In search of a new operative metaphor for landscape architecture, Sebastien Marot examines the necessary relationship of landscape architecture to site and speculates on the "lenses and metaphors" designers need to become effective "site-seers" to decipher the complex layers of time, program, and meaning in the contemporary "hyperlandscape." When artist Robert Smithson coined the word "site-seeing" to describe his suburban rambles and the work he did about the derelict areas that were the subjects of his "non-sites," he captured a fundamental aspect of what design is about. Nowadays, every architect, urbanist or landscape designer is first and foremost (or should be) a site-seer or a visitor: a careful observer and student of the sites he is called upon to modify, transform or activate. By considering the artist as site-seer, Smithson both compared and contrasted him with the usual sight-seer: the tourist, and the classical landscape painter.
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