As a Landscape architect student who has an ecology background, sometimes I get a little confused about this discipline. Also, I believe it has been a long time debate — which one is more important and more valuable to focus on landscape design area — people, environment, or sustainable landscape said by Richard, or beauty, the form and artistry of the landscape. I have been wondering this question for a long time. And hope through this semester’s study or the study period in Berkeley, I could find my answer.
Last Wednesday’s lecture, our professor, Kristina introduce the concept: Landscape armature and explains some examples to us in detail. From that lecture, I have a deeper understanding of the strength, the importance of PROCESS in the formation of the landscape, and therefore, rethink the value of considering PROCESS in the design process. The landscape is not a static noun, which can exist independently, but a union that contains different variables, including time, scale, human beings, biomass and etc. Some of them are cyclic and form a regular or an irregular cycle.
A sentence said by Kristina left a deep impression on me — thinking landscape as a movie rather than a photograph. The landscape is a matter of time and scale, a matter of whole(system) and part(variables). Like time carves the stone, wind shapes the sand.
We cannot foresee the future but we can predict the direction of evolution of the variables and system and do some reaction. And maybe that is the value of learning the process of landscape evolution.
Till now, I still cannot tell the answer to the question I mentioned above. Explaining ecology from the landscape armature, this landscape infrastructure, and the landscape process, kind of like explaining it from philosophy perspective. It has its charm and I think the armature itself also can be part of beauty.