When referring to sustainable landscape design, aesthetic factors are barely considered as one factor into the sustainability discourse. Sustainability stands on ecology, social equity and economy, and the ecological operates in relationship to social justice and capitalist profit, but not aesthetics.

 

    Early landscape architectures have a limited discussion of sustainability. For example, Olmsted considered that the experience of the appearance, both physical and sensory, can altered people’s mental and psychological state. That is to say, beauty is a character in a particular form of appearance. However, according to Meyer, the appearance of designed landscape is more than a visual and ornamental issue. The sustaining beauty can connect to body and poly-sensual experience which lead to recognition, empathy, love, respect and care for the living environment.

Sustainable landscape requires new words as well as new technology. It must do more than function or perform ecologically; must perform socially and culturally. Sustainable landscape design can reveal natural cycles and generate natural process, while intersecting with social routines and spatial practices.

 

    Sustainable landscape design should be form-full, evident and palpable, so that it draws the attention of an urban audience distracted by daily concerns of work and family, or the over-stimulation of the digital word.

    Beauty and aesthetic are crucial to an ecological design agenda. Howett wrote that aesthetics must come to be seen as coextensive with ecosphere, so aesthetic values are connected with ecological ones, aesthetic celebrate motion and change, encompasses dynamic process. The aesthetic is not a timeless one, but can engage all senses. The aesthetic is not simply an act of pleasure but one of transformation. This new forms of beauty can be discovered as new techniques and approaches for reclaiming, remaking and reforming a site’s natural process are invented. This beauty will be found through experience, as well as the making of landscape. They can expand public’s and designers’ conception of sustainability beyond ecological health, social practice and culture sphere.

    Sustaining beauty exploits the aesthetic experience of landscape as a tool in the sustainable design. This beauty is not refer only to pictorial landscapes and pleasant, but to the somatic, sensory experiences of places that can lead to new awareness of the rhythms and cycles necessary to sustain and regenerate life. As Arthur Danto says, “Beauty is at the intersection of sensuousness and truth.”(Danto 1999; 195)

Sustainable beauty is particular, not an emulation of the physical context, but act as a magnifying glass to increase people’s ability to see and appreciate the context. It will be recognized as site-specific design, emerging out of its contest but different form it.

    Sustainable beauty is dynamic and change over time. Beauty is ephemeral, while people move through landscape, the landscape also moves, changes and declines. Since sustainable landscape reveal, enable, repair and regenerate ecological processes, they are temporal and dynamic. Projects that are dynamic rather than static can be designed for disturbance and resilience. Resilience, adaptation and disturbance have replaced stability, harmony, equilibrium and balance as the operative words in ecosystem studies.

 

    For the reciprocity between human or human experience and natural or natural landscapes, according to Meyer, the experience of certain kind of beauty is a necessary component of fostering a sustainable community, and the beauty is a key component in developing an environmental ethic. She also argues that work of landscape architectures is not designed ecosystems or strategies for open-ended process, but “cultural products with distinct forms and experiences that evoke attitudes and feelings through space, sequence and form. Like literature and art, images and narratives, landscape architecture can play a role in building sustained public support for the environment.” Even though design cannot change the society, it can alter an individual’s consciousness and perhaps assist in restructuring his priorities and values.

    As the mass media is saturated with image and discussion of sustainability, media saturation can as easily lead to cynicism as to environmentalism. Designed landscapes need to be constructed human experiences as much as ecosystems. They need to move citizens to action. The designed landscapes of the world take up a small amount of the globe’s surface. Yet they are visited and inhabited by people who have a great impact on the environment in everything they do.

The performance of a landscape appearance, and the experience of beauty, should have as much currency in debates about what a sustainable landscape might, and should, be as the performance of its ecological systems. Such shift can be a tool that jolts our clients and neighbors out of their complacency and inaction, transforming them into a new generation of environmentalist-citizens.

 

    After reading the article carefully, three things impressed me most. Firstly, I often think of aesthetic as a beautiful appearance, the form of the design, but I didn’t realize that esthetic values are connected with ecological values, celebrate motion and change, and encompasses dynamic process. Whenever I find a successful precedence from book or website, the things attract me most would be the beautiful drawings it displayed. So it is quite easy for me to learn the form but I often neglect the intrinsic reasons why the design should become looks like this. Now I learned that the most important things of aesthetic is not the visual, stylistic or ornamental issue; the beauty can lead to new awareness of rhythms and cycles to sustain and regenerate life.

    Besides, Meyer talks about the ecological mimicry of natural process which also inspires me a lot. We often like to create some nature environment in our site to make it more “natural, more ecological”. As a matter of fact, this landscape is not suitable to the site sometimes and cost a lot to maintain. Ecological mimicry of natural process is more important than the mimicry of nature form. In urban where space is limited, nature must be constructed in new ways to deploy technological and ecological knowledge.

    In addition, Meyer says that “even though design cannot change the society, it can alter an individual’s consciousness and perhaps assist in restructuring his priorities and values.” I often think of design as a way to satisfy people’s need, but regard landscape as a tool to arouse people’s awareness of nature seems awesome. As a landscape designer , I should take the responsibility to use design to stimulate people’s consciousness and motivate people’s action to achieve the sustainability of nature.