The Landscape Overheard: Campuses, Conversations, and Cultures at The University of Wyoming
A landscape is beautiful when it has been or can be the scene of a
significant experience in self-awareness and eventual self-knowledge. - J.B.
Jackson
J.B. Jackson, one of the most astute readers of our human environment, defines landscape as "a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence...." Cultural landscape refers to those aspects of the physical environment that embody the values, aspirations, conflicts, prejudices, and aesthetic sense of any human collectivity. Cultural landscapes exist at the macro-scale of whole regions (and even nations) and at the micro-scale of a neighborhood front yard (or even a child's sandbox). Through the images, graphics, texts, and links of this website we are offering a reading, or rather multiple readings, of one such cultural landscape: the campus of the University of Wyoming.
As a landscape genre campuses are good laboratories for examining how
physical places express intangible cultural processes. For one thing, most
of them conveniently display clearly marked edges. In fact, that they
emphatically set themselves apart from their surrounding environments is
itself a landscape feature requiring interpretation. If this general clarity
of boundaries makes the analyst's job easier, though, within their confines
campuses are immensely complex "compositions." They are often
self-consciously expressive of the "higher" things of mind and spirit, but
at the same time they are undeniably commercial venues. They are
simultaneously symbolic display spaces and sites of such practical, everyday
activities as work, leisure, political dispute, worship, sex, financial
transaction, tourism, and mass spectatorship. In short, campuses are often
orderly in many of their fixed physical features and in their official
images but messy in their lived daily reality. And it is precisely these
seeming contradictions that make campuses such interesting landscapes, if we
take the time to read them.
