Problematising the Sublime: Affective Archives in Landscape Design

This paper brings forth the problem of bodily, affective, intelligence and its role within landscape architectural design processes. Specifically, how might landscape designers draw on their internal memory-archives of body-environment affects to help shape design decisions? Despite sustained interest in phenomenology and other theories of environmental aesthetics, the operations of spatial affective experience have remained ambiguous within design discourse. This has led to the design of spatial experience being viewed with suspicion due to claims of ‘mere subjectivity’ or a lack of rigor compared to recent trends towards universality and positivism. To counter this, this paper argues that the concreteness of affect can be made present through Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics of affect and assemblages. More specifically, experiences of the [landscape]sublime can be understood as an ecological encounter with intensity that disrupts our being’s ability to reference it against one’s bodily archive of affects. This disruption shocks us into determining a creative solution to the spatial and sensory problem at hand, which at first may manifest as a sense of terror. Still, as the processes of experimentation unfold, we find ourselves reveling in the joy of the creation of a new self through the processes of individuation and actualization. Through this aesthetics of affect, this paper argues that although the sublime is an ‘experiential limit case’, it reveals how other forms of landscape experience can be deciphered and made concrete through and for design.