What is your idea of landscape? Landscape Architecture—a field of knowledge adjacent to architecture and urbanism—is often translated into Portuguese as landscaping (paisagismo), a term many resist because it fails to capture the discipline's true complexity. We suspect this discomfort stems from a common architectural tradition in Brazil that views the landscape as a purely designed, static entity.
We both share distant memories of unique encounters with the landscape, such as a first visit to an original work by Burle Marx, like the Praça dos Cristais in Brasília, or walking along the boardwalks of Rio de Janeiro, which revealed to us the significance of landscape for architects. More recently, as researchers (Caio as a research affiliate at the Critical Landscapes Design Lab at Harvard, directed by Professor Gareth Doherty; Erich as a visiting scholar at the Penn Institute for Urban Research at the University of Pennsylvania - Penn), we have had the opportunity to deepen our understanding of landscape nuances, as well as its ecological and educational potential. Landscapes are teachers.
