What is the future for landscape architecture? Q&A

Question: Are the art and the profession of landscape architecture likely to prosper?

Short answer: Maybe they will and maybe they won’t. But, with a good dose of conceptual clarification, they most certainly can! The profession should aim to create a collective landscape.

Longer answer: Landscape architecture’s future potential is as great as its historic achievements – in the design of cities, landscapes, parks and gardens. But Frank Clark’s Lament, that ‘nobody understands us’, is as valid today as it was 50 years ago, when he made the comment. And this is a problem. We still suffer from the conceptual confusion so well expressed by the father of the organised profession, Frederick Law Olmsted, by Thomas Mawson, the father of the UK’s Institute of Landscape Architects, and by IFLA’s father, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe.
John Dixon Hunt, shortly before he became a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote of landscape architecture’s “ignorance or cavalier disregard of history” of our “poverty of discourse”, and of “a discipline in intellectual disarray” with a “deficiency of theoretical discourse” and “a meagre command of analytical, including rudimentary philosophical, language”. (Hunt, 1992)

So what should be done?

• The first task is to clarify our historical, conceptual and procedural foundations. I don’t think this is too difficult and have sketched an outline response with my answers to the preceding questions in this Q&A.
• The second task is to promote and explain the art of landscape architecture
• The third task is to refocus our professional societies on their role in promoting the art to which they owe their existence.
• We love geography and art and poetry, but we are a design profession which shares the Vitruvian aims with the other design professions.
• In our internal discourse these aims are best-described, using Vitruvius’ words, as: utilitas, firmitas and venustas.
• We aim: to understand the nature of existing sites and to improve them, creating places that are functional, well-made, aesthetically pleasing – and spiritual (in the sense of not material)
  The expertise we apply to this task is that of composing landform, water and plants with buildings and pavings – to make good places.
•  As the founder of the International Federation of Landscape Architects phrased it: ‘It is only in the present century that the collective landscape has emerged as a social necessity. We are promoting a landscape art on a scale never conceived of in history.’ THIS could, and should, be the future of landscape architecture.

Is landscape architecture a good career?

Landscape architecture is a wonderful art with a great opportunity to become ‘the most comprehensive of the arts’. Landscape architects can create places which are visually exciting, and sustainable and also serve many social functions. As such, it will be one of the world’s most important professions.

What do you need to be a landscape architect?

To be fully qualified you need a bachelors degree, a masters degree and membership of a professional body (such as the US ASLA or the UK Landscape Institute). Personally, it is good to have skills in drawing, technology and writing.