Reactionary Landscape: The Discourse of Naturalism as a Grand Narrative

This article addresses the question of whether the discourse of naturalism – whose image is the green roof and whose conceptual reference is the idea of 'nature' – has now become the one and only 'grand narrative' of the supermodern era. In other words, is it one of our era's dominant ideologies? To add a theoretical dimension of thickness to this apparently superficial phenomenon it is necessary to penetrate the 'verdant mantle' covering our cities and to unpack the highly polemical and unstable terms – 'grand narrative', 'ideology' and 'supermodern'. In short, the argument of the paper, is that the supermodern era is dominated by one hegemonic idea – that of nature as opposed to progress; that idea is deployed in the public space by means of an ideology – the narrative of nature; that ideology is structured around a figure – the landscape; and that landscape is made up of images and words – projects and their accompanying verbal accounts.