Environmentalism, Environmental Ethics, and Some Linkages with Landscape Architecture (original) (raw)
Related papers
Ecology and ethics: landscape architecture and sustainability
The present articles aims at analyzing the ecological dimension of the landscape in the context of the integrated and vast perspective of Landscape Architecture, which ethical vision considers the landscape both as a holistic system, living and dynamic, in constant transformation, and as a good of natural and cultural origin to be preserved. Through the thoughts of different authors we develop a reflexion on the consideration of ecology and culture as a foundation of the intervention in the contemporary landscape. In the context of the changeable dynamics typical of contemporary landscape, the intervention is based on sustainability principles, within of an ethical responsibility that seeks the long-term development of both Nature and Society.
The Authority of Nature: Conf lict and Confusion in Landscape Architecture
1998
Gardens are shaped by rain and sun, plants and animals, and human hands and minds. Whether wild or clipped, composed of curved lines or straight, living plants or plastic, every garden is a product of natural phenomena and human artif ice. It is impossible to make a garden without expressing, however unconsciously, ideas about nature. For thousands of years, nature has been both mirror and model for gardens, has been looked to for inspiration and guidance. Designers who refer to their work as “natural” or “ecological” make ideas of nature central and explicit, citing nature as authority to justify decisions to select some materials or plants and exclude others, to arrange them in particular patterns, and tend the result in certain ways. Appealing to nature as the authority for landscape design has pitfalls which are often overlooked by advocates of “natural” gardens. To describe one sort of garden as natural implies that there are unnatural gardens which are somehow different (and p...
ARCHITECTURE AND THE RIGHTS OF NATURE
Dialectic , 2019
This paper critiques the application of the rights of nature in the production of eco-friendly architecture from a decolonizing perspective. The question at the center of our argument is whether the rights of nature can be useful as a method to express deeper relationships between natures and not peoples in architectural practice, or is the taking up of the rights of nature just another colonial manifestation of terra nullius meant to ensure settler colonial regimes are maintained in perpetuity? To tease out this question a recent architectural competition in Hawaii will be analyzed and explored as a methodology, alongside other architectural projects that serve as far more successful attempts at addressing indigenous rights, epistemologies and ways of building, which acknowledge settler colonialism and the need to decolonize architectural practice through respectfulness and reflexivity.
Nature in the man-made landscape
This essay looks to explore the typologies of nature and the result of human intervention. It discusses the origins of man’s dissociation with natural world as a result of permanent settlement and sense of superiority. Examining the changing balance of nature through the development of agricultural, urban and industrial landscapes and the subsequent narratives. Additionally looking at environmental issues and the current dilemma of climate change faced by modern society and how this relates back to the ideas discussed within. The main aim is to show that ultimately man’s involvement with nature is of self-interest.
Re-Envisioning Nature: The Role of Aesthetics in Environmental Ethics
The discussion of environmental aesthetics as it relates to ethics has primarily been concerned with how to harmonize aesthetic judgments of nature’s beauty with ecological judgments of nature’s health. This discussion brings to our attention the need for new perceptual norms for the experience of nature. Hence, focusing exclusively on the question of whether a work of “environmental art” is good or bad for the ecological health of a system occludes the important role such works can play in formulating new perceptual norms and metaphors for nature. To illustrate this point, the work of sculptor Andy Goldsworthy presents us with a different perception of time that is ethically useful.
Architecture’s involvement with Landscape
A+BE: Architecture and the Built Environment, 2019
While nature is an important component of architectural theory, we must reevaluate how architecture deals with nature in theory in order to place landscape in this thesis in the disciplinary context of architecture. While revisiting 17 of architecture's crucial exponents throughout twenty centuries, I explore their dealings with landscape or nature and the concepts thereof. The beginning of this chapter (3.1) will touch on some crucial problems that lead to the polarity of 'wild' nature and human architecture, or more precisely, the divide between nature and humanity through architecture. Part of the theoretical problem elaborated in the beginning of the chapter is, that landscape and nature are oftentimes conflated if not confused, in particular by architects. Out of my critique of a thematic selection of common architectural theories and within the methodological differentiation (3.2), I will argue for the necessity of research through analyses of landscape spatial com...
Racines Modernes de la Villle Contemporaine, 2019
The historic La Sarraz Declaration (1928) made numerous claims and aspirational assertions regarding architectural pedagogy, practice and policy – among those claims whose merits stand out 90 years later is that “the essence [of urbanization] is of a functional order…[whose] essential objects are : (a) the division of soil, (b) the organization of traffic, and (c) legislation”. While there are elements of continuity in those concerns expressed by the authors of La Sarraz Declaration and contemporary issues, perhaps the greatest apparent difference derives from the very different environmental inclinations that exist in the Anthropocene. The purpose of this essay is to focus on an issue that was not really on the minds of the La Sarraz authors. The issue is climate change mitigation. Historically, environmental ethics were predicated on a certain casual anthropocentrism – characterized by environmental historian Roger Kennedy as “the theology of dominance” – in which nature was regarded as “belonging of right to mankind”. Our contemporary ambitions are informed by the distinction made in a 1992 amendment to the Swiss Constitution stating that the purpose of the constitution is to “ensure the dignity of living beings”, and by the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology’s advocacy of this in their official 2008 report, 'The Dignity of Living Beings with Regard to Plants: Moral Consideration of Plants for their Own Sake'. Highlighting change and continuity in the architectural discourse, the essay relates CIAM’s La Sarraz Declaration (1928) and the Charter of Athens (1944) on one hand, and the proto-ecological architectural discourse from John Ruskin’s 'Unto This Last' (1860) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s 'The Living City' (1959) on the other, arriving at contemporary efforts to create “The Charter of Elements” – extending rights to soil, water, and air themselves.