Thinking about Landscape Architecture

Principles of a Design Profession for the 21st Century

Bruce Sharky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317538400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

What is landscape architecture? Is it gardening, or science, or art? In this book, Bruce Sharky provides a complete overview of the discipline to provide those that are new to the subject with the foundations for future study and practice. The many varieties of landscape practice are discussed with an emphasis on the significant contributions that landscape architects have made across the world in daily practice.

Written by a leading scholar and practitioner, this book outlines the subject and explores how, from a basis in garden design, it 'leapt over the garden wall' to encapsulate areas such as urban and park design, community and regional planning, habitat restoration, green infrastructure and sustainable design, and site engineering and implementation.

Coverage includes:

• The effects that natural and human factors have upon design, and how the discipline is uniquely placed to address these challenges
• Examples of contemporary landscape architecture work - from storm water management and walkable cities to well-known projects like the New York High Line and the London Olympic Park
• Exploration of how art and design, science, horticulture, and construction come together in one subject

Thinking about Landscape Architecture is perfect for those wanting to better understand this fascinating subject, and those starting out as landscape architecture students.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS A LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT?

Landscape architecture is one of those little-known professions with a substantial legacy of extant built works that have added value and beauty to cities and regions throughout the world. This legacy has included parks, gardens, college campuses, greenway systems, and all manner of designed places where people live, work, and recreate. The aim of this book is to present a window onto the world of landscape architects and the principles that inform their work in designing the outdoor places and environments we enjoy and pass through during our daily routine. The chapters are liberally sprinkled with photographs of significant projects designed by international and award-winning practitioners. The landscape architects of these works have incorporated ecological and design principles that are infused and informed by cultural and historical considerations to create built works following the highest design standards. Many visitors have admired and enjoyed this work without knowing whose hand was responsible for their creation. The reader will also come to realize that the knowledge, skills, and experience of landscape architects have prepared them as credible participants in seeking solutions for some of the significant environmental issues of the twenty-first century. These issues include diminishing water sources and water quality, global warming, loss of biodiversity, human health and quality of life issues in urban areas. Landscape architects have a growing voice, while working at the table with others in creating strategies to solve these and other issues affecting the quality and the very survival of life on this planet.

The target audience for this book is university students enrolled in the early landscape architecture design courses, students taking a university survey course from a menu of general study courses, and for those considering landscape architecture as a career choice who want to know more in order to make an informed decision. The students in Figure 1.1 are midway through their landscape architectural curriculum towards earning a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture degree. The group represents the diversity of students who are attracted to the profession, including international representation.

Figure 1.1 Third-year landscape architecture students after having presented their design studio projects at a neighborhood meeting.

Landscape Architecture: A Design Profession for the Twenty-First Century

Landscape architects often work in close association with other professionals, including architects, civil engineers, various scientists, and others in the planning and design of a range of urban, rural, natural, and cultural settings. Landscape architecture is a relatively new profession, at least in name. The name was coined in the mid-nineteenth century and the young profession established its identify and growing influence, beginning with an early pioneer of the profession: Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted, along with Calvert Vaux, designed the American park icon: New York’s Central Park and later the Emerald Necklace, a system of parks and greenways celebrated and enjoyed by the city of Boston, Massachusetts. These two projects are noteworthy in two vital respects. New York’s Central Park was the first large-scale urban park in America with a design influenced by the estates and parks in England visited by Frederick Law Olmsted. While the design of Central Park was steeped in the naturalistic and Romantic tradition of Capability Brown and other early English landscape architects, the park was seen by Olmsted as a means of providing relief from the crowded tenements of New York by providing healthy passive, outdoor recreation spaces framed in a naturalistic setting. Olmsted also applied these natural and Romantic traditions he found in his travels to England to the design of the Emerald Necklace, another landmark urban park of nineteenth-century America. Olmsted’s design for the Boston greenway park system also helped to reduce the recurrent flooding from winter storms. What we see on the surface are large expanses of lawn composed in a series of grand outdoor rooms, defined by planted forests of mostly native trees. The park was in essence the basis of the newly created storm-water infrastructure system designed to reduce periodic flooding in downtown Boston. So in the early years of the profession, a tradition was established where the landscape architects assumed an almost messianic point of view to deal with social as well as environmental issues, in addition to creating aesthetically appealing and functional green urban open spaces and parks. With Olmsted and the early landscape architecture pioneers, a professional tenet advocating stewardship for the environment and the goal of creating healthy livable communities was inaugurated. Later in the twentieth century, the profession firmly embraced and advocated the concept of land ethics and creating greater value by incorporating what has become known as sustainable and resilient design strategies: plans and designs that will be sustainable places where people live, work, and recreate now and into the future. And these created landscapes can include design strategies that will make the resulting landscape resilient to the negative impacts of storms and other naturally occurring phenomena.

The profession of landscape architecture is well positioned to participate in solving some of the fundamental problems facing communities, cities, and global regions. The academic preparation and professional practice career trajectories prepare practitioners to create design solutions that consider the environmental as well as the social, economic, practical, and aesthetic factors. Landscape architecture, like engineering, is an applied discipline that uses scientific-based knowledge to inform planning and design solutions. The practical application of scientific knowledge is the basis for landscape architects participating in identifying solutions to such global issues as global warming, increased scarcity of adequate safe water, loss of biodiversity, and problems related to sea levels rising. The involvement of landscape architects in these issues occurs in collaboration with other disciplines. What the reader will realize while reading through the following chapters is that landscape architects have a rightful and meaningful place at the table when dealing with global-scale environmental issues, just as they do at the local and regional levels. Among the design professions, landscape architects have assumed the role of good citizens of the environment.

Landscape architects are involved in various realms and on many scales. Employment opportunities can be found in many realms of practice. There is a diverse range of professional career options open to graduates, including private, public, and academic practice as well as the emerging areas of practice involving non-governmental organizations. Landscape architects are engaged in private practice, working with multiple design disciplines and with scientists in a wide range of land resource planning and management investigations.

Landscape architects were key designers and planners of the City Beautiful Movement,¹ a movement that contributed to making the rapidly expanding cities of the post-industrial era more humane and desirable places to live. One of the early legacies of Frederick Law Olmsted was his role in the establishment of the system of US National Parks, beginning with Yellowstone and Yosemite. Early landscape architecture pioneers had a significant impact on the park movement in the United States, including the design of urban park systems that have provided enjoyment and, to a considerable degree, healthy recreation opportunities for cities, beginning in the early twentieth century and the post-World War II period and up to the present day. The design work of landscape architects can be found in iconic examples of urban design, an area of importance to the profession that has been re-energized as older areas of central cities have found new ways to reinvent and make more livable, healthy central urban neighborhoods.

In addition to the work of landscape architects at the national, state, and city project scales of development, members of the profession have collaborated with natural scientists and land resource managers tasked with creating and maintaining our system of natural areas set aside to preserve and enhance large tracts of nature preserves, coastal areas, and river corridors. Landscape architects have played a central role in attempts to identify and preserve cultural heritage sites. They have worked as part of teams of planners, designers, and engineers, assisting in route selection and later landscape restoration and landscape installations associated with national and state transportation networks, oil pipeline corridors, and large mining extraction enterprises. And of course, landscape architects have been responsible for the design of private residential gardens and commercial properties. Other types of projects for landscape architects have been either as the principal designer or associated with teams who have designed golf courses, destination parks such as Disney World, eco-tourism resorts, ski resorts, and the list could continue. And, finally, landscape architects have participated in addressing the impact of natural disasters, such as hurricanes, by contributing to the rebuilding or developing strategies to increase the resilience and sustainability of communities affected by floods, fire, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. The profession appeals to individuals interested in creating more livable, environmentally responsible, safe, healthy places for people. These people must have a range of interests, skills, and passions steeped in the arts and the natural sciences.

The skill set developed by landscape architects is applied to the processes of problem solving and design. If you like to draw, write, and interact with people, you will most likely acquire a range of effective verbal communication, drawing, and computer skills. Interestingly, the profession has embraced the application of a growing range of computer representation software, including various technical drawing, animation, and photo-simulation programs. Hand drawing remains important and those skilled in the use of various media, including pencil, watercolor, and pen and ink, continue to be valued. Model making is another skill that is used to help clients better understand a proposed design. Model making can involve quick constructions out of clay or cardboard or more elaborate models using laser-cutting machines and 3-D printers. Landscape architects have found themselves at the cutting edge of computer applications to enhance their work and increase their efficiency in communicating design ideas and solutions.

Landscape Architecture: Science or Art?

The old slow art of the eye and the hand, united in service to the imagination is in crisis. . . no other medium can as yet so directly combine vision and touch to express what it’s like to have a particular mind, with its singular troubles and glories, in a particular body.²

Another worthwhile topic to consider as we set out to explore the profession is whether or not landscape architecture is an art or a science. The short answer—as you probably will guess—is both. Since it is in fact both, this is the underlying reason that people choose to become landscape architects. Landscape architecture is arguably not readily considered an art form, as is the work of a studio artist, for reasons we will briefly review. Landscape architecture is considered a profession, whereas artists see their work as a calling, not a profession. The word profession suggests someone who provides a service to others and indeed, landscape architects do perform a range of design and planning services for others as their prime endeavor. Artists, on the other hand, do not normally work to serve others except when a commission is involved. Still, landscape architects produce designs that follow their creative instincts and ambitions as an artist might in applying paint on canvas or creating sculpture from stone or metal. It is probably much more challenging for a landscape architect to produce a work of art than an artist, considering the former must incorporate such practical matters as user safety, zoning and regulatory criteria, and functional design standards (such as vehicle turning radii). The artistic expression is manifest in the choices the landscape architect makes in creating (designing) the physical forms and spaces inspired by their artistic sensibilities. The two garden walls shown in Figure 1.2 are very different aesthetically. The wall in Figure 1.2A provides a straightforward division between two spaces. The wall in Figure 1.2B not only provides the desired separation between two spaces, but also it can be accepted as a sculptural piece, visually attractive in addition to serving its functional intent.

Figure 1.2 Two very different wall designs: A: Parc André Citroën, Paris, designed by landscape architects Gilles Clément and Alain Provost, and the architects Patrick Berger, Jean-François Jodry, and Jean-Paul Viguier; B: Garden wall in Scottsdale, Arizona, by Steve Martino, landscape architect.

Most landscape architects consider what they do and how they approach their work as having characteristics of both art and science. They see their discipline enabling them to be both creative and inventive as well as incorporating pragmatic and scientific interests to inform their work. While the words art and science appear on different pages in a dictionary, their application is anything but mutually exclusive. And the successful practitioners apply their artistic (creative) and scientific (pragmatic) skills, knowledge, and experience to what they do and the work they produce. Design is another component in the equation that can add clarity to the definition of what a landscape architect is. The result of their efforts is that something physical is to be made: they make things and make places. As we will see in a moment, the act of design is guided by the word intent. Design intent guides much of a landscape architect’s creative work.

It is any one or a combination of the triumvirate (art, science, and design) that attracts people to study landscape architecture. Landscape architects are makers of things (landscapes) and the making requires the acquisition of a body of knowledge and specific skills honed by experience that are applied, using one’s creative imagination in creating places of beauty and utility. The American designer Charles Eames states: “Art resides in the quality of doing [making]. Process is not magic.”³ What Eames means by “process is not magic” is that art is a process that can be learned. One can learn an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One: Introduction—What is a Landscape Architect?
• Chapter Two:The Language And Concepts of Design-Practical Principles and Definitions to Bethinking About
• Chapter Three:The Design Process and the Life of a Project
• Chapter Four: Historical Context of Landscape Architecture—From the Garden of Eden to the Newyork High Line and Sustainable Design
• Chapter Five: Fundamental Design and Spatial Organization Concepts
• Chapter Six: Gardens, Communities, Parks, and Urban Design
• Chapter Seven: Designing with Plants in Mind
• Chapter Eight: Concrete, Soil, Wood and Other Materials
• Chapter Nine: Design Realization
• Chapter Ten: Green Infrastructure and Sustainable Design
• Chapter Eleven: The Future of Landscape Architecture
• Index