The art of design

摘要

Many former students of landscape architecture will have memories of their frustrating moments during studio hours in their early years: an assignment, a blank piece of paper and a pencil...after hours of wrestling, a desperate feeling...showing one's first attempt to the instructor...his response: no, this is not it, ...try again. More often than not it was a fellow student who would lend a helpful hand. The arrival of a book which promises to show a way out of this quandary is therefore greeted with relief and hope for improvement...but does it fulfil the promise? The overall question addressed is how to improve design quality through education. The author begins by pointing to 'the great design riddle': why it is still largely considered to be untea-chable and how we can dismantle this antiquated supposition, constructing in its place a means of dealing with spatial visual information that is artistically and conceptually rigorous.