The New Landscape Declaration by Landscape Architecture Foundation

Author:Landscape Architecture Foundation
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2017-10-16T23:20:47+00:00

Gina Ford is principal, landscape architect, and chair of Sasaki’s Urban Studio. She holds degrees in architecture from Wellesley College and landscape architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Chapter 21

On the Future of Landscape Architecture

Carl Steinitz

Size and scale matter. Landscape architects have always worked across a broad range of project sizes and scales from a small garden or a house on a difficult site, to a typical midrange of new residential areas or large parks, to regional urbanization studies or conservation strategies. The reality is, however, that most landscape architects work on smaller projects.

This has not always been the case. In the nineteenth century, gardeners made gardens and architects designed buildings, developments, and even parks. Engineers designed infrastructure for expanding towns, parks, and water supply projects. There was opportunity for those with appropriate skills to work across size and scale. The landscape-oriented professions began to coalesce around the term landscape architecture. Frederick Law Olmsted, Peter Joseph Lenné, John Claudius Loudon, and Warren Manning all worked across size and scale. They all designed villas and gardens. Olmsted designed a rose garden and oversaw a forest management plan for the largest private estate in America. Lenné made designs for Potsdam and Berlin. Loudon made a plan for the London region. Manning designed both gardens and the entire United States as published in Landscape Architecture Magazine in 1923.

I see the profession mainly, but not only, from an academic perspective. The Department of Landscape Architecture in the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) was founded in 1900, aided by the Olmsted office. From its earliest days, Harvard’s landscape architecture faculty taught across a wide range of scales. However, it rarely emphasized each scale equally. There has always been competition within the GSD and the larger university for academic turf. This has implications for size and scale.

By the 1920s, commissions came from the wealthy needing help in designing their villas and gardens, and professional education began to shift toward smaller projects. This loss of interest in the larger landscape and the increasing (and, in my opinion, artificial and harmful) separation of design from planning caused a political division within Harvard’s Department of Landscape Architecture, resulting in the creation of America’s first Department of City and Regional Planning. Both departments continued to emphasize physical design as taught in studios.

In 1966, when I first joined the Harvard faculty, Charles Harris and Hideo Sasaki led an attempt to bridge the gap between landscape architecture and planning. My first teaching assignment was in a collaborative studio with Charles Harris and Reginald Isaacs, with Charles Eliot II, Phil Lewis, and Ian McHarg as visitors. This kind of collaboration continued well into the 1970s.

In the late 1970s, the planning department moved away from physical design and focused on economic analysis and social planning. It subsequently moved to the Kennedy School of Government. (Planning with an emphasis on design was reestablished at the GSD in the 1990s.) Landscape architecture focused mainly on small and midsize project design. An exception was much of my own work, extending across scales but emphasizing change in the larger landscape.

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