| Abstrakt: |
According to Oscar Wilde, after the "fall of man from the Garden of Eden" nature lost its human dwelling and home qualities and became uncomfortable and wild, so that man had to invent landscaping and architecture as human domains -- mediators between the unleashed forces of nature and the anthropic environment that ensure the satisfaction of needs and a thankful standard of living. In order to master these uncontrollable forces, to meet needs and to achieve a certain degree of comfort, man has had to appropriate nature through certain processes of "domestication" such as agriculture, landscaping and continuous maintenance of the landscaped state. Compared to buildings, gardens seem to belong to a more dynamic category of design, with a much greater capacity for transformation and adaptability, due to the fact that "they are 'constructed' largely from 'light,' 'vegetal' elements,"1 with an ephemeral and cyclical character. The garden, the park and / or the courtyard manifest themselves as different species of landscaping, and yet all take up innumerable aspects of contemporary art as ephemeral aestheticization every day. Today landscape constitutes - both literally and metaphorically - the horizon of our existence in time and space. The European gaze, which once - when not lost in imagination, in search of the heavenly beauty of the unseen God - "focused on things at a near or medium distance, has learned, since the Renaissance, to look boldly at the sky."2 The territory we design and inhabit today is measured on the larger scale of an ever-changing planet. The origin of the term landscape is relatively recent and separates "European attitudes into two periods: pre- and post-landscape. The concept of landscape, as it is understood today, did not exist in the Middle Ages, Renaissance or Baroque."3 Society was more oriented towards the architectural interior, extending almost exclusively the observation of nature to the cloister or the vegetable garden, the exterior landscape being merely a backdrop for these scenes. The world's view has been externalized over the centuries, as long as man has exercised increasing dominance over his environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
