Estrangement (Shklovsky)

Estrangement (ostranenie), introduced by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917, defines art’s capacity to make the familiar appear strange. By disrupting automatic perception, estrangement forces renewed attention, extending the act of seeing itself. It is a technique of defamiliarization that resists habitual consumption, opening perception to ambiguity. In landscape and architecture, estrangement unsettles normalized environments, allowing them to be experienced as aesthetic and critical phenomena. Estrangement is both a device and a method: a strategy of un-homing that reawakens the sensible.

As we confront the growing ecological crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to argue that harmonious aesthetics, designed primarily for pleasure and ease, are always the most effective mode of expression. Perhaps there is space to question whether ecological efforts demand a different aesthetic attitude, one less fixated on traditional notions of balance and spatial conformity and more open to dissensus and confrontation.

The production of landscape architecture projects has been in recent years outstanding, and our entire professional community has much to be proud of. But as always, there is a flip side; like in architecture or any design discipline of the globalised and speeding-up world, we are faced with a sea of sameness. Too many buildings […]

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