Landscape Architecture Research Paper

Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr (1822–1903) was largely responsible for creating the discipline. He adapted European landscape gardening ideas to American places. The driving force for Olmsted was how to make increasingly industrial and crowded cities more livable. Olmsted’s work as well as his goals for the discipline defined the field. Beginning in the midnineteenth century, he and his colleagues designed urban parks; new suburban communities; parkways; campuses; state, national, and international parks; city and regional plans; cemeteries; and estates. In the process, a truly American art form was born, which has had international influence.

Landscape architecture was developed in four periods. First, varied European styles emerged in landscape gardening, including the Moorish in Spain, the Italian Renaissance, the French Baroque, and the highly original English picturesque, as well as distinct, yet synthetic, styles in the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland. Second, the contributions of Olmsted and his collaborators established a broader social agenda. Third, a modern movement emerged just before the World War II, which reached fruition in the decades that followed the war. Finally, landscape architecture has played an influential role in the environmental movement from the 1960s to the present. In each of these four periods an Asian influence has been present. For example, especially the English landscape style exhibited an awareness of Chinese and Japanese gardens.

1. European Precedents

In Islam, the Mediterranean city, building, and garden design tradition of the Greeks and Romans was maintained as the Dark Ages descended on Europe. The Islamic tradition emphasized the organization of space based on an application of principles from geometry and other branches of mathematics. Interior courtyards were favored for housing, with the judicious use of water. Water played an important role, not only for drinking and irrigation, but also for cooling. The arrangement of space, the manipulation of water flows, and the careful application of building materials, such as masonry and ceramic tiles, contribute to a pleasant living environment.

The Islamic garden is the ‘Paradise Garden’ of the Koran. These places were to be a manifestation on earth of a heavenly condition. Its rigorous ordering according to geometrical principles is a logical corollary and makes it equivalent to a mandala. The Islamic approach had a significant impact in the Iberian peninsula. As Spain was conquered by the Christians, Islamic ideas about design and planning filtered into European thinking. Among the structures built by the Moors in Spain, their dramatic, fortress palace at Granada, called the Alhambra and built between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, would make an especially important impression. In particular, its inner courtyards (the Court of Myrles and the Court of the Lions) provide models for how water and shade can be manipulated for human comfort and delight.

The Islamic world was one of the influences on the Italian renaissance. The early phase of this learning revival was especially strong in Tuscany, where the influence of Moorish design on the hillside villas around Florence is evident. For example, the powerful Medici family built hillside gardens at Fiesole (1458) overlooking Florence. They were also responsible for the extensive Boboli gardens behind the Pitti Palace in Florence. The outdoor spaces of these villas were remarkable both in Tuscany and later around Rome as the Medici introduced the style there and eventually elsewhere in Italy. While there were adaptations of Islamic ideas and uses of materials, the Italian designers also drew on ideas from ancient Rome, especially those of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, and forged a new style. In works such as the gardens of Villa Lante (1518) and Villa D’Este (begun c. 1550), architects such as Donato Bramante (1444 –1514), Pirro Ligorio (1491–1580), and Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola (1507–73), sculpted earth, water, and plants in new ways. Geometric patterns were carved into hillsides, with water flows directed tOverupt strategically at dramatic fountains, framed by rows of trees and shrubs that guided the eye to various focal points. Water is an essential feature of Italian gardens, of almost all designed landscapes really, just as are hard stone and living plants, because the polarities of the senses can be exposed.

The great French garden designer Andre Le Notre (1613–1700) took these Italian forms and enlarged them with Baroque proportions. The natural expanses of the French countryside were not as constrained as the hillsides of Italy and the power of the Sun King eclipsed that of even the Medici. Begun in 1661, Louis XIV’s palace at Versailles recreated a vast, five-squaremile portion of the French countryside into an elaborate system of grand vistas. A main east–west axis and several crossing axes of various sizes divide the space into a series of parterres with connecting allees bordered with massive, carefully manicured trees. As with the Italian gardens, Le Notre created fountains and other focal points at strategic points along the sight lines, but whereas trickles of waters collect into gushing fountains in Italy, a grand canal an elaborate, mechanical pumping system was created at Versailles. From the apex at the chateau, the landscape underscored who controlled and ruled this place.

A contrasting landscape style emerged in England, as it became a sea power connected to the Americas and the Orient and influenced by growing ideas about democracy. While John Locke (1632–1704) wrote about the inalienable rights of people to pursue life, liberties, and property, poets like Alexander Pope (1688–1744) waxed on about learning from the genius of the place. As the Englishman Horace Walpole (1717–97) observed of William Kent (c. 1685–1748), one of the innovators of his nation’s landscape design tradition, ‘He leaped the Fence and saw that all Nature was a garden.’

Kent, Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–83), and Humphrey Repton (1752–1818) sought to improve the English landscape. They arranged estates with asymmetrically placed clumps of trees, broad undulating greenswards, serpentine lakes, and surrounding belts of woodlands in the grounds of Stowe (1736), Rousham (1738–41), Kensington Gardens (c. 1744), Bowood (1763–71), Blenheim Palace (c. 1765), and Ashburnham Palace (1767). Their romantic designs used small classical and Asian influenced structures as focal points. The English landscape garden became known as an imitation of nature. Where straight lines dominated the Moorish, Italian, and French designs, curves preponderated in the British Isles from the eighteenth century on.

Watkin (1982) argues persuasively that the English landscape tradition drew its inspiration for its nongeometric ‘picturesque’ qualities from the Chinese garden. The English and other Europeans were exposed to the Chinese approach especially by returning French Jesuit priests. The Chinese garden contains complex symbolic meanings for its cultural and physical context. These gardens, as well as subsequent adaptations and transformations in Korea and Japan, are richly symbolic as microcosms.

Ancient Roman gardens, as well as rising English nationalism, also influenced the picturesque approach. Watkin notes that the third Earl of Shaftesbury, ‘called for the creation of a national style and a national taste based on the spirit of national freedom, which he believed was enshrined in the Whig oligarchy …’ and to achieve this style the model was ‘the free commonwealth of republican Rome as well as the culture of China’ (1982, p. 2).

This growing philosophy, affected largely by the teachings of Locke, coincided with the English colonization of the New World and would have a lasting imprint in North America. Meanwhile, the English landscape style and the contrasting geometric forms from the continent impacted approaches in other European nations, which also developed their own styles, notably in the Netherlands, Germany, and Poland. In the Netherlands especially, the term landscape (landschap, in Dutch) has deep cultural significance, because much of the land in the nation has literally been made. The Germans borrowed from the English approach, but contributed a more scientific understanding of nature, laying the groundwork for contemporary concepts of ecology and sustainability. The Poles combined formal and informal spaces in conscious melding of nature and culture, at places such as the grounds at Wilanow Palace and Lazienki Park.

2. Olmsted And His Collaborators

American landscape architecture came into being after several decades of marination in the English style. Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–52) was certainly an adherent to the English school of landscape gardening. Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. had been influenced profoundly by the English style, especially Birkenhead Park, which he visited during an 1850 trip to the British Isles. Birkenhead is a suburb of Liverpool. Its park was designed specifically for the public by Joseph Paxton (1803–65) in 1844. Previous parks in England and elsewhere in Europe were the estate gardens of the aristocracy donated to a city or loaned to the public.

A second direct impression from the British Isles on Olmsted’s work was his partnership with the English architect, Calvert Vaux (1824–95). In spite of the strong English influences, Olmsted was an original. He altered the name of the field from ‘landscape gardening’ to ‘landscape architecture’ and established a new discipline that transcended making gardens for the very rich and powerful.

Olmsted’s incredible start in landscape architecture was the design and construction supervision of Central Park in New York City with Vaux beginning in 1857. Through Central Park, Olmsted sought to bring the benefits of open space to the urban masses. The urban park would provide a healthy antidote to the crowding and pollution brought on by the Industrial Revolution. Central Park was an immediate success. This led to Olmsted to establish a landscape architecture practice, initially with Vaux and later with his sons. The practice was responsible for urban parks in Brooklyn, Boston, Chicago, Montreal, and, eventually throughout North America.

The discipline that Olmsted founded was defined by the scope of his own work as well as that of his son (Frederick Law, Jr., 1870–1957) and nephew–adopted son (John C. Law, 1852–1920). In addition to urban parks, Olmsted designed Riverside, Illinois—a prototype suburban new community; contributed to the preservation of Yosemite and Niagara Falls—setting the state for national and international parks; and participated in the planning of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 which created the inspiration for the ‘City Beautiful Movement.’ Toward the end of his prolific life, Olmsted, Sr. also designed an estate for the very wealthy George W. Vanderbilt, but Biltmore was also an experimental forest and farm. At Vanderbilt’s Biltmore, the French-trained American forester and conservationist Gifford Pinchot (1865–1946) first applied his ‘multiple use, sustained yield’ concept, a precursor to contemporary sustainability.

While the Olmsteds broadened the scope of landscape architecture, the style they employed was strongly English-influenced. The ‘pastoral aesthetic,’ as well as the associated Whig political philosophy, resonated with Americans. The aesthetic was appropriate for large portions (but not all) of the North American continent. When Olmsted worked in California on the design of the Stanford University campus plan, the style, more Spanish than English, was more suitable for the climate and history of the state.

Stanford was but one of the campuses that Olmsted, his sons, and their collaborators designed. In addition to designing campuses, Olmsted was involved in other aspects of higher education. He was a strong supporter of the land-grant colleges, established by Justin Morrill (1810–98) in 1862, to offer education in the agricultural and mechanical arts and sciences. Morrill, Olmsted, and others believed that the interests of agriculture and industry had been ignored by the established universities in the United States which followed more elitist goals. Many of these land-grant schools began requiring landscape gardening courses in the late nineteenth century and one (Iowa State) offered Olmsted its presidency.

Landscape architecture impacted the elite schools too. Perhaps, Olmsted’s brightest young collaborator was Charles Eliot, son of the president of Harvard. The younger Eliot organized probably the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary ecological inventories of Mount Desert Island in Maine during the 1880s. With the Olmsted firm, Eliot developed a plan for the Boston metropolitan region in 1893. He proposed an ‘emerald necklace’ for the region that linked park and open space systems while making environmental improvements for flood control and water quality. Eliot died of spinal meningitis prematurely at age 38 in 1897. In his memory, his father established the landscape architecture program at Harvard that would lead the discipline through much of the twentieth century.

3. The Modern Movement In Landscape Architecture

In the early twentieth century, landscape architecture established itself as a profession in North America and northern Europe and Japan. Professional associations were founded, including the American Society of Landscape Architects (1899), and leading universities, such as Harvard and the growing land-grant schools, initiated departments or programs. However, much of the idealism of the Olmsteds dwindled, as the progressive branch of the field embraced the new profession of city planning. The leading landscape architecture historian Norman Newton noted that ‘single-track eclecticism’ took over especially in the Harvard department as practitioners flocked to build estates and exclusive neighborhoods for the wealthy.

However, it was at Harvard where a counter movement against this eclectic garden-design dominance began. In the late-1930s, students Garrett Eckbo (1910–2000), Dan Kiley (b. 1912), and James Rose (1910–91) rebelled against the Harvard curriculum. Their quest for a more modern, a more creative, approach to landscape design coincided with the arrival of Walter Gropius (1883–1969) at Harvard in 1937. Gropius helped institutionalize the Bauhaus philosophy of design within this leading American academic institution.

Meanwhile, in California, Thomas Church (1902– 1978) had developed a practice revolving around gardens for the middle and upper-middle class. Celebrated in Sunset magazine, the Church garden provided an ideal for the new American outdoor, suburban lifestyle. Between the rebellious Harvard trio and Church, a modern movement in landscape architecture developed. This modernism is characterized by both its democratic spirit, that is, making the benefits of landscape design available to a wide spectrum of people, as well as by its spare cubistand surrealist-inspired forms. For example, Eckbo designed Depression-era multifamily housing in California for the Farm Security Administration. These schemes are functional, spatial arrangements, designed to provide shelter and a delightful environment for working people in challenging economic situations. Eckbo was one of many landscape architects who contributed to the economic and social recovery of the nation through various public works projects from the greenbelt new towns to the national parks and forests.

American modernists found inspiration in the works of the Brazilian Roberto Burle Marx (1909–94) and the Mexican Luis Barragan (1902–88). However, arguably modernism in landscape architecture coalesced through the work of Hideo Sasaki (1919–2000) and Lawrence Halpern (b. 1916). As both student and teacher gravitating between the University of Illinois and Harvard, Sasaki defined landscape architecture during the 1950s. In his San Francisco home, Halpern’s work reflected a free spirit, in harmony with the 1960s. Their work returned in scope and scale to that established in the previous century by the Olmsteds—urban parks, new communities, campuses, and, increasingly, corporate headquarters.

4. The Ecological Era

During the 1960s, the way people viewed their relationship to the Earth changed fundamentally. Since the World War II, the specter of nuclear destruction clouded the future. In the quest to prevail in the arms race, the Soviet Union and the United States raced to the moon. Something unexpected happened. Images of the Earth from space were transmitted into living room televisions and breakfast newspapers. On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon and altered our view of Earth. From that barren orb, it became clear that the Earth is alive. Boundaries are human impositions. The world we inhabit is both fragile and beautiful.

Even before the Apollo images were broadcast, voices for protecting the Earth had been raised. Aldo Leopold (1886–1948) urged people to view land as community, and Rachel Carson (1907–1964) demonstrated the dangers of poisoning our nest. To this chorus, Ian McHarg (1920–2001) urged that we ‘design with nature.’ His book by the same name provided a new theory for landscape architecture, and altered other fields as well, notably planning, architecture, and the environmental sciences.

From his University of Pennsylvania (Penn) base, McHarg married a traditional landscape architecture technique with contemporary concepts from ecology for his new theory. Map overlays had been used by landscape architects since the Olmsteds and Eliot. McHarg suggested that information be collected in a systematic, chronological order to reveal interactions, relationships, and patterns. Natural phenomena, such as climate and geology, influence processes like water flow and soil development, which in turn affect the location of plants and animals. McHarg suggested that by conducting such an ecological inventory of a place opportunities and constraints for various possible land uses can be identified. The values of people living in the place can then be used to determine how these opportunities and constraints indicate a range of suitabilities for potential land use.

This approach influenced how environmental impact assessments are undertaken and provides the underlying theory for geographic information systems (GISs). GISs are used for displaying, analyzing, and storing spatially-related data in computers. The initial technological and theoretical advancement of GISs largely came from landscape architecture (and, sometimes, planning faculty) such as Carl Steinitz (Harvard), Bruce MacDougall (Penn then the University of Massachusetts), Julius Fabos (University of Massachusetts), Lewis Hopkins (University of Illinois), and Thomas Dickert (University of California–Berkeley).

McHarg recognized that in order for human communities to take full advantage of ecological knowledge, a fundamental value shift was necessary especially in western nations. He argued that the Judaic–Christian philosophy of ‘multiplying and subduing the earth’ has deleterious consequences for the environment. McHarg found hope in Native American and Asian religious beliefs, worldviews that stressed harmony with nature, rather than dominance.

5. Prospects: Following Nature’s Lead

The ecological revolution promulgated by McHarg at Penn went beyond influencing techniques and technology. The ecological prospective advocated a fundamental shift in the way we design and plan. Ecology is the study of how all living creatures, including people, interact with each other as well as with their physical and biological environments. Such understanding is essential for sustainable development and regenerative design. Ecological design involves understanding the regional context in which humans live, a recognition of natural limits and capacities, and an ability to build at an appropriate scale.

Landscape architecture practices, such as Andropogon in Philadelphia, Jones and Jones in Seattle, and Design Workshop in Colorado have continued to refine and advance McHarg’s concepts about ecological design and planning. Iconoclastic practitioners such as Rich Haag in Seattle, A. E. Bye in Connecticut, and Laurie Olin in Philadelphia have adopted a less empirical, more intuitive, yet still ecological, approach to their work. Other practices, such as Hargreaves Associates in San Francisco and Civitas in Denver, initially rejected an ecological based approach in favor of a more fine arts orientation, but eventually gravitated toward addressing ecology, because of the complexity of the urban and suburban sites where they work demanded it.

Meanwhile, theorists such as Anne Whiston Spirn, Elizabeth Meyer, and James Corner suggest new insights into how to read landscapes, with ecology providing the vocabulary for such readings. Landscape architects are unique among artists and architects in that their mediums for creation are mostly living entities. They work with natural processes and materials, which is a complex undertaking. As the Roman architect Vitruvius observed in his second book on architecture ‘… all things are generated as the Nature of Things has determined, not for the pleasure of man, but disparate as though by chance.’

The necessity to understand the nature of places is basic to the art of landscape architecture. Ecology provides the language for reading landscapes. Such understanding leads to an appreciation of critical regionalism. Understanding and acknowledging the diverse cultures of places is fundamental to such regionalism. American landscape architecture appears to be adaptable to many places internationally. Such internationalism is neither an international ‘style’ nor a form of cultural imperialism, rather it is a flexible approach, sensitive to cultural pluralism.

Landscape design as a distinct art can first be recognized in the Moorish gardens of Spain and in the hillside Renaissance villas of Italy as well as the contemplative places of China, Korea, and Japan. All the early examples represent cultural adaptations to climate and topography. The Italian style was expanded to grotesque proportions in the French Baroque, and was then muted to the practical scale of the Dutch polders. The English landscape school leaped the garden wall, and the Americans introduced landscape aesthetics to the city, the suburb, and the wilderness. Landscape architecture is now crossing continental divides and finding Nature in the whole world.

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