LA+ is an award-winning biannual journal produced by the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. LA+ explores landscape architecture's interdisciplinary potential, bringing together the work of contemporary thinkers and designers to explore single themes in landscape design from multiple perspectives. This article was published as part of an issue charting the economy, psychology and spatiality of pleasure. The Pleasure issue includes contributions from neuroscience, philosophy, visual arts, geography, landscape architecture, aesthetics, planning, architecture, marketing, tourism, urban studies, cultural studies, historic preservation, archaeology, and history.
My contribution explores the influence of cultural regimes of Pleasure and Leisure on urban recreation in order to critically reflect on the current trend for embodied, spectacular experiences of the city. I begin by proposing a new conceptual framework with which to define concepts of Pleasure (as feeling) and Leisure (as doing). I then set out evidence to show how, over the last two hundred years, distinct kinds of architectural experience have been produced by these distinct ideologies. Using examples of real and imagined pleasurescapes in London’s Battersea – from a ‘Dream City’ proposal in 1908 to the Festival of Britain’s Pleasure Gardens (1951) and, more recently, Atelier Zundel Cristea’s unrealized vision for the abandoned Power Station (2013) – I conclude by arguing that the postmodern blurring of lines between work and play has rendered distinctions between leisure and pleasure redundant. The chapter combines archive research with new speculative and critical thinking around the role of pleasure in the urban landscape past and present.