Philippe
No I think it's the same concept! This was one of the things that helped define the break of modernism with the past. A positive notion of negative space was radical and extended into painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music -- and landscape architecture.
I don't know a lot about landscape architecture, but my understanding is that the pioneer in thinking of the positive uses of voids was someone named Camillo Sitte. He was Austrian; do you know of him?
Apparently, he was one of the first to reverse the way to think about urban planning, changing the priority from where to place solid objects (positive space) to optimizing the use of space itself.
On the building architecture front, if you get up (or over, if you are Canadian French!) to Amsterdam, check out the Amsterdam Commodities Exchange. I spent a fair amount of time studying this building just last week! The architect, Hendrick Berlage, reduced the ornamentation from the facade common at the time it was built (1890-1903). This was a building built primarily to optimize not the positive space (materials, forms, facades, etc) but the space around which it was built!
Berlage wrote, "The nineteenth century forgot to build from the inside out." He sought to create an "art of space."
I apologize for going on like this -- even though I could go on and on! I have been studying modernism lately and this is one of the really cool ideas to come out of it, this reconceptualization of space from a void to something to be designed for: positive negative space.
I think this idea may be one of the developments that contributed to naturalistic "obscurantism" in golf-course design: just as you write, on a golf course (like in a painting) negative space is the stuff that's not nominally the golf course but rather the background, the stuff on the sides or "outside the ropes."
For a designer to care about negative space means that he has revalued negative space in relation to positive space; he finds the design and treatment of negative space more important.
From my reading, this concept, so common today as to constitute a subsumed, unconscious belief shared by all of us in the Western world -- i.e., we don't even realize this is not how people thought about their surroundings before the modernist revolution -- originated in modernism, and was one of the major contributions of Cubism (although the revolution in thought began with the Impressionists, who chased the light all the way into the corners of their canvasses).
So, Philippe, do you think TOC actually was designed from this "negative" perspective way back when? Is there anything someone wrote or said to support this view?
I can see how they practiced "addition by subtraction" back then but isn't that just down to the limitations of agronomy, construction technologies, that sort of thing, rather than a conscious design philosophy?
The one thing I can think of that has a tantalizingly vague connection to all this is the decision in the late 19th century to widen the course. But widening implies they only thought in terms of positive space back then...yes?
Mark