On the Book "Landscape Theory" (English) (original) (raw)
We have lost an important connection with the landscape, a way of seeing and understanding its profound significance in our everyday life and culture. This gap in our knowledge is the consequence of a rationalist paradigm that continues to dominate western thinking, a conceptual void that threatens the landscape in the face of 21st century challenges. An alternative philosophical approach argues that refocusing attention on materiality and re-evaluating the relationship communities have with the land would be an important step towards addressing the problem, but it does demand a very different role and agenda for philosophy. This chapter illustrates the potential of a new way of thinking about landscape, consciousness and design and aims to initiate a new discourse by abandoning the philosophical filters that currently obscure a meaningful engagement with the built environment. This would help to establish an expanded definition of landscape as a vital means of achieving a better quality of life and robust sustainable development.
Philosophy of Landscape : Think, Walk, Act
2019
This landmark collection of essays on landscape offers a much-needed comprehensive exploration of an important dimension of our human environment. Landscape is different from such environmental topics as the forest, the city, and the sea. Unlike other subjects of environmental inquiry, landscape is strangely situated, giving it a compelling significance. For landscape is not a place that can be clearly demarcated. It is not a natural object like a mountain or a river, nor is it a location such as a valley or an island. In fact, landscape is no thing at all. Etymologically speaking, landscape is an expanse of the perceived environment: a scene, a region, surroundings as viewed by an observer. This gives landscape unique standing in environmental experience because landscape cannot be considered alone: it is, in effect, defined by and in relation to human perception. Landscape is a relationship. We can think here of the Claude glass, so called because it was an optical device, invented by the seventeenth century French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, through which an artist or a traveler in the countryside could look and adjust in order to frame a pleasing aspect of the scenery, arranging the view through the glass to resemble what a painter would depict with brush and paint. This exemplifies how what is designated as a landscape depends on the viewer, a point of exceeding importance. For there is no landscape "out there", so to speak, no independent object or place. Recognizing this has dramatic implications, for it demonstrates how landscape is actually a complex synthesis of viewer and environment. Recognizing this led me to entitle my first extended discussion of environment, "The Viewer in the Landscape", and that same understanding underlies many of the essays in this volume. Moreover, landscape has been used metaphorically in ways that do not always suit a visual meaning, such as 'earthscape' and 'spacescape' and even in referring to memories of one's previous home as an internal landscape.-Filosofia da Paisagem. Estudos, 2013. A compilation of essays by Adriana Veríssimo Serrão, the principal investigator of the project. Organized in four chapters: "Anthropology and Philosophy of Nature"; "Nature and Art: The Composite Categories"; "Landscape and Environment. A theoretical debate" and "Problems of Philosophy of the Landscape", the book reflects on the essence of Landscape as idea and reality, being and manifestation. 'A piece of nature' is, as such, an internal contradiction; nature has no pieces, it is the unity of a whole. The instant anything is removed from this wholeness, it is no longer nature, precisely because it can only be 'nature' within that unlimited unity, as a wave of that global flow. 2 19 Spazio limitato il paesaggio, ma aperto, perché, a differenza degli spazi chiusi, ha sopra di sé il cielo, cioè lo spazio illimitato; e non rappresenta l'infinito (simbolicamente o ilusionisticamente), ma si apre all'infinito, pur nella finitezza del suo essere limitato: costituendosi come presenza,
In his article "The World of the Landscape" Bart Verschaffel analyzes the visual logic of the landscape genre in painting as it was developed from the sixteenth century onward. He argues that the structure of a minimal foreground, a middle ground cut off from the foreground, and a background that gives way to the distant, corresponds to a meditative attitude, proper to the nature of the image as such. The landscape is essentially a calm image. Second, Verschaffel puts forward that the middle ground in landscape images is not, as in history painting, a waiting room adjacent to the action in the foreground, but is rather oriented towards the horizon and beyond: a landscape always represents the world. Further, in the tradition of landscape for the Romantics the vagueness resting on the horizon comes to the fore and creates an "atmosphere" that touches a lonely soul and transforms an image of the world into an intimate encounter.