"Learning from "Environmental Design" Studies. Cultural Landscape and the Renovation of Teaching in US Schools of Architecture between the 50s and the 70s", symposium EURAU 08, ETSAM (original) (raw)

When studying the notion of built environment in design education, some names regularly appear: Serge Chermayeff, Christopher Alexander, Kevin Lynch and Amos Rapoport. Their texts deal with the landscape as a cultural object from a very interdisciplinary perspective. Authors today refer to these writings as "Environmental Design" literature, even though these people never worked together in a concerted manner nor in one single institution. This paper seeks to give substance to this classification of texts and to understand why this literature emerged between the 50s and the 70s. First, we briefly consider the biographies of these authors stressing that all were teachers in particular institutions. Then, through the history of the three main ones (Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley), we will see how this literature came from the translation into a scientific project of an attempt to link architecture and planning. Finally, we will present some elements explaining how this research project came to be interested in the issue of "cultural landscape".