| Summary: | Landscape architects and researchers often try to understand power by relying on allegory or symbology to interpret expressions of authority and ideology in space. This research proposes an interdisciplinary perspective and method based on Michel Foucault’s theories of power relations to empirically analyze the discursive and material power relations in built designs. This new method of daylighting power relations is called landscape genealogy, and is applied to Director Park in Portland, Oregon. Landscape genealogy demonstrates that by charting the shifting objects, subjects, concepts, and strategies of archival discourse and connecting them to the shifting material conditions of a site, landscape researchers can daylight the societal power relations and conditions of possibility that produced a design. The results of this research indicate that landscape genealogy as a method is well-suited to producing defensible analyses of power relations in landscape designs with well-documented discursive and spatial archives.
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