Syntax of Landscape: The Landscape Architecture of Peter Latz and Partners

摘要

The land art and ecology movements of the 1960s had repercussions for landscape architecture that continue unabated today. The renunciation of centuries of supposed aesthetic contrivance in garden design has gained momentum through the increased engagement of landscape architects with the tenets of the nature-culture dialectic. Ecological principles have taken deep root in the garden design bed; ecology's lexicon has flowered throughout landscape theory. As a result, landscapes previously determined as homeostatic are now treated as entropic; designing the landscape has become a process of experiment around flux rather than creating an ideal and singularly fixed entity. Similarly, the cultural landscapes of urban areas have been reinterpreted. Instead of attempting to obliterate all remnants of a place's disreputable industrial past, landscape architects now seek the unification of historical elements within a new aesthetic framework of place making that explicitly rejects the previously dominant examples of picturesque arcadia. It is on this understanding that the Latz dynasty - Peter, his wife Anneliese and son Tilman - has based its practice of landscape design.