Concentrating on the period between 1920 and 1940, the talk will present ideas and practices central to the design professions that were either supported by or that emerged from aerial vision. It will show how viewing the earth from above redirected attention to bodily experience on the ground, and illustrates how design professionals understood the aerial view as simultaneously abstract and experiential, detailed and contextual, harmful and essential.
Sonja Dümpelmann is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She holds a Ph.D. in Landscape Architecture from the University of the Arts, Berlin, and has held research fellowships at the German Historical Institute, and at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC. Her publications include a book on the Italian landscape architect Maria Teresa Parpagliolo Shephard (VDG Weimar, 2004), and most recently Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design (University of Virginia Press, 2014) as well as the edited Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury Publishers, 2013), and the co-edited Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (University of Virginia Press, 2011).
