Landscape Design

Landscape Design. Landscape design means shaping land forms, plants, and site features such as walls or water courses for utilitarian and aesthetic purposes. The term “landscape architecture” connotes the work of professionals. Landscape design began in America with the arrival of Europeans, who adapted landscape forms to the terrain, climates, and flora they encountered. Colonists created landscapes in the wilderness, ordering the arrangement of dwellings, gardens, fields, mills, and roads, in juxtaposition to the unknown world beyond the edges of settlements. These alterations to the land reflected economic practices and belief systems. Virginia planters organized their farms to earn a living and to demonstrate that they were masters of their realm. The few geometric gardens they made were decorative correlatives to well‐drained fields and securely fenced yards. Thomas Jefferson, who recorded his horticultural and aesthetic observations in his journals, introduced aspects of picturesque design to his plantation gardens at Monticello, based on his reading of English and French treatises and his garden tours in England and France.

By the nineteenth century, gardening was a popular pastime, and a variety of public landscapes—cemeteries, campuses, suburbs, and urban parks—were shaped by America's first generation of professional designers. The horticulturist and popular writer Andrew Jackson Downing (1815–1852) promoted the morally uplifting art of “rural improvement,” adapting the English picturesque aesthetic to American villa and cottage grounds. Downing also advocated public parks, and his partner Calvert Vaux (1824–1895) later worked with Frederick Law Olmsted to design Central Park in New York City in 1858. Dozens of American cities followed suit, creating large “pleasure grounds” that provided healthy recreation and naturalistic scenery. Olmsted, sometimes called the father of American landscape architecture, combined a philosophy of social purpose with aesthetic and managerial expertise over the course of a long professional career. His two sons continued his practice through the 1940s.

Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (1870–1957) led the professionalization of landscape architecture as a writer, as a founder and first president of the American Society of Landscape Architects (1899), as creator of Harvard University's first landscape‐architecture course (1900), and through his public service and important commissions. His work, epitomizing the broadening of professional expertise in the early twentieth century, included city planning studies, designs for suburbs and private estates, and the promotion of national and regional parks. Many landscape architects of this era, including Charles Platt (1861–1933) and Beatrix Jones Farrand (1872–1959), combined horticultural expertise with aesthetic sensibilities derived from formal Italian Renaissance gardens. Others, such as Jens Jensen (1860–1951), emulated patterns of indigenous natural landscapes. Modernist landscape design was propagated in the late 1930s by Christopher Tunnard (1910–1979), Garrett Eckbo (1910– ), and Dan Kiley (1912– ), who advocated designs based on human needs and on an aesthetic of geometric abstractions and continuous spatial patterns. In the 1960s, Ian McHarg (1920– ) led the landscape‐planning movement, which advocated shaping urban development to preserve landscape resources as determined by visual, cultural, and scientific criteria.
See also Architecture, Public; Suburbanization.

Bibliography

John R. Stilgoe , Common Landscape of America, 1580–1845, 1982.
William Tishler, ed., American Landscape Architecture: Designers and Places, 1989.

Joan E. Draper