Return To Commonplace——Aesthetic Of Daily Life In Martha Schwartz’s Landscape Works

Martha Schwartz is an internationally outstanding landscape architect in the20th century. Chinese classical landscape is looking for artistic beauty, while modern landscape is in pursuit of purely formal beauty and supreme functionality. However, what Martha Schwartz focuses on is different from Chinese classical landscape and modern landscape. To gain insight into Martha Schwartz’s aesthetic mentality and interests, this paper is aimed to analyze her works and find out her attention to daily life.Martha Schwartz’s work otherwise reveals the beauty of life with full concerns to life. This paper firstly explains concepts of daily aesthetics and narrative expression and then analyzes the aesthetic theme of Martha Schwartz’s works by using daily aesthetics and method of narrative expression as starting point. Finally, this paper sums up these themes, some of which are as follows:(1) Narrative of emotions in daily life. Martha Schwartz pays attention to delicate emotions in daily life, narrates mundane, cozy, pleasant and bothers of everyday life and shows us the ordinary and sentimental life.(2) Narrative of daily objects’sentiment. Martha Schwartz shows concern to objects which are unusual, discarded, ordinary and ignored to illustrate shinning points from ordinary objects.(3) Habitual and cultural narrative, Folk culture is closely related to life, sometimes even without notice. Martha Schwartz magnifies cultural customs to make people aware of the wisdom and humor of folk culture.(4) History and historical narrative. Martha Schwartz shows fragments in history and the footprint of social development, instead of the grand narrative of history. In this way, Martha Schwartz shows humanistic charm of fragments of history.These four points exhibit her attention and emotion to the dull, trivial, ordinary, mundane things in daily life.In words, her landscape works full of daily concerns reflect her attention to the simplicity and beauty of our daily life and to her critique of rationalism in life. Her application of objects from daily life in the practice of landscape architecture shows the beauty of these mundane, ordinary things and emotions both usually ignored by people. Aesthetic returns to everyday life, and returns to extraordinary from the ordinary of life.