Fundamental phenomenological categories of garden and landscape

Abstract

The current scientific methods describing gardens and landscapes all over the world are not always sufficient for the purpose of deep understanding of specific and close relations between landscape/garden and its inhabitants/visitors. A new dimension of qualitative investigation of these phenomena and relations between humans and the environment, as distinguished from the common mechanistic methods, has to be acquired. While a systematic anti-mechanistic research on the interaction of humans and living space is carried out especially in the United Kingdom and the United States, Continental Europe persist mechanistic in its core.In Continental Europe phenomenology as well as hermeneutics are regarded mostly as the particular areas of abstract philosophical studies that do not refer enough to practical sciences such as, for example, garden and landscape architecture. However, there are some especially transatlantic centres of applied phenomenological research. This article examines the phenomenological and hermeneutical approach as it might be used to explore the specific field of garden and landscape issues. In the first step, the nature of hermeneutics and phenomenology as compared to the common mechanistic scientific methods is discussed and the parallels between hermeneutics and phenomenology are outlined. Then, using the phenomenological method helps we give evidence on the fundamental categories of garden and landscape. These categories, in contrast to mechanistic constructions, represent garden and landscape as they are intimately experienced by humans. The focus of this research is both methodological (it is an effort to articulate a method alternative to the objectivity and abstraction of strict science, to be used in the field of garden and landscape architecture and related areas) and hermeneutical (it is an effort to achieve a deeper and profound understanding of garden and landscape as the irreplaceable base for every responsible interaction, whether scientific, creative, or other, with garden and landscape).