Applied Botany to Landscape Architecture as a discipline: an experience in the Architecture and Urbanism undergraduate course at Federal University of Pernambuco (original) (raw)

2022, Revista Brasileira de Geografia Física

Knowing and understanding plants are essential factors for a successful landscape architecture project. Great landscape architects from the 20th and 21st centuries-such as Burle Marx, Fernando Chacel, Rosa Kliass, Caldeira Cabral, and Piet Oudolf-perceive vegetation as a link between nature and the city, in which the valuation and the respect for the landscape are the central points. Unfortunately, little focus has been given to the appropriate employment of plants in landscape architecture projects at architecture and urbanism schools, resulting in generic planting schemes. Should these schemes be called landscape architecture projects? Oppositely, Applied Botany to Landscape Architecture has as one of its objectives providing knowledge for the conception of plant palettes, which should consider not only aesthetic criteria but also biological and environmental ones from each species to establish a harmonious relationship with the existing environment. Thus, this article intends to present the experience and the results achieved in the discipline AQ553-Special Topics in Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape Architecture Theory III (Applied Botany to Landscape Architecture). For this discipline, it was adopted descriptive and bibliographical research as a methodology, which has made possible the understanding of aesthetical and environmental matters related to the plant element and how these attributes can be reflected in a landscape architecture project. By leading students to consider the architectural and biological aspects of the vegetation components in their proposals, the procedure adopted in this discipline had great outcomes; for instance, improvements in the areas of environmental perception, graphic representation and design of landscaping projects.