Landscape transparency: An approach to elucidating and harmonizing contradictions in contemporary landscape design

Abstract

The concept of “transparency” has evolved from a spatial aesthetic to a spatial property that describes the underlying organization of things and derives its “contradiction” from the combination of “orderliness” and “polysemy”. This contradiction arises from the unity of opposites between synchrony and diachrony in modernity—where the rational logic of synchrony pursues “orderliness”, while the concept of mobility in diachrony is oriented towards “polysemy”. The path to linguistic transparency can be summarized in three dimensions: distortion of morpheme, recomposition of phraseme, and double-entendre of semanteme. Due to the shared symbolic meaning between language and graphics, the framework of graphic language can be employed to analyze the evolution and variation of transparency's essential feature across painting, architecture, and landscape. Landscape transparency shares commonalities with painting and architecture regarding morphemes, phraseme, and semanteme; however, as landscape expands in scope, its transparent representations exhibit gradual synthesis and complexity. The synthesis and complexity can be decomposed into three unique endogenous contradictions within landscapes: “dynamic growth”, “multiscale nesting”, and “spatio-temporal overlapping”. These characteristics have led to the expanded expression of landscape transparency that differs from painting and architecture on three levels: morpheme usage, phraseme construction, and semanteme interpretation. Consequently, this breakthrough transcends geometric two-dimensional compositions and three-dimensional spatial organizations, enabling future-oriented landscape design to embrace pluralism and inter-adaptability.