How should the term ‘landscape architecture’ be understood and explained? Q&A
How should the term ‘landscape architecture’ be understood and explained? Q&A-13
1. Landscape architects use the word ‘landscape’ in a specialised sense which developed in the eighteenth century. So we don’t use it in the senses given to it by painters, geographers, printers or poets. We use it, in a designer’s sense, to mean a place where landform, water and plants have been composed with buildings and pavings to make ‘good places’ for human use and enjoyment.
We therefore compose five primary elements to make designed landscapes much as architects compose walls, floors, roofs, openings and stairs to make buildings.
2. We use the word ‘architecture’, in the same sense as Vitruvius, to mean the activity of bringing various technologies together to making places which have ‘Commodity, Firmness and Delight’. In today’s terminology, we want them to have good functional, ecological and visual qualities.
3. Like Gilbert Laing Meason and Frederick Law Olmsted, we use the phrase ‘landscape architecture’ to express a special concern with public goods and with the relationship between our designs and the environmental contexts in which they are given forms and functions.