Issue 26 "The memory, design and construction of the landscape"
Deadline for submission of articles: September 15th, 2025
Expected publication date: June 2026
Call Text:
The landscape, in any of its categories or formulations, and especially in what today we call the cultural landscape, is a common heritage that requires, for its existence and culmination, the gaze and intervention of the individual on nature or on a built heritage in time. Thus understood, contemporary man receives the landscape as a testimony of a legacy on which, progressively and cyclically, his gaze returns. Moreover, it needs it as a necessary stimulus to build its identity in a world in dizzying evolution. Thus, the theoretical and conceptual framework of a reality needs to be reconstructed in continuous transformation, and the anthropological bases of living in which memory and identity are constitutive elements associated with the growing idea of a return to original situations needs to be considered.
The analysis of the idea of return to these forgotten heritages and to the rural world is narrated from a polyhedral and transversal perspective, architectural, landscape, literary, visual, musical, which includes the updating of the bases and demographic, sociological and economic reasons for abandonment and proposes the keys and strategies for its transformation as engines of change in declining assets. Logically, multidisciplinary teams, including architects, urban planners, landscapers, geographers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and economists, have answered this call.
In this context, those examples in which heritage plays a decisive role in their development are particularly interesting. This is especially the case in areas where there has been a strong demographic imbalance and where the management of this heritage becomes an effective tool against depopulation. Agricultural, forestry, industrial, historical or defensive landscapes, or symbolic landscapes, have become realities that attract the gaze of academics, researchers and professionals in search of new uses and opportunities. Preserving their memory and identity is as much as guaranteeing that the immediate future is built more reliably on the basis of the principle of continuity.
The construction of this memory, which in some cases is at risk of disappearance, requires new mapping and digitization tools. In line with the postulates of James Corner in his “The Agency of Mapping Speculation, Critique and Invention”, the look on a territory or a landscape not only represents reality but, above all, has the capacity to reformulate what it already has unveiled hidden potential. The verification and recovery of the memory of the soil on which every foundational act of man's action takes place is also extremely attractive. New occupation strategies can be derived from critical analysis.
The survival of visual memory is equally crucial. Photographic documentation, both historical and current, plays an essential role since it places us on the stage where new performances are born. This is not only a question of preserving memory but also of establishing the codes and bases for reinterpretation. Hence, there is a need for a modern photographic view of forgotten landscapes and heritages that alerts their presence and promotes their activation.
A careful look at the landscape and the intention to contribute to its construction in time lead to a timeless and universal architecture. Memory, in this way, refers not only to monumental heritage but also, fundamentally, to the domestic structures adapted over the centuries in the construction of the landscape. Hence, interest in studying the practices of reconstruction of both architectural and landscape structures in rural areas is understood as development opportunities. These interventions are often associated with new artistic practices and the promotion of cultural parks that enhance heritage and contribute to sustainable tourism.
In strictly architectural terms, we recall that the evolution of modernity was also nurtured by the tension between the near and the universal, between tradition and revolution, and between the plastic formulations of the new times and ancestral realities. For example, Le Corbusier, at the turn of the decade between the twenties and thirties of the last century, simultaneously built Villa Saboya and drew, in the sketches of the Errázuriz House, Zapallar, Chile, traces of the vernacular. In this tension between apparent opposites, the evolution of the arts germinates. It is enough to recall the trajectories of many modern architects, such as Luis Barragán or Dimitris Pikionis, who, in the encounter with the landscape, radically transformed their work. In the most intense examples, there is a deliberate will of the architect to disappear in favour of the anonymous, the small, even if possible, the innocent.
In keeping with the scale of the landscape, it is pertinent to remember, from a strictly architectural perspective, that the desire to return to the origin prompted a good number of architects and artists to dispense for themselves some spaces in the rural environment that would help them understand domesticity and encounter the essential conditions of living. The idea of refuge prompted, among others, Wright, Le Corbusier, Aalto, Asplund, Erskine, and Murcutt to build a small home in which their innovative architectural approaches not only did not blur but, contrary to appearances, found their true meaning in continuity with the origins. Other teachers, who were geographically closer, felt the same need to build their cabins. It is enough to remember the refugia of Sáenz de Oíza, Coderch, Vázquez Molezún or Fisac. Donald Judd also found the landscape for his work and his home in the desert of Marfa, Texas.
These evolutions had, inescapably, the recognition and support of the subject. Thus, material can be understood as a depository of the memory of the places on which the landscape is built. There are many examples in which the essential construction of the same refers to the memory and the information accumulated in the materials. Not only in the architecture inherited from modernity but also in contemporary practices, we find a turning point from a modification in the perception and use of materials and the significant values emanating from them.
This call for the journal aims to bring together the studies and professional practices that investigate the memory contest and its cartographies, with the breadth of fields and scales previously mentioned, as a reason for the construction of cultural landscapes waiting to be redefined. Studies and works on heritages, both monumental and domestic, and fragile and abandoned spaces that await the gaze of contemporary man are equally welcome to be identified, valued, and qualified and, in this way, contribute to building their identity. Among them, and from the scale of architecture to that of the territory, research can be incorporated, both current and those that show past examples, in rural settings that influence new intervention strategies.
Carlos Labarta Aizpún, Ascensión Hernández Martínez, Alegría Colón Mur
