Lost in translation : investigating challenges of picturing landscape experience

Abstract: The versatile qualities of the drawing medium, from analogue sketches to digital production, makes visual depiction a much used tool in architecture and design because of its ability to communicate ideas, proposals and visions. However, depicting landscape experiences in a picture is claimed to be difficult. Even though understanding human experiences of landscape has policy relevance in discourses on sustainability, there is no general strategy for how landscape architects visually represent such aspects of landscape. The objective of the thesis is to draw attention to a challenge landscape architects face when representing a landscape in a picture. This is done by critically exploring the limitations of digital still picture media in relation to how humans perceive landscapes corporally. As a methodological exercise, an otherwise regular visualization process is reversed in order to ”translate” an already lived landscape experience, as opposed to one imagined, into a picture. A theoretical framework drawing upon the philosophical field of aesthetics is constructed using ideas of everyday aesthetics, formalism and environmental aesthetics. What the results are showing is that the two dimensional still picture is rather limited in its ability to express a landscape experience. While depicting appearances in a landscape can be created as views, the still picture hinders a sense of motion, action or response that one otherwise may find in a physical landscape.