Nature: the phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations
Landscape: all the visible features of an area of countryside or land, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal
“For although limitation when we consider the immensity of nature and the inadequacy of our ability to adopt a standard proportionate to estimating aesthetically the magnitude of nature's domain, yet we also found, in our power of reason, a different and nonsensible standard that has this infinity itself under it as a unit; and since in contrast to this standard everything in nature is small, we found in our mind a superiority over nature itself in its immensity. In the same way, though the irresistibility of nature's might make us, considered as natural beings, recognize our physical impotence, it reveals in us at the same time an ability to judge ourselves independent of nature, and reveals in us a superiority over nature that is the basis of a self-preservation quite different in the kind from the one that can be assailed and endangered by nature outside us.” Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Hackett Publishing Company, Cambridge MA: 1987. Page 120.
“Hence if I am judging nature aesthetically we call it sublime, we do so not because nature arouses fear, but because it calls forth our strength…” Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Hackett Publishing Company, Cambridge MA: 1987. Page 121.
“Hence nature is here called sublime merely because it elevates our imagination, it exhibit those cases where the mind can come to feel its own sublimity, which lies in its vocation and elevates it even above nature”
Nature is and has always being an ideal; a romanticized utopia of greenery and pureness. A place of utter virginity where a dissolution of human rationalities and creations takes place. Human beings accept the loose of control over it by the fact that an unknown metaphysical body [God] created the ideal canon of perfection on earth. The idea of classical Nature is the space where men have never disrupted its elements and where a synthesized control over it doesn’t exits.
When nature is overlooked (as if the human being is God) it looses its real essence, it becomes a territory, and it becomes landscape. When this process takes place the viewer claims that what he/she overlooks belongs to his/hers persona; this is when nature as an ideal dies.
In the past this only happened in a small scale. The appropriation of nature took place by overlooking at frescos, standing at a high-elevated viewing point or by popular narratives or stories (religion). This appropriation was very vague and distorted. Lots of gaps were filled by peoples’ imagination and “irrational” explanations. Nature was still alive in the inaccuracies of the information and knowledge being absorbed. All those stories (including religion and popular culture) generated an embracement on doubt by believing in an absolute explanation that lacked of any rational explanation. Every question leaded to one single answer. The genius of this irrationality was its weakness. The inaccuracies of the idea of nature kept it alive by accepting that the individual did not know about it in a physical matter. The vague explanation of the unknown gave at the time a sense of control, yet this last one was achieved by embracing doubt. The idea of Nature as a physical body still existed by simply accepting it and not claiming its ownership.
The way we experience nature nowadays has radically changed; in the twenty-first centurys’ Baudrilardian Hyperreality we pre-experience nature due to an excess of information that poisons our understanding of it by creating early preconceptions of the element. Reality through a screen becomes a farce. Nature is owned, does not belong to a superior entity anymore (God) belongs to a corporation. This is when nature as the idea of utter virginity collapses, instead nature becomes landscape due to its modification. It is not physically modified, however media and popular culture use direct references of it to sell or tell their own perspectives of nature or natural as if they were universal and privately owned.
All the presumptions made of nature without facing it are generated by the overconfidence we have on science, photography and video (all of them are contained in the internet). The absoluteness of God can’t be compared with the absoluteness of the image seen through the net. The imposition of the idea erases it completely.
This is the death of nature as an untouched physical space separated from humanity and idealized by it. The absoluteness of knowledge, globalization and the market economy killed the concept of nature as the unknown. Nature is theorized for us and it’s presented on a silver plate for quick consumption. Nature is a good to be sold and bought.
However this is not Nature. Nature has died. Death means the end of a physical body; this gives the opportunity to the substance or essence to arise. Nature as an essence, as a metaphysical being, as a feeling felt by the individual and not hold by the masses is the argument to be posted.
Nature is not green anymore; it is ephemeral; it belongs to the threshold of what appeared to be and what it is after taking control of an unknown and uncontrolled situation. It is the grey space between the rejection and embracement due to the understanding of the element. From having a sense of ownership on a pre-conceived space, to confronting and sensing the unexpectedness of it; to finally accepting and understanding the before misunderstood space. This is Nature as a process of confronting what before was virtually known.
This must not be confused with The Sublime, because nature appears when the object or space experienced is idealized and known before hand. The Sublime is interdependent of what we know; it is inherent on human beings, its not achieved through knowledge or idealization, it is triggered by a space, action or object that appears to be magnificent as "nature considered in an aesthetic judgment as might that has no dominion over us" (Pg 28 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime, Kant). Nature as an essence is a pre-known element that while facing it control is lost.
Architectural experience is part of this, the way architecture behaves on photo or text is challenged by the way the architectural space is read and confronted.
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