Taking Place

While typically accorded form-driven interpretations, Kahn's work may contribute significantly to the emergent discourse on architecture and landscape. Meditations on landscape in Kahn's work and ideas, although present in an unsystematic and sporadic manner, provide a provocative way of thinking about a building's relationship with the landscape. Applying the phenomenological notion of "lived body," a built work is seen not only inscrutably emplaced or intertwined with the landscape but also embodying it, thus making architecture inherently a landscape "event." An analysis of Kahn's work and writings from the vantage point of landscape presents, first, an affirmation of Kahn's particular ideas about land and landscape and, second, a substantiation of the claim that architecture is a landscape phenomenon.