England and the Isovist

During the late 1950s and 60s, when the harsh encroachment of industrialisation in rural areas reached a new peak, landscape architecture, design and urban planning were sought out by industrialists as means to improve deteriorating public relations. Facing the contentious task of integrating large industrial structures—coal and nuclear power stations, pylons and power lines, coal mines, spoil heaps, motorways and oil terminals—the hired practitioners were asked to put their design skills and sensibilities to use in new ways. This chapter tells of how methods of perceiving, recording and describing scenery rationally and geometrically came to the fore in the siting of industrial projects, and in landscape planning more broadly. Geometry and abstraction offered landscape architects and planners, first, a new way of understanding the changing landscape, which corresponds with a broader turn to systematic and science-based planning during the post-war period. It also offered the practitioners a new way of capturing landscape change geometrically in charts and diagrams. The chapter traces how this new way of assessing scenery abstractly with properties and relations between points and lines, manifested in new ways of graphically simulating, predicting and ultimately controlling rural landscape change during the 1960s and 70s.