Mapping the forms, characteristics, and processes of landscape narratives in the disciplinary infrastructure of landscape architecture
In contemporary landscape design, narratives have become a common intention for landscape architects. There are always questions of what makes a landscape meaningful and how is meaning found in the landscape. This may then raise confusions about what is the actual role of landscape narratives and how they should be understand and conceived. Although the term landscape narratives “designates the interplay and mutual relationship between story and place, they are not simply considered in terms of literal storytelling that is expressed and controlled by clear references to the histories, biographies, local emblems or other textural forms of a place. Beyond the communication of a local sense of place and the extension of the content of landscape expression, both landscape and narrative have great potentials and much wider significance that need to be studied and further explored.
Stories are the basic tool to convey information among people, and people use stories to shape the worlds that they lived in. The term “narratives” refer to both the story, the aspect of it being told and the means of telling. The very beginning systematic analysis of concepts in relation to narratives was initiated in the 1960s. Coming from Latin and Indo-European words with the meaning of “to know”, narrative “implies a knowledge acquired through action and the contingencies of lived experience”. Since the early 1980s, narratives have become the focus for many design filed including landscape architecture as people started to realise the importance of meaning which may perhaps make design similar to a piece of litera...
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...ur major forms of “tropes” in design approaches including metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. They not only relate things together but also communicate the identified with the unidentified.
• Metaphor is a strategy that commonly find in design practices which can present complex ideas into a more familiar practice without changing the complexity of those ideas. The use of metaphor can create new relation between elements, yet they can also facade one element’s qualities with those of another. “Not only do metaphors covey meanings in a story, but stories also structure the very terms of similarity and substitution that precipitate metaphors.”
• Metonymy create meaning though association, it demonstrates the relationship between cause and effect. One thing can relate to another so that it can be used as a sign of the other through repeated use or memory.
“Metaphor.” Dictionary of World Literature: Criticism - Forms - Technique. Ed. Joseph T. Shipley. New York: Philosophical Library, 1943. 377-8.
In "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains," it is pretty obvious that the landscape is going to play an important part in the story - we are given the setting right in the title. However, a majority of the story actually takes place in an "Orientalized" locale that has been transposed into the Ragged Mountains. This alone is a great juxtaposition: the title describes what seems to be a run-down, unappealing landscape, while the real action takes place in fantastical setting. But why is the landscape so important if the psychological aspect is what Poe is trying to focus on? Most likely it is because the landscape gives us clues about what is actually happening in the minds of the characters, and hints at things that make the story clearer. For example, Bedloe starts his tale by describing "the thic...
While reading short stories, two stood out: Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants and Raymond Carver’s Cathedral. The themes in both stories are powerful and convey strong messages that really pose existential thoughts. Not only is each story’s theme attention grabbing, but so is the common and reoccurring use of symbolism throughout the stories. They did not just use the Element of Fiction symbolism, but even used one common symbol. Ernest Hemingway’s story Hills Like White Elephants and Raymond Carver’s story Cathedral each contain existential and similar themes such as talking versus communicating and looking versus seeing, as well as demonstrating creative and comparable symbolism throughout.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) spend much of their book talking about where metaphors come from, how they function in conversation, what their tie to underlying social structures might be. However, I read the book hungrily looking for some information about why metaphors serve a purpose that nothing else seems to for me. Finally, near the end I found this statement:
Metaphors, according to Professor George Lakoff, are a way to think and reason about life. They are not a unique way to speak about it, but a common way to talk about life experiences since they are a reflection of our thought processes (1986). This became immediately apparent to me when I began looking for metaphors commonly used. It took some time to find any because they were pervasive of my thought system that I did not even notice many phrases around me were metaphors. Those phrases were not “poetic or rhetorical” way of talking, but a normal usage for those around me to express their thoughts (Lakeoff, 1986, p.216). The metaphor that came up several times on my search was history as roots. This metaphor allows us to think about life in a certain way and it holds particular implications for our interpersonal communication.
Since the Environmental Movement, traditional land art evolved, on one hand, to climate art, and on the other, influenced landform building. “The principles of landform building,” according to architect and theorist Stan Allen, “offer a new lens with which to reexamine phenomena as diverse as the megastructure of the 1960s, the current fascination with green building, artificial ski slopes, or the vast multi-use stadia being constructed today.” These principles include the inhabitation of the landscape, which much of contemporary architecture has incorporated into its design. However unlike land art’s wild terrains, such as the salt lake of Spiral Jetty or the vast desert of Double Negative, contemporary architecture has incorporated principles of land art into densely populated urban typology, of which the following two projects serve as significant examples.
According to Lakoff and Johnson, "the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" (5). This definition extends to any symbolic type of expressions, like the concept of hate, the spatial direction "up", or the experience of inflation. When our most important life experiences are often too abstract for basic understanding, we attempt to capture the nature of the experience by placing it in a relevant and more easily recognizable context. Three basic types of metaphor are used to, "conceptualize the less clearly delineated in terms of the more clearly delineated"(59). These are: the orientational metaphor, the ontological metaphor, and the structural metaphor.
A metaphor can be defined as “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison” (dictionary.com). We use metaphors in our everyday language more than most people realize. But metaphors are also vital in the field of Information Systems, especially in the design of user interfaces. To the “Average Joes” of the world, or those people who have difficulty understanding the complicated concepts of digital storage, information transmission, and processing, metaphors provide them with relevant concepts to which they can easily relate. Therefore, metaphors allow a significantly larger amount of the worldly population to use many of the common technologies that we take for granted today.
How to create an environment suitable for human living when resources are limited is a challenging problem for modern society. My strong interest in photography and art has compelled me to become especially observant toward the relationship between human beings and the environment. I have come to realize that the environment we live in has suffered much damage from pollution and lacks competent planning, making it difficult to find beautiful scenery to photograph or sketch. I began to think that I could make use of my artistic gift, concern about, and interest in the environment by entering the field of landscape design and putting my effort into beautifying our surroundings. Therefore, after graduating from high school, I entered the Department of Landscape Architecture at ABC University.
Linguistic metaphor is identified through the use of words or phrases that potentially link to a vehicle (or source) domain which is distinct from the domain of the surrounding, ongoing talk (the topic or target). An alternative to domain difference as criterion for linguistic metaphor is the use of words and phrases with some meaning other than their basic or core sense, where basic is primarily physical and concrete. (Gibbs, 2011, p.197)
A metaphor makes us attend to some likeness, often a novel or surprising likeness, between two or more things (Lycan, 178).
This chapter explores the idea of landscape in an anthropological construct. Hirsch aims to move away from the western ideals of understanding of landscape, and deconstruct it in an attempt to understand the local interoperation of landscape to prove it is part of a cultural process. Landscape has been used as a “standard framing device” (p1) by those looking from the outside in across anthropological history. Hirsch is looking to explore the landscape through the cultural understandings of the local people. (p1-5)
Davoudi’s (2012) environmental management typology discusses eight distinct meanings of environment that are incorporated into the planning system of today. The new discourse that is involved with environmental management has meant that the environment is being seen in different ways. And as a result, the meanings attached to the environment have changed substantially over time (Davoudi, 2012). Davoudi (2012) discusses that environmental management is restricted by the limited definitions of the environment, and the onset of climate change and the discourse surrounding it has meant that perceptions of environment have been shaped (Davoudi, 2012). The first definition that is offered is local amenity, which explains that the environment has aesthetic and recreational values associated with it. The next is environment as heritage landscape, which sees the environment as he...
Several authors have based some of their writings on their spirituality. Some of these writings are as intricate as the Bible or as basic as an article in a local newspaper, but the meaning and passion behind them should never be doubted. In Leslie Marmon Silko's "Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination", she expresses how her people have a very different meaning of "landscape". To Silko's people, the popular definition of landscape as being "a portion of territory the eye can comprehend in a single view" makes it seem as though the viewer is on the outside looking in. To them, the term landscape is much more than that. One cannot leave their surroundings, the earth and nature are always around us and we are always interconnected. The ancie...