The Mary Kim McKeown Memorial Lecture Series welcomes Bas Smets.

"The Invention of Landscape"

What is a landscape? How is it designed? How is it constructed? The western notion of ‘landscape’ was invented in the fifteenth century to name a new genre in painting. In Europe, the first landscapes were painted in the Low Countries, when windows appeared in paintings. The frame provided by the window created a view on the surroundings, independent from the commissioned scene in the foreground. These landscape paintings are characterized by their independence, both in content and in form, from the initial commission. The painters did not aim at a truthful rendering of the actual terrain but preferred revealing an unseen reality into new types of landscape.

A landscape project can be seen as an extension of the invention of landscape painting. Similar to landscape painting, it is independent from both the actual program and the limits of the site. Similar to landscape painting, it transforms a land—the given terrain—into a landscape—its perception—by means of an image. But a landscape project subsequently constructs this image on site. Once the landscape project has been constructed, the transformed reality produces new images, new perceptions. In this way landscape projects involve an endless succession of perception and transformation, imagination and execution, not unlike the cycle of the seasons.

One of the world’s rising-star landscape architects, Bas Smets hails from what he describes as “a land without landscape”—Belgium. Situated beside France, Germany, and Holland, countries with stunning natural features or deep traditions of design, Flanders is largely flat and suburban with little differentiation between city and countryside. Here—and increasingly across Europe and Asia—Smets and his firm, Bureau Bas Smets, have developed a unique vision for shaping public parks, vast regional visions, film sets, and, each year, one private garden into a bold mix of the natural and the synthetic.

Smets has a background in civil engineering, architecture, and landscape architecture. Since starting his firm, Bureau Bas Smets, in 2007, he has developed public-space gardens for places as diverse as Ingelmunster in Flanders, the PMQ Center for Design in Hong Kong, and the Estonian National Museum in Tartu. He has designed projects as large as regional visions for Brussels 2040 and a 100,000-plus acre reserve in Bordeaux, and as small as a garden of black plants in Portugal for the artist Phillippe Parreno’s film “Continuously Habitable Zones.” Since 2009, he has been collaborating with Frank Gehry on the Parc des Ateliers in Arles.

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Bas Smets will also be lecturing on April 16 in Portland.  For information about the Portland lecture, please visit the Portland event page.