A concept proposing a successor to Norberg-Schulz’s Genius Loci, Genius Mutabilis redefines place identity in the context of climate instability. Whereas Genius Loci was grounded in permanence and rootedness, Genius Mutabilis frames landscape as a condition of perpetual transition, uncertainty, and mutation. It rejects the domesticated “process landscape” paradigm of predictable succession, instead embracing change without trajectory—an aesthetic of the post-predictable. In this view, design no longer seeks harmony or visual order but cultivates perceptual resilience: the ability to live with what exceeds comprehension. Genius Mutabilis calls for aesthetics that expose friction rather than resolve it, seeing disorder and unpredictability as productive forces for adaptation. By suspending the compulsion to beautify ecological disturbance, it reorients landscape architecture toward an ethics of interdependence and an openness to the out-of-hand. It is an aesthetic and political stance for designing within uncertainty, where new obligations emerge from instability itself.
The essay argues that climate collapse pushes ownership into public responsibility and aesthetics into a medium of obligation. Landscape architecture can cultivate perceptual resilience, an ethics of design attuned to disorder, shared accountability, and the mutable nature of life.
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