Complex Concepts and Controlling Designs: Charles Jencks’ Landform at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Catharine Ward Thompson*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Charles Jencks' writings as an architect and his enthusiastic inventions in the ‘Garden of Cosmic Speculation’, the private landscape developed with his late wife, Maggie Keswick, at Portrack, near Dumfries, in the Scottish Borders, have contributed to his gathering fame as a designer of monumental landscapes. In 1999, he was invited to develop an earth sculpture project at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, entitled the Landform. This reworking of the landscape in front of the early nineteenth-century Gallery of Modern Art building has received much attention and praise, not least because of the Landform’s photogenic qualities. The critique of the Landform that follows takes into account Jencks’ stated intentions and inspirations as well as traditions of earth sculpture and land modelling, particularly the eighteenth-century landscapes of Britain as well as twentieth-century precedents.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)64-75
Number of pages12
JournalJournal of Landscape Architecture
Volume2
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2007

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Complex Concepts and Controlling Designs: Charles Jencks’ Landform at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this