Landscape History Chapter Pre-conference Symposium Landscapes in Time
18 April 2012, Detroit
Susan Herrington and Sonja Duempelmann, symposium chairs

The Landscape History Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) invites you to submit an abstract for our second upcoming pre-conference colloquium, Landscapes in Time. Since landscapes and gardens physically change over time, as do our readings of them, they pose interesting questions for historians.

The tipping bamboo water shoot in the Edo period gardens of Japan furnished an aural sensation denoting the passage of time; ruins, monuments and epitaphs in eighteenth-century English landscape gardens evoked the passing of time; night-blooming Mughal gardens accentuated the appearance of the moon; in the 1950s Ruth Shellhorn designed a landscape for Disneyland that would take visitors back in time to small-town America, and in the contemporary landscapes by Gilles Clément the growth and movement of plants over time are key to understanding their subtle beauty.

These examples are not as sundry as they appear. Time has always played an important role in landscape and garden design. In fact, landscape theorists have positioned time as a defining feature of gardens and landscapes. J. B. Jackson contended that landscape speed up or slow down time. Observing the Danish landscape, Steen A. B. Høyer has claimed that things take time and time takes things. As Marc Bloch wrote in The Historian’s Craft, time is “the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible.” Indeed, landscapes have both formed and resulted from historic events, and their inception, creation, and reception

The second Landscape History Chapter Symposium seeks to address some of these queries regarding landscapes and time. Papers can address but are not limited to the following topics: Physical time, Representations of time, Perception of time, Time travel, Topology of time- for further descriptions see: http://www.sahlandscape.org/ and click on "events."

Please submit abstracts and a one-page curriculum vita by 1 August 2011 to both susan.herringtonubc.ca and sduempelumd.edu. Please note: Each speaker is expected to fund his or her own travel and expenses to Detroit. All speakers must be members of the Society of Architectural Historians by 1 October 2011, but do not need to register for the main conference.