Landscape

The landscape is a construct of our perception and a relatively new “invention”. A geographical area becomes a landscape when it is viewed or depicted and, consequently, humankind begins to develop a relationship to it. There are generally aesthetic and emotional connotations in the sense in which the term is most often used; landscape does not leave us unmoved. It constantly awakens longing – a longing that can often acquire a tinge of melancholy. During the era of Romanticism the attraction of picturesque nature as a driving force occupied the foreground and grew stronger with the development of industrialism and the massive interventions in natural space that went along with. In his book “Helvetische Meliorationen – Die Neuordnung der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse an der Linth 1783-1823” historian Daniel Speich uses the example of the Linthwerk to describe how the attitude to nature radically changed in the late 18th century. Whereas previously flooding and other natural catastrophes were accepted as God-given, in constructing the Linth Canal people took their fate in their own hands. This structure of the century not only changed the lives of the local population, but also significantly altered the landscape. What at that time was right and necessary for survival is viewed today in a more critical way, but not without ambivalence. Sprawl is accepted, while so-called intact landscapes are generally viewed through tinted glasses. Consequently infrastructure elements are swallowed up for dozens of kilometres in tunnels or between noise protection walls. But as a result the “protected” landscape vanishes from view. Permanent change, which is the theme of this issue, emerges as one of the few constants in the perception of landscape. A series of paired images that show differently justified changes to the landscape speak a clear language. One contribution is devoted to the technology of land surveying which provides the basis for many human transformations of the landscape. In the 19th century daring topographers and surveyors combed every Alpine valley and scaled innumerable Alpine peaks, often accompanied by the distrust of the local populace. We then take a look at the Gotthard region, which more perhaps than any other landscape in Switzerland has been affected by constant reshaping, we switch to the scale of the "Birsstadt" agglomeration, in which a new concept for open space links the remaining green areas with each other and then, at the micro-level of the settlement in the urban context, examine the form of everyday green spaces in housing. Finally, a look at Holland opens up unsuspected perspectives of an architecture that, like the polder areas wrested from the sea, tells about landscape as an artefact.

The editors