By The Skin Look Look

In recent years, with China’s economy developing rapidly, we are pursuing higher quality of life, in particular, the features of the environment where we live. However, the economic "globalization" has brought a new challenge to landscape environment design. Despite the great achievements have been made in this area, landscape often appears to be monotonous in terms of regional features. Many designs only apply the advanced technologies, materials to the landscape surface in a literal manner, ignoring the deep cultural connotation as well as the potential meaning of local features. Consequently, the distinctive characteristics that the landscape originally has are disappearing over time, and the traditional value and aesthetic standards that used to be based on local styles and ethnologic features have lost their ground due to the impacts from European and American mainstream culture.We all want some landscape environment that is different from others, but one of the difficult problems in contemporary landscape design is that how to develop the landscape in such a way that it can clearly point to local features (i.e., the landscape with region directing affect). Note that landscape and architecture are interrelated, and landscapes have their own skin and facial expressions. Through their skin, people see the facial expression hidden underneath, and then with the influences of natural and social factors, they form their personal understanding of the various landscapes. As we know, China is a country with long history and vast territory, which objectively guarantees the diversity of its regional landscapes. Each region has its own culture and history. In my opinion, the most direct and yet effective way of developing regional landscape features is to deeply dig into the regional cultures and try to beautifully integrate them with modern civilization.This thesis exposes landscape’s facial expressions via its skin and demonstrates the relationships between the regional cultures and landscape’s skin and facial expressions, hoping that it can offer some degree of guidance in the future around how to emphasize and thus direct to regional features in landscape environment design.