Representing the Landscape Project: The Creative Process and Design Education

Representation is an indispensable creative process, able to develop our thinking, making us more aware and weaving a new connection with the landscapes surrounding us. For the landscape architect, representation is fundamental to unravelling all those values that underlie reality. It also allows the development of an analytical, introspective and observational capacity that goes beyond the mental and social structures we have grown up with. Representation is, therefore, a proper form of communication that translates thoughts into images, managing to develop a landscape sensitivity of which the designer is the spokesman and interpreter. In landscape architecture, there is always the tendency to consider nature systemically as if painting and botany are inextricably linked. Despite everything, representation is currently experiencing a crisis – especially in the school system where probably it is not considered enough. Instead, representation can be understood as a tool able to stimulate the creativity of designers and students in their creative process. Sensibility, awareness and creativity are the central values of representation, which, thanks to the attention to terrestrial, communicative and personal phenomena, make culture, ecology and landscape expressive complements of the project.