Doing, Seeing; Seeing, Doing traces the lineage of landscape and garden ideas that have shaped Leon van Schaik's spatial thinking across decades of practice and teaching — part autobiography, part essayistic journey through the histories we carry into every line we draw.
About This Book
Spatial intelligence, for Leon van Schaik, is not a faculty developed in studio — it is accumulated through childhood homes, traversed landscapes, and inherited garden traditions. This book unearths the formative encounters with space that inflect how designers perceive and reshape the world. Moving from Persian paradise gardens to the mosaic burning that maintained pre-colonial Australia's parkland landscape, from the nested arches of Edwin Lutyens to Renaissance axiality, van Schaik argues that every line drawn in our world brings a system with it. The critical question is whether we recognise those inherited systems before we impose them on others. Essential reading for architects, landscape architects, and educators grappling with the unexamined assumptions embedded in design practice.
Key Features
- 176 pages of autobiographical essays and spatial histories tracing influences across architecture, landscape, and garden design
- Author: Leon van Schaik AO, Emeritus Professor of Architecture, RMIT University
- Case studies spanning Persian paradise gardens, pre-colonial Australian landscapes, Edwin Lutyens, and Renaissance spatial systems
- Published by Uro Publications, 2008
What You'll Discover
- How the domestic and natural landscapes of childhood become sediment in a designer's spatial intelligence — shaping perception long before formal training begins
- The way inherited garden and landscape traditions embed entire spatial systems into design thinking, often without the designer's awareness
- A reading of pre-colonial Australia's mosaic burning as a deliberate landscape practice, connecting Indigenous land management to broader ideas of designed space
- Why critical self-examination of one's own spatial history is an ethical obligation for anyone who makes decisions about shared environments
About the Author
Leon van Schaik AO is Emeritus Professor of Architecture at RMIT University, where he has spent decades developing a practice-based research methodology centred on the relationship between personal spatial experience and design intelligence. His books include Kerstin Thompson Architects (Thames and Hudson, 2021), Building a Culture (Uro Publications, 2019), Spatial Intelligence (Wiley, 2008), and Practical Poetics (Wiley, 2015), among others.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 176
- Dimensions: 240 x 168 mm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781922601179
- Publisher: Uro Publications
- Publication Date: 2008
Perfect For: Architects, landscape architects, and design educators interested in the relationship between personal spatial history, inherited design systems, and the ethics of shaping shared environments.