Map and landscape are two visual strategies of a journey that can take on the formula of maps and landscapes “in the head.” A map is a contribution to the trip. The results of the travel experience are mental maps, maps in the head. They allow to create private topography, and introduce an experience instead of cartographic points. Their purpose remains the same as that of cartographic maps: orientation in space and finding the right way. The subject of a mental map is the surroundings which contain places and landscapes. In the familiar surroundings landmarks are the traces which contain histories, values, experiences and emotions. Walking means reading the traces. The maps in the head are created of traces, sites and landscapes and they outline our routine paths. Such a route means abandoning the point of observation and entering into a landscape in order to reach a place and be in a landscape. However, when we go on the route in familiar surroundings, we are guided not by the mental maps but by experiences that teach us how to find a way. Way finding (Ingold) is a way of moving around the surroundings, where the places mean stories and landscape means values and senses.
On the historical and cultural plane, ruins are a lasting element of our landscape. The attitude towards ruins evolved, yet eventually, the 18th and 19th century “cult of ru-ins” allowed them to be perceived from the perspective of aesthetics, which, associating ruins with the category of the picturesque and the sublime, rendered a new meaning to them. The principal thesis of the article rests on the assumption that the discovery of ruins was possible due to the recognition of the landscape’s aesthetic dimension, while their essence lies in their permeation into the world of nature, which allows them to live a natural time.
The main question of the essay is: do ruins need a new definition? Ruins are not only destroyed architecture, but also everything that has been associated with it in the process of life. From the perspective of the question, the concept of ruins should be understood much broader than just architecturally, and they should be assigned not to the past but to the present, or rather between past and present. If we consider ruins from the standpoint which situates them between culture and nature, there opens up another opportunity: here ruins are found on the juncture of nature and culture, becoming a natureculture hybrid. Here, degradation encompasses the cultural sense in the first place and the expectations it involves, but not from the perspective of nature. The order of nature translates into a new “life” of the ruin, which is attributed a new functionality, subordinated to other – non-anthropocentric – goals and values. Concluding, ruins require a new approach and a new definition that does not condemn them to degradation, but sees hope in the revitalizing forces of nature that ensure for them a new status and a different ontological significance.
This essay offers an analysis of the countryside defined and perceived as an inhabited place but also as a landscape where the visual evolves into a multi-sensory experience. The text is divided into three sections corresponding to three dimensions of the landscape. The aesthetic dimension relates to the visual features of the landscape which determine its aesthetic sense. The participatory dimension comprises the cultural sense that encompasses the meanings inscribed in the landscape as well as the social and historical processes that make the taskspace with its patterns of dwelling activities. The third dimension, whose description is based on Józef Chełmoński’s painting Indian Summer, is represented by the embodied landscape defined by the polysensory features and tactility playing the primary role (the landscape can be ‘touched’). These three dimensions show how the relationship between humans and the landscape can change in two differing situations: when humans adopt a distanced attitude of viewers or that of participants who enter the landscape and shape it not only physically and symbolically, but also in the sensory dimension.
When considering the relationship of the city and nature, I analyse the ways in which nature appears in urbanised space. It may be tentatively presumed that nature appears in the city in three forms. Being an integral decorative and structural element, nature has its “socialized” aspect, subordinated to the urban structure, and “privatised”, for instance in the home gardens. The third form is the live, sometimes even wayward nature, which manifests itself in the forgotten wastelands as well as climatic conditions and elements. Those three forms are confronted with the concept of Gernot Böhme who, giving a short historical outline of the process in which nature penetrated and entered the city tissue, points to two mechanisms he denoted as „bringing nature into the city” and „transferring the city into nature”. Drawing on that proposition, I deliberate how nature exists and manifests itself in the city, especially with respect to the concept of public parks and their rapid development in the 19th century. The “green islands” of city parks, although they seem a space liberated from the city and its processes, are city’s utterly subordinated surrogate of what is natural in the place of residence. In the context of the nature-city relationship, similar observations can be made with regard to E. Howard’s concept of garden cities, based on social eugenics and lifestyle hygiene, which was concerned with lucid structure and functionality of the city rather than building a harmonious relationship between the human settled in the urban space and nature, which ensured its harmonious development. The analysis of city parks and the concept of the garden city permits me to move on to another idea suggested by Böhme – the park city. This is a component of a utopian vision of a new relationship between the city and nature, devised upon the idea of “extended ecological vision of the city” where the city is construed as part of nature. Although Böhme’s suggestion is apparently a compromise, it still does not yield the conditions, in which one would find interpenetration of the city and nature as equal entities. It seems impossible without a limitation or degradation of either sphere.
The paper will focus mainly on the question concerning the possibility of a cultural reading of landscape. A starting point for me will be the historical evolution of the notion of landscape, a new interpretation of which makes it possible to approach it as “cultural landscape.” Showing the possibilities of moving from an aesthetic landscape to a topographic experience, and referring to both aesthetics and humanistic geography, I will illustrate the changes in the very understanding of landscape, the cultural dimension of which has long been examined in reflections on culture. Such an approach to landscape seems to me key to understanding the place of individuals today in the cultural space, in which an examination of the past finds its counterweight in the horizon of the future.
The main purpose of the article is to try and locate the meeting points, but also the substantial discrepancies developed in the course of history, the aesthetics which devises its own notion of landscape and the empirical sciences, humanist geography in particular, which resorts to a broader understanding, incorporating it into the notion of environment. By drawing upon the Renaissance idea of landscape, I point to three factors: landscape painting along with the perspective, theatre and the development of cartography, which significantly contributed to the evolution of an aesthetic notion of landscape. The environmental aesthetics may however play a conciliatory role between the traditional, aesthetic presentation and the standpoint of humanist geography, if one takes into account the assumptions of the latter in terms of shaping the renewed cultural notion of landscape.