History of landscape architecture

The discussion of the history of landscape architecture is a complex endeavor as it shares much of its history with that of landscape gardening and architecture, spanning the entirety of man's existence. However, it was not until relatively recent history that the term "landscape architecture" or even "landscape architect" came into common use.

Early History

"Landscape architecture" was first used by Gilbert Laing Meason in his book "On The Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy" (London, 1828). Meason was born in Scotland and did not have the opportunity to visit Italy. But he admired the relationship between architecture and landscape in the great landscape paintings and drew upon Vitruvius' Ten books of architecture to find principles underlying the relationship between built form and natural form.

'Landscape architecture' was then taken up by John Claudius Loudon and used to describe a specific type of architecture, suited to being placed in designed landscapes. Loudon was admired by the American designer and theorist Andrew Jackson Downing and 'landscape architecture' was the subject of a chapter in Downing's book "A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America" (1841).

This led to its adoption by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Olmsted and Vaux gave a different slant to the meaning of 'landscape architecture', using the term to describe the whole professional task of designing a composition of planting, landform, water, paving and other structures. Their first use of this term was in the winning entry for the design of Central Park in New York City. Olmsted and Vaux then adopted 'landscape architect' as a professional title and used it to describe their work for the planning of urban park systems. Olmsted's project for the Emerald Necklace in Boston was widely admired and led to the use of 'landscape architecture' as a professional title in Europe, initially by Patrick Geddes and Thomas Mawson.

Landscape architecture has since become a worldwide profession, recognized by the International Labor Organization and co-ordinated by the International Federation of Landscape Architects. Three remarkable histories of the landscape architecture profession were published in the 1970s.

A first comprehensive history of landscape architecture, as distinct from the history of gardening was written by Norman T Newton with the title "Design on the land: the development of landscape architecture" (Belknap/Harvard 1971). The book has 42 chapters. The first three chapters are on Ancient Times, The Middle Ages, and The World of Islam. The last three chapters are on Urban Open-Space Systems, Variations in Professional Practice and the Conservation of Natural Resources. This reflects the development of landscape architecture from a focus on private gardens, in the ancient world, to a focus on the planning and design of public open space in the modern world. Since kings used to be responsible for the provision of public goods (irrigation, streets, town walls, parks and other environmental goods) the distinction between public and private was not quite the same in the ancient world as it is in the modern world.

A second comprehensive history of landscape architecture was published, in 1973, by George B Tobey, with the title "History of Landscape Architecture". It extends from 5,000 BC, through the development of agriculture and towns to the design of gardens, parks and garden cities. This represents a broader view of landscape architecture than that of Newton and would have been well suited to Newton's title 'Design on the land'.

A third comprehensive history of landscape architecture was published by Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe in 1975 with the title "The landscape of man: shaping the environment from prehistory to the present day" (Thames and Hudson, 1975). The book has 27 chapters and is more comprehensive than its predecessors, geographically, artistically and philosophically. Like Bannister Fletcher's "History of Architecture", the book has introductory sections (eg on environment, social history, philosophy, expression, architecture, landscape) and then a series of examples with plans and photographs. Many of the examples are parks and gardens but the book also includes the layout of temples, towns, forests and other projects concerned with 'shaping the environment'.

{Note: this section on the History of Landscape Architecture could and should be enlarged to include country-specific sections, eg History of Landscape Architecture in America and History of Landscape Architecture in Australia. It is suggested that instead of attempting a history of 'design on the land' since the dawn of history, there is a focus on the modern (post-1500)period} and on making a collective landscape. This would avoid overlap with the History of gardening}.

Representation

A history of landscape architecture or of the landscape in general, cannot be complete without the discussion of the many modes of representation which have disseminated the ideas, theories, methodologies and aesthetics of the profession. These methods have evolved and changed over the centuries and millennia to reflect not only the ever changing notions inherent in the history of landscape architecture itself, but also through the emergent methods within the worlds of art, printing, photography and the many technologies and advancements surrounding those mediums.

Painting

Photography

Modern photography first began in the early 19th Century with the advent of the first permanent photographs as a combination of technologies by several chemists, physicist and inventors culminated in many of the photographic processes used today. However, it was not until George Eastman's introduction of 35mm roll film and the Brownie camera that accompanied it that photography became affordable to a wide audience.

Early Paradigms

In 1845, less than five years after the first silver chloride photographic process was used by Fox Talbot, the famous architect John Ruskin wrote that photography was the antidote for the “mechanical poison that this terrible nineteenth century has poured upon men.”Sharf, Aaron. “The Gospel of Landscape”. The Land: Twentieth Century Landscape Photographs. Ed. Bill Brandt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976.] Ruskin was, of course, speaking in reference to his many theories on architecture, art and the industrial revolution which centered on his moralistic understanding of society in the first half of the nineteenth century. His approval of photography as a means of representing landscape, both designed and ingenuous, had a significant influence on the understanding of both photography as a medium and on the landscape as a subject and practice in its own right. To Ruskin, they both shared a sense of prudence, having a “temper of parsimony”, that demanded a form of active participation.

Throughout his writings, Ruskin compares the properties of landscape representation that photography provides with those of painting, which was until much later in the nineteenth century, the status quo for artists and designers as representation tool. The hegemonic nature of painting, and in particular the Cartesian perspectivalism of the Renaissance, came into question with the advent of photography. [Jay, Martin. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”. Vision and Visuality. Ed. Hal Foster, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988.] The nature of photography, it was argued, was descriptive, unlike painting which had lost its power to produce a narrative and had broken “the bond with the viewer’s physique”. [Bryson. “Vision and Painting”. quoted in Martin Jay. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”. Vision and Visuality. Ed. Hal Foster, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988.] Instead, photography offered a fragmented, arbitrary frame that allowed “Nature the power to reproduce herself directly unaided by man”. [Alpers, Svetlan. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. quoted in Martin Jay. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity”. Vision and Visuality. Ed. Hal Foster, Seattle: Bay Press, 1988.] In 1899, Alfred Steiglitz, a pioneer in developing photography as an accepted form of art, would call photography the “bastard child of science and art” praising photography as an artistic medium from “under the shadow of landscape painting”.Hildebrand, Gary R. “Photographing the Designed Landscape: A Practice of Seeing and Knowing”. American Designed Landscapes: A Photographic Interpretation. Washington D.C.: Spacemaker Press, 1998.]

Comparison to Painting

Steiglitz would take a slightly different stance however, when discussing photography’s objectivity. Unlike Ruskin and Alpers before him, Steiglitz saw photography’s objective status as a “conflation” having both artifice and nature imbedded in its frame. In this way, he introduced a new paradigm to the use of photography as a means of representing landscapes. No matter whether they were designed or “natural”, photographing the landscape was itself a process in design and composition. Photography was both “expressive and analytical”, ultimately being itself natural.

This comparison would continue beyond the early stages of landscape photography as theoreticians and practitioners alike reveled in the comparisons and contrasts of this new media. The birth of color photography and its availability in the late 1930s provided even more fuel to the contested paradigms of representation. In his many essays on the subject, László Moholy-Nagy wrote on the ability of color photography to bring new intensity and complexity to the representation of light and nature.Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo. “Paths to the Unleashed Color Camera”. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Color in Transparency: Photographic Experiments in Color. Ed. Jeannine Fiedler. Berlin: Steidl, 2006.] He warned that though a technical advancement, color was not necessarily a step forward for photography as a whole. He argued that it introduced new problems that early pioneers had already solved in black-and-white. His praise came in comparing color photography with the post-impressionist Paul Cézanne and the impressionist Seurat before him who had recognized additive color as a profound method of representation: “the Impressionists dared to take the first step toward objectivity in optical problems; they were the first to suppress the narrative, story-telling element in painting in favor of the cult of color”. This understanding opened photography to express, in its representation of landscape, whether through black-and-white or color the concept of space and temporality.

Photographic Representation as Legacy

The legacy of photography as a representational tool for picturing the landscape is the legacy of landscape architecture itself. This can be seen through some of the best-known works of modern landscape architecture. As photography displaced landscape painting as the primary means of representing the landscape it also became a crucial element in disseminating built works as well theories of the land.

A key example can be seen in Dan Kiley’s Miller Garden. Designed and built in 1955 in collaboration with Eero Saarinen’s design for the house, it was not until Peter Walker’s pivotal 1980 exhibition featuring Alan Ward’s photographs that Kiley was credited with designing a modern masterpiece. Several factors played into this happening. The first was that the house and its garden, like so many projects from the twentieth century, was a private estate and inaccessible to the public and no less visible even to scholars. But most importantly, Ward’s photos captured the form and space of the site with a clarity and subtlety that even physical presence would be impossible to capture. In the Miller Garden and many landscapes like it, photography becomes the only means by which thousands of students, scholars, historians, theoreticians and practitioners know and understand the land and is due, as many have argued, to photography’s “ambivalent posture—as tool and product, means and result, reportage and artistic work.”

This duality has been an important concept to engage in throughout the photograph’s history and one which has been explored by both photographers and landscape architects. In the last twenty years, writers like Holly Getch Clarke have developed responses to theories of both visualization and emergent themes in the “expanding field” of landscape architecture.Getch Clarke, Holly A., “Land-scopic Regimes: Exploring Perpectival Representation Beyond the ‘Pictorial’ Project”. Landscape Journal. 24.1 (2005): 50-68.] She argues that landscape design, through its representation can begin to operate as a “process of cultural production” citing diorama, montage, scale, juxtaposition and other methods that “reinstate an element of wonder or magic to rationalized human experience”.

ee also

*History of gardening
*Landscape architecture
*Landscape planning

* [http://www.aila.org.au/LApapers/papers/historyhendry/history-hendry.htm The profession of Landscape Architecture in Australia] originally published by Margaret Hendry in 1997

Notes