Paisaje Sentido: Designing for Multi-sensory Landscape Experiences - Part 1

Designing for Multi-sensory Landscape Experiences

Technische Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe

Master -Thesis PAISAJE SENTIDO

Designing for Multi-sensory Landscape Experiences

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Rohler Advisor: Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Martin Hoeslcher

Presented by Darell Katherine Ruiz Álvarez B.Sc. 3. Juni 2022

Technische Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe | Standort Höxter An der Wilhelmshöhe 44 37671 Höxter Fachbereich 9 Landschaftsarchitektur und Umweltplanung Fachgebiet Freiraumplanung Master-Thesis zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades Master of Science Sommersemester 2022 Title: PAISAJE SENTIDO: Designing for Multi-sensory Landscape Experiences Year: 2022 Number of pages: 157 Language: English Presented by Darell Katherine Ruiz Álvarez B.Sc. | Matrikelnummer: 15324002 born on 24.03.1993 in Bogotá, Colombia.

Resident in: Gartenstraße 15 37671 Höxter Telephone: +49(0)1789396237 E-Mail: darell.ruiz@stud.th-owl.de | dkathr.alvarez@gmail.com Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Rohler Advisor: Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Martin Hoeslcher

For ease of reading, all quotes are translated from the original language into English.

Höxter, 03.06.2022

Designing for Multi-sensory Landscape Experiences

Abstract

absence of interaction with space is reflected in a lack of connection of the individual with space. This lack of ‘sensitivity of space’ simultaneously affects sensitivity with one’s own body.

This master thesis explores the importance of integrating the human senses into the landscape experience and its influence on planning processes. Traditionally, the focus in art, architecture, landscape architecture is strongly placed on visual stimuli, although these only make up a limited part of the perception. This hierarchy, in which visual perception comes first, influences landscape perception and largely determines landscape experience. This thesis therefore questions the extent to which people generally experience landscape consciously and multisensorially on a daily basis, and in conjunction with this, addresses the question of how much daily landscape experiences invite interaction with the environment. The overarching goal of this research is to contribute to the construction of a new narrative about landscape studies and potential applications in planning processes.

Based on the results, PAISAJE SENTIDO (perceived and at the same time meaningful landscape) is proposed as a concept, an attitude and an alternative methodology for an integral landscape experience. This concept is based on a multisensory design at different scales that encourages people to perceive spaces through their own senses and sensations, and thus from within. Underlying this is the understanding of the body as an ‘inner landscape’ to be discovered. Only through the experience of the ‘inner landscape’ can the outer landscapes be perceived and experienced multisensory and subsequently appropriated and actually inhabited.

Keywords: landscape perception, landscape experience, sensitivity, multi-sensory design, inner-outer landscape

This thesis addresses the following research question: what theoretical approaches and applied practices allow us to complement conventional methods of landscape analysis , with the aim of creating an integral perceptual tool that can be used in landscape experience and in landscape architecture to create more sensitive spaces? This thesis explores landscape and landscape perception as transdisciplinary concepts from the perspective of theories and methods from human geography and environmental psychology, which provide a complementary perspective for landscape architecture and planning processes. The present research, based on experience-based research and the analysis of existing theories, opens the possibility to sensitize and reconnect with the sensory system. This takes the form of an experiment that brings awareness to the individual and collective experience of landscape.

This is achieved as an experiment that brings an awareness to the individual and collective landscape experience. The experiment was conducted using an instrument developed by the author. The LANDSCAPE SENSORY PERCEPTION EXPERIMENT - (LSPE) investigates individual sensations evoked by sensory signals in natural, semi-natural and urban landscapes, e.g. emotional responses and memories. A distinction is made between sense of proximity (sense of taste or touch) and sense of distance (sense of smell, sense of sight).

The results form the basis for the LANDSCAPE EXPERIENCE VALUATION TOOL - (LEVT).

This is based on the three main factors associated with the process of landscape perception: physical space, sensory interaction and subjective-emotional perception. In addition, the second experiment includes five relevant variables to evaluate the quality and intensity of an integral landscape experience: spatial qualities, materiality, physical experience, functional specification, and intensity level. With the aim of application and subsequent evaluation , the instrument is also applied in case scenarios on ten different spatial situations.

Based on the results, a criteria system for multisensory design - MULTI-SENSORY DESIGN CRITERIA (MSDC) - has been developed for the design of multisensory experiences, which can be used in the different disciplines of spatial planning to design and improve urban or landscape planning projects.

The results of the experiment described in this research indicate that people’s living spaces, are usually experienced primarily through the sense of sight. Living spaces are mostly designed according to functional requirements and basic visual qualities - and not ‘sensitively’ - disregarding the potential of a conscious and affective interaction and with the place. The 8

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Zusammenfassung Diese Masterarbeit untersucht die Bedeutung der Integration der menschlichen Sinne in das Landschaftserlebnis sowie dessen Einfluss auf Planungsprozesse. Traditionell wird der Fokus in der Kunst, der Architektur oder der, Landschaftsarchitektur stark auf visuelle Reize gelegt, obwohl diese nur einen begrenzten Teil der Wahrnehmung ausmachen. Diese Hierarchie, in der die visuelle Wahrnehmung an erster Stelle steht, beeinflusst die Landschaftswahrnehmung und bestimmt in hohem Maße das Landschaftserlebnis. In dieser Arbeit wird daher hinterfragt, wie sehr die Menschen generell in ihrem Alltag Landschaften bewusst und multisensorial erfahren und damit verbunden wird auf die Frage eingegangen wie sehr die täglichen Landschaftserfahrungen zu einer Interaktion mit der Umwelt einladen. Übergeordnetes Ziel dieser Forschung ist es, zur Konstruktion einer neuen Narrativ über Landschaftsstudien und mögliche Anwendungen in Planungsprozessen beizutragen.

Dazu wird untersucht, inwiefern theoretische Ansätze und angewandte Praktiken es ermöglichen konventionelle Methoden der Landschaftsanalyse zu ergänzen, mit dem Ziel ein integrales Wahrnehmungsinstrument zu schaffen, dass in der Landschaftserfahrung und in der Landschaftsarchitektur, zur Schaffung sensiblerer Raume, eingesetztzt werden kannDiese Arbeit erforscht die Landschaft und die Landschaftswahrnehmung als transdisziplinäre Konzepte aus der Sicht von Theorien und Methoden aus der Humangeographie und der Umweltpsychologie, die eine ergänzende Perspektive für Landschaftsarchitektur und Planungsprozesse bieten. Die vorliegende Forschungsarbeit, die sich auf erfahrungsbasierte Forschung und die Analyse bestehender Theorien stützt, eröffnet die Möglichkeit, dass sensorische System zu sensibilisieren und wieder stärker mit diesem in Verbindung zu treten.

entwickelt, dass in den verschiedenen Disziplinen der Raumplanung zur Gestaltung und Verbesserung stadt- oder landschaftsplanerischer Projekte herangezogen werden kann.

Die im Rahmen dieser Forschungsarbeit entstandenen Ergebnisse,deuten darauf hin, dass die Lebensräume der Menschen, in der Regel vorrangig durch den Sehsinn erlebt werden. Lebensräume werden meist den funktionalen Anforderungen und grundlegenden visuellen Qualitäten entsprechend – und nicht etwa ‚sensibel‘ – gestaltet, wobei das Potential einer bewussten und affektiven Interaktion mit dem Ort außer Acht gelassen wird. Die unterbliebene Interaktion mit dem Raum, schlägt sich in einer fehlenden Verbundenheit des Individuums mit dem Raum nieder. Diese fehlende ‚Sensibilität des Raumes‘ beeinträchtig gleichzeitig die Sensibilität mit dem eigenen Körper.

Auf Grundlage der Ergebnisse, wird PAISAJE SENTIDO (wahrgenommene und gleichzeitig sinnhafte Landschaft) als ein Konzept, eine Haltung und eine alternative Methodik für eine integrale Landschaftserfahrung vorgeschlagen. Dieses Konzept beruht auf einer multisensorischen Gestaltung in verschiedenen Maßstäben, welche die Menschen dazu ermutigt, Räume durch die eigenen Sinne und Empfindungen und damit von innen heraus wahrzunehmen. Dem liegt das Verständnis des Körpers als zu entdeckende ‚innere Landschaft‘ zu Grunde. Erst durch die Erfahrung der ‚inneren Landschaft‘ können die äußeren Landschaften multisensorisch wahrgenommen und erlebt und in der Folge angeeignet und tatsächlich bewohnt werden.

Schlüsselwörter: Landschaftswahrnehmung, Landschaftserfahrung, Sensibilität, multisensorisches Design, Innen-Außen-Landschaft

Dies geschieht in Form eines Experimentes, das ein Bewusstsein in die individuelle und kollektive Landschaftserfahrung bringt. Das Experiment wurde mit einem von der Autorin entwickelten Instrument durchgeführt. Der LANDSCAPE SENSORY PERCEPTION EXPERIMENT - (LSPE) untersucht individuelle Empfindungen, die durch sensorische Signale in natürlichen, halbnatürlichen und städtischen Landschaften hervorgerufen werden, z. B emotionale Reaktionen und Erinnerungen. Dabei wird zwischen Sinn der Nähe (Geschmacksinn oderTastsinn) und Sinn der Ferne (Gerüchsinn, Sehsinn) unterschieden. Die Ergebnisse bilden die Grundlage fuer das LANDSCAPE EXPERIENCE VALUATION TOOL – (LEVT). Dieses basiert auf den drei Hauptfaktoren, die mit dem Prozess der Landschaftswahrnehmung verbunden sind: dem physischen Raum, der sensorischen Interaktion und der subjektiv-emotionalen Wahrnehmung. Darüber hinaus beinhaltet das zweite Experiment fünf relevante Variablen zur Bewertung der Qualität und der Intensität eines integralen Landschaftserlebnisses: räumliche Qualität, Materialität, körperliche Erfahrung, Funktionsvorgabe und Intensitätsniveau. Mit dem Ziel der Anwendung und anschließenden Auswertung, wird das Instrument auch in Fallszenarien auf zehn verschiedene räumliche Situationen angewendet.

AAuf Grundlage der Ergebnisse wurde ein Kriteriensystem für multisensorisches Design – MULTI-SENSORY DESIGN CRITERIA (MSDC) – zur Gestaltung multisensorischer Erfahrungen 10

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Acknowledgments To God and life for having brought me to this magical place to learn about trust in life, about the importance of allowing oneself to doubt and ask questions, especially if one already knows the answers.

To mother nature, as a source of inspiration and daily sustenance, through which I received this deep calling to connect with myself to discover and recognize her within me.

To my mother and father for giving me life, for all their love and unconditional support, and for still being there in their struggle and watching me grow even in the distance.

To my maternal grandmother for continuing to beat with the desire to see me be a tree like her. And to my paternal grandmother for accompanying me in dreams and in essence through the plants.

To the strength of my women that has led me to conquer myself and to believe that it is possible. To all their strength and struggle. To their sensitivity that has been guarded for many years, that I learned to recognize, love and care for and give a place within me.

To the men in my family who have supported me with their dedication and listening, for their courage and wisdom in knowing how to sustain processes.

I thank my body for being this instrument with which I explore the world, where I carry all the energy that moves me forward to continue on the path.

To all the versions of me that I recognize and carry within me, ready to trust in life again.

To Colombia, mi tierra querida, all its diversity, richness, struggle, immensity, we carry inside all your seeds spread around the world.

To Prof. Hans Peter-Rohler for sharing his knowledge, time and experience through conversations that invited me to question myself and at the same time motivated me to continue with my ideas.

To Prof. Martin Hoelscher, friend and great example as a weaver of our cultures, who for years opened the doors for me here, has accompanied me in this process of recognizing and adapting to another territory.

To Foresta Collective and Design Science Studio for so much dedication, openness, resonance, coherence, and reciprocity. Thank you for accompanying us to believe and create another possible world. I found living connections through incredible people who accompanied me during this stage.

To women healers like Laura Sanabria, Veronica Anderson for all their love, their work for the world, with whom near or far I always feel sustained, listened to, and supported.

To Mirco, for being a grounded pole during so much sensitivity. For so many learnings and conversations, for his company, presence, and openness in this moment of my life.

To Malena, Vanessa and Alina for their energy, the deep conversations in the forest of this small town that gave us answers and accompanied us through this phase of life, I carry them with me always.

To these people who have seen me grow, have seen me fall and are also waiting to see me blossom, who are part of my landscape.

Finally, to my intuition that with time I am learning to listen to, that spoke to me at night without resting, that pulsed in my heart for me to listen to it and to dare the unknown.

I call for the closing of one chapter because another one is upon me.

To this country Germany and to TH-OWL as an institution for receiving me 9 years ago for the first time, which has motivated me and has been a very important part of my path as a person and as a professional.

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Glosar Allocentric senses: modes of perception which is object centered. Allocentric senses involve attention and directionality.

Autocentric senses: mode of perception which is subject centered. Sensory quality and pleasure are involved in autocentric senses.

Cross Modal: Different modalities have capabilities to collect similar kinds of information such as shape, movement, or taste. Associations are often the outcome of earlier encountered experiences (Schifferstein & Spence, 2008).

Daily experience: everyday experiences that are constantly occurring.

Embodiment: as a way of being-in-the-world, Csordas, J. (1994). in which experience as a physical being with a body is explicitly recognized. Embodiment calls for an approach that goes beyond participant observation to “experiencing participation” (Ots in Csordas, J. (1994).

Embodied practice: use the body as a tool for healing through self-awareness, mindfulness, connection, self-regulation, finding balance, and creating self-acceptance. It involves the interaction of our body, thoughts, and actions.

Experiential design: prioritizes human interaction with a built environment. It means using design elements to elicit an emotional connection from the design of physical space to the qualities of interaction, expectation, and intention.

Haptic perception: human ability to experience and interpret things based on touch and movement.

Hedonic quality: Hedonic quality refers to the psychological and emotional experience of the user and focuses on the product’s perceived ability to support goals such as being excited (Hassenzahl, 2008).

Inner landscape: or inner world understood as feelings, emotions, thoughts, individual reflections.

Integral Landscape Experience: A experience which balances and integrates the interrelation between the physical environment, the senses and the body, and the affective-subjective dimension in an active way.

Landscape: a transdisciplinary term composed of different layers that interweave and overlap with each other. The landscape is a fabric loaded with symbols, textures, colors, sensations, individual and cultural memories in the body or in a territory.

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Landscape Perception Process: is consolidated in three phases: the sensory experience, where the senses capture information from the environment; the cognitive, the stimuli received are structured and processed; symbols are codified through the individual, cultural and social filter. And the evaluation phase forges or strengthens attitudes, values, and preferences in relation to what has been learned and structured in the two previous phases. Here the elements of the landscape are already loaded with meanings and values even without leaving aside their main function. The process of landscape perception is constantly active due there is a continuous interrelation between the perceiver and the perceived.

Landscape Experience Valuation Tool - (LEVT): based on the three main factors liked to the landscape perception process: (Physical space, sensory-interaction and subjective-emotional), this tool presents five relevant variables to evaluate the quality and the intensity in an Integral Landscape Experience: (Spatial qualities, Materiality, Bodily experience, activity determination, and intensity level). To bring theory into practice the tool is also tested in ten different interventions as case scenarios.

Landscape Sensorial Perception Experiment - (LSPE): is designed as a tool that allows landscape experience immersion as the first applied experiment with the objective of recognizing the landscape through the senses and as a data collection method.

Multimodal: A combination of the motor system and sensory input in the brain. Multimodal includes interaction, and for example, passive viewing is not considered as multimodal. Oviatt, S. (2017).

Multisensorial: A combination of a minimum of two different sensory modalities in a sequence.

For example, touching an object involves haptic and visual modalities. Multisensory processes can be multimodal if they include an active motor input, such as turning head or moving hands. Oviatt, S. (2017).

Multisensory design: The multi-sensory design refers to an integrated design where all sensory modalities are coherent and support the same product expression (Schifferstein, Hendrik, 2011).

Multisensory Design Criteria - (MSDC): a tool that summarizes the multisensory experience for each of the sense systems. Here, the main concepts and the corresponding variables in the haptic, visual, olfactory, auditory experience and the basic experience of orientation within the multi-sensory design are presented to design or to improve an integral landscape experience.

Pragmatic quality: refers to the user experience’s pragmatic aspects of completing a specific task and is closely related to usability.

Outer landscape: spaces, elements, textures, materials in the environment.

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Promenadology: applied theory and methodology from L. Burckhardt: Spaziergangswissenschaften in German, The Science of Strollology or Promenadology as a new perspective on landscape studies. Through walking tours, direct physical experience confronts traditional visual expectations and patterns of perception, he also focused on finding flaws in design and planning.

Reciprocity: Interconnectedness. understood as the continuity links and interdependence relations proposed by Arturo Escobar based on the Relational Ontology: ‘’No entity pre-exists the relations that constitute it. ‘’Nothing exists, everything inter-exists.’’ (Escobar, 2014) Sensation: any human perception that is directly based on the senses. (vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch) are interpreted over time to detect pattern that become sensations as responses, ideas, emotions, feelings.

Sensorial hierarchy: The primacy of the sight over the other senses.

Senses of distance: The distance receptors concerned with the examination of distant objects.

Senses of proximity: employed in examining that which is contiguous to contact with one’s own body, related to touch, the sensations of the skin.

Special experience: can be defined as ‘’Meaningful experience’ or memorable” more practical.

(Hassenzahl, 2011) User experience: User’s perceptions and responses which are resulting from the user or anticipated use of a product, service, or a system. User experience includes user’s emotions, beliefs, responses, preferences, responses, and accomplishments before, during and after use (DIS, 2009).

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‘‘Being the garden, and the gardener’’. (Téari, 2021)

Contents

III: Conceptual theoretical framework: Contributions towards 3 Chapter a new narrative of landscape perception & landscape experience 84

Abstract Zusammenfassung Acknowledgments Glosar Introduction Motivation Methodology: An experiential - creation research

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Chapter I: State of the Art: First steps into Landscape perception theory 26 1.1 The sense of the landscape: the landscape I perceive, the landscape I seek and that seeks me 1.2 Landscape Perception Theories: a dialogue between some aesthetic thinkers 1.2.1 Landscape perception concept: The hierarchy of sight. J. Pallasma + Y. Tuan 1.2.2 Landscape perception process: The role of the senses in landscape perception: Aesthetic Thinking in our technological era – J. Nogué + W. Welsch 1.2.3 Landscape perception Methodologies. Alternatives in the Landscape Architecture: Psychology of Perception S. Kaplan + L. Burckhardt 1.3 Conclusions: Key concepts in landscape perception

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8 10 12 14 20 22 24

30 39 40 47 54 60

3.1 Immersion in the Integral landscape experience 3.1.1 Relevant factors to create an Integral Landscape Experience 3.1.2 Everyday experiences & special experiences 3.2 LANDSCAPE EXPERIENCE VALUATION TOOL - (LEVT): From the landscape perception theory to an applied practice 3.3 Conclusions

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Chapter IV: Hypotheses: PAISAJE SENTIDO a concept, an attitude, and an alternative methodology for an Integral Landscape Experience based on multi-sensory design 108 4.1 Paisaje Sentido and Multisensory Design as a concept for an Integral Landscape Experience 4.1.1 MULTI-SENSORY DESIGN CRITERIA (MSDC): practices & experiences from border disciplines 4.2 PAISAJE SENTIDO: a toolbox, an applied methodology for an Integral Landscape Experience in planning processes 4.3 PAISAJE SENTIDO as an attitude: weaving the interior and the exterior landscape

DISCUSSION & CONCLUSION Additional experiment: Paisaje Sentido as a virtual experience Further research References Appendices

Chapter II: Diving into the experiential & creation research: Re-connecting with the senses, expanding the own landscape.

62 2.1 LANDSCAPE SENSORY PERCEPTION EXPERIMENT (LSPE): Analysis, diagnosis, and experimentation 2.1.1 Experiment procedure 2.1.2 Development of the Strategy 2.1.3 Evaluation of results: discussion, first conclusions and research priorities 2.2 Conclusions

86 87 91

64 66 68 80 81

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Introduction The theme of this research The Sense of Landscape and the Landscape of the Senses invites us to open the discussion on how the conscious integration of the senses into the landscape experience through exploration and experimentation questions the methodologies and theories of perception from a rational and scientific point of view to re-signify the meaning and experience of the landscape today particularly in a time of radical system change. In this way, the object of study focuses on the role of landscape perception methodologies and their influence on the integration and appropriation of the experience of the own and collective landscape.

Landscape is defined as an individual and collective construct loaded with languages, signs, symbols, and memories that evolve over time and vary depending on culture, geographical location historical moment, climate situation, use of resources and personal stage. We are the reflection of the landscape that surrounds us and are in constant dialogue and interaction with it and its elements. Moreover, we learn to perceive and read the landscape through the body, mind, and senses.

However, rationality and modernity have brought with it a visual hierarchy over the other senses and thus an obvious disconnection or forgetfulness of a part of the experience of being and being in the world.

This work focuses on presenting and analyzing the methodologies of perception of the landscape, some scenarios or approaches that allow re-humanizing the gaze by integrating a non-dualistic thought where the senses are part of the practice of appropriation of the landscape experience.

And finally, the experimentation and exploration of audiovisual, manual, or digital techniques that integrate the perception of the landscape towards a human and more than human sense and allow the implementation of these techniques in different disciplines focused on sensory and landscape studies.

Key words: Landscape, landscape perception, dualism, sense of the landscape, sensitivity, landscape senses, individual and collective landscape, appropriation, perception, re-humanize.

“The cosmovision is a way of understanding how I inhabit my body and the world. Contrasting to the productivity paradigm that dominates us where competition is more important than cooperation.

Our society teaches us to separate the personal from the work, the material and the spiritual, the micro and the macro, the social and the economic, science and art. We are full of dualisms that hurt and destroy us, that do not allow us to remember what we knew in the womb, that is, that we are one with ourselves, with the mother, the universe, the cosmos. . .what we inherited from modernity, from Europe and from the Enlightenment served us to humanize us, but ended up dehumanizing us. . . This dualistic thinking translates into dualistic and fragmented practices that do not allow us to be, to heal, or to be social and functional beings... It is a call to remember that we are integral beings.’’ (Bermúdez, 2021)

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Motivation “I crossed the ocean with the landscape in my suitcase, with my roots spreading out looking for another land, blurring memories and making space for new accents. However, I carry my rhythm under my feet and sometimes it sings in my ear while I pronounce another language. I am Latin America and Colombia trying every day to rise. I am the beating of unconquered mountains and living rivers to protect. I am the madness of a loaded and intense capital that does not stop, that almost does not breathe anymore. I am the landscape of my land and that saw me born and I am also this new landscape that receives me and today sees me germinate’’. R. Álvarez In this geographical duality my two landscapes look at each other, recognize each other, confront each other, question their differences, and open a dialogue to find different ways of integration: What is the meaning of landscape? How is landscape perceived in different geographical and cultural contexts? How is it possible to integrate landscape through the body and the senses? What concepts, practices, theories, or methodologies of landscape perception have been applied for this integration? How does landscape architecture as a discipline contribute today to the application of these methodologies?

During the chaos and uncertainty of global conditions, having to adapt quickly to new conditions and regulations, accepting to feel angry with life and at the same time a little lost and when suddenly nothing out there made sense, the motivation for this research work was born. This context allowed me to feel the coldness of our society and the structures in which we have been immersed during the last decades. This was when I understood that precisely this issue of the pandemic strengthened the division between the inside and the outside. I took this opportunity to explore myself deeply through an internal dialogue that allowed me to connect with questions that I had never asked myself or the world before.

The motivation for this work began when I wanted to understand and consolidate my vision, my way of perceiving and being in the world. It has been an opportunity of life to find what moves me, to choose a path, my path. This work represents my own search for all that I have been because of my journey. And that journey has to do with everything I have been through, with my family, with my culture and everything I have experienced from the moment I left my homeland and set foot in another territory.

In this dialogue between cultures, I meet different visions of the world with characters who in their time also sought answers in what is inside. Understanding one’s own perception of the world means recognizing and questioning what has been walked to trace a new path and call it landscape, my own landscape: PAISAJE SENTIDO. It is therefore not only a work of personal recognition, but also a way to propose new alternatives more aligned with what the world is asking of this generation. Perhaps a more regenerative vision, with much more sensitive cities and spaces that activate the curiosity of the body and the senses, that invite us to discover ourselves by exploring the landscape.

ourselves. The question is why cities do not allow this; at what point do we disconnect? Is housing the only place where I fully inhabit myself? How do I inhabit and experience public space? What kind of spaces do I need in the city to inhabit myself like at home?

To answer these questions, I begin to weave my two slightly contrary realities, although I would say that they are also complementary since they need each other. On the one hand, cities in Latin America or more specifically in Colombia are as lively as wild, chaos is a part of the everyday life, euphoria and emotionality can be felt on the streets and on public transport, the vibrant city does not slow down, does not stop, does not breathe, but shines and does not get tired of shining. On the other hand, the industrialized European cities work differently with a controlled nature, present but distant, they become somewhat cold through their automation and functionality. In either of the two realities there is one constant: the disconnection of the corporeal and the sensory when inhabiting the city.

This disconnection stems precisely from the European city model that is imposed and replicated in Latin American cities which focuses merely on navigating through the city in a fast, effective, and productive way. For this reason, the motivation of this research is to present alternatives that allow us to recognize, feel and re-inhabit the body, the landscape and the city; to open spaces for discussion about the importance of reconnecting the senses to inhabit the landscape experience in a more conscious and active way; to visualize existing examples of interventions and practices of exploration with the senses in public space in different contexts; and finally to create devices, artifacts or tools focusing on the re-humanization and sensitization of spaces, which in turn complement the models of analysis and conventional city planning processes.

The following is a deep look for the sense of the inner landscape itself and how it reflects the landscape I perceive, the landscape I seek and that seeks me.

In this thesis, multiple theories and/or methodologies of landscape perception inserted in different moments of history and in different geographical locations (i.e., “Yi-Fu Tuan, Nogué, J.B. Jackson, Burckhardt, Pallasma among others”) are analyzed and compared. At the same time, it is possible to create alternative structures of analysis and systematization of experiences through experimentation and exploration of the senses with different techniques based on practices and experiences from other border disciplines which can complement landscape architecture projects. And finally, to review and propose a new methodology of landscape perception that from subjectivity allows to complement, integrate, and respond to current issues and debates in interdisciplinary and supposedly objective landscape studies.

This pandemic slowed us down, locked us in and allowed some of us to take care of ourselves again.

It also helped in some cases to reconsider what is important and being inside allowed us to find 22

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Methodology: An experiential - creation research The methodology simultaneously involves research and creation. This research proposes an experimental alternative that challenges the conventional and scientific methods of research in the landscape architecture as a discipline from the beginning by returning to its origins and artistic bases in the history of landscape. In this way, landscape architecture opens the opportunity to reinvent itself, to return and broaden the view from other complementary disciplines such as arts, sociology, anthropology, psychology and philosophy, geography, and architecture, which allow for learning, unlearning, and relearning of how transdisciplinary knowledge is built. “Science has collected a body of theoretical knowledge, the humanities an interpretive body, the third area design has collected a body of practical knowledge based on sensibility, invention, validation, and implementation.’’

(Saikaly, 2005). Archer (1995) describes that in order to look at the subjective nature of artistic activities, it is necessary that authors clearly communicate their theoretical point of view, their ideology. Research-creation balances the theoretical basis, scientific knowledge, and the systematization of results hand in hand with exploration, openness to sensitivity and self-knowledge as transversal elements in this work. It also exposes the importance of working from the contrast from the methodological development where the physical and the poetic are confronted and integrated to build new languages, new structures, and new ways of understanding the landscape from one’s own subjectivity.

The process considers the implementation of tools included in Mixed Methods research such as observation, routine data collection and mapping, followed by systematization to complement the research-creation methodology that includes earlier research’s audio and video recording, manual and digital illustration, and digitalization of the mapping. This is an opportunity to discover the importance of learning to perceive the landscape as a contribution to create a new narrative, as well as to collect the strategies in a toolbox as an instrument that could accompany and complement the learning processes in the academy, supporting the process of design, planning and planning especially at this time in which as humanity and as individuals we are adjusting our way of perceiving the individual and the collective landscape experience.

and understand the importance of the sensory system for the landscape experience within an individual, shared, collective and virtual practice.

The third chapter consolidates the Conceptual-theoretical framework centered on the Integral Landscape Experience as a contribution towards a new narrative of landscape perception. Here, the LANDSCAPE EXPERIENCE VALUATION TOOL - (LEVT) is presented, which is the second tool designed to evaluate the quality and the level of intensity of any landscape experience. The former is also applied in ten different case scenarios which are also presented in this chapter.

The last chapter presents PAISAJE SENTIDO as the central concept which consolidates the hypotheses of this experiential-creation research: PAISAJE SENTIDO or “MEANINGFUL LANDSCAPE’’ in English is a conceptual and methodological proposal that, together with multisensory design, offers an answer to integrate sensoriality in the landscape experience with the possibility of being applied in planning processes. MULTI-SENSORY DESIGN CRITERIA (MSDC) is presented as a third research tool in this chapter, as well as edge disciplines that apply this concept in their practices. Likewise, PAISAJE SENTIDO is a conscious attitude that goes beyond the academic and transdisciplinary while proposing a disposition from the individual, the corporeal, and the sensorial with the aim to establish contact and be open to dialogues with an integral experience of the landscape.

Finally, conclusions are presented that open the discussion for new ways of interaction with the environment at different scales. The role of cities is highlighted, which from the planning perspective have the possibility of offering possibilities to activate the curiosity of experiencing the environment through the sensory as a natural way to strengthen the links of interdependence between the human and the non-human.

For the implementation of experiential-creation research, a methodology developed in four main phases formulated and presented below as shown in figure 0.

The first chapter opens the State of the Art based on the research problem: The sensory hierarchy within (conventional) methods of landscape perception influences the disconnection between human beings, their sensory system, and their environment. This first phase corresponds to a deep review into the landscape as a key concept to understand Landscape perception theories and methodologies from a transdisciplinary perspective.

The second chapter presents the experimental phase of this experiential research creation based on the conclusions of the last chapter and on the research question: Which concepts and applied practices allow to complement conventional methodologies of landscape analysis to create an integral perception tool to be applied into the landscape experience and into landscape architecture to design more sensitive spaces? Here, the LANDSCAPE SENSORY PERCEPTION EXPERIMENT (LSPE) is also presented, which is the first tool designed in this research to experiment, analyze, 24

Figure 0. Experiential-creation research. Metholodogy. (Ruiz, 2021)

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Chapter I: State of the Art: First steps into Landscape perception theory

In this chapter, a theoretical foundation of Landscape as a transdisciplinary concept related to landscape perception theories and methodologies is presented. The term landscape has influenced the evolution of different disciplines throughout history, while at the same time being an opportunity to weave and complement them. This chapter also presents how the sense of sight has been the predominant way of perceiving landscape and how this has influenced our contemporary society. For this reason, positions of different experts in landscape perception were collected from disciplines such as human geography and environmental psychology, who have dedicated themselves not only to understand the phenomenon of sensory hierarchy, but also to propose methodologies as alternatives that expand the possibilities for integrating the body and other senses in the perception of landscape. Both the academic research and the literature presented in this research aim to give a general understanding of key theories and findings that are relevant to open up new spaces for discussion about how we perceive the environment surrounding us and how architects, planners and landscape architects can use that information to re-think planning processes centered on an integral landscape perception.

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As part of this chapter is also presented a series of figures that accompany the description of the reviewed theories and methodologies of perception.

At the same time, these graphs correspond to each of the authors’ perspectives, as an attempt to understand, compare and consolidate in graphic content the same theme: the understanding of landscape perception from different perspectives.

To facilitate the reading, the following page presents the basic structure of the graph in which the information is consolidated. It is important to consider that in the different graphs there are some color variations that indicate the independence between one theory and another, since they vary according to each author’s approach, however, the graphical basis presented below is preserved.

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Figure 1. Guide to read the graphics related to the reviewed landscape perception theories. (Ruiz, 2021)

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1.1 The sense of the landscape: the landscape I perceive, the landscape I seek and that seeks me Landscape as a concept has been the subject of discussion and research from different disciplines throughout history. From the art and landscape painting of the seventeenth century, to geography, sociology, literature, psychology, photography, architecture, among others. This, in turn, extends its complexity and evidences a duality between the natural sciences and the humanities. However, the evolution of the landscape concept has made it possible to exemplify trans-disciplinarily as an attempt to connect, understand and complement these different views of landscape.

On the other hand, from the roots of language it is possible to draw closer to the general idea of landscape. In Latin root languages <<paisaje>> has a common origin in the word Pagus, whose meaning is related to a rural district, derived from paganus, a person of the countryside. Likewise, words such as paesaggio in Italian, pasage in French, paisagem in Portuguese and paisaje in Spanish derive from it.

Particularly the Germanic roots of the term Landschaft, landskip in Dutch or landscape in English are composed of the noun land, which means “free land’’, “fallow land’’ “open land’’ and the suffix -schaft means “to create’’. To shape the land, to involve the indivisible connection between humans and their environment. Thus, what these terms have in common is the meaning of belonging together, which has emerged due to human activity. Landscape, hence, is transdisciplinary, and as J.B. Jackson (1984) postulates, and as a such is a composition of man-made spaces on earth.

The European Landscape Convention in 2000 defined landscape as “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and human factors’’. Hence, landscape has something ‘physical’ and something ‘perceived’, something understood and shared, which is both individual and culturally shared.

Despite the generality of this description, everyday expressions such as: “to see the landscape’’, “to contemplate a place’’, or “to have a nice view’’, show that the concept of landscape is perceived as an external element. “Something’’ that is seen out there from a certain point. This is due to the strong influence of landscape painting where landscape is an object observed from the distance. The traditional way of understanding and perceiving the landscape is first place through the visual field.

Landscape today is a multidimensional concept and phenomenon that requires integrating the non-visual not only to broaden perception, but also because it demands other levels of reflection and relationship with the environment.

Other interpretations of landscape based on philosophies and scientific landscape design theories connected at the same time with the complexity of the landscape phenomenon are brought together in four different dimensions by Annemarie Bucher in her essay: “Landscape Theories in Transition’’. First, Bucher (2018) describes the Natural Perspective as the physical and material, object-based space that exists beyond human beings. Secondly, the Social Perspective is understood as the space of action and interaction, it refers to the space of residence and social fabric. The next perspective is the Ideal, i.e., the landscape as a social construct is the abstract idea, the cultural construction that configures the conditions of perception. And finally, the Perspective of the Environment understood as all the images, films, texts, codes, symbols that communicate the physical 30

reality and transmit the graphic idea of space. These four dimensions are differentiated due to their disciplinary and conceptual orientation, which are also articulated by their own complexity within the phenomenon of landscape. Despite the clear differentiation between those dimensions, they have not been sufficiently discussed and offer only a first overview of the variety of possible realities to classify the concept according to the context or area of study.

Nonetheless, it is important to keep in mind that, any attempt to define landscape will be determined by an individual and their cultural perception. For this reason, both concepts and theories vary, contradict, or complement each other. According to Lucius Burckhardt (2006) it is the visible environment and the existing appearances that remain ignored. “Landscape is a construct that is not sought in the environment, but in the mind of the observer...Seeing the landscape is a creative act inside our brain, which is produced by certain filters, exclusions, and selections.’’ (Burckhardt, 2006).

Also, in a way of integrating the concept, he affirms that it is not only part of a visual phenomenon, but is also loaded with cultural layers, educational processes and has the capacity to change over time.

Another alternative to understand and deepen the dimensions of landscape mentioned above is presented by Besse (2006) in his essay: “The five doors of landscape’’ where he defines landscape as a polysemic and mobile concept due to the fragmentation of knowledge in different ‘disciplines’.

Therefore, Besse brings together five possible views or perspectives: 1. Landscape as a cultural representation; 2. Landscape as a territory produced by societies and their history; 3. Landscape as a complex system that articulates natural and cultural elements; 4.

Landscape as a space of sensitive experiences rebellious to the various forms of objectification; and finally, 5. Landscape as a site or a context of a project. Each of these doors can be used by itself or intertwined with each other. Besides, all of them are linked to concepts and to additional concepts and to multiple disciplines as shown in Figure 2. The following is a brief description of each of them. See figure 2.

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Landscape as a cultural representation:

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Landscape as a territory produced by societies and their history:

The first door describes that landscape does not exist itself, it is relative to what one thinks or perceives of it. “Landscape is an interpretation, a reading, it does not exist itself, but in its relationship with an individual or a collective subject that makes it exist as a dimension of the cultural experience of the world.’’ (Corbin, 2001). Landscape expresses the community that inhabits it and its values, it does not necessarily refer to the physical environment. From this perspective, Besse (2006) affirms that only interior landscapes exist, and that these are expressed out there. Thus, landscape is a form of thought, it is something subjective and is part of the cultural and human expression represented in different ways in reality, for example through art, painting, and the ways of inhabiting space.

When perceiving a landscape from an iconographic approach or from the outside, it can be said that the landscape is something that must be deciphered beyond what is seen. It is a set of symbols arranged in space and in a specific time that the sight encounters and the brain interprets. It is also a living space, a territory, a space inhabited and woven by an individual, a group, a community.

It is focused on a more objective view that reinforces the physical, material, and spatial idea of landscape. It can be defined as the result of economic, social, political, and cultural arrangements throughout history, and in turn encompasses the sum of experiences and habits that a community 31

has developed in relation to its territory. This perspective is based on. Jackson’s landscape theory (1984) which holds two main postulates: a. The landscape is a physical space with its own character as it is designed and worked by a human group with a certain degree of permanence. It is a cultural space as it is produced through a set of practices and values that symbolize it. These practices are also called ‘random patterns’ and are evidenced in everyday life, in each space or along a given route. Under this premise the landscape is then understood as a living map. For this reason, learning to read the landscape is to come closer to understanding how a community has organized and adapted its space. b. Landscape is a collective work of societies that constantly transform and adapt the natural soil: (J.B. Jackson describes it as the succession of traces and tracks). In this way, studying the landscape has the challenge of analyzing and decoding those traces. This position distances itself from the aesthetic and the perceptual especially because the subject, the group, or the community is not only part of the landscape but is the landscape. Identity itself is taken from the landscape by modifying it. When the human being modifies his landscape, he modifies himself. For this reason, this view is not related to respond to a pictorial ideal, but to the basic and affective, which is also linked to the social needs of the being. “Landscape as an expression of living well together’’. (Jackson, 1984)

• Landscape as a complex system that articulates natural and cultural elements:

This landscape gate focuses on the landscape as object and as substance. The landscape is essentially determined by the phenomena that occur in it: climate, rain, heat; the elements that compose it and the spaces that inhabit it. It is understood as a living material environment that is influenced by human action which has the capacity to continue its evolution without human presence. The landscape is also a reality independent of man, explained under the scientific laws of modern naturalism and other disciplines that accompany it. The complexity of the landscape is determined by its morphological, constitutive, and functional condition. However, this perspective has been strongly criticized because it has reinforced the dualism between man and nature, the human, and the non-human beings. Besse (2006) highlights the importance of moving between these two realities and suggests understanding landscape as a mediator between the natural and the cultural.

“Landscape is the element in which humanity naturalizes and nature humanizes.’’ (Besse, 2006) Based on this premise, this perspective of landscape is refined and recognizes the landscape as a being of its own and can be understood as a system of natural and artificial elements that constantly interact with each other. This dynamic, evolving totality, traversed by different uses, flows, variable forms and temporalities shapes the history of the landscape in each place and time.

• Landscape as a space of sensitive experiences rebellious to the various forms of objectification:

The following perspective of landscape, somewhat ignored by modern science, is presented as an encounter of contents, between man and the world that surrounds him. It is focused on understanding landscape as an opportunity to open oneself to the sensitive qualities of the world, to emotion, to the power of imagination that places evoke through the senses. According to this view, the body intensifies its experience of life when it exposes “its porosity’’ to the environment as Bouvier (2001) says, and in this way perceives all its textures, structures, spatialities in a particular moment.

Another important concept that Besse (2006) works on in this perspective of landscape refers to what is beyond the object and the subject. “Landscape is in the experience that something that pushes 32

us and takes us out of reality. To live a radical experience of the landscape, an exposure that pushes beyond the limits...the subject loses all stability’’ (Besse, 2006).

Perhaps because the subject does not know something similar or has not had this kind of experience before.The object, which can be a mountain, a river, or the color of the sky, is unknown and at the same time the subject is unknown to himself at the moment in which he faces the emotion.

Being so open and exposed that the landscape suddenly surprises, shakes and confronts the subject with the emptiness of the immense or “the Sublime’’: as the delight of the emotion that is lived according to Lyotard (1998). It describes landscape as a particular and different experience for those who risk it because it is at the same time a way of being in the world.

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Landscape as a site or a context of a project:

Finally, this gate describes the landscape as a project specifically for landscape architects which basically focuses on three directions: 1. The ground or site contemplating its physical and symbolic components, it demands the analysis and understanding a historical construction.

2. The territory where the scale of intervention is expanded to integrate it with the other scales which implies considering the complexity of the urban space and its relationship with the natural system with all its logics, flows and temporalities.

3. The natural environment as an alternative that allows the integration between city and nature, starting from the environmental determinants, the influence of water, air, connectivity with the system of parks and gardens to the diversity of plants and animal species that coexist in the large urban system.

By integrating these three dimensions of the landscape as a landscape project, allows the urban and the non-urban as well as the human and the non-human to encounter each other, respectively.

Planning the city through its relationships and weaving the particularities of the site, the territory, and the natural environment is a challenge in every landscape project. Thus, the task of the landscape designer, according to Besse (2006) is to weave ties, to read symbols and signs to give them form, as well as to see and to feel what is behind and under the layers of a place. “What the landscape designer creates already exists there. it is present as the unseen. It means to participate in the creation of the world.’’ (Besse, 2006) Through these five views, Besse (2006) highlights the complexity of landscape and the opportunity to explore each door to expand the possibilities of understanding a transdisciplinary interaction in landscape studies. This multiplicity of perspectives of the landscape term were recognized after the second half of the twentieth century. It was precisely at this time that art, design, and architecture were rapidly undergoing great changes, and various theories tried to identify and understand their complexity from different disciplines. In this way, the concept of landscape was adapting and questioning the traditional model of perception centered on an ideal and idyllic landscape directly related to the sense of sight and the visual field.

The perspectives of different characters that supported this transition and integration of the landscape as a concept are presented below, no longer understood from the independent dimensions, but rather from the articulation of knowledge as the result of their own search for the meaning of landscape.

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Figure 2. The five landscape Gates by Besse. (Ruiz, 2021)

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“We have walked through the great outdoors countless times and, with varying degrees of attention, observed trees and bodies of water, meadows and grain fields, hills and houses, and thousands of variations of light and clouds- but looking at one thing, or at these or those things together, does not mean we consciously see a ‘landscape’. Such fragmented content of our visual field is not what we should be capturing our attention. We need to be aware of a new whole, an entity that goes beyond individual elements, that is not bound to their specific meanings, and does not mechanically assemble them into a design- that is when landscape happens.’’ (Simmel, 1913) Simmel, J.B. Jackson was focused on reconsidering the landscape delving into everyday landscapes and systematically recording them. He established a “progressive’’ approach to landscape when his examination of the urbanization of the landscape and the emergence of new patterns of use since the 1950s led him to destroy the classical understanding of landscape. Then he postulated three types of landscape starting with the European landscape and concluding with the American landscape based on a look at the past. According to Jackson, traditional landscapes designed and constructed purely based on sight and beauty are neither alive nor charged with everydayness. Everyday landscapes should be a product of their history, they should be open, progressive, social and should show a democratic attitude towards the world”. Jackson (1951) describes them in terms of the following historical periods: “Landscape of tribal societies: Landscape One is a smaller mosaic of smaller functional landscapes that convey use, ownership, power relations and technological circumstances, and hence are constant and rarely change. The epitome of such territory is the medieval village where inhabitants all speak the same dialect, have the same traditions, rights, and privileges.

Landscape after the Renaissance: Landscape Two has a specific purpose, it is clearly defined and visible. This visibility makes a difference between city and countryside, field, and forest or public and private, and then to specifying external perspectives and the understanding of landscape as a natural scene to be either to put on view or displayed.

The landscape of (American) modernity: Landscape Three, is specifically an American Landscape that returns to Landscape One but with the static characteristics of Landscape Two. It is no result of planning, but more a pragmatic space created by uses and imported from overseas and the continuous adaptation of these traditions and practices to the specific conditions of the site.’’

With those definitions J. B. Jackson tried to develop his own vision by understanding, dynamizing and joining different perceptual perspectives. He also raised awareness of the concept landscape dimensions and the geographic space and recognized the networks contained between them. He defines landscape not just as an “scenery’’ but he recognizes the importance of the visual dimension because landscape itself expresses an “image of Heaven’’, a system of man-made spaces on the surfaces of the earth, that means a cosmic order that is designed by humans and has the power to inspire wonder and worship. For that reason, his theory also highlights the very special impact that every culture makes in its own piece of land in a specific period of history. The ´cultural landscape’ grows organically from this settlement cell, and the earth is humanized and built into a “human landscape”. Jackson’s most particular contribution is ultimately how each human group, adapting to natural conditions and physical factors, leaves its own mark on the territory and develops a different degree of intensity in its relationship with nature. “The aggressive attitude is however only part of what earliest farmers in northern Europe bequeathed us. Since they created the human landscape themselves and under great difficulties, they had a deep affection for it’’ (Jackson, 1951). In this way, 36

the importance of the cultural dimension to the landscape is evidenced, affirming that it cannot be understood without detaching it from the people and the environment, but that it is created from the structures and relationships that people build to satisfy their needs.

Besides, the geographer Gerhard Hard (1934), also questioned the understanding of landscape in geography and took a deep review into humanities. He criticized the scientific evidence and showed that “landscape’’ cannot be understood just as a scientifically objective spatial term, but that connecting it with the aesthetic perception of a chosen area is/makes it much more powerful.

For Hard, language and symbols precede and influence perception and the subject’s reaction to the environment. “Landscape is defined by the feedback effect of linguistic structures on a significant broadening of the viewing parameter, in which the spatial, media-related, and abstract dimensions on landscape all play a role.’’ (Hard, 1970).

In that way he developed The Trace Theory based on the “tracking’’ concept and on Carlo Ginzburg’s (1995) evidential paradigm. It is an every-day science where ‘Traces are evidence and tangible through understanding previous actions and processes. For that reason, culture determined everything we do all the time. Another important factor is the multiple presence in space. Here the presence of a subject or an object connects interpreting traces with leaving behind, pre-traces and traces. Everyone traces and tracks at leaving. This concept of landscape does not imply a visual component, but the awareness about our transitory experience at that specific moment.

Another of the great thinkers of the concept of landscape was Lucius Burckhardt (1925-2003), a Swiss sociologist and urban planner who was centered essentially on dismantling the pictorial and physical idea of landscape by arguing that landscape does not exist per se, according to him it is a construct generated by the observer. For him the phenomenon of landscape reflects the social consciousness through the language also called “collective landscape’’ understood as a system of symbols that evolves and wears out according to the structural changes of a society. According to his theory, the meaning of this symbol system or this particular social expression must be learned.

It is what he defines as the social meaning of landscape. Therefore, it is not perceived as an object, but it is rather its cultural interpretation, its cultural good, through each of which one learns to see and understand the landscape.

It is here that the invisible character of the landscape is highlighted. In his words: “Landscape is as invisible as language is inaudible. The landscape you feel it, you learn it, you entrails it. Visible and audible is only color and sound’’. (Burckhardt, 2006) His perspective developed a relevant contribution, which has to do with the regulation system of the landscape, since it requires elements that react in a reflexive and proportional way to the stimuli. An element, a drawing, a symbol function as a stimulus for the human being and he reacts linguistically. The behavior of the individual is influenced by environmental, social, political, cultural processes and therefore is committed to a historical moment.

In his attempt to implement this postulate, Burckhardt suggested taking walks as an instrument to involve the time factor. Walking denotes a temporal organization of a space from a subjective perspective and allows the formation of spatial relations.

He calls this applied theory: Spaziergangswissenschaften in German, The Science of Strollology or Promenadology as a new perspective on landscape studies. Through walking tours, direct physical 37

experience confronts traditional visual expectations and patterns of perception, he also focused on finding flaws in design and planning. His main premise about design comes from “the invisible networks within the system and leads back to it.’’ “Design is invisible’’ and it is not determined by any object and its technical, practical function, but rather by its marginal and the very basic conditions.

Burkhardt’s perspective was not to focus on the function of the space, but rather the social relationship to nature and the invisible fabric of meaning. As mentioned above, the designed space works as a symbol of the culture in the urban fabric. In his daily practices he invites users to participate in the design of the environment with experimental spatial explorations and the Strollology is the method to integrate different disciplines with his own landscape concept.

These are just some of the approaches, conceptions, and theories as an attempt to broaden the panorama and discover the own notion of landscape. Through this journey it is possible to understand the importance of how the revision of landscape concept in the history of art from the seventeenth century, pictorial landscape painting and its development during modernity, are crucial for the analysis and understanding of the complexity of the term landscape from different disciplines.

It has been particularly enriching to re-alive the experience of the landscape through other points of view. This confirms the vivacity of the landscape as concept which continues to question its meaning in each historical moment. The landscape mutates and transforms on a daily basis with the beings that inhabit it. To ask oneself about the landscape meaning today is a beginning of questioning one’s own way of being in the world and from there it is a begin to adapt, to expand and to grow. As mentioned above, landscape is transversal to multiple disciplines and this shows its importance as a fabric in every culture, and as the result and expression of an infinity of historical, geological, physical, environmental, and socio-economic processes. Due to its vast extension, defining the landscape would not make sense itself, but what does make more sense than the simple search of the individual perspective and role within the society and trying to understand and deepen the map of one’s own human traces within the landscape? This search is just a start to decide how to transform the landscape outside that at the same time is a way to transform oneself.

In general, it is necessary to mention that theory as a basis in these disciplines related to landscape has been devalued. In this short review of positions, there is a constant and intention to unveil and integrate the non-visual in the landscape, a very particular issue in identifying and recognizing the true meaning of what is seen. A plea to rescue what is beyond the immediate, on the surface. There is a strong intention that is felt, perceived more than what is seen; it must be experienced, lived, touched. In these last decades influenced by modernity, in these last 70 years we have “seen’’ the opposite. “Seen’’ because we have also been part of the construction of this contemporary landscape, more and more futuristic and unbridled. “Landscape today is a multidimensional phenomenon that needs to integrate the non-visual as well as change, and that also demands different levels of reflection.’’ (Bucher, 2018).

While Besse’s landscape doors are open to explore landscape from different worlds, Jackson, Hard and Burckhardt, in their own search, question us again today as a society, in particular with respect to the pressure of change we are going through as humanity. On the one hand, it is a challenge and a responsibility for the academy and for the disciplines dedicated to landscape studies in order to discover the causes and drivers of this change. On the other hand, it is crucial for anticipating future needs and developing tendencies through new visions, models, and methods for what we are becoming. The crucial question now is which understanding of landscape- which basis theory- will 38

form the basis? And what kind of landscape will be produced as a result?

The sense of landscape is then for me is to enter deciphering what I perceive, how I perceive it, it is this decision to be present in the world. The landscape stimulates my human experience and I respond in an active and present way. The landscape seeks me so that I transform myself and with my perspective I transform it. The sense of the landscape is to walk and feel the steps walked at the same time, to stop to observe and to understand other landscapes as well, to walk together for a while and to continue while and to continue seeking the landscape that seeks me.

1.2 Landscape Perception Theories: a dialogue between some aesthetic thinkers Based on the above, when approaching the search for the meaning of landscape, not only definitions of the term itself appear, but also ways of being, perceiving and understanding the world. Both the different individual perspectives as well as those grouped in disciplines, have provided important questions, bases, and guidelines throughout history, in most of which the implementation and practice of the concept is generated.

“Landscape theories play a role that is not to be underestimated. They not only offer insights, justifications, descriptions, and explanations for the ‘landscape phenomenon’ they also create an environment for negotiations by localizing them within a larger intellectual and practical context.’’…’Under landscape theories it is mean all the reflections and theory formulations that are meant to define or deal with landscape. Current landscape theories attempt to illustrate, make tangible parts of landscape reality by means of statements.’’ –(Bucher, 2018) Theories of perception provide basis for research in psychology. For example, Environmental psychology concerns with relationships between physical environment and human behavior. It is a multidisciplinary field where perception of the environment is a core subject. Environmental perception research includes topics such as cognitive mapping, landscape or environmental preferences, way finding, restorative environments. All that should be considered in landscape architecture, planning and design. The purpose of Landscape architecture is to create livable, pleasant, and sustainable outdoor environments. Although research findings in environmental psychology can enlighten and influence landscape architects in the context of research and practice, there is a reciprocal relationship between people and their physical environments which affects each other.

Therefore, landscape architects must recognize that perception of the environment has an essential role to play in understanding this relationship.

Here is presented an overview to landscape (environmental) perception research in context of landscape planning and design. It discusses some base concepts of landscape perception in three different moments: 1. Concepts: 2. Theories y 3. Methodologies of landscape perception by some authors who, during the same period and in different latitudes, questioned their way of understanding, perceiving, and relating to the landscape. Those theories and research methodology on visual perception and aesthetics will be presented to provide guidance for landscape design and planning.

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At first the architect J. Pallasma, with a critique of ocularcentrism evidences the need for an architecture that stimulates the senses, while the humanist geographer Yi Fu-Tuan, who in Topophilia reinforces this idea by bringing together a way to create emotional ties with the place through personal experience. Followed by Joan Nogué and his understanding of the process of perception and sensory experience of landscape, accompanied by the gaze of W. Welsch focused on expanding this perceptual process through the understanding of the aesthetic and the anesthetic as a contribution to an alternative dialectic for new landscape thinkers. Finally, Kaplan (1978) presents the psychology of perception through an applied methodology based on individual and collective preference factors.

Through this review it is possible to analyze, compare and understand different theories and methodologies of landscape perception. On the one hand, as part of the construction of the bases that open the discussion to new concepts in landscape studies today; and, on the other hand, as an opportunity for landscape architecture to re-evaluate, integrate and implement complementary premises to understand the process of landscape perception through edge disciplines and thus enrich the implementation in the design process of space and experience.

1.2.1 Landscape perception concept: The hierarchy of sight. J. Pallasma + Y. Tuan The phenomenon of perception is understood as the individual’s capacity to obtain information from the environment based on the reactions that stimuli produces on the sensory systems. “Perception is an active process that takes place between the organism and the environment.’’ (Kaplan, 1978). He also states that information is fundamental for the survival of the organism and essential to make sense of the environment, to which perception is supposed to be oriented.

According to that, Porteous presents two basic modes of perception; autocentric, which is subject centered, and allocentric, which is object centered. For him, sensory quality and pleasure are involved in autocentric senses, while allocentric senses involve attention and directionality. For example, vision (except color perception) is mostly autocentric, and most sounds (except speech sounds) are autocentric.

“The perception of the physical environment is not merely a physiological phenomenon. It is also influenced by the individual’s experiences, and both social and cultural factors.’’ (Knox and Marston, 2003). At the same time, they point out that “different cultural identities and status categories influence the way in which people experience and understand their environments.’’

The hierarchy of sight: The way to recognize a place is largely through the sense of sight: colors, height distance, architectural typology, natural elements. Etc. “Psychologists, urban designers, landscape architects and advertisers emphasize vision as the primary mode of knowing the world. In fact, the term ‘perception’ is almost always directly related to visual perception.’’ (Porteous, 1996). However, according to the concept of landscape in the previous chapter, what is perceived visually is not enough to form a complete idea of a place. The visual field is limited and this in turn determines a “psychological distance’’ between the observer and the observed.

In addition to the visual field, the locomotor apparatus is essential in the experience of the land40

scape, for example, in cities where the difference in building heights influences the visual perception of the pedestrian. “In general, the upper floors of tall buildings can only be seen from a distance and never up close in the urban landscape.’’ (Gehl, 2010). Likewise, lights, advertisements and publicity are part of the urban landscape and through stimulation, cause changes in the behavior of the inhabitants. This constant visual hyperstimulation is also present in buildings designed as isolated elements independent of the context or as repetitive elements that lead to disorientation and loss of sense of place.

In the book The Eyes of Skin, Pallasma brings together his ideas around his concern for the predominance of sight, the suppression of the other senses and how this has influenced the way architecture is made and taught. He also opens a space for the sense of touch in relation to the experience in everyday interior spaces. In his words, “The very essence of lived experience is shaped by hapticity and unfocused peripheral vision. Peripheral vision confronts us with the world, while focused vision envelops us in the flesh of the world.’’ (Pallasma, 2005). The architect highlights the importance of the role of the sense of touch and how the other senses are extensions of it and at the same time there are other ways of touching the world. Touch is not only the most primary and sensitive sense, but it is also through it that it is possible to integrate “coherence and transcendence’’ into perception and experience itself.

However, since ancient Greece, Western culture has given primacy to the sense of sight, as it was attributed security and accuracy. Since then, this sense has also been related to intellect, knowledge, and truth that leads to a sensory dualism: Sight and hearing were related to the mind and spirit and the other senses such as touch, smell and taste were limited to biological survival. Pallasma describes how in the Renaissance this idea is reinforced through a hierarchical system where the eye comes first and at last place is the sense of touch. “The Renaissance system of the senses was related to the image of the cosmic body; vision was correlated with fire and light, hearing with air, smell with steam, taste with water and touch with earth’’. (Pallasma, 2005) The visual is directly related to the scientific, rational, objective, and disembodied “complete’’ description that separates mental processes from sensory experiences. This paradigm, which questions bodily experiences by focusing on rational and spiritual knowledge, has also been referred to as Ocularcentrism. Throughout his work, Humboldt (1986) questions this concept with the expression “vagueness of the senses’’ which means when the senses act as mere receptors which are hidden behind the sense of sight. In fact, with his scientific illustration of the tropical landscape he distinguished himself from other scientists by demanding an infinite variety of immediate observations trying to capture and to offer a scheme of sensory interrelation between the human and the environment.

Descartes, Nietzsche, Sartre, Lyotard and many other thinkers and philosophers throughout history have delved into this criticism of the visual predominance that has been transversal and relevant both in the arts and in science, as well as in general in the experience of being in the world.

This “anti-ocularcentrist’’ movement anticipates current social situations, through the critique of the privilege of the sense of sight “The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as an image.’’ (Heiddeger, 1977) and the sensory studies that rightly question the importance of the simultaneous interaction of the senses. “My perception is an integration of visual, tactile, and auditory data, I perceive with my whole being: I grasp a structure of the thing, a single way of being that speaks to all the senses at once.’’ (Merlau-Ponty, 2000) 41

Pallasma particularly relates this visual hierarchy to the intellectual distance in planning processes that leads to dehumanization in architecture and in the construction of the contemporary city since the modern movement. On the one hand, materiality in architecture as a response to the evolution of technology has been a relevant factor in the design and creation of spaces that evoke sensations and experiences of distance, isolation, and exteriority. On the other hand, many of these elements, spaces or buildings arranged in the city by the hand of technology are focused on capturing the visual attention of the viewer, thus loading it with images as constant stimuli that strengthen this idea of sensory dualism and disconnection from other possible ways of experiencing the space.

“The modern project has hosted the intellect and the eye but has left the body and the rest of the senses homeless.’’ (Pallasma, 2005) The Figure 3. consolidates the main concepts related to Ocularcentrism as a paradigm of sight-based knowledge production. On the one hand, a contemplative distance accompanied by a disembodied ideal vision. Supported by two types of eye: the nihilistic eye and the narcissistic eye, according to Heidegger (1977). On the other hand, two types of focused vision and peripheral vision based on the fields related to vision, such as physiology, ophthalmology, optometry, or the science of vision in general. Pallasma integrates these forms of observation into what he calls the hegemonic eye.

“The narcissistic eye sees architecture as a means of self-expression, an intellectual, artistic game, separated from fundamental mental and social connections, while the nihilistic eye focuses on sensory, mental distance and alienation, which separates and isolates the body; instead of reconstructing a new cultural order, it makes a reading of collective meaning impossible...The world becomes a visual journey devoid of meaning.’’ (Pallasma, 2005) Just as the narcissistic and nihilistic eye, the focused vision or central vision on the other hand, by covering approximately thirty (30) degrees, is responsible for focusing on the observed object, expels the observer from space; he is only a spectator from his perspective. Architectural theory is based on this vision when representing the planimetry from “top view’’ or as a perspective. While the unfocused peripheral vision covers approximately 180 degrees, although most of the time it operates unconsciously, it has a great importance in the perceptual and mental system because it integrates us in space. In the suppression of sharpness, the observer is involved in spatiality, interiority and hapticity. According to Pallasma this experience transforms the retinal Gestalt into spatial and bodily experiences. By being aware of peripheral vision the experience with the immediate environment changes. “It is no longer me and the world or me and the object, but me with the world or the object.’’ (Pallasma, 2005).

This latter way of observing the world is presented as an alternative to free the eye that is sensorially overloaded with constant stimuli. This vision of the unfocused eye is an opportunity to explore new visual and sensory fields by consciously interrelating with the elements of the environment and in turn an option to free oneself from the hegemonic and patriarchal eye. The responsibility of architecture and city planning in the creation of spaces should compensate for the mental and sensory distance, as well as the deficit in the use of peripheral vision to encourage the awareness of the observer in space and towards its own perceptual system. “We have started to discover our neglected senses. This growing awareness represents something of an untimely insurgency against the painful deprivation of sensory experience we have suffered in our technological world.’’ (Montagu, 1986).

Another much broader alternative position to the phenomenon of visual perception mentioned above is contained in the work of Yi Fu-Tuan. Under his view the perception of the environment 42

Figure 3. Ocularcentrism. The hierarchy of sight (Ruiz, 2021)

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involves the activation of the senses for a new proximity to the elements. It is both a sensory response to external stimuli and an intentional activity in which certain information is registered and other information is suppressed. He also states that what is perceived or valued is part of biological survival, produces a sense of satisfaction and varies depending on each culture.

In general terms, perception for Tuan is based on the understanding of two other concepts that accompany perception itself: “Attitude’’ which in the first place is cultural and is at the same time a position of the subject in the world. Moreover, it is much more stable than perception as such, since it is constituted by a series of “perceptions’’, i.e., the experience itself that forges firmness and/or interest in front of something. From this attitude the second concept is consolidated: “Worldview’’ understood as the experience conceptualized in a system of beliefs that encompasses the structuring of values and attitudes at a personal and social level. In his book Topophilia, he encompasses and delves into the multiple layers and relationships that human beings, groups, or communities weave with their environment and allow them to develop love for it. From this feeling the human being has learned to perceive the world. Some concepts that make up the sense of Topophilia are related with the human being response to the aesthetics of its environment that can be more or less intense or can be also unexpectedly revealed. (See Figure 4) The attraction to a place resides in the emotional charge of the events that occurred there, then the place can be perceived as a symbol. Likewise, the exposure of the subject to the appreciation of the beauty of the place can awaken this sensation of intense awareness in an almost fleeting moment, although according to Tuan it can be more lasting if the perception is combined with the observer’s memories, or through scientific curiosity. “The response maybe tactile, a delight in the feel of air, water, earth. More permanent and less easy to express are feelings that one has to a place because it is home, the locus of memories and the means of gaining a livelihood.’’ (Tuan, 1974) In addition, for visual perception there is an indispensable haptic factor that has been lost not only with the advent of technology such as Pallasma mentioned and as the Ocularcentrism describes.

According to Tuan, it is a fact that along their live, humans begin to lose physical contact with their environment. “Age is proportional to aesthetic distance and this in turn diminishes the topophilic feeling.’’ (Tuan, 1974) Re-learning from children’s openness to get in touch with physical sensations, from farmers who develop an intimate relationship with the environment by working in contact with the earth, by understanding natural cycles and by giving confidence and memories to their work, are clues to remember how to activate this sensation in the body’s memories. As important as the previous variables is the simplicity of expressing the sensation of well-being. Although it is linked to external factors, it has a direct impact on the health and integrity of the being inhabiting the place. On the other hand, the attachment to familiarity, which Tuan (1974) describes through the love for the mother earth that indigenous people embody, feel, and express for their piece of the world, which they defend not only because it is their and their ancestors’ place, but because they are the already involved in the place. In other words, they are the landscape itself. “I am the land, and the land is me’’ writes Australian Aboriginal author Margaret Kemarre Turner (2010). The German biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber in his book “Indigenialität’’ explains this statement in such a way that the individual being has emerged from the land and its soul and identity are grounded there, so that: “he perceives himself as an expression of place itself.’’ (Weber, 2018) Parallel to the position of Weber (2018), Tuan also mentions patriotism as another way of experiencing Topophilia, which according to the author applies to small provinces of past times, as it is 44

Figure 4. Perception & Topophilia by Tuan. (Ruiz, 2021)

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related to an intimate experience of the place: local patriotism. When thinking of great empires, or conquests of other great territories, the sense is lost when the feeling is guided by ambition and power: Imperial patriotism. Under this premise, he describes that to perceive a genuine topophilic feeling it is enough to have a compact scale that allows to supply the biological necessities and to enter in contact with the physical sensations.

Tuan adds that the variables mentioned above which are culturally internalized in each person and human group, are as important as the very capacity of certain environments to awake the topophilic sensation in human beings through a diverse sensory stimulus, which are perceived as images, shapes, or textures. According to individual or cultural attitudes, values, preferences and purposes, those stimuli are attended to or ignored. In general, since ancient times, the ideal of place is embodied in religious writings related to a “promised land’’ fertile, abundant, a radiant land which represents an image of idyllic and earthly paradise that covers the main function of refuge. The ideal will vary depending on each origin or culture. Burckhardt (2006) supports Tuan’s idea in his book: “Warum ist Landschaft schön?’’ in English, Why is landscape beautiful? The Science of Strollology, by mentioning that, although no one can put himself in the visual field of another, in this individual diversity there is great common ground, which creates a collective unity called culture. In this collective memory the preferences of the ideal place can be perceived and found. “To recognize the ideal of place will go back to childhood and youth, to one’s own impressions of the family home, the books and stories read, or the images of childhood.’’ (Burckhardt, 1980) For both Tuan (1974) and Burckhardt (1980) what the eye observes or perceives in a place is intrinsically related to individual and cultural preferences. On the one hand, Tuan describes the preference of places such as the seashore, an island or a valley, as archetypal landscapes loaded with symbols that function as stimuli to which human beings respond because of their visual, historical, emotional, transgenerational, ecological, and social content. For example, Tuan starts from the basic needs of human beings such as the need for food, water, protection, security and at the same time the need or desire to explore a territory. “On the one hand: the recessions of beach and valley denote security, on the other, the open horizon to the water incites adventure. The water and sand receive the human body that normally enjoys contact only with the air and the ground. The forest envelops man in its cool shadowed recesses; the desert is total exposure in which man is repulsed by the hard earth and excoriated by the brilliant sun. The beach too is washed in the brilliance of the direct or refracted sunlight but the sand yields to pressure, wedging in between the toes, and water receives and supports the body.’’ (Tuan, 1974).

On the other hand, Burckhardt (1980) calls these places conventional landscapes. For him, these places are of little use because they focus on visual and aesthetic pleasure, but one does not learn from them. Instead, he claims that places that diverge from the visual ideal provide pleasure because they call out to the unexplored. “The more the observed place distances itself from the ideal of the enchanting place and yet is congruent with it, the more information the observer extracts from this situation.’’ (Burckhardt, 1980). This journey of Tuan’s perspective is consolidated in Figure 4. which, in comparison with the previous one, concentrates on balancing the visual hierarchy under the general concept of perception in relation to the landscape. Regardless of the place, whether conventional or unusual, the act of perceiving implies direct contact with cultural values that invite learning about the world through experience. On a physical level, perception invites the body to play and interact through touching and manipulating the reality of other objects in space, while 46

expanding the capacity of each of one’s senses to discover beyond what is seen.“Human beings perceive with all senses simultaneously, yet in their daily tasks, only a small portion of the innate power of experience is required. The most trained sense organ varies in each individual and in each culture. In our society the most trained sense is the visual sense.’’ (Tuan, 1974) Although, as described above, the sense of sight helps to detect objects, figures, or colors at a distance and quickly, it is not involved in the scene and therefore the perception of the world is more abstract due to the physical, and intellectual distance from the scene. “The visual field is far larger than the fields of the other senses. Distant objects can only be seen; hence we have the tendency to regard seen objects as ’’distant’’- as not calling forth any strong emotional response- even though they may actually be close to us.’’ (Tuan, 1974). The opportunity arises to release the visual burden by allowing oneself to explore the immense potential that exists in the field of each of the other senses.

For example, by integrating the haptic as a more direct experience with the elements of the place or with the place itself; the auditory and olfactory to connect with the attention and receptivity of more intense emotional experiences through place and memory respectively. In Tuan’s words “Each sense reinforces the other so that together clarify the structure and the substance of the entire building, revealing its essential character.’’ (Tuan, 1974). Balancing the hierarchy of sight is a call to the body, to recover the sensitive, to embody the experience beyond the gaze. Or as Tuan says, to manifest and recover the spirit of the animal through curiosity, the sensory and the instinctive.

According to Goethe, not everyone who looks sees. “For the gaze to be effective the eyes of the spirit and the eyes of the body must act in a constant and living connection, because otherwise one runs the danger of looking and yet not grasping what one sees.’’ (Goethe, 2002)

1.2.2 Landscape perception process: The role of the senses in landscape perception: Aesthetic Thinking in our technological era – J. Nogué + W. Welsch As mentioned above, the senses contribute to the perception of the landscape, they strengthen attitudes and values in response to external stimuli and foster a way of being in the world. For this reason, before entering into the understanding of the process of landscape perception, it is worthwhile to briefly review the function of each of the senses and how they complement each other.

There is a long discussion between anthropologists, ethnographers, and philosophers related to the western modern five-sense system. According to Howes (1991) it constitutes a cultural construct which is difficult to apply in every context and does not serve to establish an universal truth, “but rather they are convenient units through which to analyze sets of experiences. ’’ (Pink, 2009). For that reason, this paper reviews M. Tallafa’s Essay Paisaje y Sensorialidad where the sensory system recognizes the function of the individual senses but reinforces the connections between them, which at the same time is linked to Edward Hall’s theory of Proxemic spaces. Human’s sensory apparatus is divided into two categories shown in the Figure 5. The distance receptors concerned with the examination of distant objects and the proximity receptors, employed in examining that which is 47

contiguous to contact with one’s own body, related to touch, the sensations of the skin. These are the distance senses and proximity senses respectively. In this way the perception of the environment through the senses is complemented and configured.

From this premise and the understanding of the function of each sensory organ and the importance of their integration in the experience, different characters from other disciplines develop their journey to study the process of landscape perception. The following are two perspectives centered on delving into the process of landscape perception. Joan Nogué (1992), a geographer who has dedicated a large part of his academic career to landscape studies, and Wolfgang Welsch (1990), who develops his approach based on aesthetic thoughts.

From the perspective of human geography, the concept of landscape perception for Nogué is focused on the analysis of perceptual processes through three moments: First, the individual perception, followed by the collective perception of the landscape and finally the aesthetic valuation of the landscape.

Figure 5. Senses of proximity and senses of distance

by Hall. (Ruiz, 2021)

It is therefore important to understand how these not only complement each other, but also influence each other to integrate the perceived information. Smell, for example, traces a link between external and internal perception. It provides a more complete experience of continuity than sight.

“The senses are windows to univocity.’’ (Merlau-Ponty, 2000). This author defines the interaction between senses as ‘Multisensoriality’ also understood on the subject-body relationship, perceiving the mind as a lived space. In his perspective the body is not “a collection of adjacent organs but a synergic system, all of the functions of which are exercised and linked together in the general action of being in the world.’’ (Merlau-Ponty, 2000)“Multisensoriality is defined as the inclusion of both experiential and interactive resources, which also contain sensory information. Meaning is often created over time and through sensory memory connected to identity, rather than through a fixed interactive cognitive process.’’ (Dicks, 2014) In Tamalla’s essay, mentioning Carlson’s proposal (1979) that vindicates the multisensory in the perceptual act implies “perceiving with all the senses, combining intellectual reflection with the experience that the body accumulates as it travels through it’’... “it is not an irrational and mystical approach, but a defense of the experience of people through the senses.’’ (Carlson, 1979). According to Tamalla it is also an opportunity to accept human complexity and to integrate mental and bodily duality by recovering the role of the senses, and by opening to weave deeper and more diverse connections with the environment.

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Perceiving the landscape is first an individual act that is linked to a psychic and biological singularity. On the one hand, Nogué insists on the importance of learning from the sensory relationship with the landscape beyond the visual; it is a construct of multiple simultaneous sensory impressions. On the other hand, memories, experiences, childhood, and youth landscapes in the unconscious form a “perceptual filter’’ that influences the perception and the evaluation of the landscape.

Like Tuan’s position, collective perception states the influence of culture and different historical periods on the formation of symbols in the different elements of the landscape give rise to different interpretations. “The landscape is a dynamic code of symbols that tells us about the culture, its past, present, and future...Thus each landscape possesses a greater or lesser degree of complexity in the decoding of these symbols to what is called: ‘‘semiotic legibility of the landscape.’’ (Nogué, 1992). Another important factor to consider, even in the same culture, landscape is also perceived according to different social groups or place of residence. People have learned, developed, and appropriated alternative ways of relating to their landscape.For the aesthetic valuation of the landscape as a third component, according to Nogué (1992), it varies depending on individual sensitivity, the historical period, the influence of the media. It is a way to accompany and implement in territorial planning projects and management, and at the same time a change of appreciation of the sense of the landscape.

This landscape perception process according to Nogué (1992) is consolidated in three phases described in Figure 6. The first phase is defined as the sensory experience, where the senses capture information from the environment. In the second phase called cognitive, the stimuli received are structured and processed; symbols are codified through the individual, cultural and social filter.

Finally, the evaluation phase forges or strengthens attitudes, values, and preferences in relation to what has been learned and structured in the two previous phases. In this phase the elements of the landscape are already loaded with meanings and values even without leaving aside their main function.

According to the above, the process of landscape perception is constantly active due to the existing continuous interrelation between the perceiver and the perceived. On the one hand, the landscape nourishes the senses and at the same time it is dynamic and changing itself. Then the process of landscape perception is simultaneously individual and social, it is developed and evidenced through daily practices that consolidate and strengthen individual experience and social life. “Landscape cannot be seen separately from everyday life; it is a determining condition of our being in the world.’’ (Jackson, 1984) 49

Understanding the importance of landscape perception process and its influence on daily practices in different cultures and social groups, can be a strong potential when it comes to participation processes, urban, architectural and landscape interventions at different scales. For example, when applying it in methods of aesthetic evaluation of the landscape. As important as the physical and technical assessment of the landscape elements, is to discover the essence of the place, to decode the symbols that are hidden behind what is perceived from the eyes of the inhabitant. “Place provides the primary means through which we make sense of the world and through which we act in the world.

Human beings create places in space, live them and imbue them with significance. We root ourselves in them and feel part of them. Places, at any scale, are essential to our emotional stability because they link us to a historical logic and because they act as a link, as a point of contact and interaction between global phenomena and individual experience.’’ (Nogué, 2010) People have always modified and adapted their piece of territory according to the physical characteristics and their needs through daily practices that determine and consolidate these collective symbols in the landscape. However, in the last decades since modernity and globalization in the eagerness of technification and ‘’development’’ our society has left aside the human sensory needs with a strong technological influence that suppresses the cultural meaning of the local. This current cultural paradigm has prioritized the external reality linked to the visible reality; the objects produced by people. However, the inner reality and the reality of other living worlds is devalued. “We live then in a fragmented reality. Therefore, nature is conceived as something out there.’’ (Téari, 2021) “Being in the world for today’s cultures is preponderantly aggressive towards the natural environment that leaves indelible traces in the landscape. Widespread practices produce degradation in landscapes, loss of value in different dimensions. With this, the degradation of ecosystems, the erosion of fertile soils, the loss of biodiversity and natural resources, forgetfulness of ancestral knowledge, practically a cultural erosion.’’ (Nogué, 2014) From this position, the aesthetic thought of the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch (1995) is taken up again, proposing an exhaustive review of the evolution of the aesthetic and its importance in the process of landscape perception and how this is an alternative to counteract the fracture between the relationship between the human being and his experience of landscape. First, Welsch became aware of the current misunderstanding of the aesthetic and proposed to retake the aesthetic as a concept that groups together everything perceptible in any possible way: the sensual, the spiritual, the everyday, the sublime, the world of the living, and the artistic, among others. “Aesthetics is the science of the sensory, the sensory recognition of thought. Although it is nowadays the opposite, the aesthetic quality is attributed to the visual, physical, material.’’ (Welsch, 1995). In this way, the author then presents a complementary and parallel concept called Anesthetics of “Anesthesia’’: that is, when sensibility is turned off, or cognitive perception is interrupted. The anesthetic represents insensitivity or loss of sensibility. However, this concept does not reject or oppose the aesthetic altogether, but rather is a consequence of keeping and preserving pain or emotions. Aesthetics and Anesthetics are presented by Welsch as complementary and interwoven concepts in which human beings move consciously or unconsciously in everyday life. “Everything aesthetic contains something anesthetic.’’ “we do not see because we are not blind, but rather we see, because we are blind to most.’’

(Welsch, 1995). To see means to make visible -tangible to the senses- and thus it is exclusive.

Making something visible in contingent upon making something invisible, is shifting these things to a different dimension of perception that is not embedded in the consciousness. (See Figure 7.)

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Figure 6. Three phases of the perceptual process by Nogué. (Ruiz, 2021)

According to the above and contrary to other views, specifically since modernity in our society is framed in the Anesthetics because since then, there has been no space for sensory needs. On the contrary, architecture, technology and media have overseen strengthening the simulation of digital scenarios that dissolve sensitive reality. “An evasive vision focuses on a systematic desensitization.

Design elements are not meant to be perceived, but to create a mood in which they act as foci of a justified atmosphere of stimulation for an individual and consumer life.’’ (Welsch, 1995) Another important aspect that Welsch (1995) mentions has to do with the influence of technology and the media in the loss of trust and reliability of human beings in their own body and senses, especially in the function of informing about the limits and tolerances of these. This is reflected, for example, in the demand or over-demand in everyday life, as well as in the processes of detriment, cultural and territorial degradation. When human beings disconnect from their individual body, they also disconnect from the collective body, the place, the territory. His position is very close to the principle of reciprocity understood as the continuity links and interdependence relations proposed by Arturo Escobar based on the Relational Ontology: by affirming that “No entity pre-exists the relations that constitute it. ‘’Nothing exists, everything inter-exists.’’ (Escobar, 2014).

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Figure 8. Three phases of the perceptual process by Welsch. (Ruiz, 2021)

From that perspective, “Technologization has so changed nature that our comparatively inert conservative senses of nature are unreliable and counterproductive.’’ (Welsch, 1995) In evolution and adaptation, human beings have surrendered the power of their senses to the point of being trained in exchange for comfort and security. Here the author mentions the example of Nuclear Energy as one of the most efficient sources of energy in our time. However, “What is comfortable for us, destroys us at the same time.’’ (Welsch, 1995). For that reason, the anesthetic is also a positive strategy within the process of landscape perception. By being conscious, the anesthetic can act as a filter to the constant hyperstimulation received as sensory information (visual or auditory) that seeks to influence human reaction and behavior.

Figure 7. Aesthetic thinking & Perception process

by Welsch (Ruiz, 2021)

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According to Welsch (1995), it is precisely a task of Postmodernity to weave the modern dualistic theory that has influenced not only the sensorial dualism previously mentioned but also the duality body-spirit, body-territory, human being-nature, human and non-human. Understanding the perception of the landscape from the integrality and complementarity encompasses then, on the one hand, the sensory or aesthetic perception, the information received through the senses. On the other hand, the non-sensory or anesthetic perception understood as the awareness of the information received, the interpretation of the situation, the understanding of the meaning and the symbols. In 53

this way, Welsch integrates the process of landscape perception in a similar way to Nogué (1992): Figure 8. First, the body encounters a source of inspiration or stimulation and receives sensory information. Followed by a general idea of what is perceived, where the first internal associations that give meaning to the scene are then constructed. In a third place, the external image is stabilized since both the exposed body and the interpreting mind are already part of the scene and there is reflexive control over the being and feeling. Finally, the reflection of the aesthetic perception consolidates the experience itself.

This is how aesthetic thinking is consolidated as a game between the sensory and the cognitive, where people in everyday life can open up to the sensitive experience and at the same time be aware of its meaning. For architects, urban planners, and landscape architects this work offers what to make visible or tangible and what not, especially when considering that the sensory perception present today in cities is based on traditional patterns of perception that have excluded everything that is not catalogued therein. So, landscape should not be perceived only as aesthetic. It is a challenge to open and create spaces based on reciprocity to build a new dialogue and a new dialectic through transdisciplinary strategies where the anesthetic focuses on recovering the aesthetic at different scales. “New thinkers mobilize their senses in thinking, they practice a thinking which senses makes sense with them.’’ (Welsch, 1995)

1.2.3 Landscape perception Methodologies. Alternatives in the Landscape Architecture: Psychology of Perception S. Kaplan + L. Burckhardt In landscape planning and environmental impact studies, the assessment of the visual characteristics of the landscape is usually based on the evaluation of the physical characteristics of landscapes (such as climate, topography, land cover, etc.). This is performed by experts in disciplines such as Ecology, Soil science, Hydrology, Botany, Climatology, Hydraulics, Building construction, Sociology through specialized methodologies or techniques independent of the users. These methodologies usually process the objects of study through measurement procedures, which determine the purpose or the fulfillment of the function through amounts. ‘‘A one-sided quantitative assessment of designs and projects loses sight of qualitative phenomena and runs the risk of unwanted and inappropriate emotional emissions through a lack of attention to qualitative phenomena in newly created places.’’ (Weidinger, 2014) Although we receive spatial information through many of our senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, and feeling) it is assumed that sight is the most valued sense. ‘‘More than 80% of the sensory information we receive is through sight.’’ (Porteous, 1996). Hence, most studies of environmental perception, and of landscape evaluation, focus on the visual dimension of the perception process. Landscape character assessment is fundamental to the decision-making process in landscape planning. ‘‘Landscape assessment is a tool for determining landscape quality and provides a systematic analysis and classification for sustainable landscape management. In this context, the criteria for landscape perception studies are mainly scenic beauty or landscape preference.’’ (Palmer and Hoffman 2001) 54

However, recognizing the failure of historical attempts to objectify design, and if one follows the definition of spatial quality set out here, one must criticize the current tendency towards quantification. ‘‘To design public spaces, experience contemporary urbanity and develop a lasting emotional effect, it is indispensable to deepen and understand qualitative phenomena.’’ (Weidinger, 2014) Thus, the turn towards quantifiability has led to a deficit in the evaluation of qualitative phenomena in the discourse on cities, open space, and landscape. J. Weidinger (2014) Professor at The Faculty of Landscape Architecture at TU Berlin argues that there is a theoretical deficit that not only restricts the view of urban open spaces, but also affects landscape planning and aesthetics. ‘‘Often, outdated aesthetic models, such as pre-industrial rural agriculture, determine the evaluation of the landscape image instead of developing and applying new concepts and categories for it.’’ (Weidinger, 2014). The idea is not to detract from the work of the Natural Sciences but rather to broaden the gaze to other disciplines of the humanities such as philosophy, psychology, perception theory, behavioral research, literature, and the arts that have already built their own theories about the qualitative and experiential studies. ‘‘The common thread of these schools of design thought is the phenomenon of design quality, which brings together individual pieces of information into an overall impression, makes the environment legible and gives space to the emergence of poetry through a new aesthetic.’’ (Weidinger, 2014) The objective of this section is to present that in addition to the importance of psychophysical and cognitive dimensions of the visual perception of landscape, there is a deficit in the qualitative and subjective dimension for landscape designers and planners that directly affects both the perception and the construction of the city. At the same time, it is a call to recover the sensitivity of the landscape itself from landscape architecture as a profession and as a field of experimentation. Beyond the understanding of geological, physical, and natural phenomena and the support of architecture and urban processes, landscape architecture has also an integrating role between the social and natural fabric, which is vital for the daily human experience.

In accordance with the above, two methodologies of landscape perception are presented that seek to understand the qualitative phenomenon in the Landscape analysis in which transdisciplinary concepts are integrated and implemented. First, from the Psychology of Perception, Kaplan (1979) contributes to landscape aesthetics by combining different functional factors involved in human preferences for landscapes. And, secondly, Burckhardt (2006) in his theory and methodology of Promenadology or Strollology, proposes a way of perceiving the landscape through walks, applying a dynamic system between distance and continuous movement.

On the one hand, Kaplan’s methodology (1979) is based on the analysis of the reactions of human beings seen in terms of the sense in which they have the capacity to interpret a scene and what interests they must find in it. (See Figure 9.) The perception process described by Kaplan (1979) complements Nogué’s and Welsch’s description. He goes deeper into the Preference Factors that are indispensable beyond the reception of information and its interpretation. ‘‘Preference is a result of a complex process that includes perceiving objects in space and reacting in terms of potential, usability, and supportiveness...Aesthetics should reflect the functional appropriation of spaces and objects.’’

(Kaplan, 1979) Under his view, very similar to that of Tuan (1974) mentioned in the previous chapter, he states that human preferences are based on the need for survival and safety but also on the options of 55

discovering space through stimulation that are normally related to the persisting two basic human purposes. According to Kaplan (1979), these two main purposes of any human activity are divided into the following: to make sense, i.e., to have a clear structure and to be easy to characterize, which is what he calls MAKING SENSE. And purposes that enable an environment of interaction, learning, stimulation, or a call to INVOLVEMENT. At the same time, Kaplan (1979) takes care of applying preferences at different levels of interpretation within the process of landscape perception. Within his methodology he differentiates then the perception of the landscape as a surface (2D: two dimensions), either a photograph or a panorama observed from a distance that offers a visual set. And landscapes as three-dimensional configurations (3D: three dimensions) with the implication of being analyzed in depth. To each of these levels of landscape interpretation Kaplan assigns two variables to respond to the previously mentioned purposes as shown in the graphxxx. To analyze the sense of the visual set (2D) the factor ‘’Coherence’’ is necessary, the easy identification of the elements, textures, forms that compose the scene. On the other hand, to analyze the level of involvement in the visual field it is important the ‘‘Complexity’’ or the diversity of the scene, the general description of what is happening. ’’People can only hold a certain amount of information in their working memory…Greater the complexity of a scene, the more structure is required…’’ (Kaplan, 1979) On the other hand, to analyze the level of Involvement in the 3D space, Kaplan proposes the factor ‘‘Mystery’’ as ‘‘the opportunity to gather new info in the context of an inferred space’’ when the scene ‘’embodies the attraction, when it involves no presence, but it promises’’. (Kaplan, 1979). The person can be immersed in curiosity, anticipate on the way, and take action to discover. And finally, another important factor for the analysis of the sense of the landscape or 3D scene is related to the ‘‘Legibility’’ like the ‘’Coherence’’ in the visual field, which refers to the structure in space, the organization in the spatial plane that offers conditions for movement. ‘’Perception and Interpretation are inseparable in the perceptual process and are influenced by all these cultural, experiential & individual factors that are supposed to underlie interpretation.’’ (Kaplan, 1979). For that reason, Kaplan is responsible for establishing these four Factors or objective variables: Coherence, Complexity, Mystery and Legibility, which frame his methodology of landscape perception based on the basic human purposes and preferences by focusing on terms of landscape features. These in turn are analyzed at two different levels of interpretation and determine the type of landscape experience. The value of this process is precisely the attempt to objectively approach the analysis through these variables based on human preferences that can be applied to any landscape and complement a purely scientific analysis based on traditional methodologies of measurement and quantification. Finally, when applying this methodology, the previous variables present the selectivity in the visual content, the function of space, the intrinsic relationship with nature, the ease of movement in space or route, which according to Kaplan are variables that facilitate the understanding of the sense of place.

Figure 9. Psycology of perception. Methodology by Kaplan. (Ruiz, 2021)

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The following Theory and Methodology of landscape perception was developed and applied by Lucius Burckhardt (2006), denominated as ‘‘Spaziergangwissenschaft’’ in German or The science of Strollology, Promenadology which is based on the phenomenology, understood as “a learning process of refinement of attention and widening of the horizon for possible assumptions.’’ Schmitz, H. (1969). ‘‘Strollology examines the sequences in which a person perceives his surroundings, and the way is as important as the goal.’’ The idea of a mind walk combines science with a subjective perception which is focused to bring rather the physical experience but seeing the landscape as something that is in the mind. While walking the walker becomes part of the landscape and the landscape becomes part of him. ‘‘On the one hand one is walking through the landscape and on the other hand one gets rid of its thoughts and experiences. That leads to the opportunity for the landscape to come inside of the walker and to become an imprint of the landscape inside of him.’’ (Burckhardt, 2006) Burckhard (2006) affirms that Landscape is in our minds and for that reason is possible to transform it. In his words: “Landscape is a transformative, a creative act’’. From this position, the action of walking is? an analysis method of landscape perception. His interventions were focused on questioning the concept of the “normality of everyday life’’. Moreover, these temporary interventions in the landscape became political and social acts applied in the city. “A concern of the Strollology must be it therefore, at the same time with the perception also the determinateness of our perception forms to stop, so that also new and unusual evaluations of old-known situations become possible.’’ (Burckhardt, 2006). The criticism points out that the perception is controlled by determinations that are worked out from previous perceptions. In this way, the Strollology or Promenadology is an opportunity and an impulse from a planning perspective to recognize the potential of the perception process in order perceive and to think the city and the landscape differently. ‘‘We are the first generation of people for whom the aesthetic experience does not occur automatically. Instead, the place itself must explain its aesthetic intent.’’ (Burckhardt, 2006) Through this planning method and instrument Burckhardt did not just recognize the importance of the cultural imprinted images but rather saw the individual landscape experience as a possibility to deconstruct this assumption. Walking is a means to reflect on this. For other scientist this method could not classify as a quantitative or qualitative method, it is rather an experimental method that moves away from science and towards art that encourages and offers opportunity for creative openness. To this position Burckhardt responds: ‘‘Certain perspectives can probably only be conveyed through art, since the restriction of the gaze is so widespread today that people hardly have the distance to lift it.’’ (Burckhardt, 2006) Within the process of landscape perception, Burckhardt recognizes both the importance of the individual information received from the environment, as well as its interpretation. However, compared to the previous methodology of Kaplan who delves into the interpretation phase through qualitative variables of space, it can be interpreted that Burckhardt’s most important contribution is the fact of questioning what is perceived in the interpretation phase, deconstructing it and projecting alternatives in the environment by socializing it with other individuals. He integrated participation and joint walks as a tool in the interpretation and intervention process. This action allowed him to broaden the perception and experience of the landscape by taking direct action on it through man-made interventions that made another reality visible. For Burckhardt (2006), Strollology, besides being a theory and a methodology of landscape analysis, became a movement 58

of students and citizens interested in walking as a political act that claims the right to the city.

Accordingly, it is indispensable in the context of planning and landscaping today as an impulse for the creation of new landscape images in the city. ‘‘They belong to a whole series of projects that deal with intentionally limited time horizons and are discussed in planning practice under the terms of temporary uses and open spaces, intentionally limited space experiments - here, too, terms are changing.’’ (Schild, 2004) Some places are then waiting to be intervened as a new way to expand the possibilities of shortterm actions that in turn invite and involve interventions at the local scale. ‘‘The intentional limitation is a reaction to and interpretation of processes of change .’’ …‘‘these practices open scope and make niches that are available to them in the actual sense of the word corporeally.’’ (Schild, 2004). It is precisely this aspect of landscape that has been hidden, diminished over other physical and technical aspects. Tessin (2004) describes it as ‘‘the Aesthetics of the Performative’’ which in Strollology has to do with the aesthetic experience of the landscape: the do-it-yourself character is also performative.

We create it for ourselves largely through our own inner, but also through our outer (physical) actions.’’

(Schild, 2004) The above methodologies present the importance of the integration of the process of landscape perception as a fundamental part for the understanding of individual reality, which in turn allows the consolidation of a personal way of perceiving the world through the development and implementation of methods and practices applied in space. Secondly, the development of these methodologies has allowed to complement quantitative methods of landscape analysis, as they have focused on deciphering the qualities of space related to preferences, interests, and human behaviors that in turn have promoted and accompanied processes of social transformation. In this way, the deficit of the discipline becomes evident once again when prioritizing quantitative methods based on a visual hierarchy, which, although objective, also take distance from other possible realities. For this reason, approaching the analysis and understanding landscape perception remains today a transdisciplinary task.

Landscape architecture has a vital integrating role in the urgent update focused on the reinterpretation and creation of new images and experiences of the landscape that balance the relationship of the human being with his body and his environment. It is through the discipline as a mediator between architecture and the city that it is possible to initiate conscious processes of transformation of behaviors and, attitudes. At the same time the adaptation to new needs and conditions of the environment where the body, the senses and emotions have a central role in the development of qualitative and experimental methodologies and interventions that activate both the city and its inhabitants.

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1.3 Conclusions: Key concepts in landscape perception

Based on the above, the question of this academic research-creation focuses on the following question: Which concepts, scenarios and applied practices allow to complement conventional methodologies of landscape analysis to create an integral perception tool to be applied into the landscape experience and into landscape architecture to design more sensitive spaces?

The review of the landscape concept, theories and methodologies along the history was a way to weave personal and professional processes. It is a way to integrate my own individual duality between what I perceive ‘out there and the body that sustains me’’. Delving into the concept of landscape has been a way and an opportunity to understand my own journey. It has been a way to expand my way of perceiving reality, to understand it, to shape my attitude about the world.

The importance of understanding landscape as a transdisciplinary concept allows to embrace and deepen several complementary views in landscape studies. The concept of landscape is a call to integrate, to understand the set of elements of which an image, an experience, a space, a journey, a body is composed. The landscape is a fabric loaded with symbols, textures, colors, sensations, individual and cultural memories. The landscape is a skin that we do not see, but it is the skin with which we see and feel the world.

Here, is where the perception of landscape becomes so relevant. For although, in the evolution of western society, perception is understood mainly through the visual phenomenon, therefore, the landscape is also understood and reduced to an external and distant image.

Thus, as the organ of sight is trained to absorb the greatest amount of external information, it is at the same time the most saturated in the process of perception, being the sense that connects us more quickly and immediately with the world, it is also the most vulnerable to be influenced by distant external stimuli. If the landscape is perceived solely from a two-dimensional visual field, then the process of landscape perception is reduced to observation and a basic response. The automation of this process leads to a disconnection from the body and the other senses, as well as from curiosity and the possibility of a broader understanding of space and the experience of landscape.

This paradigm reflected in the cities evidences the devaluation of the other senses as windows that also integrate perception, which in turn influences the disconnection and ignorance of the body itself, the immediate environment, its qualities, and the multiple possibilities of inhabiting it. In this way, the importance of re-evaluating, reinterpreting, and re-signifying this perspective is highlighted with the objective of understanding that the perception of the landscape encompasses a whole process that involves a system of senses with which the human perceives, interprets through individual and cultural preferences that expand and evolve and allow him to identify the capacity to modify his environment and in the same way the experience of the landscape.

The task of current and future planners should focus on understanding reciprocity in any context to bring alive a more sensitive design that goes beyond the visual through textures, colors, materials and forms that provoke the involvement of the body in space which leads to new sensory embodied experiences, new sensations, emotions, and reactions, that invite to discover through complexity and mystery new functions that integrate a continuous and attentive interaction between the physical, no physical elements of the landscape and those who inhabit it and for those who are ready to discover it.

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