Design with Nature

Stewardship is the commitment to the responsible overseeing, management, and protection of something considered worth caring for and preserving, such as riparian streams, cultural landscapes, and lands crucial to maintaining the integrity of open space and wildlife habitat. In the United States, landscape architects have formalized a variety of stewardship tenets through policies adopted and promulgated through the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). One of the organization’s stated policies that reflects the stewardship responsibility inherent in the profession is a policy on the preservation of landscapes associated with wildlife and wildlife habitat.

Landscape architects, as a profession, extend stewardship concerns and responsibilities to urban, rural, and natural areas. Cultural and historical sites and landscapes are acknowledged to have an intrinsic value and require a stewardship stance, as the ASLA does in its policy on historic and cultural resources of the nation, state, and local jurisdictions.

By logical extension, one way that landscape architects can carry out their stewardship responsibility is by applying lessons learned from the process advocated first by Frederick Law Olmsted in the nineteenth century and later in the mid-twentieth century by Ian McHarg. McHarg elegantly argued in his book Design with Nature (1970) for a systematic approach to assess the suitability of land resource allocation to accommodate human uses and development.

Landscape architects often derive inspiration for their designs from their experiences and observations of nature. The nature-inspired designs are rarely a direct appropriation of forms and compositions experienced in actual nature. Naturalistic landscape designs seem to move in cycles of favor and relevance among landscape architects, or from the way one landscape architect “works” as opposed to other forms of artistic expression (formal or abstract, for instance). Designed landscapes informed from nature are often referred to as naturalistic designs. This is a term with a broad meaning with many variations. Naturalistic designs are composed with forms (compositional arrangements) and materials (the use of materials taken directly from nature such as native plant species and building materials). Landscape designs appropriated or inspired from nature are rarely direct copies but rather are abstractions, symbolic, or interpretations although artistic intent may result in some ambiguity. The viewer might be compelled to ask: “Is the landscape natural or not?” The designs of traditional gardens of China and Japan were created with the intent of realizing an abstraction, even a miniaturization of nature. While natural-looking, these gardens are filled with symbols composed of plants and arrangements of rocks placed to represent other places (sacred or admired) or animals such as birds. The creation of naturalistic gardens is a tradition steeped in Western culture, including the Romantic gardens of Northern Europe and North America. Nature became the fountainhead of theory and approach to landscape planning and design in the latter half of the twentieth century in an approach referred to as design with nature.

Ian McHarg, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, emerged as the charismatic proponent of a systematic approach to landscape design and planning. He was the author of the landmark book, Design with Nature, published in 1970. McHarg recognized that a reconciliation of human and natural systems could be achieved through the systematic sifting and layering of geo-formatted data in the form of maps. The aim of his pioneering approach was to identify suitable landscapes for development that would reduce the negative impacts caused by the mismatched or unsuitable location of human development and activity. His work was further developed by others exploring regional landscape planning theory, and this has led to identifying designs for site development, community development, and resource management that could be more sustainable while achieving a quality and healthy environment, economic advantages, and social equity goals.

The book immediately proved to be popular with a diverse readership. Its message gained wide acceptance and its publication coincided with the passage of the U.S. Environmental Protection Act of 1970 that established the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The basic tenet of the book argued for a systematic approach of designing with nature. The approach considered the underlying processes of nature as a basis for planning and designing places for human activities, while considering the historical and cultural context. McHarg’s message was that incorporating what we know about natural phenomena and processes could help us to make better land use and design decisions. McHarg’s assumption was basically that past decision-makers and designers of land use did not understand the value of nature, nature for its own sake and for human survival. This assumption was generally the case, witness the plethora of environmental disasters that have made headline evening news with great regularity since the 1970s. Later, McHarg began to incorporate human considerations in parallel to natural factors. Professor McHarg became an influential advocate for making better-informed decisions regarding environmental resources. He was widely sought after as a speaker for his systematic approach to making land use and resource development decisions. His message resonated with those active in the environmental awareness movement of the 1970s through the 1990s, not only in America but elsewhere throughout the world.

McHarg’s design with nature process has evolved over the years, incorporating the use of GIS (geo-spatial information software) to rigorously document and analyze an extensive variety of mapped information such as soils, topography, vegetation, hydrology, demographic data, and a seemingly unlimited range of information about the Earth and human physical conditions. The systematic processes for analyzing information about a project site and its surrounding context have become an intrinsic process approach by landscape architects, informing their design and planning decisions. Suitability maps are often generated from the GIS information to indicate the optimum locations for various design elements (program activities, functions, and facilities). The mapped information can also be used to suggest resource management decisions, resolve land use conflicts, and lead to inspired design decisions. The Landscape Institute of the