Systems, Signs, Sensibilities: Sources for a New Landscape Aesthetic

Abstract

This paper examines three separate critical and theoretical currents, each of which is already at the center of research, experiment, and argument within the profession of landscape architecture and its allied disciplines, that have potential for contributing to a new intellectual synthesis and an aesthetic canon capable of generating new forms, new and more appropriate landscape styles. These key source areas for a late twentieth-century aesthetic are (1) the new ecology, which over the last two decades has fundamentally recast our vision of the natural world and humankind's place within its complex systems; (2) semiotics, which in proposing analogies between language and architecture has forced a fresh understanding of the expressive meanings of built form and the devices of architectural communication—sign systems as critical to the designer of landscapes as natural systems; and finally, (3) environmental psychology, including the work of human and cultural geographers on the nature of place experience and the profound conscious and pre-conscious affective bonds that make us respond in specific ways to the various environments through which we move.