1.2 DIFFERENTIATION OF GREEN FUNCTIONALISM IN GERMANY
The German version of green functionalism is also based on objectifying the aesthetic field through functionalistic principles of beauty. These principles, however, are not deduced from a liberal worldview as in the United States, but are rooted in an organicistic conception of aesthetics—as, e.g., represented by the poet and philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder‡—which became the foundation for an idea of landscape as an object in the form of cultural landscapes. The actual physical landscape became the object of investigation for the newly emerging scientific discipline of geography§ and, simultaneously, the arena for political disputation between preservers of tradition and their opponents, the advocates of technical progress. The custodians of cultural landscapes, being the inferior combatants in what they considered to be a “spatially” expressed political battle, attempted to mitigate the discrepancy between technical progress and the traditions of cultural landscapes on two levels: through integrating technical artifacts into cultural landscapes and through harmonizing spatial development by means of holistic or, rather, organic regional planning.