The semi-desert landscape of Southwest Texas appears to the traveller as continuous and undifferentiated. The land is buff-coloured with minimal variation in topography, the sky, wide, blue and open (figure i). The horizon lies as a singular mark defining the difference between the two pale tones, shimmering and distant, separating without scale. This horizon mark alters continuously with the motion of the viewer, yet remains consistently distant, existing only in relation to the position of the viewer and topography. Without the viewer, the horizon disappears. This paper is part of a larger study on the ways that scale operates and is perceived in the urban setting and in the landscape, investigating a number of devices that we use to help us understand, participate with, and order the scales of place. These devices include perceptual relations of the environment to the body, to materiality and to detail, familiar and new recognitions of series, movement and change over time, and memory, as well as more formal representations of scalar structure. In this paper I wish to explore just one particular device: the horizon. I hope to show that our understandings and perceptions of the horizon, especially in its role in understanding scale, are not themselves a fixed structure, but historically, culturally and spatially fluid. Similarly, they do not operate identically in the territories we call the urban and landscape.
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