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Definition 2024


flatscape

flatscape

English

Noun

flatscape (plural flatscapes)

  1. Any flat surface or area; a platform.
    • 1988, A. Papadakēs, Deconstruction in architecture:
      This non-place could be the flatscape of a parking lot, or a suburban sprawl littered with supermarkets, parkways, little houses and garden plots.
    • 2010, Douglas Coupland, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!:
      Other rooms filled with other men roaming a flatscape only recently wired with electricity and now braising in radio waves.
  2. A flat landscape.
    • 1999, Maude Schuyler Clay, Delta land:
      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 [...]
    • 2003, Perri O'Shaughnessy, Unfit To Practice:
      A flatscape of houses with the San Francisco Bay beyond unfolded outside Ford's office window.
    • 2004, Dayne Sherman, Welcome to the Fallen Paradise:
      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.
  3. A landscape lacking distinguishable or interesting features; a plain or monotonous landscape.
    • 1992, Lothar Fietz, Paul Hoffmann, Hans-Werner Ludwig, Regionalität:
      In industrial civilization, environmental variety has been replaced by what has been called "'a flatscape", lacking intentional depth and providing possibilities only for commonplace and mediocre experiences.
    • 1997, Michael Parker Pearson, Colin Richards, Architecture and order: approaches to social space:
      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'.
    • 2007, Arnold Berleant, Allen Carlson, The aesthetics of human environments:
      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.

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