagery is also at odds with landscape architecture, since the evolution of design takes time in the landscape, it is not instant. This paper explores a range of examples of 'sensory deprivation', of designs where the 'authenticity' of the local sensory experience has been edited out or ignored, in the drive for a globalised, or more often, "Westernised" landscape architecture. Also presented are examples of the transcending of the visual hegemony, where designers have explicitly sought to reconnect design to the rich sensory experience of place.