Is landscape architecture a good job, and career? Yes, it s very good. The attractions are:
It s a creative design profession You spend your days dreaming
about excellent places and working to make them You contribute to easing the world s environmental
problems on a local and step-by-step basis. The principle that we should "Think global
and act local" comes from Patrick Geddes, who was the first UK citizen to use term
landscape architect in the sense given to it by Frederick Law Olmsted in the 1860s
The demand for landscape architects is on an upward trend because environmental quality
is an income-elastic good: as we get richer we want better places to live in,
to work in and to enjoy in our leisure time. ? Since I m a Londoner, I m illustrating this
video with clips of well-composed man-made landscapes in London.
? And since I prefer the plain truth to marketing spiel, I ll start by telling you
about a problem landscape architects face - and about how to solve it.
The problem is that despite the landscape profession s many
great successes the term landscape architect is poorly understood by the general public and by
the other design professions. The consequence, too often, is that opportunities for creating
brilliant new landscapes are squandered. Muddling it up with the older term landscape
gardening , too many people think that landscaping means planting. It doesn t.
We do produce planting plans but they can hardly be 5% of the profession s workload.
Other people think you can make a good landscape by planting and paving alone which is also wrong.
The solution to the landscape comprehension problem
is of course for the profession to do a good job of explaining the art of landscape architecture:
its history, theory, aims and objectives. So the rest of this video is a short summary of the story
the profession should, in my view, be telling the world. There s more about each of the ten points
in the videos listed in the Q&A section of the landscapearchitecture.org.uk website.
1 Landscape architecture can be defined as the art of planning,
designing and making good outdoor space 2 This art began over 30,000 years ago,
which makes it about 3 times as old as building architecture.
The first illustration in Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe s excellent book on The Landscape of Man
is of a hunting landscape, drawn in the Lascaux cave from about 17,000 years ago.
3 Fundamentally, landscape architects are engaged with the composition of landform, water and
planting with buildings and pavings. These are the five primary compositional elements. We do this
for residential, educational, industrial, transport, leisure and other land uses.
4 As an organised profession, Landscape Architecture in Britain, and in most countries,
grew from two famous projects by Frederick Law Olmsted: Central Park in New York City and the
Emerald Necklace in Boston. It s an urban design for parks connected by greenways.
5 Landscape architects use the word landscape in a specialised sense. It relates to Plato s
theory of forms and means a good place . That is a place with good looks, good functions and good
construction. This differs from the way the word landscape is used by painters and geographers.
6 We use the word architecture , in the sense set out 2,000 years ago by Vitruvius Polio,
for the task of integrating the work of other specialists. When composing landscapes,
this includes building designers, engineers, hydrologists and horticulturalists.
7 Modern landscape architecture, as practiced in the 20th century, rests on a linear design
method often described as Survey>Analysis>Design. It wa, perhaps, more scientific than artistic.
8 In the 21st century landscape architecture is moving towards a more sophisticated
and creative design method. Known as landscape urbanism , it is a conceptually
layered approach with the technical layering often provided by CAD and GIS software - the
letters stand for Computer Assisted or Aided Design and for Geographical Information Systems
9The layers relate to the natural world, to the man-made world and to the Vitruvian objectives
of creating places which are functional, beautiful, well-made and healthy.
10The landscape profession s focus on Design with nature, which Ian McHarg
advocated in his 1969 book, has grown into a creative approach to conservation, sustainability
and adaptation to climate change I wish I d known about these points on
the first day of my landscape architecture course - at Edinburgh University, in the autumn of 1969.
And I d have welcomed some information about salaries before I applied. You can now find this
on the websites of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US, and from Prospects.ac.uk in Britain and
from similar websites in other countries. The income of principals in private offices , and
in the public service, can be way above the median salaries given on these websites. Or,
if for example you work part-time or from home, they can be below the median. My own experience
has been that landscape architecture is a fascinating, rewarding and enjoyable career.