What contemporary urbanites need most is to embrace nature. In a fast-growing, highly dense city, a touch of green and a pool of clear water makes people contemplate. Through design means, urban residents can contact nature and understand nature at their doorstep, which is one of the missions of landscape architecture. This knowledge and technology is being discovered vigorously and is increasingly appearing in people's field of vision.
Landscape design brings a lot of refined space to the city. For example, in recent years, the four-leaf clover community garden, which is quite famous in Shanghai and has developed into many cities in China, is through the initiation of experts and the participation of residents, so that everyone can gather together to create gardens and farmland, fill the idle open space between buildings with greenery, and let the charm of nature lead everyone to establish friendship.
During the epidemic, we have often seen that various landscape spaces such as parklands have become places that undertake functions such as nucleic acid testing, material distribution, and staff rest. Landscape design is not only for the city to be landscaped for people to see, but also to create spaces that can also meet people's various needs.
Sourced from flowers
Chinese edition of the Oxford General Reader series recently launched a new book, Landscape Architecture, which provides a concise introduction to the essence of landscape architecture and its more than 200-year history. British landscape architect and scholar Ian Thompson wrote this popular reading book to tell people that the practice of landscape architecture has shaped the daily life and workplace of today's human beings, which is closely related to the improvement of human settlements.
Historically, landscape design and gardening have always been inseparable, and the same is true in China, when the ancient literati not only personally designed and built gardens, which were used to recite poems, receive relatives and friends, read and walk, and constantly wrote garden art into poetry.
The book Landscape of Mankind, published in 1975, shows the arrangement of thousands of monuments and boulders in the town of Carnac in brittany, France, and the 50-ton Stonehenge in Wiltshire, England. Architectural historians have discovered these mysterious prehistoric landscapes, demonstrating the conscious efforts of humans to groom the land. This practice of transforming the landscape to express a certain point of view or value pursuit has continued to become an instinct for people to set up protective barriers around the land and create courtyards and gardens.
Thompson thus argues: "Landscape architecture usually involves the design of functional and productive landscapes, such as farms, forests, and reservoirs, but it has something in common with gardening in terms of aesthetics, pleasure, and comfort, which not only links it to the earliest settlements and arable land, but also to the ancients' dream of paradise." ”
Just like a small open space in front of the building is always planted by the elderly to plant vegetables or flowers, once people have a small piece of space at their disposal, they will want to use their ingenuity to find some materials to use and create a paradise that can be enjoyed. This kind of thinking is very common in all ages.
In Asia's largest flower market, Kunming Chenggongdou South Flower Market, you can see people rubbing shoulders through the flowers and buying their favorite flowers and plants. In the boutique potting area, there are even refined potted plants of various sizes for sale, and each pot is designed with different plants to create a small world with a theme. The bustling trading scene throughout the flower market is also an attractive scene.
For a long time, garden building was a specialized craft in the West. Gardeners have a variety of different designs for garden sites, such as geometric, straight and regular floor plans, as well as irregular or natural gardens and more diverse floor plans. Between rigidity and freedom, successive generations of gardeners have constantly made new attempts to form localized styles in various countries and regions.
For example, during the reign of King Edward VII (1841-1910), the British Arts and Crafts style, although characterized by straight lines, regular geometry and regular floor plans, reflected the softness of naturalism in planting, and also made more use of local building materials and traditional construction techniques in all paving, walls or other architectural elements, with many local details. The Palace of Versailles, on the outskirts of Paris, is the masterpiece of the gardener LeNott, about twice the size of New York's Central Park, and is a model of the royal gardens of Europe. Of course, such gardens would also consume huge sums of money from the court.
In the words of Thompson's citation of architectural historian Jeffrey Jericho, "landscape architecture may be recognized as the most comprehensive art."
For the public good
After combing through the history of British landscape art, Thompson talked about Humphrey Repton, an Englishman who had a pioneering position in landscape architecture, and he was the first to draw the current appearance of the garden and the "design renderings" after the transformation and show it to the client. Comparing the two, customers naturally understand what Repton's design can bring to their own garden. This method of work is all too familiar to today's design practitioners.
With the development of the economy and the needs of urban construction, in the 1830s, the "park construction movement" arose in the east end of London and the industrial cities of the north of England. At that time, the utilitarian ideas of the philosopher Bentham were popular, and people of insight began to seek "the greatest happiness for the largest number of people", and building parks and other places for the public to rest in the city was obviously in line with the goal of pursuing the public interest.
Thompson pointed out that the Botanical Garden designed by the British designer Louden in Derbyshire at that time was representative of the construction of such public buildings for the public, which can be called landscape design. Joseph Paxton's 1851 World's Fair Crystal Palace, Merseyside Birkenhead Park, and American Olmsted's 1857 Design of New York's Central Park are typical landscape design works. They have not only become masterpieces of landscape architecture, but also landmarks of the city that have lasted for hundreds of years.
In 1899, the American Society of Landscape Architects was founded in New York, and landscape architects became a definite profession. However, for a long time, gardening and landscape design were not too clearly distinguished. This is somewhat similar to the current situation in China, and our cities are going through this process.
Steven, an independent landscape architect, told CBN that one of the most important aspects of each project is the selection of plants, and it is also essential to consult users. After a hundred years, how to better understand the relationship between gardens covered with greenery and public spaces that meet people's needs is still a common problem.
Creating landscapes for cities "goes through a process from valuing practical value to imagining", and as we see every day, many exquisite and elegant places are loved precisely because they can meet a variety of different needs. The space with compound functions exudes a unique charm in contemporary cities.
For example, Shanghai Jialanting Pocket Park has both a community history display wall and a wrap-around bench, as well as an open space that can be used to set up stalls and open a second-hand market, as well as cafes. Designers gather ideas into a small area and let different people alternately use the space here.
Xinhua Road's Habitat Garden originates from the renovation and renewal of the narrow space of Lilong, where designers use a variety of plants to enclose a path to give visitors a private place where they can sit down and chat. Although the place is not large, it makes people have a kind of fun hiding in the corner of the city. There are more and more such gardens that are close to the community and meet the daily entertainment needs of residents.
Explore the future
Thompson also gives many examples in the book to describe how landscape design can improve and create a site that provides people with the opportunity to swim.
Since 2006, parks authorities have been constructing 100 hectares of tropical gardens in reclaimed land in Marina Bay New Town. One of them, Marina Bay South Garden, taken over by a British design team, designed two artificial biomes, introduced plants from the Mediterranean region and tropical mountain climate zones, and built a 50-meter-high "Optimus Prime" around these plants, allowing the plants to climb on them and provide lighting at night. Gardens by the Bay is considered the "Disneyland" of horticulture, and its final appearance is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland.
As a "garden city", Singapore offers landscape architects the opportunity to create new classics, and new landscapes continue to help the city with limited land space to explore the limits of development.
In other respects, landscape design presents a very diverse exploration because it shows people's desires and values to create a natural environment. Thompson speaks briskly about several directions with a wide range of influences, including environmentalism, biodiversity, land art, and social values.
He reminds us that contemporary landscape design has undergone various quests, such as imitating the light landscape of "less is more" by naturalists such as Thoreau, or chasing grand narratives like the "Land Art Festival" held by Kitagawa Furo in Japan, and so on, and the future direction is to better demonstrate the ability to empathize with people and show respect for the land.
Olmsted's New York Central Park not only solves the problem of urban environmental health, but also provides a place for citizens to recreation. The reporter once saw the century-old open-pit coal mine in Inner Mongolia's Zagannuoer being transformed into a national mine park, which not only realized the ecological restoration after the depletion of mineral extraction, but also showed tourists the history and geological science knowledge of the ancient industry of coal mining.
As Thompson points out, the future of landscape architecture is closely related to the prospects of human settlements, from the layout planning of business parks, the reclamation of industrial wasteland, the restoration of urban historical parks, to the site selection and design of important infrastructure such as highways. Landscape design is not just about creating objects that can be viewed, but also about solving more urban problems in the future.
Landscape Architecture
By Ian Thompson
Yilin Publishing House, February 2022 edition