Dictionary

flatscape en · NOUN

Etymology

From flat + -scape.

Meanings

1. Any flat surface or area; a platform.
   • This non-place could be the flatscape of a parking lot, or a suburban sprawl littered with supermarkets, parkways, little houses and garden plots. 1988, A. Papadakēs, Deconstruction in architecture:
   • Other rooms filled with other men roaming a flatscape only recently wired with electricity and now braising in radio waves. 2010, Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!:
2. A flat landscape.
   • The interstate was at least a couple of football fields wide. I turned down Old Sawmill Road, a country road that wasn't a thoroughfare. It was a two-lane blacktop with no shoulder, winding its way through the piney woods flatscape. 2004, Dayne Sherman, Welcome to the Fallen Paradise:
   • A flatscape of houses with the San Francisco Bay beyond unfolded outside Ford's office window. 2003, Perri O'Shaughnessy, Unfit To Practice:
   • Tractor trailers pass through the flatscape, the few people whom we do see are wearing modern clothing, a billboard advertises Coca-Cola, and some of the dogs are wearing collars, so they must live somewhere outside the barren world [...] 1999, Maude Schuyler Clay, Delta land:
3. A landscape lacking distinguishable or interesting features; a plain or monotonous landscape.
   • On the whole, in comparison with traditional agricultural landscapes, the appearance seems that of a “blandscape” rather than a landscape, a “flatscape” of dreary and monotonous sameness. 2007, Arnold Berleant, Allen Carlson, The aesthetics of human environments:
   • Several phenomenologists have remarked on the problems of modern living, where architectural trends are towards a placeless geography, a meaningless pattern of similar buildings, a 'flatscape'. 1997, Michael Parker Pearson, Colin Richards, Architecture and order: approaches to social space:
   • In industrial civilization, environmental variety has been replaced by what has been called "'a flatscape", lacking intentional depth and providing possibilities only for commonplace and mediocre experiences. 1992, Lothar Fietz, Paul Hoffmann, Hans-Werner Ludwig, Regionalität:

Forms

Relateds

blandscape