Representation and Landscape Architecture: Toward a New Language?

Landscape architecture has a significant relation with figurative arts since its beginnings. The cultural, aesthetic, stylistic, and artistic contribution to its project is essential. Despite that, it appears we are experiencing a contradiction because, on the one hand, we have excellent examples in which technologies bring notable advances in our culture and in the way of conceiving transformations. It seems that design evolves in a completely new way, made up of the integration of languages, contaminations, and experimentations. On the other hand, however, we are facing a certain flattening in the majority of the works that are produced worldwide. The use of digital programs, if very useful from a technical point of view and proficient in processing and representing large quantities of information, seem encouraging an image-oriented approach rather than a reasoning-oriented approach, producing in most cases a flattening and homologation in the description of projects. If representation is directly responsible for the way we approach transformations, can we talk about a new evolving language? Considering as well the relationship with the European Landscape Convention, the paper aims to reconsider the role of representation, conceived as directly responsible for the way we approach transformations as well as for shaping a way of thinking related to the sensibility toward landscape values. It therefore considers the cognitive aspect of representation as a crucial value for enhancing a more aware culture of landscape architecture.