Techniques for Reading the Landscape:
A Study of the Perception of Place in an Industrial Landscape

by Elizabeth Warren Wells

Chair of the Supervisory Committee:
Associate Professor, Iain Robertson

2002

The landscape underlies and interacts with all human uses of our environment; consequently, it possesses a record of the changing ways in which we value and occupy the land. This record is a combination of natural and cultural inscriptions, which can contribute an understanding of the place to the process of landscape analysis in planning, design, and historical preservation. This thesis explores techniques for reading the landscape to develop an approach to understanding the landscape record. The varying approaches used and advocated by designers are explored and integrated with the techniques of landscape scholars in the fields of landscape studies, landscape history, and landscape archaeology. This integration results in a multi-fold approach which balances analytical studies of natural and cultural systems, with perceptual studies that focus on reading and expressing a "sense of place" in the landscape. These techniques are applied to a study site: the Tacoma tideflats industrial area, a landscape with a rich history, which is undergoing change through redevelopment. The choice of this study area was inspired by and interest in exploring the ways in which the history of and industrial area can be evoked as future non-industrial uses of the landscape evolve.