王向荣：行走的意义

Walking is the basis of human existence. Although we are walking ceaselessly every day, we may not have thought about the meaning and value of walking.

When I was studying at the University of Kassel, I listened to the Walking (Spaziergangswissenschaft) course taught by Swiss sociologist Lucius Burckhardt. He often led students to walk in the city and the countryside, allowing students to experience the different perceptions of landscape through walking. Later, whenever a German landscape architect knew that I was a doctoral student at the University of Kassel in the 1990s, they would mention the course of walking to me. It can be seen that Burckhardt's research on walking has a profound impact on landscape architecture in German-speaking regions.

The reason why we walk is not just for survival. The significance of walking to human beings is that it is the most basic cognitive method. The process of walking is like reading a book, because the environment around us is readable and experiential, and they truly record the history of natural evolution and human social development. Walking will also bring gifts, allowing us to harvest contents that we cannot see or experience in books, and allowing us to understand the laws of nature and the experience and wisdom of human life. From the 17 ^th to the 19th centuries, the young people of the British aristocratic class generally traveled to the European continent, especially Italy, to learn culture and art, increase their knowledge and trace the source of Western civilization through travel. It was the famous "The Grand Tour". This tradition was not only part of the education of noble youth, but also had a direct impact on the transformation of the British garden style at that time.

Walking is an opportunity for deep thinking. Walking is accompanied by observation and thinking. Walking, watching, thinking, and imaging are the normal state of human beings in the process of walking. Charles Robert Darwin took a walk in the woods every day after work. It was the best time for him to think. He called the walking path the thinking path. Many philosophers are very good at walking. Lao Tzu wandered westward, Confucius traveled around the world, and the Greek sages used to talk while walking. Many great ideas of human beings have been obtained through walking. With contemplation on the move, philosophers have tried to get their minds right to the root of things. Jean-Jacques Rousseau described himself as a walker. He said that he could only think when he was walking, and he stopped thinking when he stopped walking. His thinking followed the movement of his legs. There are many "philosopher's roads" in Europe. In K?nigsberg, there is Immanuel Kant's stroll path, and in Heidelberg, there is Hegel's (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) stroll trail. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said, "Walking puts me in the best state of mind." For many thinkers, regular daily walks are essential, because walking not only exercises the body, but also the brain.

Walking is the process of triggering inspiration and discovering treasures. Walking is a direct and personal experience, a comprehensive perception of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. The flowing space, the crisp birdsong, the blowing breeze, and the pervasive fragrance of flowers may all induce novel ideas and inspirations of the traveler, awaken the memory fragments deposited in the heart, and construct the logical connection between the thinking fragments.

Ancient poets are all walking poets, Li Bai was always on the way of roaming, Du Fu also traveled the world, Su Shi seemed to be on the road of relegation in all his life, and poets Li He and Mei Yaochen walked between mountains and rivers every day, hoping to get creative inspirations and find good sentences when walking. Walking also uncovers hidden artistic treasures. Along a path about 600km long, the Brothers Grimm (Brüder Grimm) collected, recorded, sorted out and processed about 200 folklores, and gathered them into Grimm's fairy tales, which have become classics of fairy tales in the world. The path they walked has become an important tourist route in Germany - Fairy Tale Road (Deutsche M?rchenstra?e). Musician Wang Luobin traveled in Gansu, Qinghai and Xinjiang all year round, collecting folk music from the west of China, and composing beautiful songs one after another.

Walking has influenced the Chinese people's perspective on landscape. Whether it is "landscape", "scenery", "terroir", or "terrain", Chinese descriptions of the surface state have a unique concept of time and space and humanistic color, which is obviously different from the meaning of landscape in Western languages. It shows that the Chinese people have different views on the environment. Different from the static way of depicting scenery from one viewpoint to another, the scenery expressed by the Chinese is a flowing scenery while walking. Similar to landscape poets, landscape painters in Chinese history were also walking painters. They integrated their whole body and mind into nature, remembered the experience of walking in their hearts, and presented the landscape of a region on paper in a generalized, abstract and reorganized way through pen and ink. This "cavalier perspective" painting method expresses the scenery in the travel, the vast landscape that can be not only "contained by the body and focused by the eyes", but also "traveled by the mind".

For designers, walking is the best practice. Only experience can become experience, and the road traveled and the scenery seen will eventually affect the designer's pattern. Le Corbusier's trip to the East recorded his inspiration for becoming an architect; Luis Barrag?n's trip to Europe discovered his talent for architecture and landscape design; Paul Klee's trip to North Africa discovered colors; walking in Italian gardens, Geoffrey Jellicoe found a direct passage to the subconscious; walking in French Baroque gardens, Walker (Peter Walker) saw the connection between Andre Le N?tre's garden and minimal art…

For landscape architects, when walking, we are not only observing the surrounding environment, but also communicating with it, thus forming an evaluation of the landscape quality. Walking will also enrich the landscape reserves in our own memory, which may be mobilized and integrated into the design at a certain moment of future creation. "Reading thousands of books and traveling thousands of miles", to design works with profound connotations, we need to have profound knowledge reserves and artistic accomplishments, as well as the cognitive experience of the land and the keen perception of the landscape, which requires good comprehension and long-term accumulation.

Walking is the beginning of design. Each of our designs begins with walking. After many years, most of the experiences in the design process will be forgotten, but the walking at the beginning of the design is always deeply remembered. Although various modern technologies have brought convenient ways, perspectives, and methods for designers to observe, record, analyze and evaluate the site, none of these can replace the process of walking, observing the site with the eyes and feeling the site with the heart, because the best way to understand and feel the site as a whole is walking. Designers need to face the site directly, capture the special potential of the site with keen observation, stimulate the intuition and inspiration of the design, establish the connection between the design and the site, and create the characteristics of the site. Walking in the site is the key to open design ideas and an indispensable way to high-level design.

Walking is also part of the design. The meaning of landscape is to be read and perceived by people, as the American landscape architect John Ormsbee Simonds said, "What people plan is not place, space, or object; what people plan is experience - first of all, to determine purpose or experience, followed by conscious design of form and quality." The landscape is experienced through perception, and perception needs to be obtained through walking. For landscape architects, designing a landscape is also designing a path of perception and walking, allowing viewers to walk in a certain sequence of landscapes, and continuously realize the spiritual communication between themselves and the landscape as time progresses, and feel the landscape and get the best landscape feeling.

Although reading has become the main source of knowledge for people since the popularity of books, walking, observing, and thinking are still the most direct and effective ways for us to understand the outside world. Walking can face the real world, and walking can make up for reading the shortcomings of not being intuitive and vivid enough, and walking can expand the breadth and depth of people's cognition and thinking, as the saying goes, "what you see is true, and what you know is deep".