THINKING ABOUT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE Figure 1.1 Third-year landscape architecture students after having presented their design studio projects at a neighborhood meeting.
Landscape Architecture: A Design Profession for the Twenty-First Century Landscape architects often work in close association with other professionals, including architects, civil engineers, various scientists, and others in the planning and design of a range of urban, rural, natural, and cultural settings. Landscape architecture is a relatively new profession, at least in name. The name was coined in the midnineteenth century and the young profession established its identify and growing influence, beginning with an early pioneer of the profession: Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted, along with Calvert Vaux, designed the American park icon: New York’s Central Park and later the Emerald Necklace, a system of parks and greenways celebrated and enjoyed by the city of Boston, Massachusetts. These two projects are noteworthy in two vital respects. New York’s Central Park was the first large-scale urban park in America with a design influenced by the estates and parks in England visited by Frederick Law Olmsted. While the design of Central Park was steeped in the naturalistic and Romantic tradition of Capability Brown and other early English landscape architects, the park was seen by Olmsted as a means of providing relief from the crowded tenements of New York by providing healthy passive, outdoor recreation spaces framed in a naturalistic setting. Olmsted also applied these natural and Romantic traditions he found in his travels to England to the design of the Emerald Necklace, another landmark urban park of nineteenthcentury America. Olmsted’s design for the Boston greenway park system also helped to reduce the recurrent flooding from winter storms. What we see on the surface are large expanses of lawn composed in a series of grand outdoor rooms, defined by planted forests of mostly native trees. The park was in essence the basis of 2
