98 



LANDSCAPE DESIGN 



Characteristics 

 of Objects in 

 Landscape 

 Composition 



Shape 



ber that the emotions associated with repetition, sequence, and balance 

 are associated also with and often automatically expressed by repeated, 

 sequential, or balanced muscular motions and positions of the whole 

 body, and these in turn intensify the emotion that suggested them.* 

 The delicately balanced nervous and muscular machinery of the body 

 is thus in a way a reverberator for the increasing of the effect of these 

 experiences. 



In his actual work in design, the landscape architect is continually 

 applying the principles of repetition, sequence, and balance in the 

 choice and arrangement of his materials according to their characteris- 

 tics, that is, according to their shape, color, and texture. In his per- 

 spective drawings and his rendered plans, he, like the painter, is dealing 

 with compositions of lines and areas on a flat surface. These we shall 

 discuss to some extent in the appendix to this book. In making his 

 compositions in the objects in the outdoor world, the landscape archi- 

 tect is in a way handling a more complicated problem. He is modify- 

 ing the position and characteristics of masses, of three-dimensional 

 objects, to produce relations of repetition, sequence, and balance, 

 pleasing as far as may be both in the various views that observers get 

 of the composition as they move about in it, and in the composite idea 

 of the constructed whole which they finally carry away. Moreover, 

 the shape, color, and texture of the objects which the designer uses in 

 his composition are modified in the outdoor world by effects of light 

 and shade, of distance, of atmosphere and aerial perspective, effects 

 which often play as dominant a role in the composition as do the more 

 essential characteristics themselves. 



We do not perceive shape so directly as we seem to perceive color. 

 We learn the shape of a thing only by perceiving the relation of its 

 parts. When we perceive a shape visually, the information which we 

 get directly through the use of our eyes is information as to the extent 

 of the object in two dimensions only, that is, information given us by 

 the two-dimensional image which falls upon the retina. The actual 

 three-dimensional shape of the object we are aware of only in so far 

 as we can deduce it from this two-dimensional image by means of our 

 visual and muscular and tactual memories of previous experiences. 



* Cf. Chapter II, p. 13-14. 



