Abstraction in design is the reduction of complex realities into simplified forms, diagrams, or models to clarify relationships and generate concepts. It suspends detail to reveal structure, making latent patterns perceptible. While abstraction risks detachment from context, it enables new readings and imaginative leaps in the design process. It is both a method of distillation and a medium of projection.
An essay on how we push animals into playing roles — from fables and films to renders of biodiversity and art — tracing how these projections tame, abstract, or estrange, and how synurbists and artists unsettle the human–animal divide.
Exploring the interplay between low-res design and the transience of landscapes, this essay foregrounds the notion of resolution, enquiring about a dynamic interaction with landscapes in flux.
Dr. Jevgeniy Bluwstein, a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern, examines how the reductive Western view of landscapes reinforces colonization through exclusionary conservation practices, focusing on a case study of Tarangire National Park in Tanzania. Introducing the term “landscapism,” meaning the “double movement of colonizing landscapes/landscaping colonies,” Bluwstein offers a critical perspective, advocating for viewing landscapes through a lens of relationality.
In this new series, we wish to highlight the value of models in the widest possible sense, from images to physical representations to diagrams … It’s about models, and modalities and modulations that formed them. It investigates the role of abstraction in representation, how all sorts of models serve as a communication device and also […]
Observed as a recurring phenomenon in nature and universally interpreted, the circle stands as a fundamental geometric shape. It symbolizes various concepts such as infinity and unity, among others. In constructed environments, the focal or central point of a circle can be represented by a tree as the axis mundi, a fire pit or an […]
The production of landscape architecture projects has been in recent years outstanding, and our entire professional community has much to be proud of. But as always, there is a flip side; like in architecture or any design discipline of the globalised and speeding-up world, we are faced with a sea of sameness. Too many buildings […]
»Paradigm shift« has been, for at least a decade now, one of the most used phrases in landscape architecture. We use it mainly to address the need to focus on design with natural processes in mind. This is important as it concerns our core values, attitude towards nature, the understanding of natural processes and the […]
