A Picturesque Dwelling: Pictorial Planning, Irregularity & Appropriation in the Domestic Landscape

The picturesque, a broad and often enigmatic historical movement, forms the point of departure for an exploration into the spatial organisation of domestic space, as a counterpoint to functionalist planning principles that continue to inform current architectural praxis and the production of housing. Through a ‘research by design’ method involving a ‘two-fold movement’, where retrospective analysis of picturesque literature is synthesised together with prospective designs for a fictional 250m2 villa, ‘House 250,’ by using large-scale physical models as the primary means of both ideation and representation. Inaugural writings from William Gilpin (1768), Edmund Burke (1756), Sir Uvedale Price (1794), Humphry Repton (1795), Richard Payne Knight (1805) have been revisited to establish foundational theory, while more contemporary reflections upon the picturesque come from Christopher Hussey (1927), Nikolaus Pevsner (1955), David Watkin (1982), Caroline Constant (1990) and John Macarthur (2007). Through the design of ‘House 250’, four distinct traits of the picturesque are identified that productively challenge a planimetric approach to the composition of the domestic built-environment. The picturesque movement has been responsible for the development of pictorial planning methods related to perspectival spatial experience, an approach to the spatial organisation of the built environment based upon spatiotemporal experience, an appreciation for irregularity and a focus on providing opportunities for inhabitant appropriation through imaginative interpretation. However, the greatest contribution of the picturesque movement to this research project, revealed in the design of ‘House 250’, is that it has provided a catalyst to conceive of the domestic interior as an architectural landscape.