"Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene." The interpretation of ordinary landscapes

Abstract

Our human landscape is our unwitting autobiography, reflecting our tastes, our values, our aspirations, and even our fears, in tangible, visible form. We rarely think of landscape that way, and so the cultural record we have written in the landscape is liable to be more truthful than most autobiographies because we are less self-conscious about how we describe ourselves, (12). Lewis Axioms for reading the landscape are based off of this (bad) assumption that landscapes are texts that reflect human ideals and behaviors (and not the ideal forms of these). These axioms include: Landscape as a clue to culture the culture of any nation is unintentionally reflected in its ordinary vernacular landscape (15); Cultural unity and landscape equality. Nearly all items in human landscapes reflect culture in some way most items in the human landscapes are no more and no less important than other items- in terms of their role as clues to culture (18); Common thingsare by their nature hard to study by conventional academic means (19); The historic axiom we do what we do, and make what we make because our doings and our makings are inherited from the past. To understand those historical objects, we must try to understand the people who built them-our cultural ancestors- in their cultural context, not ours, (23); The Geographic or ecological axiom To study a building as if it were on an artists easel, detached from it surrounding, is to remove some of the most important evidence explaining why the building looks the way it does, and what its appearance has to tell us about the culture in which it was built, (25). Recognizing these axioms poses some very interesting questions about the landscape: What does it look like? How does it work? Who designed it? Why? When? What doe it tell us about the way our society works? (26). While asking these questions reveal much about society, we must realize that the landscape is not a panacea, not the master key to an understanding of culture, (27) but merely a factor in the process.