This symposium will address a largely ignored aspect of the practice of landscape design that cuts across cultures and centuries: how did garden or landscape designers anticipate experiences of motion in their works? It will examine gardens from the Roman Empire to the present, and confront cultural differences among China, Japan and the Western world. Detailed studies of the cultural significance of garden or landscape design will introduce discussions of the following session topics:
- Friday morning, Designing for an Aesthetic of Engagement
- Friday afternoon, Three Aesthetics of Performance: Walking, Riding in a Train, Driving
- Saturday morning, Design of Metaphorical Itineraries
- Saturday afternoon, Design Challenges to the Opposition Between Place and Motion
These sessions focus on different design issues that neither follow from any necessary order, nor are mutually exclusive. Individual lectures may, in fact, demonstrate that designers, when dealing with motion, may have a wide scope of issues in mind. We hope each of these issues will highlight a domain of design creation that corresponds to a particular way for designers and garden or landscape visitors to reflect upon the experience of motion. Since many aspects of design activity do not require words, and do not follow from written rules, each of these domains of design creation may have been practiced long before it was conceptualized.