The landscape can be something that you rest your eyes on, something that goes quickly past outside the windscreen or the place for the daily work.
To me, landscape is everything around us – the city, the field and the forest. But what is landscape for you? What does the idea of the landscape stand for? How does our view of the landscape become influenced of the place where we grow up? And the differences between peoples different views of the landscape – what does they depend on?
My point of the view for this paper is that the landscape ideals mostly depend on the landscape where you grow up and that it depends less on the differences between the individuals.
As a landscape architect the idea of the landscape is the essential. The more we learn, the more we realize how complex it is, but deep down we always have our own experiences and memories and that shapes our personalities. This is important to be aware of when that plays an important part in what we create.
My purpose and aim with this paper is to inquire in what way the landscape of the childhood affect on the individuals’ image of the idealistic landscape and through this work get a deeper understanding for this. The sub targets I will reach is about the idea of the landscape, if the childhood landscape is important for the individual landscape ideal and to see if it is possible to draw any conclusions if these landscape ideal is individual or general for those who have grew up in the same place.
The method I have used to inquire the idea of the landscape and people’s relation to this is a mixture of literature studies and qualitative interviews. The interviews have to the half been based up on photographs of different types of landscape characters – field, town, sea, lake, mountain, deciduous forest and pine forest. This has been an important tool to build up a dialogue. What were discussed under the interviews were the interviewed person’s thoughts about the idea of the landscape. They were also asked to tell about there landscape ideal and where they grew up.
The persons I have interviewed are of various age and they come from different parts of Sweden – from the country and from the city. The interviewed has furthermore different conditions when it comes to the awareness and the knowledge about landscapes, when some of them work with it and some of them just live in it.
The result shows that landscape can be many different things; there is at least one definition per individual. It can for example be a geographic designation or be seen in a more figurative way “as something of the viewer spirited, a mental room”. However all the interviewed persons had that in common that they all excluded the city from the idea of the landscape. The love to the landscape, in the meaning nature, can be seen as something typically Swedish and already early in life we direct our emotional engagement through it, that will later in life constitute a part of our cultural identity.
The landscape of the childhood makes deep marks in the memory of the individual and that is important because it gives us a concrete anchorage in ...
