Though it began in the 18th century the ideas embodied in the picturesque were a precursor to how we currently move through and experience the world. Manifesting themselves most prominently in new media landscapes: the shapeshifting flux of rolling news and the endless scroll of social media accounts. Using drawing as a research technique to excavate meaning, we explored Picturesque Landscape Gardens through experimental cartographies, perspectives, sequences, frames and images to situate our research territory within historical contexts. These drawings were developed throughout the course and acted as a touchstone for expanded research in the urban realm. As individual drawings they are a timely exploration of Landscape Gardens, but taken as a whole this atlas reinvents picturesque for the present day.

Following a close reading of Architecture and landscape by Clemens Steenberg some students chose to use ideas inherent in the picturesque as an optic through which to examine other traditions of landscape gardening. Thus moving the atlas towards a timeline of the gestation of artificial landscapes.

Formal and emblematic gardens, such as those at Versailles, aim to control nature and the bodies that inhabit them through the use of harsh geometric patterns—often they contain a rigidly prescribed route that was traditionally only known to the landowner. Conversely, the meaning and experience of a picturesque garden, an expressive garden, is always in motion, having more common with fluid methods of free association than Cartesian geometries. While a formal garden can be appreciated from an objective distance, from the ‘godlike’ perspective of their creators, a picturesque garden is only activated through subjective movement. This sense of flux was typified in the Eighteen-century fascination for the illusion of parallax—the perceived differences in an object’s position when seen from different locations—and was important to the development of ambiguity in modernist art and architecture, which promoted discontinuity, montage and a temporal conception of space. The picturesque then is essentially a splintering of time and space that is perennially settling into different forms. It has a ruin logic that is broken and incomplete leaving it up to the visitor to fill in the gaps. The visitor is in charge of their own movement forward, their own spatial production, transforming them into both spectator and actor in a fragmented theatrical performance that fictionalises reality.