Chinese Garden Research in the 21st Century International Academia —A Diachronic Analysis of Journal Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes and Dumbarton Oaks Library and Collection

In response to increasing attention from international academia on Chinese gardens, this article advances China’s landscape studies by exploring international research trends on Chinese gardens during the 21st century. It mainly adopts a diachronic perspective to examine the journal Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes—a leading journal, and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection (Trustees for Harvard University)—international academia’s leading institution on landscape studies. Using a bibliometric approach, it first carries out a statistical analysis of the rules and trends of development to explore the distribution patterns of Chinese gardens. Based on this analysis, it uses time series analysis to study the relationships of related academic discourses and contexts. The study reveals that Chinese garden studies led by Chinese scholars has attracted increasing attention from international academia and has involved growing numbers of scholars from various disciplines. Consequently, it has not only shaped much of the output from China and Britain, but is also driving a paradigm shift away from studying Chinese classical gardens to modern designed landscapes, drawing upon a monolithic approach to investigate the pluralistic, and from focusing on Chinese national interaction to transnational interaction.     

AN EVIDENCE-BASED METHODOLOGY FOR LANDSCAPE DESIGN

As a design method supported by scientific knowledge and findings, evidence-based design now is widely applied in the field of architectural and landscape design. This design process makes architects and landscape designers’ decisions about built environment sound and reliable. Combining two practice cases — the Urban Ecological Corridor Planning of College Station of Texas, a regional planning project, and Landscape Design of the Yangpu Bridge Park in Shanghai, an urban public space project — this article illustrates the concept and process of key issue identification and response, a pivotal step in evidence-based design, and points out the challenges in related applications of this method.     

Ecological Planting Imperative: Functional Systems,Not Stylized Ecologies

The ability of landscape architectural projects to mitigate the worst effects of climate change will depend upon designed ecological systems. These systems will be built with plants. Despite the recognition of ecology as an essential driver of landscapes, the professionals of landscape architecture too often lack the knowledge and practical skills to create robust vegetative systems. New approaches and tools are required. This article outlines principles and methods for designing biodiverse plant systems for urban sites. Planting methods that increase species richness, functional diversity, and spatial complexity are emphasized as a way of developing more resilient plantings. Selecting species with similar evolutionary adaptions to stress, disturbance, and competition—as well as creating multi-layered compositions of diverse plant morphologies—allows designers to create compatible, long-lived plant mixes. To balance the increased visual complexity of diverse plant mixes, the article explores design techniques to make plantings more appealing to the public. The strategies explored here are based on the projects, experience, and research of Phyto Studio, a Washington, D.C. based studio. The methods build on work described in the author’s book, Planting in a Post-Wild World, an exploration of how to create designed plant communities.     

PARTICIPATION,INTERPRETATION, AND REPRESENTATION OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN

At the beginning of this interview, Zhang Dong, partner of Z+T Studio, believes that landscapes of each nation should be closely rooted in its own culture and designing landscapes which praise China’s cultural identity should be a part of Chinese designers’ values and beliefs. Beside of integrating with strategies of sustainability and resilience, landscape design should also combine with environmental education. Zhang summarizes a landscape design process into “two objective aspects and one subjective aspect,” and points out that a designer’s professional knowledge, social values, and aesthetic preferences together influence his / her acquisition of information from sites and the design what and how he / she will make. While recognizing the importance of ecology and public participation to landscape design, he stresses that design essentially is to solve problems in a creative way and landscape designers should not neglect the fundamentality of spatial creation and aesthetics to the profession and the discipline. Finally, he explains the Whole- Process Participation design mode adopted by Z+T Studio, and how it helps improve designers’ capacity in observation and representation.     

A DISCUSSION ON INSTITUTIONAL IMPROVEMENT FOR ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION AND LANDSCAPE GOVERNANCE IN CHINA

With the development of landscape discipline and governance theories, “landscape governance” has become a new frontier of inter-disciplinary research, and is considered a sub-topic and extension of “environmental governance.” Institution is an important factor to the development of landscape governance theory and practice. Since the Eighteenth National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012, the construction of Ecological Civilization has marked itself a new milestone for its systematic top-down design and institution-oriented efforts. At the same time, the Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 2013 proposed to improve the contemporary national governance system and capacity, and took governance as a new means to evaluate state capacities and state-society relations. Both of them will significantly impact landscape planning, design, protection, and management in China. This article reviews the evolution of western landscape governance theories driven by 1) the emphasis on the spatial scale effect of landscape; 2) the exploration of the regional variety of cultural and collective identities of local landscapes; and 3) the emphasis on the practice of landscape governance. It also examines the opportunities in China’s landscape governance brought by the institutional improvement of Ecological Civilization, which might help: resolve the inherent conflicts that cause the existing environmental and ecological problems; enhance China’s capacity on landscape governance; establish a new land-use management system with a greater ecological security and broader ecosystem services; endow landscapes with more public benefits; cultivate a civil society and democracy in landscape governance; and, influence the education and research of Landscape Architecture in multiple dimensions. Finally, the article proposes roadmaps for China’s landscape governance at both global and national scales.     

LA PKU’S RESEARCH ON CHINA’S TRADITIONAL ECO-WISDOM AND RELATED APPLICATION IN CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE PLANNING AND DESIGN

Since 1997, LA PKU has conducted a series of studies on China’s traditional ecological wisdom and related application in contemporary landscape planning and design. This paper first reviews the background and the course of LA PKU’s research: In early years, they studied on Feng-shui and vernacular landscapes that stemmed from their understanding and response to local natural and human processes in planning and design practice; In 2006, Kongjian Yu proposed the concept that Landscape Architecture is a discipline concentrating on the art of survival, which has greatly promoted the study and revival of traditional eco-wisdom, not only providing a historical base for the modern development of Landscape Architecture, but also applying the research results in responding to contemporary environmental and ecological problems; In 2014, developed upon the achievement on the art of survival, LA PKU further explored the deep form of China’s traditional landscapes by studying local spatial forms and design strategies on micro- and site-scales and translating such ecological solutions into China’s contemporary landscape design. The paper also reviews on LA PKU’s important research results over the past two decades, including traditional agricultural landscapes, vernacular settlements, and traditional water-adaptive landscapes.     

Mise-en-Scène—Design Research Through Multiple Lenses

Mise-en-Scène is a design research project in the form of a book that expands the ways in which we think about the creative roles of publication and communication, and about our connections as a discipline to the issues and world around us. Taking from its title, Mise-en-Scène is an arrangement of the actors and sceneries that constitute our cities and lives. This project is characterized by four features. Communication—Distinct from a design monograph, Mise-en-Scène is a collaboration between landscape architect Chris Reed and photojournalist Mike Belleme, directed towards a general audience. Arrangement—An arrangement of photographs, drawings, models, sketches, essays, literary excerpts, and community engagement quotes from designers, activists, and ecologists, offering greater multiplicity to the narrative and provoking new associations across cities, projects, and experiences. Perspective—A reflection of how Stoss Landscape Urbanism observes, investigates, and engages with our urban landscapes. Opportunity—Mise-en-Scène puts forth a new model of integrating interdisciplinary perspectives, as well as public audiences, within the formation of design research. Built and speculative works, from Reed and the practice of Stoss, spatialize how these conditions coalesce—whether at the scale of a bench or the entirety of the city fabric. And through a foregrounding of human connection, rather than design, Belleme’s photography elucidates both the quotidian and fantastical occupation of these urban landscapes.     

Mapping Landscape Architects’ Expertise in Climate Adaptation With Design Research Projects Over the Past Two Decades

This article maps out landscape architects’ expertise in multidisciplinary, comprehensive climate adaptation discourse. Systemic frameworks and process-driven approaches in contemporary Landscape Architecture discipline can become a powerful tool for harnessing unprecedented solidarity for climate actions across fields. However, landscape expertise is still largely ignored or marginalized in real-life climate discourse dominated by policymakers, scientists, and engineers. This study addresses this gap in understanding landscape expertise through design research projects over the past two decades. The article theorizes a body of landscape architecture projects in the past two decades, and proposes three terms—spatialize, synthesize, and speculate—for describing the landscape expertise in multidisciplinary, comprehensive climate adaptation projects. „Spatialize” refers to landscape architects’ capacity to construct knowledge through strategically displaying „data” through critical cartography. „Synthesize” is the ability to envision multispecies entanglement by combining cultural, ecological, historical, biological, and political lenses through material practices. „Speculate” means to understand landscape design as a long-term practice with repeated operations, and, thus, to design is to deploy a speculative framework that generates knowledge through practice.     

TO BE ALARMED BY THE TRAP OF INTELLIGENCE TOOLS

Boeing aircraft crashes aroused the author’s thoughts on intelligence tools. He believes that they should be used to help humans solve problems, rather than put a burden on human life and work. From his own experience of measuring sites, drawing maps, and collecting information, the author is optimistic about the use of intelligence tools in human activities, especially in the field of landscape architecture — intelligence tools have undoubtedly freed designers’ hands for more creative work while acquiring more accurate data, helping humans realize the value of being designers. The author appeals the public to be alarmed by the trap of intelligence tools, and humans’ creative behaviors should not be replaced with such tools. Only in this way can we avoid being lost in the age of artificial intelligence.     

Deciphering Historic Landscapes: A Case Study of Slender West Lake in Yangzhou,China

Historic landscapes today are changing gradually or abruptly, and the abrupt changes have caused the loss of much historic information. How to identify and protect the significant evidence of dynamic landscapes is a question that must be answered by each cultural community. This article establishes a decipherment process—an operational guide for landscape assessment in China. This is a methodology using European methods integrated with traditional Chinese ways of landscape appreciation, providing an effective approach to translate the cultural landscape framework into the conservation inventory. Using Slender West Lake as a case study, the decipherment process has expanded the existing landscape investigation theory using the factor of artistic conception to integrate intangible values into the assessment process. It has also established a unit-based method to classify and represent historic landscapes.     

Landscape Design as an Asset Management

Landscape is a product of economic activities and an asset associated with a society’s productivity levels and the relations of production. Despite the range of projects —self-owned, for-sale,or public infrastructure — that designers undertake, life-cycle benefits such as rental returns and public satisfaction should always be considered. By interpreting landscape design as an asset management, this article highlights the third-party role of asset managers who coordinate the benefits of all stakeholders at different stages through negotiation of design options. Designers are also expected to have a product and user thinking, acquire general and interdisciplinary knowledge of certain businesses through role rotations, cross-department meetings, and diverse project teams to improve design proposals, and strengthen mechanisms of pre-occupancy engagement and post-occupancy evaluation.     

Invoking the Wild

Wild places remind us of the adaptability, resilience, and fragility of plants and humans alike. The urban environment is awash in plant life, often taking root in remnants of industrial infrastructure in poetic ways—along roadsides and chain-link fences, between cracks of pavement, and within vacant lots, rubble dumps, and highway medians. Future Green Studio’s investigations into spontaneous urban plants have aspired to engage people with their neighborhood environments—streets, walls, lots, and tree pits—through a series of walks, talks, citizen science participation, and the publication of a book, SUP: Weeds in NYC. This work continues to feed planting concepts behind many of the studio’s designed landscapes, which seek to capture the rugged vision of urban wilderness. Species for the studio’s projects are selected for their ability to tolerate the proposed habitats created on sites and are often drawn from local plant communities, such as oak barrens and shrublands; the plants and ecologies of project sites are a frequent source of inspiration. The studio does not see uncultivated plant growth as the specter of disinvestment, but as an asset to the performance, health, and well-being of its inhabitants, human or otherwise, which demonstrates the ability of the city to support the evolving ecologies of the future.     

The neglect of aesthetics in landscape planning in Switzerland

In this paper, landscape is defined as any part of the Earth’s surface in which various aspects, such as terrestrial, aquatic, natural and cultural interact with differing dominance. Within landscapes, energy and material flows over time are major driving forces of landscape dynamics. Such a comprehensive approach to landscape should also be applied in landscape planning, however this is rarely the case in Switzerland. The concept of landscape aesthetics in particular is neglected, therefore, four theses are formulated and discussed in this paper.The tourist industry promotes Switzerland with pictures showing beautiful scenery. Some of the landscape elements shown, e.g. ecclesiastical buildings and historical profane buildings, are widely recognised for their aesthetic values, and scientifically examined by art historians and other disciplines. Strangely enough, this is not the case for cultural landscapes, despite the fact that they also reflect the history of human culture. This paradox evolves from the dichotomy between natural sciences and humanities. There is a lack of multi-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary approaches to studying cultural landscapes. The long-term genesis of the elements of the cultural landscape is illustrated by the typical structure of traditional cultural landscapes, i.e. “the hides of land” (i.e. strip-shaped forest clearings) (Hufenfluren).Between 1750 and 1850, many painters depicted the beauty of the traditional cultural landscape. Their paintings are acknowledged as a part of culture and treated accordingly, but this is not the case for the remains of the cultural landscape they painted. Comparing maps from different points in time reveal the loss of elements of cultural landscapes. Results show how traditional systems of land use led to highly structured landscapes, whereas today’s land-use levels out the scenery. Lack of public support significantly reduces the success of the legal tools to limit this process.     

On Rivers and Drawing Practice

This work flows from two propositions: sites and settings are interdependent, and understanding why and how is fundamental and inexhaustible for landscape architecture. It builds on the work of Scottish–American landscape architect Ian McHarg and Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes. Although separated in time by nearly half a century, their shared belief in the role of regional knowledge for local design and planning led to parallels in their canon relative to subject matter and approach. Prompted by a recent comparative study of two rivers influential to McHarg’s work—the Clyde and the Delaware—the essay reflects on transect modeling and related drawing practice that engage incremental change, accumulation, and time. It begins with a discussion of relief maps and their application to river basin research in the United States, Italy, and Scotland. This is followed by a brief retrospective on the contributions of McHarg and Geddes to regional planning theory and practice. The interdisciplinary usefulness of transect-based practice for observing and analyzing landscape phenomena is then presented, and provides context for a recent exhibition by the author, which explored both analog and digital drawing techniques. The essay concludes by reasserting the importance of field study to landscape architecture and other works of environmental imagination.     

Cultural Landscape and Goldfield Heritage: Towards a Land Management Framework for the Historic South-West Pacific Gold Mining Landscapes

This article investigates how cultural landscapes (especially the potentially limiting organically evolved landscape) can be used as a research framework to evaluate historical mining heritage sites in Australia and New Zealand. We argue that when mining heritage sites are read as evolved organic landscapes and linked to the surrounding forested and hedged farmland, the disruptive aspects of mining are masked. Cultural landscape is now a separate listing for World Heritage sites and includes associative and designed landscape as well as those that have evolved organically. These usages have rarely been scrutinized with care. We analyse how mid-nineteenth century goldmining sites can be best thematically interpreted and understood for their heritage, indeed World Heritage, significance and, where appropriate, developed for their sustainable heritage tourism potential. Drawing on a number of research disciplines, a schematic framework is offered for interpreting and classifying these new world cultural landscapes based upon analysis of gold-rush heritage sites throughout the Trans-Tasman world. We evaluate and apply this framework to place-based case studies in Victoria, Australia and Otago, New Zealand.     

光的印刻--天印艺术会馆设计实录

天印艺术会馆是一所私人投资的艺术会馆,用以展示投资者私人收藏的艺术品,举办艺术交流的会议与展览,提供与之配套的住宿及餐饮服务,总建筑面积达到 15 660m2。项目位于南京市江宁区带状公共绿地与科技园区线性景观水系的交点,场地内丘陵地形起伏舒缓。天印艺术会馆设计的核心理念是让地形与风景在建筑形体之间自由穿越,建筑与风景构成互融共生的整体。光的刻画是设计的另一个主题,在满足艺术品展示需要的同时,光塑造了建筑的精神维度。     

Cognition and Design of Complex Landscapes: The Function,Logic, and Mechanism of Mapping

Being rich in form and obscure in content, mapping brings not only new opportunities, but also confusion and doubts to the research and practice of contemporary complex landscapes. Therefore, deep exploration of mapping’s function, logic, and mechanism in inspiring design is needed to help recognize the value of Mapping and promote its understanding and application. Through literature review, case studies, and the authors’ practice and teaching, this article attempts to answer three questions: Which function does Mapping emphasize, representation or exploration? What is the logic of mapping in arranging information? And what is the mechanism of mapping in inspiring design? The main conclusions of this article include: 1) Rather than viewer-oriented representation, mapping more often serves the cartographers themselves in their exploration activities, in which they develop new understandings and create new possibilities while constructing the complex relationship of existing information; 2) Despite the various forms, media, and methods, mapping’s logical structures in organizing information would converge into five types: sequence, matrix, parallel, network, and deconstruction reflecting to various degrees the logic of complex landscapes themselves; And 3) through collecting and connecting information and ideas with certain logical frameworks, mapping helps with bottom-up generation of cognition and design of the site, which provides a visual operation carrier that reflects the site’s structures and evolutionary processes. Applying mapping in teaching and practice can promote designers’ cognition on structures and processes of complex landscapes and get rid of the dogma of following standardized workflows or imposed cultural symbols.     

Integrating wetlands into planned landscapes

The commonly held perspective of wetland habitats in planned landscapes has shifted from areas requiring drainage and fill to valuable habitat providing benefits to society. This shift in perspective has given rise to federal, state and local wetland protection efforts, but planners, landscape architects and engineers have yet to integrate wetland habitats into communities and planned landscapes. In fact, many of the practices employed by land planners to address wetland protection are all too often creating ecological traps that do more harm than good. Complicating the integration of wetland habitats into communities is the public preference for certain types of natural landscapes. In response to this stated aesthetic preference, landscape management practices intended to improve the appearance of wetland habitats actually destroy valuable breeding sites, and food and cover for numerous birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians. With careful planning, design, implementation, and public education, wetland habitats can be fully integrated into planned landscapes without destroying valuable benefits provided by wetland ecosystems.     

重塑生活场域：英国乡村景观遗产地 活动策略研究及启示

以乡村庄园为代表的英国乡村景观遗产保护有着悠 久的实践历史,其近20年来借助系统而丰富的活动设置和灵 活的空间利用,从过去静态的博物馆式保护模式向融入当前各 阶层、各年龄段公众生活的可持续场所转变,代表着当前世界 乡村景观遗产保护与发展的理论与实践方向。通过对英国英格 兰地区36处乡村庄园遗产地的实地考察,结合以文献综述、 调查访问和案例分析为主的研究方法,梳理英国乡村景观遗产 保护理念转向注重活动、与公众健康与福祉相联系的发展历 程,从组织机构、活动类型与活动保障探讨其活动安排策略, 并结合中国乡村景观遗产实际总结出以“多元价值”为本、以 “儿童活动”为基、以“协同资源”为纲、以“公众参与”为 领的经验启示。     

Landscape’s physiognomic structure: conceptual development and practical applications

The past decade has seen an increased interest in approaches for the identification and assessment of landscapes, which has been, in part, a response to the European Landscape Convention (ELC). In this article, we review landscape physiognomy, an important component of the Polish approach to the assessment and identification of its landscape. We address the relevance of physiognomy both in relation to the ELC and to the landscape character assessments approach, and then explore the theoretical basis of landscape physiognomic structure. We also expand the existing classification of landscape interiors; this is followed by combining three approaches: (1) physical geography in the field of comprehensive classification of natural landscapes; (2) landscape ecology studies on the spatial structure of land cover patches against the ‘landscape matrix’ and (3) the theory of landscape interiors. Presented ideas create the outline of the concept of landscape’s physiognomic structure.