Landscapes as cultural objects: The idea that landscapes have a cultural value is firmly established in Russia, and throughout Europe. It dates back at least to the late 18th century (Herder and de Stael) and was elaborated throughout the 19th century (Schelling, Taine, and in Russia I. E. Zabelin) until it became a virtually unquestioned assumption. The idea takes two forms, both of which address the interaction between human cultures and geographical environments:

• Natural landscapes are modified by the activities of their human populations -- cultivation, building etc. -- to the point that they become comparable to cultural artifacts in the conventional sense.
• Human cultures are themselves formed in important respects by the physical geography of the regions in which they arise.

In the 20th century, the idea received more critical treatment, but it is still a staple part of the thinking of anthropologists, geographers, ethnographers, philosophers, psychologists and cultural historians. In America, it has been scientifically elaborated into the interdisciplinary 'biophilia hypothesis' (Wilson 1984, Kellert and Wilson, 1993), widely accepted and drawn on by scholars in many fields.

Relevance to Architecture: Architecture is both a man-made addition to the geographical environment, a product of it (through the use of locally occurring materials) and sometimes a deliberate contradiction of it (through the conspicuous use of non-local materials). The potential interest and importance of a 'panoramic' view of an architectural object in its setting can be its illustration of:

• the derivation of the buildings in question from their geographical environment;
• the contribution of the buildings to the formation of a partly man-made 'cultural environment';
• the combination of buildings and their environment as a cultural object in its own right.

Description and classification of 'cultural landscapes': the contemporary study of 'cultural landscapes' is conducted primarily in the context of preservation, in a convergence of biological and cultural conservation efforts. Work done in Russia (e.g. Vedenin and Kuleshova, 2004) has proposed cultural criteria for landscapes that parallel UNESCO's criteria for World Heritage Sites. As an illustration, the following table gives the first three of these:

UNESCO World Heritage Criteria	Kuleshova's adaptions for cultural landscapes
Constitutes a masterpiece of artistic creativity	Constitutes a masterpiece of combined human and natural creativity
Demonstrates a turning-point in human values which at a particular time or in a particular cultural sphere had an effect on the development of architecture or technology, monumental art, urban planning or landscape design.	Provides exceptional examples of the effect on the landscape of the important cultural processes and interactions that accompany a change in cultural concepts that is characteristic of a particular historical area or cultural sphere.
Contains a unique or exceptional example of a cultural tradition or civilization, either extant or extinct.	Contains unique or exceptional examples of the acquisition of a landscape, or the endowment of it with symbols that are expressive of the cultures that formed it.

How should we describe the Brumfield Collection's 'panorama' photographs, given that an authoritative framework for describing 'cultural landscapes' already exists? Appropriate might be something not too elaborate that does two things:

1. Assigns the general geographical environment of the buildings in question to an already established landscape category
2. Briefly describes in a note field the cultural relationship between the architectural object in question and its environment.

For (1) we might use the existing classification of the world's ecoregions developed by conservation biologists and used in a heritage context by UNESCO, the WWF and similar organizations. It can be readily consulted on a number of web sites, including a National Geographic resource. It is based on characteristic vegetation and animals, but a strong case can be made for using flora and fauna as a basis: they closely reflect geology, climate, elevation and other relevant geographical characteristics, and they are pervasively reflected in the language and culture of the people occupying a given region. Like much of our other metadata (2) might be supplied either by our own research or by WB.

An example: The images above and at the head of this page show the same area, the vicinity of Chita in Southern Siberia, close to the border with Mongolia. Technically, it falls in Terrestrial Ecoregion PA (for 'palearctic') 0804: Daurian Forest Steppe, characterized by comparatively low forested hill ranges separated by basins holding extensive wetlands, and traversed by several large rivers (e.g. the Selenga). This is actually one of the more anomalous items in the Brumfield Collection: the culture 'formed' by this landscape is not Russian but Buriat, and the architecture of both the city of Chita and the isolated church is strictly speaking Russian colonial, a category that has its own cultural complexity for any colonial nation. It would be interesting to see how WB would describe the significance of this landscape, which he chose to include in his Chita material, and the others below, one of which is from the Ferapontov material (Vologda region).