001 — Brief — Project 1

Mapping landscape armatures to build a “landscape imaginary”

As a language lover, I am thankful when life introduces words I do not know and redefines others I thought I knew. “Armature” falls into the second category. Before this first brief for LA 201, I had only a physical definition for the term: wireframe for sculpture.

A historic, and also physical, set of definitions that invert this: “Middle English, “armor, armed force,” borrowed from Latin armātūra “armament, troop” (Medieval Latin, “suit of armor, defensive equipment of an animal”).”¹

Whether external or internal, perhaps these definitions of physical, fairly static armatures at the individual scale relate to concrete, linear, dynamic structures at the landscape scale: reefs and ranges.

A beetle’s exoskeleton is its solitary armor against the world, while the protective cups secreted by corals stack up into miles-long wave barriers. A spine supports a single body, and an uplifting mountain ridge supports bands of soil, vegetation, and migration.

Hopefully this is a good start at grasping physical landscape armatures. As for the more conceptual and imaginary definitions, I have some reading to do.

[1]: Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “armature,” accessed September 24, 2020, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/armature.

Photographs by Susie Benes, James Wainscoat, Yanguang Lan, and Julian Hilweg.