Peter
It's not a different perception, it's a different conception. It's not that you literally would "see" differently, it's that you would design differently.
I'm just saying maybe one of the reasons obscurantism took hold is because in the arts and design fields a revaluation of negative space occurred.
I think there are two issues at work here:
First, the softening of contours and angles "inside the ropes."
Second, the tying in of inside the ropes (aka as Philippe's def has it "positive space") to outside the ropes (negative space), in order to hide the hand of man, or perhaps simply to harmonize the outside (negative space) to the inside (positive space).
To blend a golf course into its surroundings, don't you have to revalue the negative relative to the positive? Don't you have to look at what will never be part of the course, and somehow incorporate that into what you create?
For example, you'd route a course to take advantage of a view over a sound, even though the sound had no function inside the ropes.
Or: you'd design bunkers in some style that reflected or mirrored the terrain. While that terrain might technically include the ground inside the ropes, as the entirety of that ground is either actively manufactured or passively manufactured - "manufactured" in the sense that what's left untouched is left untouched only as a product of a conscious design process - fascinatingly, this latter passive approach occurring ONLY if a designer elevates the value of that which is NOT part of the golf course: he gives negative space a "positive" or "affirmative" value. It's like a void that's invested with meaning.
I'm saying people used to not conceive of voids in this way. It was all about the positive space. Negative space was treated negatively.
Apparently, in the art and architecture a major impetus for this change was the Japonisme that infatuated the West in the latter half of the 1800s, providing some influence on movements such as Aesthetic, Arts and Crafts, Impressionism - and various modernist designers and artists, notably Frank Lloyd Wright.
Mark