Beauty - How Does A Landscape Feel And Why?

'Infrastructure is the most banal and ordinary: "invisible" to our eyes, basic and technical' - Martin Barry

 'Making your unknown known is important' - Georgia O'Keefe

Applying Georgia O'Keefe's belief to infrastructure, how do you then make the unknown known within that? There are a huge amount of opportunities in how we express ourselves and through art understanding how art expresses the culture of the time and how is our body part of a landscape.

Denis Oppenheim: Waiting Room (service station for ideas)

How do you take sexual art and bring it into the landscape? Artists tend to talk about the time of the culture they are in, whereas Oppenheim talks much about space and the conceptual use of space as Igor Mitoraj talks about the human dilemma of today.


Igor Mitoraj: Florence, Italy

Art is the pulse of our societies. 

When Beauty Strikes by David Brooks.
Beauty conquers the deadening aspects of routine; it educates the emotions and connects us to the eternal. By arousing the senses, beauty arouses thought and spirit. 

John O' Donohue book 'Beauty: The Invisible Embrace'
We feel most alive in the presence of the beautiful for it meets the needs of our soul. Without beauty the search for truth, the desire for goodness and the love of order and unity would be sterile exploits. 

The human spirit makes art different from other things; our human spirit is constantly changing. At a cultural level we change, however our basic soul and those primal pieces of us are still constant through time. Looking at art, I wonder what makes a painter paint a landscape and what is it about that landscape that is so beautiful. I think it is those primal pieces.


Matisse: Corsican Landscape. Olive Trees.

Here notice the pathway overlooking water; the water is reflecting light back into you but you are within the protection of this shaded pathway and you have prospect. Reflecting now back to landscape architecture, whilst designing it is important to consider what will make the human experience something that is nourishing and beautiful.

It is important to consider whilst designing that nothing is fixed, everything is going to evolve over time and to understand where the journey is going to take you and having the flexibility to do so.















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