September 5th, 2025 @ 4:00 p.m. MT
About the Lecture: Landscape Representation for Communicating Future Environments
Landscape architects and environmental planners are shaping our shared future. A core competence of landscape architects and environmental planners is spatial thinking and visual communication. We create plans and designs of envisioned changes.
These outcomes of analytical and creative processes are shared among cognate disciplines that represent expertise from the natural and built environment generally, as well as within specialist groups, such as fellow landscape architects and environmental planners.
Often, the wider public is required to be included in this communication process because of compulsory participation in decision-making.
Since hundreds of years, landscape architects and environmental planners have used analogue techniques to communicate such plans and designs. Only since recent decades digital technology has become commonplace and visual representations are now ubiquitous. They have become part of our everyday life.
This presentation will give an overview of how we communicate our plans and designs. Including several case studies, it will highlight the limitations and opportunities in landscape representation for engaging with stakeholders, including experts and the general public.
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Bio:
Eckart Lange is Professor Emeritus of Landscape in the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield, UK. He holds a Dipl.-Ing. degree from TU Berlin, an MDesS from Harvard University and a PhD and Habilitation from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich).
Prior to joining the University of Sheffield in 2004, from 1990 until 2004 he was Senior Researcher in the City and Landscape Network at ETH Zürich.
From 2008 to 2016 he served on the scientific committee of the European Environment Agency.
He has published around 200 articles, with a focus on linking landscape architecture and environmental planning with innovative methodologies in landscape visualization and modelling.
He is a member of several editorial boards, including e.g. Landscape and Urban Planning (Elsevier), Landscape Journal (University of Wisconsin Press) and is on the editorial board of all three major Chinese journals in the field, i.e. Landscape Architecture Frontiers (Higher Education Press), Chinese Landscape Architecture (Chinese Society of Landscape Architecture) and Landscape Architecture (Beijing Forestry University).
He was visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley and recently at Hamburg Institute for Advanced Study. He held visiting appointments e.g. at the University of Tokyo and the University Putra Malaysia and he is Visiting Professor at Tongji University, Shanghai.
He was elected as the first ever Academic Fellow of the Landscape Institute and is a recipient of prestigious research awards from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) and the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS).