Resumen de Mapping atmosphere: rehearsals on rural mediterranean landscapes
Ioanna Spanou
This thesis explores embodied experience as a vehicle for the enrichment of the spatial interpretation of the landscape, a subject of constant interest in the discipline of landscape architecture, responding to a considerable detected gap as far as the landscape analysis of the embodied is concerned in the scale of the territory, one that does not reflect the lack of interest for this "type" of variables but perhaps the lack of approaches to these variables from and with in the tool by excellence of the discipline that is cartography. The subject is certainly of an immense complexity; nonetheless, this thesis pretends to provide a way towards a partial dimension of the embodied experience of the landscape filtered through the concept of atmosphere, commonly referred to also as "first impression". This thesis refers to atmosphere through one of its more mediated meanings, one that points to a resonance between the properties of environment and patterns offeeling or emotion. The thesis is developed in two units: the first one is related with a theoretical inquiry, while the second one is dedicated in the development of a series of cartographic essays. The first part of the thesis hosts the theoretical inquiry, initially related with the existing theoretical references to atmosphere coming from the field of architecture and philosophy. The insight is selective and especially focused in the references that provide hues on the spatial properties of atmosphere. This theoretical inquiry has been expanded to a selective review of references coming from cognitive science and environmental ps~hology, in the search for shared inter-subjective patterns of perception. The review of existing approaches to the cartography of atmosphere has been a more difficultt ask: experiments on cartographies of atmosphere are absolutely missing from the map ofthe "official" cartographies of landscape analysis. For this reason, the investigation turns to cartographical approaches to concepts tangent to atmosphere coming mainly from the field of landscape analysis, urban planning and environmental psychology. The second part of the thesis hosts the series of cartographical essays, developed in two case studies: the first situated in the region of Lerida, coinciding with one of the landscape units that have been delimited in the Landscape Catalogue of the Lerida region, is a dry-land agricultural, essentially ordinary landscape under transformation due to the implementation of a new irrigation channel that crosses its territory. The second one is situated in the region of Barcelona, forming part of the agricultura! park of the Llobregat River. The challenge is placed initially in the cartography of the landscape unit of Lerida on the possibility of mapping atmosphere in terms of its causes and not to represent its effects in our perception. The cartographic essays propose a cartographic interpretation of these causes, defined as atmosphere activators, and point towards the relation of the concept with this of pattern. In parallel, they point towards the importance of an interscale approach and of a dense representation of the variables that configure the specificity of the landscape. The cartographic essays are developed towards a specific approach to morphological complexity and its cartographic interpretation based mainly on the evaluation of the quality of the visual information perceived in the field. The passage to the second case study does not pretend to thoroughly test the transposition ofthe methodology followed in the first case study to a different landscape. In a complementary manner, what it is pretended is to deepen into the potentials of the investigation of the cartographic, but also theoretical interpretation of atmosphere that at this stage finds specific resonances with the concepts of frontier and units.
