Architecture as landscape

Architecture is an "art of space", it resides in relationships. The substance of architecture pendulates between the raw material to be modeled and the natural setting in which it arises or is installed. The essence of architecture starts from the specific rules of composition and consists in the links it proposes, affirms and induces in a much wider landscape created by the architectural intervention itself.

Architecture as landscape is based on the assumption that architectural space can be understood as a manifestation of the mental image of the built ^environment1. The mental image in this sense is a composition, a representation, a construct, but above all an invention.

Landscape is a relevant repository for architecture and urbanism because it contains, represents and informs a process ^model2. Landscape cannot be designed and controlled to the same extent as architecture; there are varying degrees of artificiality, but the subjection of landscape-space by architecture-object is typical of modernity. We wonder whether today the architecture-landscape relationship is not rather one of interweaving and encompassing. This is why ARHITECTURA magazine proposes the thematic dossier LANDSCAPE.

Landscape in architecture, or rather in the way architects look, think and practice, has long been linked with the idea of the ^garden3. Landscape is constituted - in the architect's imagination - by the dialog between the construction (house, palace, villa, church, shop, office building...) and its surrounding space - garden, park, street, square... in this iteration landscape is a relationship.

The built landscape arises from the combination and superimposition of several natural and cultural factors, which have evolved in space and time and are subject to dynamic processes. These are obviously perceived differently by people, depending on their involvement or, in other words, the role they ^play4.

Whether natural or ^man-made5, landscape is always part of the gaze. THE IMAGE of the landscape is formed by a subjective, sensitive approach. For example, an artist, by interpreting a theme or imagining a subject, induces emotions and sensations in his work. By analogy, the image that each of us forms of a landscape is comparable to an ^artistic representation6. We see not only physically, but also emotionally.

Kevin Lynch has written that "man has an image of the environment, an image that results from immediate sensations and the memory of experience"^7. An image of the built environment, somewhat restrictively referred to as the artificial landscape, or of the natural landscape, gives the person who embodies it a reference point. The image thus provides him or her with emotional security and equilibrium through the legibility (K. Lynch) of the context being seen (and ^{contemplated8}). We observe that the process by which an image of architectural space can be transposed into the emotional register is expressed by the concept of landscape.

Architecture can also be seen, delimitatively, as form. By this we mean that the form implies the visualization of one or more volumes with pure or altered geometry, but which appeals to a notion of abstract nature - detachable from the landscape, with autonomous but not autistic legalities in relation to the environment. But the constructed form together with certain rigorously spatial determinations, variations of use and conventions of society generate, in turn, a material, physical landscape conventionally called artificial.

Read the full text in Arhitectura 5/2013

Notes:

1 Surrounding

2 Here we understand the term process to mean the unfolding of an event or phenomenon over time, and we propose the sense of preface, successive, progressive transformation.

3 Among the ancient oriental peoples, the notion of the garden was linked to the idea of supreme human happiness. One of the seven wonders of the ancient world - the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, built by King Nebuchadnezzar II (605-562 BC) for one of his wives, Amytis or Amuhea - is one such reality, built with effort but with the intention of provoking wonder.

4 Roles can be direct or indirect, active or passive, participatory or neutral, interpretive, framing or visionary, just as in a play there are actor, spectator, set designer, choreographer, choreographer, scriptwriter or director.

5 We reserve the right to nuance.

6 Roland Barthes says that each painting has as many images as there are gazes placed on its surface by those who see it(Œuvres complètes, tome II: 1966-1973, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 1994, p. 114).

7 Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1960, p. 58.

8 Perhaps one of the great sins of the contemporary world is the diminishing availability for contemplation.