Corpus — Corpus

Corpus
An editorial note for Canonical Landscape Architecture

In 2008, when Peter Eisenman published Ten Canonical Buildings, the digital turn in architecture was not imminent, it had already happened. Zaha Hadid’s work was mainstream. Koolhaas, Libeskind, and Gehry were the recognisable faces of a moment in which parametric form had moved from provocation to practice, and the transition from analogue to digital was, for most schools and most offices, simply the condition of working. The book, in other words, arrived late. It was not a manifesto for something emerging. It was a consolidation, precise, and somewhat defensive of a tradition that its author sensed was being quietly marginalised by spectacle on one side and post-critical pragmatism on the other.

What Eisenman meant by “canonical” was something more demanding than celebrated or exemplary. A canonical building, in his account, advances the internal discourse of the discipline. It shifts what architecture can say formally, and it does so in a way that cannot be undone. “A canonical work,” he writes, “is a hinge, a rupture, a premonition, in other words, something that necessarily signals a change.” The canonical work does not have to be a great work. What it requires is a reading in two directions simultaneously: forward, to what the building inspired; backward, to what it was working against. It is time-bound in this sense, dependent on a particular moment in history, and to be seen as a rupture in either the architect’s career or in the broader architectural discourse. The buildings Eisenman selects are not there to be admired. They are there to be interrogated, as argumentative objects whose formal positions changed the available options for everyone who came after.

Architecture can sustain this kind of reading because over the course of several centuries it has accumulated a sufficiently dense body of critical self-reflection. A long tradition of buildings responding to buildings through formal argument rather than through stylistic allegiance. Each significant work enters a library from which subsequent architects build. The corpus of the discipline is not simply a collection of influential objects; it is an ongoing conversation in which each new contribution must position itself relative to what has already been said.

Landscape architecture does not have this. Or rather: it has it in fragments, and these fragments have not yet been assembled into anything that functions like a critical tradition. Michael Jakob, in What is Landscape? diagnoses the problem as follows: landscape has become too successful as a concept, absorbed into so many disciplines (geography, ecology, anthropology, philosophy) that it has lost any precise meaning. The word is everywhere, which means it is nowhere in particular. What he calls the omni-landscape is not a sign of the discipline’s maturity but of its conceptual diffusion: a term so widely used that it no longer designates anything specific enough.

In Jakob’s account, this is partly a structural condition. Landscape cannot be defined purely from within its own formal tradition because that tradition is too thin and too recent. His resort to phenomenology and comparative literature to answer the question of what landscape is might be a necessary compensation for the absence of the very thing Eisenman takes for granted.

There is a second difficulty, which is not philosophical but material. The role of time in landscape makes it genuinely hard to isolate a study object. Most significant landscape projects are designed as strategies, frameworks whose outcomes unfold over decades, whose form at any given moment is provisional, and whose argument, if there is one, is distributed across phases rather than concentrated in a plan. The project scale compounds this. The difference between a garden and a territorial strategy is not merely a difference of size; it is a difference in the kind of knowledge the work requires, the kind of drawing that can represent it, and the kind of critical vocabulary that can describe it. A discipline that operates simultaneously at all three scales (the garden, the city, the territory) will inevitably produce a discourse that appears dissimilar to itself, not because it lacks rigour, but because the objects of its rigour are genuinely unlike one another.

Corpus: Canonical Landscape Architecture begins from these difficulties rather than from a position beyond them. Its interest is in landscape as intervention work with a physical form and direct presence in urban environments, where the argument a project makes is legible in what was built and in what it changed. This is not a boundary drawn against the discipline’s broader ambitions. It is a point of entry: a way of asking, through specific built works, whether landscape architecture has produced (over across the last fifty years) objects that function as Eisenman’s canonical buildings do, objects that changed what the discipline could formally say and that subsequent practice has had to position itself relative to, whether consciously or not.

In borrowing from architecture its vocabulary of the canonical, its methods of formal close reading, its assumption that built work is the primary source of disciplinary knowledge, this journal does not propose that landscape architecture is architecture. It proposes that landscape architecture needs, as a matter of urgency, what architecture already has: a critical infrastructure dense enough to sustain the kind of argument that can distinguish between a work that is excellent and a work that is canonical. The two categories are not the same. An excellent work does what it does very well. A canonical work changes what it is possible to do. This distinction matters, and has been insufficiently made.

Jakob notes that landscape exists not in nature but in the act of perception shaped by cultural codes. That you do not see a landscape, you constitute one. What this journal seeks to achieve to constitute, through critical analysis and guest reflections, is something more modest and more practical: a catalogue of the works that have, over the past half century, made landscape architecture an argumentative discipline. They may be few. The exercise of identifying them is the point.

Christian Beros
Architect

2026.10.12

Editorial board

Michael Jakob
Professor of History and theory of landscape at Mendrisio, Harvard, and Politecnico di Milano. Geneva.

Mary Bowman
Partner Gustafson Porter + Bowman, London.

Eduardo Rico
Co-Director Landscape Urbanism, Architectural Association. Co-Director MaCT, IAAC. London.

Osvaldo Moreno
Director school of architecture, Universidad Catolica de Chile. Santiago.

Robin Winogrond
Principal Robin Winogrond studio, Zurich.

Zas Brezar
Landscape Architect, Founder and editor-in-chief at Landezine, Ljubljana.

Corpus team

Editors:
Christian Beros, Ilinca Pop

Proofreading:
Samuel Onn

Graphics:
BAA

Contact:

www.corpuslandscape.com
instagram.com/corpuslandscape
mail@corpuslandscape.com

Postal address:
Strada Xenopol 2, Bucharest.