Floating the Stone: The Expression of Culture in the Designed Landscape
The landscape within which people live, work and play is a cultural mirror. It expresses cultural meaning, manifests potent cultural symbols and it provides the physical supports, props, behavioural prompts, and the spatial opportunities without which a culture’s functioning in the landscape would at best be impaired and at worst be precluded. In our increasingly polyglot world it is not surprising therefore that disputes over the use, form and content of the landscape are becoming increasingly common, as indigenous, immigrant and post-colonial ‘settler’ communities seek to variously: demand their place in the sun, assert their right to use particular environments or seek to safeguard the status quo.
This paper will briefly explore the argument that design matters culturally, and, using examples from a series of design projects carried out with Maori communities in New Zealand, it will discuss the cultural underpinnings that are required to make landscape design culturally relevant. The paper will argue that much design work portrayed as ‘cultural’ is actually trite and scenegraphic and it will posit that to be culturally relevant design needs to create a layered landscape of meaning, narrative and behavioural accommodation
Keywords: Culture, Design, Maori, New Zealand
Neil Challenger
Lecturer, Landscape Architecture Group |
Ref: S07P0196