Since the mid-1960s, art and design critics, theorists, and practitioners have wholeheartedly embraced issues of site and context as part of the creative process. When Jack Burnham published “Systems Esthetic” in the September 1968 issue of Artforum, he identified a body of work that could not be described or evaluated according to narrowly construed modern-art criteria that valued an autonomous, bounded object. The site-specific works, happenings, and process pieces that Burnham noted include works by Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, Hans Haacke, and Alan Kaprow. These works, often embedded in particular places, were as much fragments or interventions in the processes and structures of their sites as they were discrete artistic objects. During the ensuing decades, scholars such as Rosalind Krauss, Lucy Lippard, John Beardsley, Craig Owens, and most recently Miwon Kwon have made substantial contributions to the analytical lenses through which we differentiate and categorize site-specific projects as well as works of art that engage and harness systems that surround them, whether cultural or ecological.

A similar body of literature has emerged in architectural design practice and criticism. One of the best read and most cited of these essays is Kenneth Frampton’s “Critical Regionalism,” which was included in Hal Foster’s anthology The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983). Frampton’s essay provided a retrospective reading of a select group of modern architects whose works mediate the abstraction of technological modernization and a regional outlook that accommodate local materials, orientation, light, texture, and climate. Frampton’s phenomenological interpretation connected craft (or making) with regional (or site-specific) tactics. In doing so, his writing spoke to historical as well as contemporary conditions and so influenced contemporary practices. For as art historian John Beardsley, cultural critic Andreas Huyssen, landscape architect James Corner, and others have noted, the recovery of landscape, environmental, and ecological issues is one of the characteristics of postmodernity—within the social arena, the art and design disciplines, and the history of those endeavors.

Architect and theorist David Leatherbarrow’s most recent book contributes to this postmodern recovery of landscape by examining the ways that certain works of modern architecture addressed site and context issues. In Uncommon Ground: Architecture, Technology, and Topography, Leatherbarrow builds on Frampton’s scholarship in two ways: through careful analyses of a few buildings by three mid-twentieth-century architects, Richard Neutra (buildings in the United States from 1946 to 1963), Antonin Raymond (buildings in Japan from 1923 to 1951), and Aris Konstantinidis (buildings in Greece in the 1960s), and in a broader examination of “how the conflict between technology and topography in modern architecture was understood and addressed” within these works. Leatherbarrow demonstrates in his book what Frampton alluded to but glossed over in his essay—that an architect reaches a regional expression through creative making with technology, not simply by observing local site conditions and continuing local building practices. Granted, Leatherbarrow does not use the term “critical regionalist” in his book, but in his Preface he acknowledges Frampton, with whom he both resonates and disagrees.

Before one can grasp Leatherbarrow’s argument, one must understand three premises upon which he bases his reading of technology and topography, or the prefabricated and the found condition. He rejects the idea that a building can be an autonomous object in spite of art and architectural criticism to the contrary. “Architectural definition starts in the folds of the terrain,” claims Leatherbarrow. “As long as architecture is spatial it is necessarily topographical.” The second of his premises explores the direction of influence between technology (globalization and universal culture) and topography (site). He rejects the notion that the site exists before the need to design and in doing so criticizes place-based, genius loci theorists and designers for essentializing locales. Instead of their assumption that place has absolute, a priori, or given characteristics, Leatherbarrow asserts that a site is created through the design process as an architect selectively identifies the salient conditions and phenomena of that particular environment. From this perspective, design is a process of both site interpretation and site construction. The author establishes a middle ground between the extremes of abstraction and contextual thought. The third premise is one of the most provocative contributions of Leatherbarrow’s argument. Although successful at chronicling unknown or misunderstood works of three architects, Leatherbarrow’s larger concern is to reconsider leading truisms of modern architectural historiography and mythology such as the sophisticated building is always an object; technology results in placelessness; and the destruction of “the box’s walls”—through the use of a column structure and the ensuing “flow of space”—that create a new modern sense of continuity between inside and outside. This broader effort permeates each chapter of Uncommon Ground, encouraging the reader to see other potential rereadings of canonical works through Leatherbarrow’s lens.

Leatherbarrow’s argument for a more nuanced understanding of the architectural artifact is grounded in traditional sources—architectural construction drawings, archival photographs, and written accounts by the architects. But his case is also built on the matter-of-fact recognition that realized architectural projects must confront the contingencies of their immediate ground, the air and light that permeates their surfaces and volumes, and the distant horizons that define the context for seeing from, as well as seeing out of, the building. In other words, he examines not only the finished product but the design process too. During this process, an architect makes all sorts of accommodations, confrontations, and negotiations that result in decisions about the levels of the ground, the degree of roof overhang and wall porosity, the amount of control and flexibility in the building skin, the ways that prefabricated items modulate the climate or environment, and the type of boundary between inside and outside. These decisions accumulate in a new building, in a new technologically modified climate, and in a new representation of the site or topography.

Thus far, I have been relying on the term “site” instead of “topography” because Leatherbarrow’s use of the former is more inclusive than most contemporary definitions of the latter. For instance, in Chapter 1, “Introduction: Architecture and Its Horizons,” he begins with a story about Alberti’s selective measuring and mapping of Rome’s walls and monuments between 1443 and 1455. In mapping Rome’s topography, Alberti was not recording its contours and landform because his urban topography encompassed buildings, streets, plazas, the distant horizon—all the features and details necessary to describe the city. Hence, for Leatherbarrow, like Alberti, topography is not simply that which describes the surface of the earth. Rather, it is the aggregation of figures and situations that are known and through which one orders experience and knowledge. Through this account, the reader comes to appreciate the ways in which designers as well as mapmakers discern order through precise, but partial, knowledge. The urban topography mapped by Alberti and described by Leatherbarrow is not exhaustively recorded. It has gaps in its field or matrix, in locations available for future discovery, and in creation.

This “discontinuous field” or “uncommon ground,” is the site upon which Leatherbarrow’s three architects construct their buildings. Accounts of these buildings are organized thematically in chapters that explore various technology/topography strategies: “Building Levels” (horizontal terracing as a means to connect inside and outside); “Back to Front, or About Face” (how facades reflect “field thinking” as much as building program); “The Topographic Horizon of Dwelling Equipment” (prefabricated objects as modulators of site—climate, light, and air); “Inside and Outside” (how architecture metaphorically separates through knotting as much as it joins through spatial flow, inside to outside); and “The Play of Articulation” (architecture as a means of initiating what the topography lacks, such a shadow and enclosure). Leatherbarrow’s beautiful prose describing the intertwining of technology and topography, and building and site, almost compensates for the lack of visual documents, such as site plans, maps, or aerial photographs that could assist the reader in truly understanding these relationships. Given Leatherbarrow’s thesis—and the fact that it is no longer unusual for art and architectural historians, not to mention garden and landscape historians, to work with context maps for their interpretations of paintings, buildings, and gardens—including such maps and photographs would have strengthened his arguments. Without them, the thesis that architectural design can be the “intertwining between proposed purposes and the latent qualities of the place—a textile order” is strongly stated but not always convincingly demonstrated.

The book adds to the growing literature that expands and enriches the history of modern architecture by exploring the interrelationships between site and building. Readers of Uncommon Ground who desire to find additional sources for this sort of interpretation will not find citations by Leatherbarrow to other authors currently working in this area. But, in addition to Frampton, I can name several architects and critics whose articles and books can situate Uncommon Ground in an exciting area of scholarship. These authors and their titles include Caroline Constant’s book on Asplund and Lewerentz, The Woodland Cemetery: Toward a Spiritual Landscape (Stockholm: Byggförlaget, 1994), as well as her essays on modernist architects like Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Plecnik, and their landscape sensibilities; and Bernard Cache’s Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories (1983 and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 [English translation]), which describes architecture as “the art of the frame” and, as evident in the following passage, shares a similar attitude about site and construction with Leatherbarrow. Cache writes, “In no case does the identity of the site preexist, for it is always the outcome of construction.” Other recent writing that address site and architecture theories include Carol Burns’s essay entitled “On site” in Andrea Kahn’s Drawing, Building, Text: Essays in Architectural Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), which, like Cache’s book, has assumed an almost cult-like readership among young students of architecture and landscape architecture; and Kahn’s essay “Overlooking: A Look at How we Look at Site, or…site as discrete object of desire,” published in Duncan McCorquodale, Katerina Ruedi, and Sara Wriggleswoth’s Desiring Practices: Architecture, Gender and the Interdisciplinary (London: Black Dog Publishing, 1996).

Kahn’s essay supplements Leatherbarrow’s critique by suggesting one of the reasons that sites were, and continue to be, overlooked in historical and critical accounts of modern architecture. After stating that site definition and analysis are often assumed as the given and objective components of predesign activity, she writes, “I suggest that site is gendered by analysis practices that associate it with a notion of the ‘feminine’ construed in terms of a ‘lack’. Specifically, I am interested in how we look at sites with respect to overlooking—a habitual site analysis practice that contributes in very particular ways to the construction of knowledge of site.” Kahn’s assertion of the gender associations and associated biases about landscape/site in modern cultural practices casts light on why the fascinating case studies recovered by scholars such as Leatherbarrow were overlooked and are just now being discovered or rediscovered.