The connections between history, architecture, and design are frequently called into question by

historians who teach in professional schools, especially given the propensity to write the history

of the third as though it were the second. Architectural designers who were interested in situating

their creations within the broad stream of tradition were the main authors of architectural

histories up until the middle of the nineteenth century. This intellectual endeavor merged with a

somewhat different project in the late eighteenth century, which was to legitimize architects as

professionals and a group with a socially recognized niche in the commercial economy. By the

middle of the nineteenth century, it was clear, at least in the United States, that these architects'

attempts to describe an architectural science that could be empirically distinguished from the

builder's science had failed. They changed the target audience from the craftsperson to the

customer and started to assert judgmental qualities that were categorically distinct from those of

the craftsman. To explain these discrepancies in judgment, the popular concept of taste from the

eighteenth century was invoked. Architecture was to be a socially defined and practiced

discipline. The second goal of limiting entry into the profession would be served by this. In

summary, the history of architecture as we have recorded it is the tale of the profession's

development as the hazy triumph of high culture over low, despite our differences in detail.

Another contribution to the history of architecture from the eighteenth century is the definitions

of high and low. Traditional notions of history and beauty were rebuilt during the Enlightenment.

Human culture was reenvisioned as pluralistic and multivalent, and human history as non

cyclical and non teleological. The idea of timeless expression, which includes the pinnacle of

human achievement, protected the universal, in this sense. It was distinguished from a low,

fragmented culture that was relevant only in specific locations, historical periods, or social
contexts. Despite the fact that this new aesthetic attitude was demeaning to the lowly, it gave it a

fresh appearance in the landscape. Recent vernacular scholars appear to reject this model of

architectural history. They contend that studies that are centered on monuments and architects

pay insufficient attention to the built environment. Additionally, they adhere to hierarchical,

top-down models of creation that are destructive to cultural and historical processes, and worst of

all, they are overly formalistic. Recent vernacular scholars appear to reject this model of

architectural history. They contend that studies that are centered on monuments and architects

pay insufficient attention to the built environment. Additionally, they adhere to hierarchical,

top-down models of creation that are destructive to cultural and historical processes, and worst of

all, they are overly formalistic.

Three fundamental ideas that stem from the nineteenth-century professional imperatives

discussed earlier in this essay are presupposed by these models for understanding the history of

architecture: aesthetic universals, the individual work (whether building, ensemble, or urban

plan) as the unit of analysis, and the distinction between creator and audience. However, these

are at odds with current analyses of how artifacts and expressive works are created in most other

humanistic disciplines. Everyone should become familiar with the fundamentals of

architecture, its historical context, and the general laws that govern it. Architectural history

continues to be rooted in these presumptions. Perversely, the story of resistance to high culture

that students of the vernacular inherited from social history is dependent on the same notion of

universality as the progress-of-the-profession or -architect narrative that most historians of the

high style adopt. Both focusing on the architect or the builder is questionable. It goes without

saying that there are those who supervise the building of specific structures and many more who

do not. However, a more nuanced understanding of the landscape is required by the historian
than what the subject/object relationship between the creator and the work of art allows. The

builder/user distinction focuses the historian's attention on the question of intention far too much.

It doesn't matter if intention is defined as building within pre-existing cultural categories and

socioeconomic relations, as preferred by vernacularists, or as artistic achievement within a great

tradition.

For a number of reasons, both provide overly restricted interpretations of the human landscape;

● First, without normative experience, no builder can be certain that the meaning,

application, or value of their work will be as intended by their audience. Even the

relatively specialized and explicitly coercive architects of early nineteenth-century

prisons and other institutional buildings were unable to accomplish this. The identity of a

building and the intentions of its creators are obscured once it is incorporated into the

landscape by perplexing patterns of human perception, use, and imagination.

● Secondly, we experience the landscape through all of our senses, and the categories we

use to interpret it are rarely internally consistent. Architectural history, like most studies

of the material environment, focuses on the eye. Our fingers and tongues occasionally, as

well as our ears and noses, also make connections, associations, and interpretations that

may be very different from what our eyes suggest. The other senses organize the

landscape in a different way than our eyes, which isolate the building as a unit of

analysis. To put it another way, each sense may detect a distinct landscape in which the

specific building is unimportant.

Finally, very few of these social, perceptual, or imaginative phenomena are taken into account by

designers in their planning; it is unlikely that they could. As a result, the landscape, which was

ostensibly the intended target, unexpectedly rebounds on us. Most of what is significant in
architecture happens accidentally. Like other users, designers also become the objects and

subjects of other people's and their own work. One gesture in an endlessly recursive articulation

of the person and the landscape is the act of architecture. It is a landscape that is fashioned more

through construing than through actual building.

CONCLUSION

This history does, of course, consider builders and buildings, but it only addresses construction

as it pertains to constructing. Instead of the interaction between creator and object, it focuses on

how people interact with their own landscape. It makes an effort to take into account as many

different types of perception as it can, as well as the mental frameworks that allow perception to

be interpreted. Because construing is influenced by the verbal lenses through which we perceive

the physical world, anthropologists and literary theorists have shown us that the landscape

history of architecture is rhetorical as well as sensual. As a result, a working definition of cultural

landscape places an emphasis on how all of its inhabitants construct and interpret the landscape

using a combination of physical and imaginative structures. The human environment must

necessarily be the result of strong yet diffuse imaginations, shattered by the faultlines of class,

culture, and personality because there can be no normative perception. It cannot be canonized,

unified, or even made universal. One of these new humanists' main concerns is the environment.

Architectural historians, who have always been interested in the built environment, can

contribute most to the interdisciplinary ferment of our time by letting go of our linguistic,

conceptual, and occasionally literal partisanship of one group of buildings, as well as by

rethinking our fundamental analytical concepts. If not true to architects, such a path would be

true to history and the landscape. They can, however, care for themselves.
WHAT DID DELL UPTON MEAN BY LANDSCAPE
HISTORY?

NAME: ADERINSOLA ADEBUKOLA ADEAGBO

EDMP21/22/H/0727

COURSE CODE: ARC 605