Analyzing Public Access and Boundary Utilization in Landscape Architecture

Abstract

(Background and Purpose) In contemporary society, Landscape Architecture crucially addresses the relationships between architecture and landscape, as well as individual and public realms within cities, establishing boundaries as areas with potential for communication while maintaining continuity between buildings and land. Despite the existence of developments ranging from single buildings to large-scale urban projects, many boundary and green spaces are currently applied in cities in isolated and passive ways, with limited functionality in terms of accessibility and publicness. Furthermore, the potential of Landscape Architecture to function diversely within urban environments is underutilized due to a lack of research on its boundary components and methods, compounded by uniform regulations. Against this backdrop, this paper proposes using the boundary spaces of buildings as a solution to practical urban problems, examining the construction methods and components of Landscape Architecture's boundary spaces to advance the concept of 'publicness' in both current and future architectural developments. (Method) This research employs case studies to examine the integration methods of Landscape Architecture within urban conditions, leveraging landscape concepts to bridge diverse aspects and elements. The study emphasizes the critical elements of Landscape Architecture, such as the rates of 'open area' and 'openness,' by investigating international architectural projects. These case studies are instrumental in understanding the types, access, efficiency, and rates of open areas, which are pivotal in expressing the public usage of Landscape Architectures numerically. (Results) The boundary spaces of Landscape Architecture, reflecting the urban context and locality, have shown high potential for public use and were categorized for analysis accordingly. This study introduced an innovative 'publicness graph,' linking objective indicators like 'public area ratio' and 'openness' to visualize detailed characteristics. By defining the Public Occupancy Index (POI) and Balance Deviation Index (BDI), the study quantitatively categorized the 'publicness' of individual buildings, which had previously been expressed qualitatively. (Conclusions) The study concludes that Landscape Architecture holds the potential to revolutionize the design and functionality of public spaces within urban landscapes. Through case analysis and conceptual establishment of the use of boundary spaces in landscape architecture, a quantitative analysis method has been presented. By applying the types of 'Street type', 'Park type', and 'Street + Park type' as case studies, the validity of the analytical method that quantifies the individual characteristics of buildings associated with publicness proposed in this paper has been confirmed. The analysis method based on the 'Publicness Graph' is expected to contribute significantly to the development of design plans and models that can optimize the public use of increasingly complex boundary spaces in modern architecture.