22 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Taste and 

 Style 



Landscape 

 Character 



Landscape 

 Effect 



Taste is the name for the mode of this esthetic synthesis. The 

 mode of organization by which a designer perceives and synthesizes 

 will be the mode of organization which can be perceived in his work 

 as a designer. This perceived mode of organization is called the de- 

 signer's style, and thus a designer's style is merely the objectified ex- 

 pression of his taste. Taste is involved in the appreciation of beauty ; 

 style, in the creation of beauty. The artist must first have the power to 

 appreciate, to perceive organization, but he must have also the power 

 to express, to put his idea into physical form (speech, action, written 

 word, work of sculpture, architecture, landscape architecture), so that 

 some one else can perceive with pleasure the organization on which his 

 work of art is based. 



Just as we can recognize in a man-created object a mode of esthetic 

 organization which expresses the taste of the designer and which we 

 call style, so may we recognize in an example of natural scenery a mode 

 of esthetic organization which is a result of the operation of the forces 

 of nature not guided by man, and which we may call character. Per- 

 fection of esthetic organization manifested in landscape character is 

 just as potent a source of beauty as is perfection of esthetic organization 

 manifested in style ; but its appreciation often demands a more highly 

 developed esthetic sensitiveness and greater keenness of perception, 

 because its organization is likely to be of a more complicated and less 

 obvious kind. 



Every object in the world, then, which has style, or character, or 

 their perfection in some aspect beauty thereby arouses in us a 

 corresponding emotion ; but every object has a further emotional 

 effect, partly due at times to less characteristic attributes of the object, 

 even perhaps to very transitory and unessential conditions, and always 

 varying in some degree with our mental attitude. There is in us a 

 general emotional reaction to the whole experience and its associations, 

 which in its totality we feel as a mood, or state of mind. When this 

 mood is at all definite, we are likely to attribute it as a quality by 

 a sort of personification to the object which immediately causes 

 it, and, for instance, to call a landscape peaceful, smiling, majestic, 

 gloomy, as the case may be. This total emotional reaction, com- 

 monly attributed to the landscape as a quality, we shall call landscape 



