The science and art of landscape
Abstract: The design of landscape is the design of land. Its basic principles are: understanding human nature and respecting people; identifying with natural processes, respecting nature and respecting the land. The "god".
Keywords: landscape design; land design; urban design
1. About landscape
Landscape should be understood from five levels.
(1) The first meaning: landscape is beauty and ideal.
People express the most beautiful scenes they see through artistic techniques. This is the earliest meaning of landscape. In the West, the meaning of landscape painting first originated from Dutch landscape painting, and later spread to England. It depicts the scenery, the feeling when a person stands in the distance and looks at the scenery, and then draws this feeling, so the painting is never the real scene, the painting is expressed after adding the person's aesthetic attitude. . The earliest source of the concept of landscape is painting. A landscape painting has a frame. This frame is defined by people and refined through their aesthetic taste. Landscape is the meaning of visual aesthetics from the beginning. However, people's aesthetic tastes are constantly changing with the development of society and changes in economic status, so the scenery that people understand is also constantly changing.
Before being used as a painting, landscape as a word first appeared in the Hebrew Old Testament. It is used to describe the scene of the Imperial City of Jerusalem. A shepherd stood on a desolate hill and saw an oasis. In this oasis there were Hongyu Buildings, temples and palaces. These landscapes he described as beautiful scenery were a city. Therefore, the beautiful scenery that people imagined in the agricultural era was a city, and this concept continued into the industrial era. Taking landscape as the ultimate goal of urban development, treating the city as an ideal, and continuing to develop will lead to the emergence of a metropolis like New York. The landscape we Chinese understand now is basically stuck in the urban ideal of the agricultural era. That’s why you see the high-rise buildings in Shenzhen and the high-rise buildings in Pudong, and the same ideals are used to build the city of Beijing. This is what farmers are describing about the future. But this kind of interest is short-lived, so after the end of the industrial era, due to the influx of a large number of country people into the city of New York, the reinforced concrete jungle of New York was no longer suitable for human habitation, and a series of urban diseases appeared. They found that the urban landscape they pursued was not suitable for people's survival and habitation. High-rise buildings were too dangerous (the tragedy of the World Trade Center Tower is a good illustration). The ideal of landscape had changed, and they no longer I want to create a landscape that resembles the city that I saw when I was a farmer or herdsman.
This denial of urban landscape is achieved through two approaches: one is to escape from the city and establish national parks and natural parks, and the other is to introduce nature into the city.
Why do national parks appear in the UK? National parks even cover tens of thousands of square kilometers and have a large number of natural areas. This is because New Yorkers’ ideal landscapes have begun to shift towards natural areas, so nature is The land was protected as a place for them to relax and vacation, so Yellowstone Park, Sequoia Park, etc. appeared. This is a way to deny the city - to escape the city and escape into the wilderness - at this time, people's concept of landscape has undergone a profound change, and nature is regarded as beauty instead of the city as beauty.
But people soon discovered that escape was not an option. Because, after World War II, cars became popular in the United States very quickly, so cars followed people in the city to the suburbs. The more people wanted to leave the city, the more the city followed people and cars. This led to urbanization in the suburbs. . Cities like this have appeared all over the United States: a large amount of land has been built on houses, turning nature into buildings, making the environment worse. Especially after the 1960s and 1970s, people discovered that the pastoral areas they had imagined before were The city was not actually realized because people at that time wanted to use railways to connect central cities and suburban garden cities. However, after the 1930s in the United States, railways were replaced by highways, trains were replaced by cars, and car companies wanted to To promote cars and tear down railways. As a result, every home has at least one car, and every inch of land becomes a city.
In addition to leaving the city and going to nature, there is a second way to get rid of the crowded city, which is to bring nature into the city.
The earliest practice was to build parks into cities. This is New York's Central Park, which covers more than 300 hectares. It is a very large place in the center of the city. Since then, the urban park movement in the United States has emerged.
This is the change in cities due to changes in the concept of ideal landscape in human imagination. This is about the understanding of the meaning of landscape as visual beauty.
(2) The second meaning: Landscape is a habitat, a place for living and living.
It is the experience of human inner life and the place that has a relationship with you, even if it is a grass, a river, or a big tree next to a village. The folk houses in southern Anhui are full of poetic and picturesque scenery and are very beautiful. This is because the people living on the land have formed a harmonious relationship between man and man, man and nature. People need to obtain resources, shelter, inspiration and everything they need for life from nature and society, so landscape is people and people. The relationship between man and nature is imprinted on the earth. Jerusalem in the Middle East has Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. From the city's landscape, you can see that there are always disputes in this city, which reflects the disharmonious relationship between people. When Lijiang passes through your door, you can wash yourself on the stone pier in front of your door. This is how the relationship between man and nature comes into being. The stone dock you see actually tells you that people need water and need to be close to water. This is a very friendly and harmonious relationship between man and nature.
If it is a disharmonious relationship, such as the Yangtze River, Yellow River, and Qiantang River. The Qiantang River dam is built to a height of 10 meters, and in some places it is 20 meters high. This is a reflection of the hostile relationship between man and nature. Instead of treating nature as your family and excluding nature, this is the failure of the relationship between man and nature. Disharmonious. What about the relationship between people? When the Berlin Wall was not torn down, it reflected the disharmonious relationship between people. Now the barbed wire fence erected on the Israeli border also reflects the disharmony between people. Before Hong Kong's return to the motherland, there was a barbed wire fence with an inverted "L" shape on the border between Hong Kong and the mainland. This also reflected the disharmonious relationship between people. Such boundaries are called political landscapes.
So when you see the landscape, when you see any element in any landscape, it actually tells whether the relationship between man and man, man and nature is harmonious.
(3) The third meaning: Landscape is a system with structure and function.
At this level, it has nothing to do with human emotions, but is something external to human emotions. But as a system, people study landscape more objectively from a perspective that has nothing to do with it, so landscape becomes the object of scientific research. When you have nothing to do with a piece of land, then your research is that of a scientist. But
If you live on this land and then study it, it will not be a scientist's research attitude, because this land is already related to your vital interests, and it will not be science. A piece of land has animal habitats, animal migration channels, etc., which all need to be studied using scientific methods: observation and simulation using ecological and biological methods to understand the landscape system. A discipline called "Landscape" actually uses scientific methods to study landscape systems and is a branch of geography.
(4) The fourth meaning: landscape is a "symbol".
Everything we see has a meaning behind it. Landscape is a book about nature and human history. The roads, pavilions, rivers and archways behind the folk houses in Wannan all tell the stories of today and yesterday. For example, the pavilion, locally called Shuikou Pavilion, is located at the water mouth of the village. This illustrates people's attitude towards nature. This place is very critical and determines the life, old age, illness, death and wealth of the local people. This pavilion tells you that this land is sacred. For another example, this archway is called the Chastity Archway, that one is called the Zhongxiao or Renyi Archway, etc. The chastity arch tells the story of a young woman who never remarried after her husband died. This monument to chastity reflected the values ??of that era. Zhongxiaofang praises filial piety and tells the story of a son who never leaves home while his parents are still alive. This is a value.
On the North China Plain, even a shallow ditch or a mound of earth tells history. The city walls and beacon towers were once the battlegrounds of war and war. These seemingly inconspicuous traces left on the land now tell very vivid and magnificent stories.
In the northern region, there is a saying that an ancient road that lasted for more than 300 years turned into a river. A road that has been traveled for more than 2,000 years has turned into a river. Then this river is not just a river. It is an ancient road used by King Wuling of Zhao in ancient times when he attacked Qin. Thousands of troops Horses have passed here before. A shallow ancient road or ditch is full of meaning. Therefore, landscapes are symbols with meanings that we need to read.
To a large extent, our earliest writing also comes from landscape. The pictogram of mountain comes directly from mountain, and the pictogram of water comes directly from water. The way water is written in the Naxi characters of Lijiang, Yunnan is different from that of the Han people. The Chinese character for water has two points on both sides of a curve, while the Naxi character for water has a circle at the end of the curve. . My understanding is: Because the Naxi people live on the Yunnan Plateau, the shape of the water there is different from that of the Yangtze River and the Yellow River: the melted snow from the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain flows down. You can’t see the water in the river, and the water seeps into the river beach. The water goes to the bottom, and then the water emerges again more than ten miles away through the river beach. This water is called a pool, including Black Dragon Pool or White Dragon Pool. You can see where this water comes from, it has a source. However, the water that our early residents in the Yangtze River or Yellow River area saw had no source. Although the source was said to be in the Kunlun Mountains, no one had been to the Kunlun Mountains at that time. This is why the differences in the landscape lead to differences in the words used to describe it, so our language also comes from the landscape. The so-called "He Chu Tu" and "Luo Chu Shu" actually mean that our ancient writings read the Yellow River and Luo River, and read the texture of the turtle's back in the water to interpret and predict the changes in things. These are all symbols, and they all tell stories, stories of rise and fall.
So when you see the landscape and elements in the landscape, even if it is a tree, you must read it carefully and understand it. For example, this tree is long and bent. Why is it long and bent? It is because of the uneven power of the wind or the uneven light. If this tree is covered with scars, why are there scars? It tells the story of being burned by fire. Or something. So if you go to the Summer Palace, you can see that the cypress trees there are all scarred. On the side of the house, many ancient cypresses have no skin. Why? They were all burned by the Eight-Power Allied Forces, so they have no skin. These trees tell history and are full of meaning.
The greatest landscape creation of mankind is the city. A community composed of tens of thousands or even tens of millions of people. They live together for the same and different purposes. Sometimes they help each other and love each other, sometimes they are jealous and hate so much that they even fight to the death. Sometimes in order to communicate, they built ponds and dug canals; sometimes in order to isolate, they built walls and set traps. When we look at cities in the past, they had walls and traps. The same love and hate are also expressed in human beings' attitudes towards nature and other life. Out of hatred, humans regard wild beasts and floods as common enemies, so they call them ferocious beasts, so they build high walls and fences to keep them out; out of love, humans dig lakes and build mountains, attracting vegetation, tigers and wolves into the city, like Building zoos and botanical gardens in cities also reflects human beings' love for nature. All these complex human nature and needs of human beings are inscribed on the earth and in a certain place called a city. This is the urban landscape. Therefore, landscape requires people to read, taste and experience it, just like reading a poem, tasting a painting, and experiencing past and present life.
(5) The fifth meaning: Landscape is the "god" of the land.
We all know about religious gods. The concept of gods is essentially spiritual sustenance. Then people's reliance on the landscape gives the landscape a divinity. When a believer climbs from the edge of Tibet to Lhasa step by step, he can kowtow for a year, which turns the land - the land of Lhasa - into a god. When he came to an intersection, there would be a pile of stones. This pile of stones was a pile of Mani. It placed people's hope and faith on it. This pile of stones was also a god. Even ordinary mountains and ordinary terrain are sacred. In ancient China, there was a pattern that was used to deify the earth, called the Feng Shui pattern: Green Dragon on the left, White Tiger on the right, Suzaku in the front, and Xuanwu in the back. Take a look at the landscape of Beijing. The Jundu Mountains in the north are called Xuanwu Mountains. Because of the Ming Tombs in the Ming Dynasty, they are called Wanshou Mountain. It is a mountain with divinity. Also because of the Ming Tombs of the Ming Dynasty, the mountain to the west is called Qinglong Mountain and the mountain to the east is called Baihu Mountain. All the cities or building sites in ancient China were based on this model, so this model was used to deify the entire land. There is no mountain range that does not belong to the gods of a certain family or a certain state. So when you break ground, you must first research which god is under the jurisdiction of this mountain.
In the story of Tang Monk’s Buddhist scriptures, Sun Wukong has superb skills, but wherever he goes, he has to call out the Earth God. What is Land Lord? Tu Tu Ye is the god of the earth. Ask him if there are any monsters here? A good monster or a bad monster? Then he knew how to treat this place and how to cast his spell. This is the local god. To put it bluntly, it is the local nature and humanistic spirit. What exactly is a local god? That is the external force that you must obey. Whether you are a scientist or a religious person, whether you are engaged in law or economics, you must obey, otherwise you will suffer a loss and be destroyed by this sacred power. Where does this divine power come from? It comes from natural forces that humans can never defeat.
Two white tigers are kept in a large casino in Las Vegas for people to visit. This white tiger was kept in a very magnificent palace, with gilded glass on the outside and marble on the ground. Inside, there was a gilded white marble throne that only an emperor could sit on, a fountain, and very luxurious decorations. But every time I go to see it, the tiger is always sick, lying there like a sick cat. Those who study biology know that tigers are cats, so when a tiger loses its power, it turns into a cat. It has no spirit and is sick. If it cannot be made to identify with this environment, it will lose its personality, nature, and its majesty as a tiger. A tiger is only a tiger when it is galloping in the jungle and roaring on the cliff. So it is with people. You can see how many of the newly built villas in Beijing look like palaces, and look at the advertisements for residential sales in Beijing, how many of them are promoting the Palace of Versailles and that of Danfengbailu. This is a kind of morbidity. A morbid psychology is guiding the living patterns of the public, leading to morbid values ??and lifestyles. If people really live there, they will lose their humanity and nature. So we need a living space that is in line with human nature. I am not saying that you should live in the Taihang Mountains, but that in addition to the superior physical environment of living in the city, you should also have a sense of belonging and identification with the land.
Many people may have been to Jiuzhaigou. On the way from Chengdu to Jiuzhaigou, there is a section of cliff. The road is very difficult to walk, and car accidents often occur. It is said that a long time ago the locals said that the mountain was like a dragon, a Dragon Bone Mountain, which could not be blown up or moved. However, the highway department did not listen and insisted on building this road. As a result, after the mountain was opened, there were always car accidents in this place, and many people died. There were only a few people there, so a temple was built locally and people worshiped all day long. When I was passing by, I found several cars falling under the cliff. Why? It’s because people don’t really understand that it’s impossible to build roads on such steep mountains. If you build roads along the terrain, this problem won’t arise. But if you have to cut through the mountains, take shortcuts, and remove the natural “bones” If it is exposed, the road will be very steep. Even if it is close and the car is driving faster, there will be more accidents. This is a scientific explanation. What does this ultimately mean? Respecting the God of the land means respecting nature and respecting the original pattern of nature.
Therefore, landscapes need people to care for and care for them, just like caring for themselves and their loved ones; of course, landscapes also need people to design, transform and manage them to achieve harmony between man and nature. To understand the landscape, to read the landscape, to protect it, to care for it, and to manage it, this is landscape architecture. Therefore, landscape architecture is the science and art of land analysis, planning, design, transformation, protection and management. It is science, because landscape is a system that needs to be understood and analyzed using scientific methods; it is also art, because it has a relationship with people and requires creation. In addition to scientific analysis and research, it also requires human emotions and Using human passion to create your living space is an art.
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