Investigating the Status of Landscape Architecture Theories of the World in the Professional Landscape Architecture Projects of Iran

By studying theories and approaches regarding landscape, this study analyzes, prioritizes, and evaluates landscapes and investigates their positions in the professional architecture projects of contemporary landscapes in Iran. In this regard, the current theories will be classified into six approaches: concept and meaning, aesthetic, social-cultural, nature and ecology, designing, form, function, planning and the process of designing and they will be analyzed accordingly. It should be noted that this study will be carried out at two levels; at the qualitative method level which is based on the grounded theory that analyzes theories by encoding concepts. At the second level, a comparative approach is used in which the extracted criteria from level one will be evaluated in the contemporary landscape architecture of Iran. The results suggest that there are some drawbacks regarding the aforementioned categories in the professional architecture projects of landscape in the country, in a way that in issues such as connecting landscape with architecture, perceiving landscape, flexibility and planning landscape no attempt has been ever made, but the cases of patterns, symbols, tradition, order and geometry are going to be investigated favorably. Therefore, by making effort to compensate for the mentioned shortcomings we can have a considerable development in all of the cited dimensions.