HEDGES

The word "hedge" appears to stem from the Old English word "HEGG" which is believed to be derived from the Anglo-Saxon words ;

HAEG - hurdle 

HECG - territorial boundary dead or planted

HEGA - living border boundary 

1

Hedges are a bordering and design tool. They enclose and subdivide fields, orchards, yards, parks and gardens. They form vegetative edges, topographic spaces, garden rooms, gateways, screens, enclosures, foci and forms within the landscape.

The term Hedgerow used to refer to 2 hedges running side by side separated by a track or pathway. These hedgerows served 2 traditional purposes , that of being a barrier to livestock and as a means of marking out territory or property boundaries. The term however tends to be used these days to describe a hedge of shrubs and occasional trees that create a border between fields and gardens or to create a privacy wall for a homeowner.

An extreme privacy hedge

www.dicts.info/img/ud/hedge.jpg

It is believed that the Romans may have first planted hedges in Britain but most of the few ancient hedges date from Saxon times, making some of them 1000 years old. The Saxons organized ‘strip farming’ in which each community of people would have a field which was divided into strips separated by grass verges. Each strip was one furrow long (one furlong or 201 metres). People were given a number of strips to farm by the lord of the manor. This system changed in the late Middle Ages when landlords wanted to put boundaries around their property, so they enclosed their land with walls or hedges. Enclosure Acts in the 18th and 19th centuries allowed farmers to put more hedges round their fields and most of Britain’s 300, 000 miles or so of hedges date from this time.

“During the 16

th

and 17

th

centuries, dense hedgerow patterns provided shelter for persecuted Protestants in France and Holland to organize their clandestine religious meetings. During the WW II the dense bocage in Normandy caused the invading Allied forces much trouble in advancing to conquer the Nazi regime.”

2

In the past hawthorne (

Crataegus monogyna)

was the most popular choice for hedgerows in the ancient woodland for marking territory or as barriers to contain livestock. Nowadays hedges are commonly constructed of various plant and non-plant material for more ornamental purposes yet still as a privacy tool.  Boxwood, Privet, Beech, Cherry Laurel, Hedge Maple, Hornbeam, Holly and Yew are but a few of the more desirous plants used currently for hedges.

 Designer Luciano Giubbilei's masterful use of hedges at a Chelsea Flower Show garden in 2009

1. Hedgerows, Hedges and Verges of Britain and Ireland

2. Natural History Museum of Britain. www.nhm.ac.uk/index.html

*all photos copyright Todd Haiman unless otherwise noted

LOST LANDSCAPE

The Catskill Mountains and Hudson River Valley in New York State were the inspiration for a group of painters in the early to mid 1800’s - The Hudson River School.  It is through their eyes that we have a sense of that original landscape.  As development and climate change continue to change our landscape it is their depiction that we consider an accurate indication of that virginal world.

Sketching outdoors, these artists paid careful attention to the correct rendering of the minute details of the landscape, although they were not afraid to literally move mountains in order to create an effect that would fit their sense of the “Picturesque.”

While the great European landscape painters traditionally inspired them, the Hudson River artists, were in search of an art form that would allow them to express and celebrate that which set America apart from Europe. And they found it in the paintings that captured the grandeur of the American Landscape.

“Kindred Spirits” is perhaps one of the best known of these paintings.  The painting by Asher Durant, depicts his friend, the deceased painter Thomas Cole and the poet William Cullen Bryant standing on a rocky ledge overlooking the Catskills

It is titled after a phrase in a Keats sonnet and has long been considered one of the finest examples of Hudson River School painting. It was commissioned by Jonathan Sturges, one of Durand's most important patrons, as a gift for Bryant, and it remained in the Bryant family until his daughter, Julia, donated it to the New York Public Library early in the 20th century. The painting’s idealized composition brings together several sites, including the Clove of the Catskills, Kaaterskill Falls and Fawn’s Leap, in a way that is not geographically possible.

The author Bill Bryson describes his affection for the painting....“It shows two men standing on a rock ledge in the Catskills in one of those sublime lost world settings that look as if they would take an expedition to reach, though the two figures in the painting are dressed, incongruously, as if for the office, in long coats and plump cravats.  Below them, in a shadowy chasm, a stream dashes through a jumble of boulders.  Beyond, glimpsed through a canopy of leaves, is a long view of gorgeously forbidding Blue Mountains. To right and left, jostling into frame, are disorderly ranks of trees, which immediately vanish into consuming darkness.  I can’t tell you how much I would like to step into that view. The scene is so manifestly untamed, so full of an impenetrable beyond, as to present a clearly foolhardy temptation.  You would die out there for sure -- shredded by a cougar or thudded with a tomahawk or just left to wander to a stumbling, confounding death.  You can see that at a glance.  But never mind.  Already you are studying the foreground for a way down the stream over the steep rocks and wondering if that notch ahead will get you through to the neighboring valley. Farewell, my friends. Destiny calls.  Don’t wait supper.”1

Bill Bryson continues to jest about the scene.  He questions how much artistic license these painters took with replicating the scenery --  “Who, after all, is going to struggle with an easel and campstool and box of paints to some difficult overlook, on a hot July afternoon, in a wilderness filled with danger, and NOT paint something exquisite and grand?”

This painting hung in New York Public Library for decades until several years ago, when desperately needing funding, the Library sold it at auction to Walmart heiress, Alice Walton for 35 million dollars to display at her new museum. 

New York art lovers reacted with outrage  seeing it as a civic landmark. “60 Minutes” TV Correspondent Morley Safer commented that the “grand inherent irony is that all that Wal-Mart money was gleaned from the systematic destruction of the very American landscape Ms. Walton so expensively celebrates.”

 Thomas Cole "Sunrise in the Catskill Mountains"

Frederick Church "Morning Looking East"

1. A Walk in the Woods: Bill Bryson, Broadway Books 1998

INSPIRED LANDSCAPE

The Marquis Rene-Louis de Girardin (1735–1808) was a French writer and designer of landscapes, who had inherited a significant fortune from his grandfather, the chief tax collector for Louis XIV. He saw several English landscape gardens during his travels in the early 1760s, and in 1766 settled at Ermonville in Oise, France, where he laid out his influential landscape garden.  He was strongly aware of the importance of associations in gardens, used to trigger memories, stimulate ideas, and create a narrative.

Girardin's textbook on gardening,

De la composition des paysages

(On the Composition of Landscapes) was published in 1777 and republished in 1805, under the name René Louis Gerardin. "Of the power of landscapes over our senses, and as a result upon our soul" was his pre-eminent view on the purpose of gardens.

"The composition of landscapes," he wrote, "can open the way to the renewal of the moral principles of the nation." He wrote in the last chapter, "...If you want to achieve true happiness, you must always seek the simplest means and the arrangements closest to those of nature, because only those are true and will have a long-lasting effect."

Girardin's garden at Ermonville stands as the most prominent example of a Rousseau-inspired garden. In his novel "La Nouvelle Helois" Rousseau imagined a perfect landscape, where people could be true to themselves. This imaginary garden became a model for French landscape gardens. Girardin made the park at Ermenonville a living illustration of Rousseau's ideas; making carefully constructed landscapes, like paintings, designed to invite the visitor to take long walks and to feel pure with simple emotions. The paths were designed to follow the hillside paths, climbing up and down, to give various views and perspectives, from the shadows of groves of trees which then extend into sunlight, meandering to let the viewer delight in the scene from different angles and light. Girardin said that gardens should be composed of a series of scenes, like paintings. Each designed to be seen from a different point of view and at different times of day to achieve an emotional effect. Some scenes should evoke solitude, others the pleasures of bucolic life, others the ideals of harmony and innocence. These scenes would be discovered by following a winding path through the garden, with a series of different views coming as surprises.

It is commonly known that his friend, Jean-Jacque Rousseau died on his estate in 1778, and was buried on the

Île des Peupliers

in the

Élysée

that Girardin had created. Surrounding Rousseau's cenotaph is a circle of poplar trees set upon a tiny island.  According to landscape historian Elizabeth Rogers, "Imitations of Rousseau

’

s gravesite became one of the great garden design flourishes of the late eighteenth century."

Isle of the Poplars/an homage to philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau

As an aside to these Rousseau-inspired landscapes, Christophe Girot* recounts an essay by French historian Michel Conan on the "static foundations of landscape scenography". He argues that the "art of the picturesque forwarded a static understanding of landscape where movement was absent, or not acknowledged. The picturesque landscape was experienced rather as a succession of immobile scenes as in the example of the romantic promenade of Ermonville.... the voyage through the landscape could only be understood as a succession of immobile scenes lending themselves to the memory and aesthetic interpretation."  Girot then asks us to review these spaces in-between the scenes of landscape beauty... "the black holes" and reconsider their value to us.

*"Vision in Motion: Representing Landscape in Time", The Landscape Urbanism Reader, 2006

**Map of Ermonville: 

Ermenonville : le parc Jean-Jacques Rousseau

TABULA RASA

The philosopher John Locke in his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” stated that the human mind at birth is a complete, but receptive, blank slate ( “a scraped tablet” or “tabula rasa” as it is literally defined ) upon which experience imprints knowledge. Anotherwords, our entire resource of knowledge is gradually built up from experience or sensory perceptions of the outside world.

There is also the architectural or landscape “tabula rasa” modernist theory that everything must be original, arising from a clean slate.  This was advocated by Le Corbusier. Knock down the old, and in with the new.

In her excellent text on “Form and Fabric in Landscape Architecture”, Catherine Dee states four reasons for the inappropriateness of the tabula rasa approach. With the tabula rasa approach there is an ignorance of sustainability, an absence of context, precedent and history to the site.  There is a lack of sensitivity to the ecological value of established vegetation and lastly, it ignores the uses and meaning of the site for the local people.

The question arises philosophically...Can you really begin anew without some evidence of the past? All things are created in context with the past. All creations come with a precedent, a history, which in some way influences the next recreation, generation or iteration.

In Ian Mcharg’s seminal text “Design with Nature”, he argued against the arrogant and destructive heritage of urban-industrial modernity, a style which he described as "Dominate and Destroy."  He sought to interweave the worlds of the human and the natural, and sought to more fully and intelligently design human environments in concert with the conditions of setting, climate and environment.

At Jacob Javits Plaza in Lower Manhattan is a public space that has evolved through four, now five iterations in the last thirty years. Originally an open plaza, Richard Serra's "Tilted Arc" was installed and became a lightning rod in commissioning site-specific art.  After court-ordered removal, traditional benches and planters were installed until Martha Schwartz redesigned the space. While many praised it's design, others were radically opposed to it.  Now it is in the process of being demolished and Van Valkenburgh Associates design is currently under construction.  While all designs were site specific, could we consider the treatment of this landscape as “

tabula rasa?"

http://www.archidose.org/writings/javits.html

2012 design by MVV Associates, © MVVA

THE FATHER OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN IN THE UNITED STATES

A. J. Downing (1815-1852) popularized landscape gardening among America’s growing middle and upper middle classes through his aesthetic sensibilities.  He wrote the first American treatise on landscape gardening -- A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America

(1841), which established him as a national authority on that subject and went through numerous editions (the last was printed in 1921).   Following British models, he categorized landscape design styles as “The Beautiful” (calm and serene) and “The Picturesque” (dramatic), with the style to be determined by the existing landscape context. He was the first great American exponent of the English or natural school of landscape gardening as opposed to the Italian, Dutch and French artificial schools.

He was an advocate for the creation of public parks in America and the health value of interaction with the natural world. He stood for the simple, natural, and permanent as opposed to the complex, artificial and ephemeral.

As editor of the Horticulturist and the country's leading practitioner and author, he promoted a national style of landscape gardening that broke away from European precedents and standards. Like other writers and artists, Downing responded to the intensifying demand in the nineteenth century for a recognizably American cultural expression.

Lindley's Horticulture by A.J. Downing. Originally published 1852. (Author's copy)

Believing that architecture, too, needed to conform to site character, he brought architect Calvert Vaux from England in 1850 to assist him in his practice, including the design of Matthew Vassar’s estate, “Springside”, at Poughkeepsie, NY. (Six years later, Vaux named his second child Downing Vaux in tribute to his mentor.) Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., a friend and colleague, was one of the many visitors whom Downing entertained at his villa on the Hudson River at Newburgh, NY. Downing’s influence is strongly reflected in the Olmsted and Vaux design for Central Park,

Downing spent his life in the spectacular natural setting of the Hudson River valley. Through his professional practice, travels, reading, and extensive correspondence, he gradually became aware of the individual and collective needs that he served. Landscape gardening, Downing came to feel, had to respect not only a client's desires and means, but also the nation's republican values of moderation, simplicity, and civic responsibility.

While influenced by European, especially British, writers Archibald Alison, Uvedale Price, Humphrey Repton and John Claudius Loudon) he recognized that America should not emulate European gardening styles.  First, Americans should make use of American material, hence his interest in all native American species.  Second, America, was not aristocratic and should celebrate it republicanism, hence his designs for middle class and a few lower class cottages and gardens in his architectural work.  He also understood that his country was young and still rapidly expanding and that horticulture could serve as a way to attach the white settlers to their new home.  Finally, he recognized two important developments in horticulture: the rise of scientific inquiries and the development of a class of professional landscape designers/gardeners who were artisans, not artists.

Recognized as the foremost U.S. landscape designer of his day, he was commissioned in 1851 to lay out the grounds for the Capitol, the White House, and the Smithsonian Institution. His death at 36 in a steamboat accident prevented him from seeing his plans to completion.

An urn at the Smithsonian Institution commemorates his work. (Images ©Smithsonian Institute)

Downing is imminently responsible for Central Park.  He called for and politicked for the creation of a great park in New York City worthy of the city.  If it were not for his untimely death he presumably would have been chosen to design Central Park.  Instead, his suddenly uncoupled partner Calvert Vaux would then join with Frederick Law Olmsted in the creation of countless notable landscapes.

RONDEL

The formal layout of the beloved

Sissinghurst

rose garden includes a central yew hedge planted in a circle with four tall yew-lined paths leading away from it.  This is known by it’s creator Vita Sackville-West as “the Rondel”.

 Sissinghurst 

photos: ©toddhaiman2011

Outside the Rondel, there are low, neatly clipped box hedges separating huge beds filled with roses.  The rondel assists in masking an a geometric garden layout whereby the two garden paths and axes do not cross at perfect right angles.  Some say a brilliant move by the designer correcting the obtuse positioning of the buildings they connect with, others claim that this was an error by a young worker on the estate who miscalculated while laying out the path.  No matter, the end result all agree is breathtaking.

Vita Sackville-West pays homage to the surrounding countryside, which is dotted with oast houses by referring to this garden structure as a rondel. Rondel is an old Kentish word employed for the shape of the hop-drying floor in the

oast-houses

, where hops lay in mounds.

Oast houses are buildings designed for drying or

“kilning” hops as part of the beer making or brewing process.

  They are true examples of vernacular architecture -- many of which have over time have been converted to homes. (Vernacular architecture is a term used to categorize methods of construction, which use locally available resources and traditions to address local needs and circumstances. Additional examples would be igloos and log cabins. Vernacular architecture tends to evolve over time to reflect the environmental, cultural and historical context in which it exists.)

Oast house photos, wikipedia

In “Sissinghurst, Portrait of a Garden”, the author Jane Brown believed that this hedged circle in yew is

“of Italian Inspiration.”

Rondels are also considered in architecture a circular window opening or the beadmolding of a capital.   But, upon further research the word “rondel” is either from the old French or old English word “roont”, meaning round or small circle. Present inspiration for the rondel can be found in the London Underground as its logo.  Past history also finds it as the logo for the RAF.

London Underground logo, wikipedia

Castlerigg stone circle/ wikipedia

Excuse the pun, but “coming full circle”, a roundel enclosure is a type of pre-Christian and prehistoric enclosure found in Europe.  Stone circles. Timber circles,

prehistoric earthworks

enclosures are all examples of this.  Stonehenge, a megalithic structure of stones is recently

believed by some to have had multiple rondel hedges surrounding it thousands of years ago

.

GREAT GARDENS

A garden is…

"Oh I have wordy definitions of a garden, al right.  Lots of them.  I even like one– particularly the one about a garden’s being sculpture.  Not ordinary sculpture, of course,  Not the kind of sculpture that someone makes in a studio and then you walk around it and admire it from all the different angles, and mostly you have to think away everything else, to see what the sculpture had in mind.   I don’t mean that kind of sculpture.  A garden is much bigger.  Bigger in size, at least.  You can walk thru it.  You are inside something.  You have to feel you are inside something, even though you are out of doors, instead of being outside of something trying to think everything else away.  A garden is sculpture from any place you are in it, even while you are in motion, and there’s nothing outside that has to be thought away because that’s part of it too –just as you are." -James Rose,

Gardens Make Me Smile 1953

To paraphrase Rose -- the trouble is that even the best definition of a garden through a photograph, video or illustration is not the thing itself –  it is not the experience. 

James Rose w. design maquette, jamesrosecenter.org

Isamu Noguchi w. playground maquette, Isamu Noguchi Foundation

Isamu Noguchi has stated that “many landscapes are intentionally designed to communicate via a range of senses, which are absent when presented only two dimensionally. Does a two dimensional photo, illustration or painting capture the essence of a rose garden in June.

You can visualize it, but can you smell it?” 1. Philosopher David Hume writes that the sense of experience, the perception of space through our “visceral interaction with the world forms our ideas about it. Like other art forms landscapes don’t always carry literal messages, but can trigger sensations.”  

Experiences based upon two-dimensional representations do not tell us much about first hand experiences with three dimensional landscapes and the specific attributes of these experiences.

Many preference studies are based upon peoples experiences with two-dimensional pictures rather than experiences with actual landscapes, so they omit powerful dimensions of landscape experience, such as thermal comfort, smell sound, and tactile sensation.

Children experiencing Charles Jenck's Garden of Cosmic Speculation (Picassa.com)

Back to James Rose..

“A great garden is more like silence that like speech. It’s the luxury of not saying something.  It’s the “something” between the lines.”

1. Isamu Noguchi, A Study of Space, Ana Marie Torres. Monacelli Press, 2000

FOUNDING FATHERS, FOUNDING GARDENERS

In the summer of 1776 the thirteen colonies declared independence.

30,000 British troops were approaching on warships, about to invade New York Harbor in the “Battle of New York” - George Washington sits down, takes his time and writes a letter to his estate gardener requesting him to plant a garden of native species only.  Shunning the past and as Andrea Wulfh calls it “horticultural independence.”  

Washington decided that Mount Vernon was to be an American garden where no English trees would burgeon in american soil.

By creating a landscape exclusively designed with plants and trees native to America, Washington was making a bold statement—a botanical declaration of independence from England.

(George Washington) "The Farmer", 1853 lithograph, The Granger Collection, NY

In Andrea Wulf’s,

“Founding Gardeners”

she argues that the economic importance of agricultural crops, self-sufficiency and self-dependence and  a passion for nature, plants and agriculture was interwoven in the growth of the United States in its formative years – an ideological level of America as an agrarian republic. A national identity of nature was being invested with patriotic meaning. The “Founding Fathers” of the United States (George Washington,

Thomas Jefferson

, John Adams and James Madison) made everlasting political statements within the garden.

In 1786  Jefferson was American minister in France stationed in Paris, John Adams was minister to Britain stationed in London. The time is just after the Revolutionary War, when the United States was severely in debt after the war and looking to create trade alliances.  The British were not receptive to trade agreements with the burgeoning country that had just gained its independence, and could only hope for an economic collapse and Britain could perhaps reclaim them.

Adams asks Jefferson for assistance in negotiating with the Brits, cause the Brits truly despise the Americans at this point. This proves unsuccessful.  Looking for a respite, they adventure on a garden tour… traveling many miles a day visiting multiple gardens a day, taking notes, speaking with owners, their estate managers, gardeners.   Among the many highlights of the trip was Stowe, originally created by Lord Cobham. Jefferson and Adams appreciated the unstylized look of these new landscapes with unclipped trees, sinuous paths, irregular groupings of plant material, “naturally shaped” ponds and lakes. What struck them (and resonated with them) was the “liberation” of rigid landscape design, geometrical patterns formerly associated in with Louis XIV’s absolute and despotic rule, symbolic within the French landscape.  Hereupon “the irregularity of nature had become a symbol of liberty.”

Monticello 2011, still a working farm 

image: Monticello.com

Most significant was the consideration of an ornamental farm, a “

femme ornee

” -- witnessed at Woburn and elsewhere.  A style of garden that combined the beauty of a pleasure ground with the agricultural elements of a working farm.  This played right into Jefferson’s belief of a self-sustaining nation through agriculture.  A way to unite the fertile fields with the grandeur of the American continent.  Eventually he created the embodiment of this abstraction at

Monticello

.

 painting of John Adam's farm, "Peacefield" by E. Malcolm 1798

nps. gov

CONCEPTUAL GARDENS

Having returned from the Chelsea Flower Show, I must admit it just gets better every year.  Cleve West’s sunken Roman garden won best in show, Diarmuid Gavin theatrics stopped traffic, and my personal favorite garden was Luciano Guibbilei’s for his serene and elegant Laurent Perrier garden. 

Lucian Giubbilei's "Nature and Human Intervention" sponsored by Laurent-Perrier 

Diarmuid Gavin's "Irish Sky Garden"

Show gardens (at Chelsea) are proposed to the Royal Horticultural Society almost a year before the actual show and are either accepted or denied.  For sheer uniqueness there was the artisanal Hae-Woo-Soo garden, which I led on about last month. The Hae Woo So garden was one that stretched the boundaries of the “British proper.” One person on the acceptance committee mentioned to me “we knew it would either be extraordinary or be an embarrassment.”  Thankfully, the garden was exemplary and honored with a gold medal. 

According to Jihae Hwang, who designed the garden, this conceptual landscape refers to a place where you “empty your mind.” According to ancient Korean tradition visiting the lavatory (the trip to it) is traditionally regarded as a cathartic experience, a way to spiritually cleanse one’s mind and reconnect with nature through a “natural cycle” -- the physical act that accompanies it. The focal point of the garden is an elegant wooden dunny (an outhouse).  The lintel is low, forcing one to bow as you enter, humbling oneself.  Typically the wooden building (the latrine) serves a dual purpose in that the human waste is left to ferment, creating fertilizer.

Stipa tenuissima, Paeonia lactiflora and Lonicera japonica embrace a stone wall

     A washbasin filled with rainwater to cleanse one's hands

Candlelight to illuminate the path at night

In romantic disorder, plants are arranged along the path to “the throne.”  Small, highly scented lilacs, Syringa wolfii and Syringa dilatata and Lonicera japonica (Honeysuckle) aid in perfuming the air surrounding the latrine. 

**all photos ©Todd Haiman 2014

PSYCHOLOGY IN THE LANDSCAPE

In 1977 J.J. Gibson wrote of "the Theory of Affordances."  Essentially what this means as it relates to landscape design is that humans see “affordances” in the landscape – what a scene or object offers.  We react to a scene based upon what these objects or scenes offer as far as the individual is concerned. Perception is viewed as not merely dealing with information about the environment, but it’s possibilities as far as human interaction and purposes are concerned.

Later on, Rachel Kaplan and Stephen Kaplan (Professors at University of Michigan) theorized on people interaction with their environments.  “Humans react to the visual environment in essential two interrelated ways: the two dimensional pattern, as if the environment in front of them were a flat picture and the three dimensional pattern of space that unfolds before them.

They like the visual array to a photograph, the pattern of information with it, the shades of grey, simplicity of scene/detail and how it “makes sense” to the viewer. The pattern of information on the surface of a photograph can be easier or harder to organize.

Complexity reflects how much is going on in a scene, how much is there to look at, how rich and diverse the aesthetics/elements are.

George Seurat, Afternoon on the Isle of La Grande Jatte 1884

Coherence reflects the simplicity, organizational components of a scene, that which makes it easier to comprehend, it should all “fit together.”  In other words, “something that draws one’s attention within the scene should turn out to be an important object, a boundary between regions or some other significant property.

Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights 1503-4

Research evidence also begins to suggest that the capacity of working memory for most people to hold approximately is five chunks/groupings of information in their working memory at any one time.  Kaplan therefore propose that dividing a scene into five major areas or groupings makes it easier or more appealing, comfortable in terms of coherence for the viewer of the scene.

Because landscapes are essentially three dimensional when viewed, but four dimensional with the addition of “time”, people interpret a landscape whether viewed or experienced as three-dimensional. In

Jay Appleton’s “Prospect-Refuge theory" there are “implications both in terms of informational opportunities and informational dangers.” Gathering these opportunities, having some comfort level with them is what leads to another component called Mystery. Mystery in this context is all about surprise and the promise/attraction assumed within the scene of new information. What encourages us to discover more.  A scene that is partially obscured by foliage, a path that is tempting to follow but you’re not sure where it leads. “A scene high in mystery is one in which one could learn more if one were to proceed further into the scene.”  “Mystery evokes curiosity.  What it evokes is not a blank state of mind but what might be coming next.”

W. Eugene Smith, The Walk to Paradise 1946

Appleton stresses safety in Prospect-Refuge theory.  Kaplan takes it one step further in his last component to one that “makes sense” or is legible.  “Legibility” entails a promise or a prediction.

” It allows the viewer to assume a way to navigate through the space and out of it, an organization of the ground plane.  With a sense of depth and well-defined space, smooth textures and elements well distributed, the viewer is comfortable moving within the space.

Concepts to ponder when designing space.

Preference Matrix by Kaplan above.

1. The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective: Rachel & Stephen Kaplan, University of Cambridge 1989

2. Ibid

3. Ibid

4. Ibid