Empowerment of Aesthetics

The contribution of landscape culture to art and science is writ large in the Danish Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale Venice, where a blend of artificial natures – bark on walls, pine needle floors aesthetics contrast with technocratic papers covering Danish Building Law, Housing Law, Planning Law and the Danish Environmental act. The Danish Pavilion charged with both Koolhaas’s ‘Absorbing Modernity’ and Denmark in the year 2050 both looks at Modernist legacies for overwhelming factual information, legislation and scientific data and the need for a more complimentary future vision that curator Stig Andersson, ‘can open up yet again the missing dimension of aesthetics as an important aspect when we make our decisions’. For Andersson , Director of Landscape Practice SLA based in Copenhagen, ‘aesthetics and rationality are actually two radically different paths to knowledge and recognition. One way, the aesthetic, is empirical knowledge and experience through sensory experiences. The other way is common sense, the deductive practice in which conclusions are logically obtained,’ citing the Golden Age (1800 -1850) where the two views were interwoven in one culture. In this way they mimic the United Kingdom where the term ‘culture’ also referred to farmland, where cultivation of the land enabled a person to become cultured and the eighteenth century estate was also understood as a key moment when nature and culture were interdependent in meanings of the term ‘landscape’.