The 6th UNISCAPE En-Route seminar RE-Connections in Landscape will take place between 12th-15th of October 2016, organized by ‘’ION MINCU’’ University of Architecture and Urbanism, Bucharest, Romania, in collaboration with UNISCAPE – European Universities Network for Implementing The European Landscape Convention and Campulung Muscel City Hall.

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The target of the seminar consists in the reconsidering of the main issues related to landscape, within a broad vision opened by The European Landscape Convention, Florence, 2000, having in view the concept of landscape as a system of systems where connections and re-connections are essential, in order to assume main landscape qualities.

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The topics of the seminar are related to:

1. Eco-places

2. Architectural heritage and landscape

3. Sustainable archaeology

4. Memorial landscapes

 

These topics will be related to the workshop targets, regarding an integrated trans-disciplinary approach to increase landscape values in Campulung Muscel, including aspects aiming conservation of traditional, byzantine and neoromanian architectural heritage, reconsidering the Targului river’s sites, revitalization within a sustainable approach of the Jidova archaeological ruins and revitalization of the public space and of the historical garden belonging to the historical structure. From trans-disciplinary perspective, the integrated re-connection of these issues intends to create a stable landscape as a system of systems, implying the process of re-search, re-creation, re-integration, re-enhancing of landscape qualities. Re-connection process in landscape targets on the relations established in time between human beings and landscape, his influence on humans behavior, in chorographic perspective landscape representing a repository of human experiences, offering different perception and understanding levels, in order to find hidden or new connections and to create networks enhancing new synergies.

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1. Eco-places

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Related with Heidegger’s approach of dwelling, but also with interdisciplinary science of landscape ecology and the concepts of eco-fields and eco-semiotics, the new concept of eco-place (oikos meaning home-place or place of dwelling in Greek language) defines an interconnected and integrated human-natural system, a structured landscape, having in view the connections between people and land, people as landscape resource, biodiversity, social networks, landscape patterns.

As a highly interdisciplinary science, studying and improving relationships between ecological processes in the environment and specific ecosystems, landscape ecology integrates biophysical and analytical approach with humanistic perspectives across the natural sciences and social sciences.

The eco-semiotics appears as a new field of competence for ecology to overcome the border between environmental complexity and human culture. According to Almo Farina studies, needs and resources are connected by a semiotic interface: the eco-field. All eco-fields of an individual or a society create a cognitive landscape.The cognitive approach to the interpretation of the landscape implies a holistic paradigms, it is possible to find specific eco-fields that there are connected with cognitive templates created by a cultural process. According to the semiotics and the eco-field theory, the sense of place is the sum of all eco-fields necessary to track separate mental resources. And when some eco-fields disappear, for example when a site is significantly modified, the sense of place is transformed into placelessness, thereby losing the interest of people.

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2. Architectural heritage and landscape

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The approach for designing through the perspective of strong discontinuity regarding the past, as dimensional and functional aspects, implies the evaluation that reconsiders this degree of historical and typological consistence.
The principle of historical and typological consistence must be considered on large scale in most recent European urban and building regulations, regarding reconstruction, restoration and re-functioning of historical buildings. The essence of the problem regarding the possibility to extend application of this principle to new built constructions, is analyzed offering a large significance to the evolution and dynamic in defining the type, and consequently the typology, proposed by Qutremère de la Quincy and reintroduced by Argan and Rossi: “the type is necessary and invariable; these characters are fundamental, even they are dialectic interacting with technology, function or with the expression individualized in time of each architectural phenomenon”. 
The character of a certain place physiognomy implies to identify architectural synthetic parameters as meta-instruments for architectural design in historic context: form, color, material, texture, proportions, symmetries/asymmetries, force lines, volumetry as essential tools for understanding the architectural significance and message.

 

3. Sustainable archaeology

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Merging heritage management and spatial development, the sustainable archaeology plays a key-role within the landscape projects, including the concept of conservation through development. Different meanings about the opportunity of conservation of archaeological resources in cities, the aspects of how, why and for whom to preserve them, lead to creative integrated solutions. Urban planners and heritage managers can develop creative strategies in order to enhance a sustainable archaeology heritage tourism, educating and appropriating the new generations by their European history and culture.

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Archaeological research and heritage management have their own challenges. Florence, La Valetta and Faro conventions as well as the new academic approaches and experimental projects, opened new perspectives. Nowadays, understanding and building or rebuilding connections becomes the most important, gaining in value when transmitted beyond the disciplines, when cultural, people-centered landscape policies are focused on behavior and human values more than on data and things.

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4. Memorial landscapes

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Including memorial houses belonging to certain personalities, war memorial landscapes and graveyards, memorial landscapes are important features for our places. Conservation, planning long term maintenance and management on site create a greater understanding, the aim being to preserve the historic significance of the design and its original character. Paths, fences, gates, built or architectural structure, but also vegetation, including here its significance, birds and animals, defined the whole memorial landscape, in order to enhance intersection and connection between collective memory and urban or rural space.

Gaining from the knowledge of certain personalities belonging to a certain place by appropriating their memorial houses and understanding of social condition of commemoration play an important role in politics of collective memory and sense of place, becoming key-points in implementing strategies to perceive landscape as open-ended symbolic system.