Cultural encounters of landscape architects Xiaoxiang Sun and Lawrence Halprin

“From nature to nature” is the major goal of landscape design. The former is the idea of nature, i.e., landscape architects regard nature as the archetype of design; the latter is the experience of nature, i.e., landscape architects hope people can perceive the natural atmosphere through designed landscape. In this sense, the transformation from idea to experience of nature refers to the process of landscape design, which materializes landscape. According to this, this article focuses on the following topics: 1) what role does nature play as the origin of the landscape design theory; 2) how does nature as an idea promote form-giving in landscape design; and 3) what aesthetic experience does designed landscape create. This article draws on two influential landscape architects, Xiaoxiang Sun and Lawrence Halprin, and analyzes their theories and works from the perspective of comparative culture, including the idea of nature and its representation, the inherent mechanism of form-giving in landscape design, and the experience created by designed landscape. It aims to explore the intellectual potentials for contemporary landscape architecture theory through comparing the discrepancies and similarities of the two masters’ paths of landscape design.

The works and words of Sun and Halprin have the magic power to go through the time and irradiate the current dilemma. They have spent their life-long wisdom to understand and interpret nature with a theoretical framework, from experience to nature and from nature to reason. They internalized and conceptualized nature. On the one hand, they completely got rid of quantifying objective nature; on the other hand, they abandoned the literary rhetorical nature with the focus shifting from thinking and consciousness towards form-giving design, so that rational tools and poetic spirits can be dialectically introduced into the landscape. At the same time, they hope that after the completion of designed landscape, people can also re-enter the natural world by embodied experience—for transcendent “attraction” or eternal “beauty”—which makes one’s emotions and feelings keep vibrating. Due to such vibration of aesthetics, the landscape will open a door to a free life that is temporarily alienated from the reality.

Sun and Halprin, two well-deserved masters in Landscape Architecture, came from the East and the West respectively, who learned from the external cultures and gained prominent achievements. The review of their significance to contemporary landscape and the comparison of their works lead to a profound dialogue between the eastern and western cultures: promoting the spread of traditional Chinese ideologies into the West, while witnessing the western cultural theories creatively fusing with the Chinese discourse. Nowadays China’s landscape design works that reflect the integration of the eastern and western cultures will greatly contribute to the theoretical development in future.

The work entitled “Cultural Encounters of Landscape Architects Xiaoxiang Sun and Lawrence Halprin” was published on the journal of Landscape Architecture Frontiers (December 7, 2023).

END