Abstract
This chapter dissects a contemporary idea of landscape into its multiple components. The text analyzes a series of landscape constructs in a conceptual sequence moving from elemental to elaborate: ur-Landschaft; habitat; environment; territory; cultural landscape; cognitive landscape. The chapter discusses various positions that have been recently confronting over the notion of landscape, whose alternative landscape paradigms gather around two opposite fronts: the ‘culturalist-geophilosophical’ and the ‘scientific-cognitivist’. The text elaborates on a number of the diverse layers and components referable to a contemporary landscape notion. Components and layers derive from literature and practice, originating in the present and in the recent or remote past. The text, then, examines with specific focus the contended character of continuity or discontinuity of the notion of landscape and its evolution both in time and space, on which the very essence of the notion is dependent. The text compares positions describing the landscape as an aboriginal construct generated by the man/nature interaction and others regarding landscape as a sophisticated construct only generated when man’s manipulation of space drops any utilitarian purpose aiming at a greater perfection. The text then construes a landscape paradigm capable to accommodate both culturalist and cognitivist layers and components from previously analyzed models. Reformed and recombined the layers and components conform a new ‘symbiotic landscape paradigm’ that is described and graphically represented in a diagram.
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Notes
- 1.
“The ‘environment’ is a physical-biological concept, while the ‘landscape’ is a relational concept, which has to do with the way in which we represent a territory and we feel in it […]. The geophilosophical and the atmospheric models recover substantial parts of the history of the landscape” (D’Angelo 2010a) [Translation by the author].
- 2.
“The discourse on the landscape seems to have migrated towards other disciplines, such as Architecture and Ecology […] The landscape is, however, a specific object of philosophical reflection […] in consideration of its aesthetic dimension” (D’Angelo 2010b) [Translation by the author].
- 3.
“The working method has become a form […]. It is a method of working that has slowly become architecture”, Jacques Herzog’s words (Chevrier and Herzog 2010, p. 33).
- 4.
“We wanted to avoid style: the idea of perception is more open”, Jacques Herzog’s words (Chevrier and Herzog 2010, p. 23).
- 5.
The island of Tenerife is reached in June 19, 1799 by the Spanish corvette Pizarro carrying the expedition. The ascent is carried out two days later, testing for the first time the sophisticated instruments commissioned to the most distinguished toolmakers of the time in London, Paris, and Geneva.
- 6.
See: Project 230 Elbphilarmonie Hamburg, Herzog and de Meuron’s website.
- 7.
Translated by the author.
- 8.
In fact, the individual’s belonging to a locale and a community does not exclusively depend on the place of the individual’s birth, the ur-Land, generating an immutable bond, but rather on a conscious election that can occur at a later moment of the individual’s life.
- 9.
Discussing of Conrad Waddington’s legacy, Hadas Steiner concludes that the notion of ‘environment’ augments that of ‘habitat’ by expanding the sphere of the immediate interactions of an organism to a larger ambit, where interchanges can be prevalently intangible, based on the passage of information, its processes and its networks. The ‘environment’, then, contains the idea of a ‘cybernetic interchange’ between organisms and their context, opening the way to bio/technological hybridization (Steiner 2014, p. 89).
- 10.
“In a condition of socio-environmental transformation […] urban metabolism [suggests] an analytical basis for gauging the continuous flows of energy, material, and population exchange within and between cities and their extensive operational landscapes” (Ibañez and Nikos 2014, p. 3).
- 11.
- 12.
“We have never had more power to do great things, to design better landscape ecologies both for sustenance and for nature, to create beauty, and to manage a biosphere that will nurture, please, and honor our children, ourselves, and our ancestors” (Ellis 2014b, pp. 180–181).
- 13.
“Nel Cinquecento non esisteva il paesaggio, nel senso moderno del termine, ma il paese, qualcosa di simile a quello che per noi è oggi il territorio o, per i francesi, l’environnement” (Camporesi 2016, p. 5). “In the Cinquecento the landscape, in the modern sense of the term, did not exist, but rather the paese, something similar to what today is to us the territory or, for the French, the environnement.” [translation by the author]. Camporesi notes how, in the mid-sixteenth century, fray Leandro Alberti is already familiar with the term ‘territorio’, which he broadly disseminates through his Descrittione di tutta Italia (Camporesi 2016, p. 166).
- 14.
“the synergic confluence between creative industriousness and visualization of reality” [Translation by the author].
- 15.
Freely paraphrased by the author.
- 16.
Freely paraphrased by the author.
- 17.
Quotation from Aenea Silvius Piccolomini’s Commentarii in Burckhardt. Translation by the author.
- 18.
“After all, in cosmography as in other matters, it is vain to attempt to distinguish how much is to be attributed to the study of Antiquity and how much to the special genius of the Italians. They see and treat the things of this world from an objective point of view, even before they were familiar with ancients, partly because they still are themselves a semi-ancient people and partly because their political circumstances predispose them to it; but they would not so rapidly have attained to such perfection had not the old geographers shown them the way” (Burckhardt 1876, p. 11).
- 19.
From Cosmos, Burckhardt derives the sequence of Dante’s observations of nature: “the bursting of the clouds and the swelling of the rivers”, “the sweet breath of morning, and the trembling light on the gently agitated distant mirror of the sea”, “the pine forest near Ravenna […] where the early song of birds is heard in the tall trees” (Humboldt, Cosmos: Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe 1848, pp. 50–51).
- 20.
Burckardt’s quotations in this sub-chapter are translations by the author from the Italian edition in the References (Burckhardt 1876) in confrontation with the classic English version of 1878 by S. G. C. Middlemore.
- 21.
Geography of Equatorial Plants: Physical Tableau of the Andes and the Neighboring Countries.
- 22.
Essay on the Geography of Plants.
- 23.
See Chap. 2 of this book.
- 24.
The idea of the equivalence of the agrarian and urban space is developed in Aldo Rossi’s discourse on The Urban Artifact as a Work of Art. Rossi quotes Carlo Cattaneo’s precursory statement of 1845 on the ‘artificial’ character of any inhabited places (Rossi 1982, p. 34), ‘distinguished from wilderness’ inasmuch as they are an ‘immense repository of labor’ forging ‘our artificial homeland’ (Cattaneo 1956).
- 25.
The Young Lions, USA 1958, director Edward Dmytryk, adapted from homonymous novel of 1948 by Irwin Shaw.
- 26.
Farina derives the concept from Jesper Hoffmeyer.
- 27.
About the cognitive landscape and its components, see Chap. 8 of this book.
- 28.
See Chap. 2 of this book.
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Pasini, R. (2019). Reconciling Cultural and Cognitive. In: Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77887-7_7
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