Gazing at landscape from architecture: the viewing spaces at the Alhambra and Generalife

Abstract

In this article, a reflection on landscape-gazing from the architecture of the Alhambra and Generalife is proposed. The intense opening to the landscape views of the main palatine spaces, though natural to our contemporary culture, shows a pioneering and incipient sensitivity towards landscape in its High Middle Age context. The desire to gaze at landscape from architecture above the utilitarian, implies an aesthetic recognition of the visible territory that could have occurred earlier than the birth of landscape in the European Renaissance. In the Alhambra and Generalife, the recurrent and deliberate presence of this kind of viewing spaces, always housing the noblest activities, materializes the final peak of a slow architectural evolution that took place in al-Ándalus. The inherited architectural traditions had to be adapted from the arid environment where Islam and its cultural foundations were constructed, to a more mountainous, temperate and fertile land, pleasant to the senses. At the same time, the territory of Granada progressively gained values and meanings, getting to become a paradigmatic landscape for the Nasrid dynasty, motif of aesthetic satisfaction and, clearly, objet of contemplation from inside the regal architecture.