masters project
landscape looking

year / 2020
mentors / Prof. Dr. Sarah Owens, Jonas Voegeli,
Dr. sc. lic. phil. Annemarie Bucher

editorial design
120 × 170 mm
number of pages: 326
printing & binding: OK Druck Zürich

paper / Lessebo Natural Smooth 100g

A multifaceted, visual pursuit towards a deeper understanding of one’s environment

How can the perception and appreciation of the visual landscape be enhanced through explorative, multi-ethnographical means? How can we challenge our preconceptions of landscape in order to gather accurate information about our environment as opposed to letting landscape fall to the background? Which aesthetic strategies can be implemented to look at landscape in a more engaged, critical way?

The inexhaustible number of landscape representations that currently floods online and offline media (from social media to travel guides) fuels the development of a problematic attitude towards landscape, the superficial view of landscape as two-dimensional, replaceable and independent of human influence. By approaching landscape in this way rather than by experiencing it, one risks losing two key understandings: the awareness of the changes occurring in our environment and the fragility of landscape.

Using the Swiss Alpine landscape as a research area, I suggest a multifaceted, visual approach to observing one’s environment. Studying the landscape in its two-dimensional representation as well as in reality allows for shifts in perception, and a change in scale by zooming in and out of the landscape in view renders new viewpoints which would otherwise not have been possible. By actively looking at one’s environment through a series of visual lenses in various degrees of abstraction, this research project seeks deeper, more critical ways of observing landscape, all with the aim of recognizing the diverse, visual wealth that landscapes have to offer.

Through the medium of a field guide and personal reflection on how landscape is perceived and experienced, Twenty-two Ways to Landscape Looking proposes new approaches to intentional landscape observation in order to bring forth a deeper awareness and new perceptions of one’s environment.

Field guide photographed by Quim Vilar

Project also found on:
ZHdK Visual Communication
ZHdK Masters of Arts in Design
ZHdK Growing Sustainability in the Arts
ZHdK Institut für Designforschung
ZHdK Textures of Sustainability