• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.71-86
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• 2017

This work explores the historical transformation of manual landscape architectural drawings in terms of hybridization to uncover their inherent creative aspect. Landscape architectural drawing has duel functions; namely, scientific instrumentality and artistic imagination, which are relative, interchangeable, and transformable. These characteristics have been embodied in the forms of particular types of drawing, projections, perspective views, and diagrams, which are not so much clearly distinguishable as rather mutually complementary and hybridized. In particular, the pictorial views of plants in the forms of a perspective view or elevation were frequently hybridized to projection drawings of grounds and architectural structures, which is called planometrics. Particular drawing types have often emerged as suitable and thereby dominant forms, depending on the particular historical styles of landscape design. Sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance gardens and seventeenth-century French formal gardens were generally visualized in the form of projections. Eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century English landscape gardens were frequently represented in a pictorial perspective view. In nineteenth-century America, different drawing techniques such as competition drawing, photography, and map overlay were specialized depending on their respective functions. Twentieth-century American modernists began to explore the diagram to deploy design strategies. In such transformation, however, the planometric, which considers both the ground plane and plant's frontal identities simultaneously and thereby is suitable to landscape design, was frequently used as a hybridization technique. In the mid-nineteenth century, a top view of plants replaced the planometric, and then, in the twentieth century, plants were no longer represented artistically, instead reduced to the forms of standardized flat symbols. The use of instrumental visualizations thereby gradually increased rather than the use of an imaginative representation for landscape architectural drawings.