Celebrate Aesthetics

[Andrew Garulay, RLA]

I’m not the Andrew who runs Land8. I’m just a fequent visitor.

Sorry for using an example near and dear to you.

I have no arguement of whether green rooftops are beneficial to the environment or not. I just used it as an introduction to the subject of what I feel is a strange phenomena in Landscape Architecture – the need to come up with a higher justification of what we do and a need to distance ourselves from being perceived as decorators.

 

I don’t mean to discredit the many other benefits of what we do, but just to ask why many of us seem to try to run away from celebrating the aesthetics as though it makes us insignificant.

 

My point is that aesthetics are meaningful and valuable contributions on their own and that we should be proud to be associated with them. The dog house looks cool. Used plywood is not a bigger deal than the fact that it looks cool.Dumpster diving is not a higher calling than creating beauty in my opnion. Why do we go so often go far out of our way to make it so?

 

 

 

[nca]

Ive always thought of aesthetic value as a means of fulfilling the innate human desire to ‘anthropmorphize’ our environment and the objects and spaces we occupy everyday. We do this in order to make sense of our world, establish a sense of comfort, and familiarity as well as for more practical reasons like wayfinding, landmarking.

This all ties in to the health, safety, and welfare thing too. I shutter to think what our world would be devoid of a diversity of aesthetic character. I heard an architect explain aesthetics in an exceptionally practical way as well– aesthetics of a given building component, such as a culumn, should speak the language of its function. You can interpret this virtually an infinite number of ways, but they all point to our innate desire to humanize the world around us and the things we create. Its too bad that more ‘laypeople’ dont realize the value, though it affects us a great deal.

[Author]

Posts