On the role of the Subconscious in Design
"The process is simple. You first prepare a design in the normal way, you find it uninspiring, you place the drawing at a distance and preferably upside down, and you gradually become aware that it suggests a shape foreign but friendly to your own. In this shadowy shape you hope to discern some form that aspires to the perfection we call beauty (in the first three examples that follow are concealed animal forms, humans as symbolism, and allegory). You now reorganize the details of your design to conform (but not recognizably so) to the abstract idea within. Tell no one, if you can, for this is a message from one subconscious to another, and the intellect spoils such things."
an extract from Landscape of Man
All design therefore derives from impressions of the past, conscious or subconscious, and in the modern collective landscape, from historic gardens and parks and silhouettes which were created for totally different social reasons. Fundamentally, these again derived from impressions of the world: the classical from the geometry of agriculture, the romantic from natural landscape. Only the small private garden remains true to its instinctive unchanged purpose of expressing, protecting and consoling the individual. This study is a concise global view of the designed landscape past and present, inclusive of all environment, from gardens to urban and regional landscape. Town planning is included only when it is also landscape-planning.
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