Optimization in landscape architecture

Abstract

Contemporary architectural proposals usually have to meet many different criteria. The most important are functionality and aesthetics, as well as rationality understood as a reference to costs. In this approach, the architectural proposal appears as a solution to the typical task considered in the Multi-criteria Decision Theory in the discipline generally referred to as Optimization. The paper presents examples of sixteenthcentury garden compositions, to try to answer the question of what the then residents (aristocrats) and the creators who fulfilled their wishes, were guided by. The homeland of the Renaissance is Italy, and the characteristics of this style were: geometry of space in the form of axial arrangement of rooms, symmetry, sheared forms of evergreen plants, and motifs referring to mythology. The basis of the Renaissance garden composition is a simple network of roads and squares, strongly connected to the main building and the remaining garden architecture. Mathematical principles, such as golden division of the segment and the Fibonacci sequence, were used as a way to bring beauty and balance to a design. This style is characterized by clipped garden ground floors with boxwood and molded vegetation. Roses, tulips, peonies and lavender were planted between shaped hedges. The terrace arrangement of some gardens has forced the creation of additional structures, such as retaining walls, ramps, balustrades and stairs. The paper discusses the subject of the golden division and its share in individual garden compositions. The authors showed many mathematical relationships that architects used when designing the described garden assumptions.