Landscape as forma mentis : interpreting the integral dimension of the anthropic space : Mongolia

With respect to multiple theories and interpretations within which the ‘concept of landscape’ oscillates, this research attempts to re-define the notion – of landscape –, bringing it back to the original condition of man-nature relation: sort of first derivative of the interaction between ‘the being’ (man) and ‘the entity’ (reality). In the effort to trace the cultural origins of the issue, the attempt is to link the matter to a paradigm of thought linked to a dimension constituting man, his awareness. Hence the need to consider the implications that each landscape embodies and consequent need to recognize its essence: by rationalizing its formative/transformative process through the elaboration of a ‘model’ that operates at the level of scientific explanation and which is able to decrypt its meaning, by unifying its identity character to the ‘in the making’; and by critically systematizing its knowledge through the progressive identification of relations between components and scalar level of complexity concerning the landscape itself. In other words, an attempt is made to formulate a unifying cognitive-evaluation of the concept of landscape by defining an analysis tool of logic-classification type, aiming at the phenomenological-synthetic reading of all elements making up a landscape with the purpose to steer relative design choices with awareness. The application-experimental field of the research is the territory of Mongolia. A landscape multi-faceted and apparently little anthropized, whose essence and balance are based on a silent and constant interaction process between environmental, social-economic and settlement conditions based on the co-existence between permanent and not permanent culture.