A Discourse on Theory II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the Alternative of Hermeneutics

This essay is about the crisis of creativity and meaning in contemporary Western culture and how the use of modern landscape and architectural theory works to perpetuate an excessively “hard” or neutral world—a world in which culture can no longer figure or recollect itself. A brief critique of three predominant approaches toward contemporary theory is presented: positivism, the use of paradigms, and the Avant-Garde. In different ways, each approach derives from modern techno-scientific thinking and invariably seeks closure, certainty, and control. The built landscapes that result often suffer from an equally closed explicitude: a stifling immanence where all is exposed and nothing is left to imagination. The essay suggests an alternative strategy grounded in the tradition of hermeneutics. Here, theory is something ever-open, permitting a free association of ideas through the mechanics of situational interpretation and metaphor. Hermeneutics provides the basis for a landscape architectural theory that transcends pictorial image and historical style by critically engaging contemporary circumstance and tradition. The landscape itself is a hermeneutic medium and becomes the ground for such an endeavor, enabling the remembrance, renewal, and transformation of a cultural tradition. The author argues that a hermeneutic approach to the theory and practice of landscape architecture is a way of returning to our designed landscapes the powers of the everyday and the revelatory—the grounds of memory and hope.