Verbal drawings: Mapping landscape ideas

This text discusses a particular category of drawings recognized as verbal drawings, and what kind of role they could play in contemporary landscape architecture design and its representation. The definition of verbal drawings arises from the observation and reading of Rupestrian art, and its process in making drawings and paintings. Rupestrian art was the first human written communication prior to the emergence of words and spoken communication. For this reason, Rupestrian art drawings and paintings are not just images to be seen; above all, they are texts to be read. They are written drawings using pictograms, ideograms, and psycho-ideograms to compose images with a specific grammar and syntax. These written images have many qualities, and three of them emerge, among the others, to better define verbal drawings: a sense of immediacy, a sense of beauty, and a sense of lightness. Representing human activities conducted and placed in particular environments, the Rupestrian art verbal drawings are the first landscape representations. Since they place human communities in particular sites doing specific activities, they are also early representations of the act of mapping, a concept that opens a strict connection between the art of cartography and the art of verbal drawings. Using examples, this text tries to explain the importance of ancient and modern cartographies and maps in connection with the discourse of contemporary landscape architecture. From these examples, it emerges that their sense of immediacy, sense of beauty, and sense of lightness help contemporary verbal drawings to compete with the neutral, beautiful, quickly produced and consumed digital representations of contemporary landscape design. In the end, the text proposes a confrontation between Umberto Eco’s concept of “open work” and verbal drawings. This comparison shows that verbal drawings might be intended more like “open frameworks” than “open works.” It is a concept that considers verbal drawings able to accept new ideas for extending their meanings and significance throughout the design process.