The Picturesque and the Periphery

The picturesque is often considered a fleeting and anomalous phenomenon in cultural history. Common contemporary uses of the term are couched in sentimentalism and lack the critical vitality evident in its original eighteenth- and nineteenth-century formulations. Consequently, our received understanding of the picturesque is partial, with its significance and the potential contemporary utility of some of its more nuanced and subversive aspects often overlooked. Using a qualitative multi-methods approach where qualitative methods from interpretive research are used alongside design methods synonymous with architectural practice, this paper revisits the picturesque and considers how it can provide a critical framework for productively and propositionally engaging with the spatial and material conditions of the periphery in the era of the Anthropocene. The paper is divided into three parts. Part one draws the critical discourses of the picturesque, the periphery, and the Anthropocene into relation. It reveals a constellation of concepts, techniques, and strategies that, for the author, suggest the possibility of a picturesque-Peripherocene mode of practice, which is provisionally outlined in part two. Part three explicates an aspect of this potential approach through the lens of a project from the author’s creative practice – a survey of a former shipyard in the urban periphery of Kyiv.