Representing the Landscape Project: The Creative Process and Design Education

Representation is an indispensable creative process, able to develop our thinking, making us more aware and weaving a new connection with the landscapes surrounding us.

For the landscape architect, representation is fundamental to unravelling all those values that underlie reality. It also allows the development of an analytical, introspective and observational capacity that goes beyond the mental and social structures we have grown up with. Representation is, therefore, a proper form of communication that translates thoughts into images, managing to develop a landscape sensitivity of which the designer is the spokesman and interpreter. In landscape architecture, there were always the tendency to consider nature systemically as if painting and botany are inextricably linked. Despite everything, representation is currently experiencing a crisis –- especially in the school system where probably it is not considered enough. Instead, representation can be understood as a tool able to stimulate the creativity of designers and students in their creative process. Sensibility, awareness and creativity are the central values of representation, which, thanks to the attention to terrestrial, communicative and personal phenomena, make culture, ecology and landscape expressive complements of the project.

Representation is an indispensable creative process, able to develop our thinking, making us more aware and weaving a new connection with the landscapes surrounding us. Representation is, therefore, a proper form of communication that translates thoughts into images, managing to develop a landscape sensitivity of which the designer is the spokes-man and interpreter. Despite everything, representation is currently experiencing a crisis –- especially in the school system where probably it is not considered enough. Instead, representation can be understood as a tool able to stimulate the creativity of designers and students in their creative process.

Daniele Stefàno was born in Rome in 1991, graduated cum laude in Landscape Architecture from Sapienza University of Rome in A.A. 2016-17, and in A.A. 2017-18 he obtained a Master's Degree in Landscape Architecture at the University of Florence, where he did an internship at the villa "La Petraia" in 2018, part of the Medici Villas (UNESCO). He obtained a Ph. D. in Landscape and Environment (XXXIV cycle) at Sapienza University of Rome in 2022 with a thesis on representation in the landscape project, while collaborating on teaching with Professors Fabio Di Carlo and Franco Zagari, and was secretary of IASLA (Italian Scientific Society of Landscape Architecture) in 2018-22. He is currently a Lecturer at Landbúnaðarháskóli Íslands, teaching Landscape architecture.