White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia

"For me, one of the most engaging problems in architectural history is to understand the social experience of architecture. To the extent that such an effort is possible, it requires us to account for the entire range of spatial divisions from the scale of furnishings to that of settlement patterns. An individual's perception of a landscape changes with the experience of moving through it. It is less obvious but equally true that an apparently unified landscape may actually be composed of several fragmentary ones, some sharing common elements of the larger assemblage. Indeed, this may be the only way to make sense of certain historical landscapes such as that of pre-revolutionary Virginia, with its racially and socially stratified population. and reformulation of individual experiences to establish its meanings.' Though similar methods and similar visual forms were used in Europe, Virginia is distinctive for the way in which they were adapted to a particular, already extant, social setting. Against the plantation houses and their surroundings, we can set the houses of slaves. While a relatively large number of planters' mansions have survived to be studied, and while contemporary descriptions of them are available, slave houses are less well documented."

Upton, Dell. "White and Black Landscapes in Eighteenth-Century Virginia," Places Vol 2, No 2 (1985), pp. 59-72.