From analysis to design: concepts for landscape conception

Abstract

This paper is the result of a reflexion about public free spaces, regarded as spaces to be thought of and conceived by a project. As we recognize in public free spaces the characteristics of an ever changing entity and based on some pedagogical experiences, we have noticed that students have some recurrent dificulty to overcome obstacles which first appear during the working context analysis prior to the project phase. Therefore, we shall demonstrate how certain concepts which we shall call identifiers of the landscape and landscape quality indicators reveal themselves as important tools to help us to migrate from the analysis phase to the project synthesis. These concepts allow to integrate different space analysis dimensions: morfological, behavioural and sensorial, which are relevant to the aprehension of free public spaces conceived in essence as mutant spaces, and allowing the designer to conduct an interpretative analysis and also to value the intervention contexts.