How Did We Get Here?

Abstract

Landscape architecture. Is it art? Is it ecology? This has been the struggle for almost 50 years. Every landscape architect or designer today finds herself at some point reckoning with where she sits on the spectrum between the two. It used to be easier: There were the design mavens, such as Peter Walker, formalists who concerned themselves largely with the way a landscape looked, whether it was striped or curvy. Then there were the ecologists, such as the practice Andropogon, who, although they do pursue a formal agenda, give the way a landscape works ecologically primacy over empty form.