Urban Landscape:From Form To Function

Any landscape exists as physical form and has corresponding functions. But form and function are not in accord at all times, let alone have equal significance in history. Looking back to the developing course of landscape, we can see that the swerving of design focus from form to function, which includes social functions and ecological functions, has its inevitability and rationality.Traditional landscape serves only the minority of private owners. The functional burden is light and the resources of land, capital are pretty abundant. Thus improvement and enhancement of form remained focus of landscape design.Yet after the prevailing of human-oriented thought, the serving object of landscape changed from private owners to public civilians. Public landscape for collective mass emerged for the first time in human history. And the focus of landscape design turned from form to social functions. Along with rapid expansion of civilization, the exhausting exploitation of nature results in aggravation of global ecological environment. City itself is not only the greatest consumer of physical energy in nature, but also the greatest producer of wastes. The ecological problems in confrontation are particularly serious. The urban landscape system embodies most of natural environmental factors spatially, the ecological functions of which are the most important way to improve urban environment and to strengthen urban self-coordinating ability. Therefore, ecological functions became the prior considerations of urban landscape planning and design. But the common status quo in contemporary urban landscape planning and construction are as follows. Picturesque form and so-called symbolic significance are paid attention to. But the social functions are not taken into account sufficiently. And the ecological functions are ignored, too. All above conflict with the reality of deficient Greenbelt, bad urban ecological environment and insufficient urban construction funds. Consequently, through the ordering of urban landscape design evolutional process, it is aimed to clarify that several changes should be made on the focus of current urban landscape construction. It means that changes from artistic romanticism to rationally scientific analysis, from individual subjective feeling to collective rational judgments and from forms to functions, which including social and ecological function, should be realized.