A Methodology of Compound Approach: Cultural Landscapes and their Design Schematization

A didactic methodology concerning landscape formation must consider, at least, two important approaches. The first approach must refer to the landscape’s cultural validity, which is crucial for the formation of human communities. It must discuss how the landscape has shaped the social identities of these communities, how their history has emerged from their natural surroundings, and how the environment is changing accordingly. Moreover, a concise didactic methodology concerning landscape formation must also refer to a second approach regarding the design of landscapes, one that considers the possibility of expressive, representational, and semantic interventions in them. It is within this context that the proposed module will present the relation between landscape design and other design practices, especially architectural and urban design, in Euclidean or topological terms. The module will intensively refer to the concept of abstract ‘schematization’ applied to both natural and human-made design elements, a concept crucial for neoteric, modern, and contemporary theory of knowledge. It is important to comment, in addition, that abstract design schemes applied in landscape design in every historical period possess cultural and, in many ways, political value. They are correlated with the approval or the rejection of the degree of human control exerted on nature. They are thus correlated with cultural and, in many ways, political intentions concerning social and ecological conscience. The module will insist on non-conventional exercise approaches, on original essays of creative texts, with the addition of supportive sketches, drawings, or elementary models.