Elements of Visual Design in the Landscape

Simon Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367024451
• eBook ISBN: 9781000713084
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

What makes a visually appealing landscape? How can the design and use of a landscape be harmonized? In this significantly revised and updated third edition of Simon Bell's seminal text, he further explores the answers to these questions by interrogating a range of design principles, applications and ideas.

Written for students, instructors and professionals, the book unveils a visual design vocabulary for anyone involved with landscape aesthetics including landscape architects, architects, planners, urban designers, landscape managers, foresters, geographers and ecologists. Structured around key design terms, which are explained and illustrated using an extensive range of examples from around the world, including North America, Europe and Asia, this book enables you to describe, debate and design the visual landscape. It starts with basic elements, before moving onto variable design components, and then the ways these elements are organized into compositions, in order to demonstrate how landscapes are created and how meanings and patterns are perceived within them.

This new full colour edition contains over 240 images; an updated introduction; examples from China, Vietnam and central Asia; a chapter on how to read and understand visual design elements in the landscape; a teaching model for instructors; and expanded appendix materials including a glossary, references and further reading.

Chapter 1

Basic Elements

Our environment of mountains, hills, plains, water, forests, managed vegetation, buildings and artefacts provides a myriad of different landscape patterns, which we see all around us. In the introduction, reference was made to the different theories of aesthetics and of visual perception. In order to make sense of our surroundings we need to be able to separate each constituent part and then to identify it and to relate it back to the whole scene. This first chapter starts this process in a fundamental way. To aid the understanding of their visual qualities, landscapes can be analysed in a rational manner. This is important if we are to be able to define the aesthetic contribution each part makes and to decide on future courses of action based on this understanding. Since the patterns we see are formed from the arrangements of different components, it is an obvious starting point to describe and classify these components. Every article or object that makes up one of these components can be regarded as a ‘basic building block’ of the landscape.

Depending on how we see these objects – our distance from them, for example – we can treat them as one of four basic elements – a point, a line, a plane or a volume (point: no dimension, only truly marking a position in space; line: one dimension; plane: two dimensions; and volume: three dimensions, respectively). These relate to the dimensions found in Euclidean geometry. As such they can be regarded as simplifications of the real world, which tends to display a rather more complex type of geometry called ‘fractal’ geometry (where a less-than-straight line can start to resemble a plane or a less-than-flat plan starts to show volumetric characteristics, etc. However, we can use combinations of elements or ones that are part one and part another to convey the structure of fractal geometry where this applies. In fact, most of the human-influenced world is fairly strictly Euclidean, made up of generally geometric forms such as squares and circles, while parts of the natural world demonstrate true fractal geometry. For purposes of analysis we need to understand the attributes of each basic element before we see how they interact and the effects different variables and methods of organization have on the patterns so produced.

Point

•A point marks a position in space.

•Small objects can be seen as points.

•Point features can be associated with assertions of power or ownership and can be symbolic in all kinds of ways.

A point, strictly speaking, has no dimension but marks a position in space. Initially, therefore, it can be indicated by some secondary means such as crossed or focusing lines or a point of light. In reality, a point needs some dimension to attract the attention and in the landscape small or distant objects may be regarded as points. A lone tree, a small distant building, a church spire on the skyline or a vertical structure such as a mobile phone mast are common examples.

◄ Many features in the landscape can be regarded as points:

(a) church or similar object on the horizon;

(b) a point of light such as a star in the sky;

(c) the point where parallel lines appear to converge;

(d) lines and a feature on the horizon create a focal point.

Quite often in the past points have been defined with a particular purpose such as to mark out territory, to assert ownership or dominion over an area, to act as landmarks, to provide a focus for a grand design, or merely to provide an interest in a featureless landscape. Examples include early megalithic standing stones or Bronze age barrows sited on the skyline, which may have established ownership or some kind of territorial claim over the nearby land; the lone church spire; the obelisk at the end of a grand avenue; a war memorial or a monument to a person or event. All these say something about the society and the position within it of the people who put them there.

► A single tree acts as a point in this otherwise featureless prairie landscape.

▼ This ancient Georgian church of Tsminda Sameba, seen with Mount Kazbek behind, is small in the view but prominent and eye-catching nevertheless.

In an otherwise empty landscape a single tree or building may have a disproportionate visual effect, because it is the only object of contrast to attract our attention. Then it may become a figure standing out from the background.

Line

•Extending a point in one direction creates a line.

•Lines can be implied by the location of points.

•Lines can be imaginary yet still exert influence.

•Edges of planes can be seen as lines.

•Lines can have their own properties.

•Natural lines are common and important in the landscape.

•Man-made lines are also numerous.

•Lines are us...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface to the third edition
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Basic elements
• 2. Variables
• 3. Organization
• 4. Teaching how to read the landscape
• Glossary
• References and Further Reading
• Index