Humphry Repton's "Designs for the Pavilion at Brighton" (1818) show the original (above) alongside proposed landscaping improvements (below) for the west side of the pavilion. Repton's body of work brought a new level of professionalism to the landscape architecture trade.

Mirka Benes gestures toward the floor-to-ceiling windows of Gund cafeteria and the view beyond. Visible are the backs of some buildings that front Sumner Road, a few parking spaces, the edge of a basketball court, and the rough granite stones of the Swedenborg Chapel, held in some sort of unity by an irregularly shaped, slightly tattered lawn.

"Right out here we have a landscape, although it might not impress you as such," she says. "You've got public property adjoining private property, and you've got signals encrypted in the landscape that tell you how to behave. The social contract is written into the landscape."

Benes, associate professor of the history of landscape architecture, is the organizer of a conference at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) that will focus an acute and sophisticated level of interpretation on landscape's encrypted meanings.

"Thinking About Landscape: Interdisciplinary Contributions of the 1990s" will evaluate and synthesize professional and academic thinking about landscape over the past decade. This period has been marked by increased dialogue between landscape architects and those in other disciplines ‹ geography, sociology, psychology, literature ‹ and the conference is expected to reflect these new perspectives.

The conference will take place this Friday and Saturday, April 9 and 10, in Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall. It is free and open to the public.

Benes is also co-curator with one of her doctoral students, M. Elen Deming from the S.U.N.Y. landscape architecture faculty, of an exhibition in the Gund lobby called "Representing Landscape Architecture: Books and Images from the Frances Loeb Library and other Collections."

One of the largest exhibitions ever mounted at Gund, "Representing Landscape Architecture" spans more than four centuries, from the 16th-century garden designs of Sebastiano Serlio and Jacques Ducerceau to the computerized land-use surveys of GSD professor Carl Steinitz.

In between is a wealth of material, some of it extremely beautiful, demonstrating not only the changing styles of landscape design but the changing relationship between designer and client.

Early practitioners worked chiefly for the aristocracy, designing elaborate garden parterres whose curving walks had all the complexity of lace or embroidery. Lavish volumes containing detailed etchings of famous gardens like those of the Villa Borghese in Rome may have been given as gifts to aristocratic landowners eager to model their estates on these fashionable patterns.

During the 17th and 18th centuries, designers began to produce how-to books aimed at gentleman farmers, absentee landowners, and proprietors of colonial estates, showing the correct way to set up farms, kitchen gardens, and orchards. These books contain much technical and social information from the period.

The 18th century saw the rise of amateur gardeners whose literary musings on the theory and practice of garden design had a great influence on later practitioners. Other writers published guides to the "picturesque," instructing readers how to look at and appreciate landscape.

Humphry Repton, who worked in England in the early years of the 19th century and is mentioned in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, brought a new level of professionalism to the trade. On display is one of Repton's morocco-bound "Red Books," which shows before-and-after views in watercolor of his proposed projects.

The rise of professional training in landscape design is demonstrated by the career of Charles Eliot Jr., son of the Harvard president. Eliot taught himself landscape design in the 1880s through detailed observation of the great gardens of Europe. A partner in the firm of renowned designer Frederick Law Olmsted, Eliot was expected to teach in the Harvard program, which, founded in 1900, is the oldest in the world, but he died unexpectedly of spinal meningitis.

In 1902 President Eliot published a nearly 800-page biography of his son with the poignant title, Charles Eliot, landscape architect: a lover of nature and his kind, who trained himself for a new profession, practiced it happily and through it wrought much good.

Nearly every 20th-century development in thought is reflected in landscape design, from the geometric Art Deco gardens of the 1920s to the modernist innovations of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, to the postmodern parks of Bernard Tschumi. Even the Nazis had their own landscape movement, exemplified by the Naturgarten of Willy Lange, which eschewed any plants of non-German origin.

Recent work has been profoundly influenced by the computer. Computer mapping, which allows viewers to move through a virtual landscape, was first accomplished at Harvard in 1966. The exhibition includes two interactive computer terminals allowing visitors to explore these exciting developments.

"Some things have changed profoundly in landscape representation, but others remain the same," Benes said. "For example, we still use the conventions of two-point perspective and the bird's eye view. How will changing technology change the way we conceive of landscape? That's one of the questions we wanted the exhibition to ask."