Landscape Architecture is the unity of art and the environment. What draws me to the profession of Landscape Architecture, what keeps me engrossed in it, is the ability to connect my passion for nature and my love for art and design.
The following are a list of values that are critical to how I design, engage, influence and become part of the process of the landscape.
Landscape is a process
Landscape Architects design, build and plant but our design is never finished, the landscape is continuously changing, evolving and transforming. We do not hold complete control. Therefore designs must not be static and viewed as ‘finished products’ but must leave gaps to allow form and function to evolve in a space. Landscape Architecture must balance indeterminacy and programing in order to create spaces that are vibrant expressions of culture and ecology.
Landscape is for flora/ fauna AND people either together or separately
Landscape for flora and fauna: Landscape exists without people but people cannot exist without landscape. Therefore not all landscapes should be created for people to use. Landscapes can serve the sole purpose of protecting and maintaing flora and fauna habitats and the health of ecosystems.
Landscapes for people: Landscapes can be for purely human use and enjoyment and serve no ecological function.
“landscape design ultimately concerns making outdoor places for human use” Marc Treib
Landscape for flora, fauna and people: In a landscape where humans and nature coexist plants serve a purpose of aesthetic value but they are more than an object, a material, in the landscape. Plants are a part of the ecology of the site and create a habitat for fauna and people.
Therefore Landscape Architecture must design for its users. It must see itself as the framework for allowing social and ecological processes to evolve a site.
Landscape Architecture must recycle NOT replicate
Landscape Architecture must resist globalization, the direct replica of ideas and forms. We need to resist the temptation of becoming a mere cookie cutter, taking an idea and replicating it across the globe. The laziest approach to design is to do what has already been done.
However we should seek to experience successfully designed landscapes in order to learn from them and to be inspired. We can then deconstruct the mixture of design styles, approaches and elements we have experienced to evolve new ideas, approaches and styles of how to design the landscape.
Through developing new ideas landscapes will develop identity as unique spaces, not landscapes which have no sense of place and could be located anywhere within the nation or the world. Identity and a sense of place does not mean that places must become a ‘window’ to the past. Landscape Architecture should not try to recreate history through restoring the history and ecology of a site, but instead recycle history and use it to inform design.
In this way we must seek a balance between replication and nostalgic regionalism without conforming to the design styles associated with Critical Regionalism.
Landscape Architecture is a product of its surroundings
It is useless to consider a site without the context of community, culture, location, ecology and the interaction of the site to these elements. I believe successful design cannot exist with the perspective of Frank Gehry “ I don’t do context” or Rem Koolhaas “F*** context”
A site is a product of its context whether the designer chooses to acknowledge context or not. The temperature, soil, wind, quality of light and the overall climate are a critical part of landscape that can not be ignored in design. Also the cultural and social context of a space can not be neglected. Even if a site is to be cut off from its social context, to be segregated, to stand apart from its surroundings, the threshold into that space then becomes a key part of the design.
Landscape Architecture designs for, not creates, experience
Landscapes should be designed to invite people to engage, explore and experience a space in order to provoke thought, foster imagination and create spaces where people indwell their surroundings not just view the landscape as a mere backdrop. Designs must involve the senses in order to provoke experience, connect spaces and engage people with a space. We must resist the ocularcentrism perspective of the Picturesque and create designs that are multi-sensate.
Landscape Architects, however, do not have the ability to control, design or create a certain experience. We can only influence a phenomenological response of a person, through design based on our own metaphysical desires, perceptions and ideas of comfort, beauty or emotion. This doesn’t mean as Landscape Architects we shouldn’t design for phenomenology with materiality or hapticity, it only acknowledges that I believe each person’s response to a space will be different, is indeterminate and cannot be controlled.
Landscapes do need to be designed based on how they will be viewed and experienced. I believe it is important to create a balance of resisting contemporary fast paced culture and allowing it to function. This involves creating spaces where people can linger as well as allowing them to move quickly from one point to another.
Landscape Architecture must rebel against the Cartesian Divide, the division of subject and object
Landscape Architecture, I believe, is the design for community. It is the unity of professions [Architecture, Engineering, Planning] and the arts [Sculpture, Art] to connect our fragmented world. As the design theories insertion and reciprocity establish, the relationship between landscape, architecture and urbanism is a very important part of how Landscape Architects design.
Architecture and urbanism do not define landscape nor does landscape define architecture and urbanism. They must coexist each individually, but flowing into and through one another. This interconnectedness of landscape, architecture and urbanism should not embrace urban sprawl, as the design theory Landscape Urbanism does. Landscape can exist without urbanism and architecture, however architecture and urbanism can not exist without landscape.
