The challenges and opportunities faced by Chinese landscape architecture specialty from the development of world landscape architecture specialty

The social development and reform constantly challenge the development of landscape architecture, but also provide opportunities. Agricultural age, industrial age and post-industrial age all provide power for the expansion of garden professional field, the formation of theoretical system and the reform of evaluation index, so that the gardens of different times have their distinctive characteristics. At present, China is in an unprecedented urbanization process, modern Chinese landscape architecture major must face significant practical problems, put down the burden of small-scale garden thinking, to a broader space. On the basis of the existing professional fields, we should strive to play a leading role in the overall planning and design of residential communities, the planning of natural protected areas, the overall landscape and ecological planning of urban and rural areas, territorial planning, urban design, and the planning and design of tourist destinations, so as to become the backbone of maintaining the natural ecological process and coordinating the relationship between man and nature.

"Let me tell you, it's impossible to live in front of our house," said one retired worker recently as Peking University researchers investigated why people hike to Fragrant Hills. Our street used to be quiet and airy, but it was lined with big locust trees... Now the sidewalk has become a small workshop, a small factory, all kinds of strange smells and loud sawing aluminum alloy sound, make us unbearable, small tractors burning diesel oil, putting out black smoke, like squid through our door... It was so unbearable that we had to go to xiangshan where the air was good for half a day or 2-3 hours."

China's unprecedented urbanization process has led to the rapid deterioration of the living environment. In contrast, "landscape city", "garden city" and "ecological city" are particularly desirable, and their slogans are particularly inspiring. And at the same time, professional Chinese modern landscape architecture theory is almost zero, appreciate the theory about Chinese classical gardens, by contrast, has a lot of), in this situation, China's urban landscape construction activities is a great danger lurks, namely blindness ─ ─ looked in business, with personal fantasies to build "garden city", And to guide large-scale garden construction activities. The lessons of history are too numerous to enumerate, and the so-called "beautification" and "greening" activities are ironic. The harsh environmental reality makes the major of modern Landscape architecture in China face severe challenges and rare opportunities. How to establish its own activity space and development direction in the unprecedented period of urban and social change has far-reaching historical significance for the development of the major.

The following will discuss the characteristics of modern landscape architecture from the general relationship between social change and the development of landscape architecture, and analyze the current situation and potential opportunities of modern Chinese landscape architecture.

I. Social change and the development of landscape architecture

Different stages of social development, there are different landscape and landscape professional, reflected in different service objects, different transformation and creation objects, different guiding ideology and concept, of course, there are different designers. The following is a systematic analysis of the characteristics of gardens in agricultural times, industrial times, especially post-industrial times, to discuss the development of modern Chinese gardens from this starting point.

1. Smallholder economy and craft beauty

The social characteristic of agricultural age is under the small-scale peasant economy is feeding an aristocracy, they no longer weather, was full of terror from the natural landscape, appreciate the natural beauty and farming landscape of the United States, and thus stimulate their reappearance and the creation of this beautiful desire, this is the landscape and garden art, including the landscape and pastoral, and synthesis of garden art now. Landscape agrees with Scenery at this time, namely "Landscape" in China, which is in the sense of visual aesthetics. Therefore, gardening is making beautiful scenery, beautiful countryside. Its users are of course a small number of nobles, so the creation of the garden and courtyard in the wall. Of course, according to the thickness of the financial resources, there are large and small gardens.
The creator of the garden is ultimately the master rather than the professional gardener, so there is "seven points master, three points craftsman" said. Gardeners are artisans only, and have no independent personality. Even Renaud or Ji Cheng are just senior craftsmen who listen to the emperor and nobles. As a result of the spatial differentiation of landscape on earth and the adaptation of agricultural activities to nature, the spatial differentiation of landscape style and different aesthetic standards have emerged with the aim of reproducing landscape beauty. Including the formal beauty of western gardens and the poetic and painting of Chinese gardens. But no matter what the differences are, they are all characterized by aestheticism. The Old Summer Palace and Versailles, which appeared almost at the same time, are typical examples of this.

Although the aristocrats, as garden owners and designers, got rid of farming activities, they did not get rid of the sense of smallholders. For example, the sense of territory is reflected as walls and fences in gardens. Crops consciousness - - all non crops must be weeds, all non beneficial insects will be a scourge, will remove it and then fast; The sense of good farmer (herdsman) -- intensive cultivation, the pursuit of horticultural perfection, in the garden for the renovation of hedges, patterned flower beds and so on; The sense of showing off -- pomp, grandeur and comparison, etc.

Two major industries and the regeneration of human body and mind

The industrial revolution originated in Britain and flourished in America. The emergence of the working class as a result of large-scale industrial production, the "city slickers" were no longer the exclusive preserve of a few aristocrats and courtiers, and the perception of the beauty of nature and the agricultural landscape was no longer the exclusive preserve of a few aristocrats. What's more, people living in cities need a space for Recreation. The creation object of landscape architecture major is park and leisure green space. It is created for beauty and, more importantly, for the physical and mental regeneration of urban residents. In the words of Olmsted: At the same time, their health and happiness are increasingly being undermined by something more serious, and there is nothing that they can do about it except to balance the circulation of the blood and relax the brain through sunshine and gentle exercise, so that people can regenerate and gain health and joy (see Charles, 1995, p43). And the garden space that can give full play to this kind of physical and mental regeneration function is the stretch of pasture landscape. The undulating terrain, grass, trees and water call for the participation and integration of human body and mind. This is known as a park-like landscape. Studies on landscape perception and cognitive science believe that parklike landscapes contain rich spatial features of "looking-shelter" and "explorable", thus arousing human nature and making physical and mental well-being (Appleton, 1975; Kapplan, 1982, 1985).

An important breakthrough in the development history of landscape architecture in the industrial era is the emergence of professional landscape designers, whose representative figure is Olmsted, the father of American landscape architecture. Olmsted started a professional landscape design practice in the United States in 1865, after completing the design of New York's Central Park with his partner Vaux (1858-61). Olmsted insisted on differentiating his profession from the traditional "Gardening" and called it "Landscape Architecture". Call yourself a Landscape Architect, not a Gardener. At the beginning of this century, he initiated the major of Landscape Architecture in Harvard University. From then on, professional designers who serve the society, have independent personality, and create for life and career, rather than a few vassals of aristocrats. Landscape architecture, as a discipline, has become the mother and cradle of American urban planning and design. After the course of landscape planning and design was created in Harvard in 1900, the course of urban planning did not appear until 1909, and urban planning was officially separated from landscape planning and design and became a new major in 1923.

Thanks to the practice and professional education of Olmsted and his collaborators established in Harvard University, landscape architecture in the United States was initially positioned in a wide range of activities, including urban park and green space system, urban and rural scenic road system (Parkway) planning and design, residential area, campus, Planning, design and management of property development, farms and national parks, and further extending to the landscape design of amusement parks and highway systems. The positioning of American landscape architecture in this period laid a solid foundation for the development of landscape architecture in the future, so that the profession of landscape architect was no longer gardener and artisan, but the planning designer and creator of living environment.

Due to the understanding of the relationship between park green space and urban residents' physical and mental health and regeneration, urban green area and per capita green area are often used to measure urban environmental quality. However, if we unilaterally pursue these indicators and forget the functional meaning behind them, landscape architecture will lose its development direction.

Postindustrial and overall human ecosystem sustainability

After the Second World War, industrialization and urbanization in the West reached a climax, and cities spread like malignant tumors on the organism of the earth. Park green space is not enough to improve urban environment, especially to the post-industrial era, fear of city combined with the development of transportation and communication and change the way of industrial production to promote suburbanization malignant development, make the earth landscape was cut limb from broken, threats to natural ecological processes, biological diversity in disappear, continuity and at the same time, the survival of mankind itself under threat. The resulting internationalization has destroyed the cultural diversity developed over thousands of years and also submerged the diversity of human adaptation to nature, which also threatens the sustainability of human survival (Gadgil., 1987). Therefore, the service object of landscape architecture is no longer limited to the physical and mental health and regeneration of a group of people. It is the survival and continuity of humanity as a species, which in turn depends on the survival and continuity of other species and the preservation of multiple cultural genes. The preservation of natural processes and other life is ultimately the preservation of human survival. As the research object of landscape architecture, it has been extended to the Land complex, which is a Mosaic of multiple ecosystems (Land Mosaic, Forman, 1995) formed by the interaction between human cultural circle and natural biosphere. It is an urgent problem for landscape architecture to harmonize the relationship between cultural circle and biosphere at different spatial scales. I. cHarg was the first to take up the banner of ecological planning. His Design With Nature (1959) marked that the landscape architecture major bravely undertook the important task of human overall ecological environment planning and Design in the post-industrial era. It greatly expanded the activity space of landscape architecture on the basis of Olmsted. Ecological planning or human ecological planning (McHarg, 1981) has become the most important revolution in the history of planning in this century.

McHarg, contrary to the previous practice of functional zoning in land and urban planning, emphasizes that land use planning should follow the inherent value and natural process of nature, namely the suitability of land. Therefore, McHarg improved the planning methodology with factor stratification analysis and map overlay technology as the core, which McHarg called "Layer-cake Model" (1981). For nearly half a century, the naturalistic design model has built a bridge between ecology and human activity, and made the landscape architecture profession a mainstay in the environmentalist movement.

However, people soon found the disadvantages of the thousand-layer cake planning mode, the most prominent of which were two points. First, this mode only emphasized the vertical natural process, that is, the ecological relationship occurring within a certain landscape unit, while ignored the horizontal ecological process, that is, the ecological flow occurring between landscape units. It is based largely on the "survey first, plan later" model of Eliot, the early Harvard landscape educator, or even earlier Pattrik Geddes (Faludi; 1978, Steiner et al. 1987), is the extension of the ecological idea that organisms, especially plants, adapt to the environment. Therefore, McHarg strongly emphasized the vertical process between geology - soil - hydrology - vegetation - animals and human activities and land use in a landscape unit. Second, the thousand layer cake model emphasizes the natural determinism of human activities and land use planning, and planning is to adapt to the natural process in addition to understanding the natural process. This is not realistic in general. The landscape planning process is a defensible process, rather than a process of natural determinism (Steinitz, 1985, Faludi, 1987), which must consider the behavior of decision-makers. Not to mention nature has been cut apart by human beings.

With the development of Landscape Ecology, the research on horizontal ecological process is gradually deepened. Landscape Ecology emphasizes the interrelationship between horizontal ecological process and Landscape pattern, and studies the spatial pattern and inter-ecosystem between multiple ecosystems, including material flow, species flow, Interference diffusion, etc. (Forman and Godron,1986; Formn, 1995). And a basic model, "patch-corridor - matrix", was used to analyze and change the landscape, based on which the landscape ecological planning model was developed.

Decision centered planning and planning mode can be defensive thought is at another level, the development of modern landscape planning theory, the natural decision planning focus back to the people-centered, but at a higher level to go to harmonize the relationship between human and environment, and the relationship between different land use, in order to maintain the health of human and other life and continue.

So, in this era, the role of landscape planner is humorous and conductor, and his service object is human and other species, he the object of research and creation is a complex landscape, its guiding theory is theory of human development and the environment sustainable ecological system science and the whole of humanity, including the human ecology and landscape ecology. The evaluation criteria include continuity and integrity of landscape ecological processes and patterns, biodiversity and cultural diversity and their implications. The living environment to be created is a Sustainable landscape (Thayer, 1993).
Therefore, in different times, due to different social needs and natural and social problems, landscape architecture and landscape professionals are faced with different tasks, objects and guiding theories. What is the urgent need for the study of landscape architecture in Chinese society? Is "51" square patterned flower beds? Is it the flowers in the streets of National Day? A meadow in a park surrounded by barbed wire? Poetic pavilions or rockeries?

Second, the challenges and opportunities faced by Chinese landscape architecture

1. The demand for landscape architecture in China's realistic society

At present, China is in a social period in which industrialization and post-industrialization coexist. Needless to say, the urban and environmental problems that occurred in the United States and other developed countries in the 1950s and 1960s have unfortunately been repeated in China, and they are even more serious. The urban and environmental problems faced by Chinese landscape architecture profession can be summed up as follows: