Towards Landscape Interaction: Inheritance and Development of Landscape Perception and Visual Evaluation

Based on the author’s 40 years of research and practice, this research reviews the critical influence of landscape perception and visual evaluation in the discipline of landscape architecture and the positive role thereof in leading landscape aesthetics to get on the right track of scientificity and rationality in the past 60 years. From the perspective of life entity, the research proposes to take a new look at landscape architecture from the three dimensions of time and space, energy and information and, according to the “five stages” of landscape perception that human beings have gone through in the past 2,000 years from the evolution of Chinese landscape architecture, rediscover and redefine the key role of landscape perception and visual evaluation, and review the origin, original intention and early research philosophy and innovation achievements in landscape perception research, so as to analyze the causes for key problems in current researches in this field: excessive repetitive application research but insufficient pioneering theoretical exploration, excessive analysis and decomposition but very few integration and systematization. This research demonstrates the necessity of developing and improving the landscape perception theory with the concept of “intersection, integration and systematization”, puts forward the basic idea of the landscape interaction theory, and expounds on the five “element bodies” covering the five aspects of landscape interaction as a whole and a philosophical proposition composed of the element bodies mentioned above that are featured by the combination of “ternary coupling”, “binary interaction” and “unity of subject and object”, so as to construct a comprehensive, holistic and integrated systematization framework for landscape interaction, thus promoting the systematization of the research and application of landscape perception and visual evaluation, and enabling landscape interaction to play a more significant role in leading theoretical research and guiding planning and design practice in the discipline and aesthetics field of landscape architecture.