Rappresentare e comunicare il progetto di paesaggio. I linguaggi visivi per descrivere e concepire i nuovi rapporti con la natura

Representation is an indispensable creative process, able to develop our thinking, making us more aware and weaving a new connection with the landscapes surrounding us. For the landscape architect, representation is fundamental to unravelling all those values that underlie reality. It also allows the development of an analytical, introspective and observational capacity that goes beyond the mental and social structures we have grown up with. Representation means going beyond the visible, overcoming appearances, learning to understand reality in depth and helping others see all that is not immediately obvious. Representation is, therefore, a proper form of communication that translates thoughts into images, managing to develop a landscape sensitivity of which the designer is the spokesman and interpreter. Landscape representation occurs through a phase of observation, which leads to an interpretation and subsequent iconographic restitution. In landscape architecture, there were always the tendency to consider nature systemically as if painting and botany are inextricably linked. As a result, we see the desire to creatively transform nature and establish a new relationship with it. Despite everything, representation is currently experiencing a crisis – especially in the school system where it is not considered enough. Many students have not developed a visual education and often find themselves learning languages as self-taught. In this way, we are losing an essential value because an adequate visual education could lead to original and innovative elaborations, especially if inserted in today's historical, cultural and social context. Instead, representation can be understood as a tool able to stimulate the creativity of designers and students in their creative process. Sensibility, awareness and creativity are the central values of representation, which, thanks to the attention to terrestrial, communicative and personal phenomena, make ecology and landscape expressive complements of the project.