Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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In “creating” disciplines – irrespective if engineering
or landscape architecture – this process is described
as designing. In the German-speaking world there is
however a rather strict distinction among the spatial
disciplines between planning and designing. Designing
usually begins on lower, spatially accurate levels of scale
once the (overall) planning has formulated the objectives,
programs and procedural specifications. As such, design
has been and is regarded as “only” a “shaping” process
rather than at the same time a fundamental mode of action
that, through the feedback of graphic insight, is able
to generate knowledge of the future.
Due however to their exclusive concentration on rationalanalytic
methodology, the fields of spatial and regional
planning have long neglected the use of design approaches
to shaping their subjects because “regional
planning at the scale of the urban region [...] is still not
regarded as a design task“ (Sieverts 2007: 12). Now
ideas, statements and illustrative visions of the extensive
shaping of a space do not necessarily emerge from the
normal planning process of analysis, identifying objectives
and developing programs. Sieverts writes elsewhere
that “design in the context of highly complex urban
landscapes must become more than just an instrument
of implementation of individual programs within abstract
spatial-constructive structures” (Sieverts: 2008: S. 261).
Therefore it is imperative, however, that large-scale planning
becomes a design task.
The process of designing always draws on both intuitive
and rational knowledge, combining emotional and personal
with objectively reasoned components. This applies
equally to the search for ideas during the design process
itself, and to the evaluation of the results. In scientific
and planning contexts, the knowledge gained through
intuition, emotions and bodily experience still attracts
little attention and even less recognition. Although it has
been accepted that this knowledge is an essential factor
in creative processes and thus a factor in design, its meaning
and relevance remain unnoticed and as a consequence
its potentials stay largely under-utilized (Seggern
& Werner 2008a: 39). Conversely, disciplines such as
the neurosciences, research on creativity, philosophy or
psychology have clearly recognised and acknowledged
the relevance of these forms of comprehension and
show that “creativity is based on a ‘fusion of intuition and
reason‘” (Salk 1985). In contrast to a linear-analytical
approach, which attempts to apply conclusions drawn
from the individual to the whole, intuition is capable of
directly comprehending something as a whole – even in
the presence of too much or too little information – and of
making complex decisions based on that (Hänsel 2002,
Gigerenzer 2007). Why do I consider the intuitive ability
to grasp something as a whole so essential for designing
complex urban landscapes?
Grasping urban landscapes as a whole
Vester, a pioneer of cross-linked thinking, formulates that
there is still a strong reluctance to “even acknowledging
complexity at all [...] attention is focussed rather on the
individual aspect, the immediately comprehensible,
instead of on the superordinate interrelations and that relationship
between things that extends beyond the individual
parts” (Vester 2002: 16). As a rule, neither cities nor
regions have ever been planned as wholes. Nevertheless,
it is crucial to grasp and express them as wholes.
This is the only way that enables firstly, the specific
promotion of an urban landscape’s overall development
and secondly, the productive application of individual
measures to this development. Otherwise, the respective
individual measures remain the rationally understandable
decisions of official planning, but their integration into an
overarching whole is lacking.
My decisive thesis is therefore that particularly intuitive
consideration of the whole is needed if productive steps
in designing large-scale urban landscapes are to be taken;
these will then be of benefit to the whole. Ironically it
is actually impossible to comprehend the whole although
grasping urban landscapes as a whole is a pre-condition
for being able to design ideas from these complex conditions.
An initial step is to find a deskriptive term for a whole.
Describing large-scale spatial structures as urban
landscapes is already such a designation, a perception
that converges to form a whole and also a step with
which we humans are intimately familiar; we use it with
every description of a holiday destination. Landscape
emerges to form a whole from a (usually subconscious)
combination of an area‘s multifaceted elements (whether
produced by nature or by human beings), its history
and its culture. Perceiving something as a landscape is
inescapably bound up with an emotional involvement and
landscape usually has a positive connotation (Franzen
& Krebs 2005); its perception is always associated with
one’s owns feelings: It is therefore an important and conscious
step – as taken by the STUDIO URBANE LAND-
SCHAFTEN – to describe complex, large-scale spaces
as urban landscapes, a prerequisite to then be able to
grasp them more specifically as wholes.
In this context whole should certainly not be confused
with complete: neither a “complete” inventory nor fixed
far-sighted “complete” overall area planning are possible.
It is much more about “comprehending realities intuitively,
in a way artistically, on the basis of patterns that include
fuzziness” (Vester 2002: 8). The essence, the character
of a space must initially be approximated through intuitive
analysis, through creative initial access. There are many
ways to do this which must be newly designed or adapted
and draw on a repertoire each time. In designing,
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