How to own a view.

This was the required reading that I'll write about.

Carol Burns, "On Site: Architectural Preoccupations" Drawing Building Text, ed. A. Kahn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991) 147-165

He writes, Emerson points out that aesthetic and mathematical conceptions are fundamentally different but intimately bound to one another: The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms. Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond.  But none of them owns the landscape.  There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can intergrate all the parts, that is , the poet.  This is the best part of these men's farms, yet this their warranty deeds give no title.

Basically he says that you can own land but not the landscape.  I'm on the fence about this one, I feel that you can own a landscape, you just have to be rich enough to buy all the land in visible range.  But I do agree that landscape is the conglomeration of numerous plots of land and the buildings on them, Combined with the environment of course.  I think that its one thing we forget about.  We concern ourselves with how people view the building itself and view landscape from the building.  We think about these because we're taught to identify the best spot on the site and then NOT build on it.  But I think we often forget about how our building fits into the landscape, or the sillouhette.  I think once we concern ourselves with that then we will be able to make the building tie into the surroundings better than we already do.