Recovering landscape

Landscapes reshapes the worl not culy because of its physical and experiential characteristics but also because of its eidetic content, its capacity to contain and express ideas and so engage the mind

• Marc Treib: Nature called .

I focus on the recovery of the designed landscape the landscape shaped to convey human intention, providing acomodation and, perhaps, even beauty. If it is indeed the quality of the designed landscape that has been lost, we must also ask wether or not, or in what ways, it should be recalled.

Indeed, time is the crucial dimension of landscape, and time may ultimately be the single most important reason that architects are drawn outside their buildings... Change is the direct byproduct of time. It is necesary to understand that many an elaborate panting plan has materialized only as a few pitifully wispy trees propped up by massive staking.

The second dimension of time in the landscape is cyclical. Succesions of night and day are underscored by the passage of the sun, but the annual rhythms of branch and bloom are perhaps more noticeable than the diurnal, particularly in climates where the four seasons are distinct and the vegetation is deciduous.

Landscape designed in conscience with the annual cycles resonate with their connection to the place and reflect the life within it.

• Sébastien Marot: The reclaiming of sites

The key priciple of this process involves careful survely, identification, criticism, and inventive analysis. The close coordination and complex representation of site and planning is worth emphasizing. It harks back to the origin and tradition of a discipline that has always been intimately linked to developments in surveying, painting, theater, and scenography. Just as the layout of the large classical gardens can be related to the progress and ambitions of cartography, so the contemporary landscape architect becomes a special type of project manager, an exegete (or narrator) of the landscape.

More precisely, there are four steps in the study and projection of site-based landscapes: anamnesis, or recollection of previous history; preparation for the staging of the new conditions; three-dimensional sequencing; and relational structuring.

1. Anamnesis: Upon the tracks overlaid by the march of time, site interpretation detects potencialities to be nurtured and passed on. The reading is thus that of an inheritance and the eventual project a bequest.
2. Preparation: A Landscape is fully bound into the effects of nature and time: the cycle of seasons and the passage of time; procecesses of hydrology, weathering, and succession; and the alternation of day and night, sun and moon. Thus, in reading the site as a living and dynamic organism, the landscape architect is able to revitalize and incorporate once abandoned sites into present and larger fields of effect.
3. Three-dimensional sequencing: The study of gardens has led to a qualitative preception of the layers comprised by public space... This is a rich and complex vision, at once aesthetic and ecological, and it involves a project (even if minimally) with all the layers that compose the landscape: earthwork, topography, soil, drainage, utilities, planting, furnishing, and so on.
4. Relational structuring: This principle refers to the special attention that must be given to boundaries, adjacent areas, surrondings, and backgrounds.

To encourage people to view public spaces as landscape means getting them to reconsider their own habits and functions and, ultimately, to overcome the divisive thinking on which those functions are based. It means persuading clients to allow other aims to have weight, aims that can be shared among many people on the basis of reworking the way in which territory is directed and managed. This strategic and synthetic approach is what enables contemporary landscape architects to assume leadresgip roles in the design and coordination of large-scale projects.

• Christophe Girot: Four Trace Concepts in landscape Architecture

I am interestes in how one recognizes sites through design.
In the course of my own work I have unraveled four operating concepts that serve as tools for landscape investigation and design, especially with regard to recovering sites. these I call trace concepts because they cluster around issues of memory...
Landing, grounding, finding, and founding. Each concept also designates a specific attitude and action that in turn nurtures a process of design and landscape transformation.

Landing: It describes the specific moment when a designer still does not know anything about a place and yet is prepared to embark on a lengthy process of discovery
During landing, nothing is allowed to remain obvious or neutral to the designer; rather everything is apprehended with wonderment and curiosity, with subjective and interpretative eyes.
The individual's sense of landing is what matters most in the beginning, and it is precisely this ontological trust in initial intuition that needs to be restored and nurtured.
Grounding: Landing only happens once, at the beginning, immediate and distinct, whereas grounding recurs indefinitely. Grounding is more about reading and understanding a site through repeated visits and studies.
Finding: Finding entails the act and process of searching as well as the outcome, the thing discovered... they are something unique (though hidden) that definitely belongs to a place and contributes durably to its identity
Founding: Founding can be also understood as bringing something new to a place, something that may change and redirect a particular site.

By contrast, trace concepts enable designers to come to grips with their intuitions and experiences of place, allowing these imp`ressions to direct the unfolding of the project.

• Steen A.B Hoyer: Things take time and time takes things

The scenic image stands only as a historical sign, a mere picture, whilethe experience of land moves from engagement and change to mere voyeurism...
It requires visionary professionals who can look at situations in new and relevant ways and then show to others the range of possiblities. This is why designers draw so much, less for scenic representatio and more for discovery and then conveyance of ideas
The Traditional Danish cultural landscape has lost much of its original symbolic value following the loss of an overall functioning structure. The question is, then, whether or not the Danish landscape, with its infinite history, should (or can) be given a new role and identity.
For instance, the shift from local to global culture afforded by new economies and technologies means that people are becoming more interested in progressive approaches to the design of landscape.
Two things may have to be overcome: One is the conservationism of administrators and land managers, and the other is the modern functionalist zoning approach to landscape planning