Introduction to Landscape Design - Hardcover

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JOHN L. MOTLOCH, PhD, ASLA, is a licensed landscape architect, architect, and interior designer. He is Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture in the College of Architecture and Planning at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, and Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems in Austin, Texas.

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Outstanding explorations of design concepts, principles, and processes This Second Edition of Introduction to Landscape Design offers even broader coverage of the environmental, human, technological, and aesthetic issues associated with landscape design than the first edition. Beginning with the way we perceive, manage, and design the landscape, it moves on to explore the forces that influence land design. An overview of landscape management, planning, and design includes a discussion of the roles and integration of the professions involved, modes of professional practice, and site scale design processes. The book explores the ecology of design and the integration of land design decisions into dynamic systems. This fully updated new edition:
* Presents landscape design as a synergism of art and science
* Addresses the interplay between buildings and sites
* Provides insights into the breadth of people-environment relationships
* Places special emphasis on our growing understanding of interrelationships between the landscape and human decisions
A superb introduction for students as well as a useful reference for practicing professionals, this book is an excellent guide for anyone who wants to develop a better understanding of landscape design.

Aus dem Klappentext

Outstanding explorations of design concepts, principles, and processes This Second Edition of Introduction to Landscape Design offers even broader coverage of the environmental, human, technological, and aesthetic issues associated with landscape design than the first edition. Beginning with the way we perceive, manage, and design the landscape, it moves on to explore the forces that influence land design. An overview of landscape management, planning, and design includes a discussion of the roles and integration of the professions involved, modes of professional practice, and site scale design processes. The book explores the ecology of design and the integration of land design decisions into dynamic systems. This fully updated new edition:
* Presents landscape design as a synergism of art and science
* Addresses the interplay between buildings and sites
* Provides insights into the breadth of people-environment relationships
* Places special emphasis on our growing understanding of interrelationships between the landscape and human decisions
A superb introduction for students as well as a useful reference for practicing professionals, this book is an excellent guide for anyone who wants to develop a better understanding of landscape design.

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Chapter 1

Landscape Meanings

Landscapes are point-in-time expressions of ecological, technological, and cultural influences. Settings are specific locations, designed or non-designed, generated by these influences, and experienced by people. The individual, for physiological purposes of survival and security, and for psychological ones of community, esteem, and self-actualization, encodes and decodes meaning from settings. Perceptual meanings grow from the perceptual characteristics of settings; associational meanings emerge from the relationship of settings to the observer's direct and indirect experiences. Relationships between designed settings and their context affect meaning. Systemic design integrates these diverse influences, promotes a sense of connectedness, and facilitates individually associated meanings. It integrates with contextual systems that, in turn, become progressively more interactive. Systemically designed settings can be experienced in different ways by different people at different times. Through systemic design intervention, multiple influences are integrated into wholes with enriched experience and intensified meaning, and the landscape becomes richer, and the place (mental construct experience in the mind's eye of the beholder) more alive.

1.1 METHOD OF STUDY

In Peasant, Society and Culture (1956), Robert Redfield distinguishes between the classic or learned culture and the popular or folk culture in many disciplines (music, religion, and so on). In House, Form and Culture (1969), Amos Rapoport considers the relationships between the learned and popular culture and physical design. He defines the grand tradition of Architecture as the creation of monuments ''built to impress the populace with the power of the patron, or the peer group of designers and cognoscenti with the cleverness of the designer and good taste of the patron. '' He defines the folk tradition, on the other hand, as '' the direct, unselfconscious translation into physical form of a culture, its needs and values, as well as the desires, dreams and passions of a people. '' He sees the folk tradition as '' the world view writ small, the 'ideal' environment of a people expressed in buildings and settlements, with no designer, artist, or architect with an axe to grind. ''

Within the folk tradition, Rapoport distinguishes between primitive and vernacular buildings. Primitive buildings (produced by societies identified by anthropologists as primitive based on technological and economic levels) are built by the common person who is a generalist equipped, as part of cultural heritage, with the limited knowledge necessary to build dwellings. Vernacular buildings (produced in societies with more advanced technologies and economies) are built by tradesmen, but the building type, form, and materials are known by everyone as part of the cultural body of knowledge. The building '' type'' follows the cultural tradition. Individual buildings subtly adjust the traditional theme to specific conditions (family size, site, microclimate, and so on). Focusing on the vernacular rather than monuments of the grand tradition, House, Form and Culture was a seminal study of the built landscape. As Rapoport says,

The physical environment of man, especially the built environment, has not been, and still is not, controlled by the designer. This environment is the result of vernacular (or folk, or popular) architecture, and it has been largely ignored in architectural history and theory.... In addition, the high style buildings usually must be seen in relation to, and in the context of, the vernacular matrix, and are in fact incomprehensible outside that context, especially as it existed at the time they were designed and built.

Rapoport's statement exposes a major deficiency of modern architectural education: it has focused on high-styled buildings and on form, to the exclusion of popular architecture, contextual forces, and broader meaning. It has studied architecture as form and object, not as process and integration.

Rapoport was not alone in his concern for these issues. Others of the period, such as Adolph Rudofski (Architecture Without Architects, 1964), Robert Venturi (Learning From Las Vegas, 1972), Christian Norberg-Schulz (Genus Loci: Toward a Phenomenology of Architecture, 1980), and Tom Wolfe (From Bauhaus to Your House, 1981), were struggling with the lack of relevant meaning in modern, and in the case of the later works, in post-modern architecture. However, the ideas these men promulgated were not widely embraced by the architectural community. The most published designers were not those exploring holistic and cultural meanings, but rather those pursuing design theories, movements, and styles, such as modernism (expression of an industrialized culture), post-modernism (visual topological explorations), and deconstructivism (dismantling conventional mental constructs whereby the populous decode meaning). Integrative building designers, including Buckminster Fuller (1930s to 1970s), Stewart Brand, Pliny Fisk, and Bill McDonough, have been seen by many as '' rebels'' at the edge, rather than as leaders of mainstream movements. Landscape management, planning, and design have been somewhat more integrative and inclusive embracing the grand tradition, the vernacular, and design integration with context.

More and more design professionals and laypersons, realizing the need to address the vernacular, are contending that cultural expressions, such as the strip development or Disneyland, are not inherently bad. They portray the values, dreams, and aspirations of major portions of our heterogeneous culture. However, vernacular expressions that clash with classical notions of design and form, taught in universities (see Sections 2.2, 3.3, and 9.1), are often discounted by designers. By recognizing the value of common places and the meanings that non-designers ascribe to landscapes, designers can create locally relevant aesthetics that convey greater meaning to a wider population, resulting in a rich, evocative landscape that functions as an integral part of culture, and that synergizes designed and non-designed elements for maximum landscape meaning.