Landscape Architecture: A Very Short Introduction

Chapter 2
The scope of landscape architecture

It is time to look at what landscape architects actually do. This small selection of case studies is an attempt to convey the diversity of contemporary practice and to give you a feeling for the broad scope of the discipline. The chapter describes four projects chosen to exemplify: high-profile master-planning; visual impact assessment; art-inflected urban design; community engagement. They range from the worthy to the flamboyant. You might like to consider whether they all fall under the rubric of ‘improvement and place-making’.

Gardens by the Bay, Singapore (2006–ongoing)

The first project is the result of a design competition organized by the National Parks Board of Singapore, which was looking for a design team to master-plan their Gardens by the Bay project (Figure 3), a horticulturally themed attraction in the new downtown area of Marina Bay, constructed on a reclaimed waterfront. Ultimately there will be over 100 hectares of tropical gardens comprising three distinct gardens—Bay South, Bay East, and Bay Central. The commission for the first phase of this huge project—Bay South—was awarded to a British design team led by landscape architects Grant Associates in conjunction with architects Wilkinson Eyre. Grant Associates’ master-plan was inspired by the shapes of the orchid, Singapore’s national flower, and the project enjoyed political support at the highest level. The plan weaves together nature and technology, incorporating two artificial biomes, the Flower Dome and the Cloud Forest Dome, designed by the architects to house plants from Mediterranean and Tropical Montane climates, respectively. The landscape architects designed strikingly impressive Supertrees, some as tall as 50 metres, which form part of the cooling system for the conservatories, but also carry towering displays of epiphytic plants, ferns, and flowering climbers, and are illuminated at night. The technologies concealed in the Supertrees mimic the ecological functions of real trees; they include photovoltaic cells which power some of the lighting and they collect and channel rainwater for use in irrigation and water displays.

3. The commission for the first phase of Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay project was awarded to a British design team led by landscape architects Grant Associates in conjunction with architects Wilkinson Eyre

The Gardens by the Bay have been described as a horticultural Disneyland and a scene from Alice in Wonderland, but also as a triumph of environmentally conscious design. As intended, they have captured the attention of the world’s media. Projects of this scale and ambition are rare, even for the most renowned design offices, but the Gardens nevertheless exemplify many features of contemporary practice. For instance, the project involved an interdisciplinary team of designers, not just landscape architects and architects, but also specialist environmental design consultants, structural engineers, visitor centre designers, and communication specialists. The location and condition of the site, reclaimed land on a waterfront, is also characteristic of many large projects over recent decades, such as the Havneparken (Harbour Park), Copenhagen, Denmark (completed in 2000), the Daniaparken, Malmö, Sweden (completed in 2001), and Shanghai Houtan Park, Shanghai, China (completed in 2010).

Hirddywel Wind Farm landscape and visual impact assessment, Wales (2010)

While the Gardens by the Bay were designed to be conspicuous and totemic, this project, which belongs in the realm of strategic landscape planning rather than master-planning or site design, will be judged to have been successful if the public remain unaware that it ever occurred. Landscape architects have often been involved in minimizing intrusions into the countryside. They are often involved in applications to extend quarries, for example, or to open-cast for coal. In Britain in recent years the siting of wind turbines has been one of the most hotly contested land-use planning issues. Whatever the merits or demerits of particular turbine designs, these machines seem to bring out an almost visceral loathing in some rural communities, perhaps because they are regarded as alien impositions which only benefit distant cities. Though people can be generally in favour of an idea, clean energy or high speed transportation, for instance, they come out in opposition if it leads to proposals on their doorstep, a phenomenon which goes by the acronym NIMBYism (not-in-my-backyard). The height and the number of turbines in a proposal have a bearing upon its acceptability, as does the existing topography. Landscape architects have become experts in modelling and mapping the ‘zones of visual intrusion’ for wind turbine proposals, and indeed for any large addition to the landscape. Using photomontage techniques and computer visualizations they can show what any proposal will look like from a variety of key viewpoints. They are often also involved in the design of mitigation proposals, which may include screening earthworks or planting, to reduce such impacts.

From a technical stance, high and open areas of land are particularly suitable for the siting of wind-farms, but such areas are often highly valued for their existing landscape character. The Welsh government is committed to doubling the amount of energy generated from renewable sources by 2025 and has identified seven strategic research areas where they believe large scale wind farms could be developed. AMEC Environment and Infrastructure UK Ltd, a company which provides a range of services, including landscape architecture, was commissioned by NUON Renewables to carry out a landscape and visual assessment of its proposal to build the Hirddywel Wind Farm in Powys. This assessment was complex, because the company was also proposing another wind farm to the east and already operated another facility nearby which it hoped to reconfigure with fewer but taller turbines. The consultancy’s visualizations made it possible to assess the cumulative impacts of the proposals and led to a reduction in the number of proposed turbines from 13 to 9. The assessment was completed in 2010 but at the time of writing the proposal is still in the planning process.

The Hirddywel Wind Farm is a good example of a major infrastructure proposal which could have great benefits at the national scale, but is also likely to have significant local impacts. In countries with well-developed planning systems, getting approval for such developments can be a long and involved process. Landscape architects can assist at all stages, from pre-application assessment, through the planning process itself, which may involve presenting evidence to a public inquiry, to the design and implementation of mitigation measures. It is also worth pointing out that while private developers may employ landscape architects, in many countries local authorities also do so. Like the rival forensic pathologists called by the prosecution and defence in many a courtroom drama, landscape architects sometimes find themselves on opposite sides in particularly contentious planning inquiries.

Les Boules Roses, Montreal, Canada (2011)

The Canadian landscape architect Claude Cormier (1960–) has made his name with witty and artistic interventions in urban life. Many of these, such as his Sugar Beach in Toronto or Clock Tower Beach on the Rue Quai d’Horloge in Montréal’s Old Port, are intended to be enduring additions to the urban fabric, but he is also known for his temporary installations and Les Boules Roses is one of these. Strung across Sainte-Catherine Street East in Montreal’s gay village were 170,000 pink resin balls, helping to transform a workaday street into an enchanted promenade for the Aires Libres festival in 2011. The balls came in three different sizes and five subtle shades of pink. They were laced across the street to form a canopy which intermingled with the branches of existing avenue trees, casting a dappled shade and stretching for 1.2 kilometres between Berri and Papineau Streets. The installation was set out in nine sections, with variegated patterns to create a range of moods along the route.

Cormier is the protégé of the American landscape architect Martha Schwartz (1950–)—at one time the iconoclastic enfant terrible of the discipline, though now one of its most respected educators and practitioners. Coming into the discipline from a background in art, Schwartz’s early work, which incorporated unconventional materials such as plastic trees and flowers, Plexiglas chippings, and even, infamously, shellacked bagels, was often a deliberate provocation, inviting rejection by the landscape architecture world: ‘Can this really be landscape architecture, or is it something else?’. Practitioners like Schwartz, Cormier, and the German office Topotek 1 are the ludic wing of landscape architecture. They enjoy overturning assumptions and confounding expectations. Yet alongside the playfulness there has to be an understanding of site, context, and the needs of users, particularly when the design intervention is made to last. The best of such practice recognizes all of this, so that the projects are not only fun but also functional.

West Philadelphia Landscape Project (commenced 1987)

The West Philadelphia Landscape Project was an action research programme, initiated by Anne Whiston Spirn, who is a landscape architect, educationist, author, photographer, and activist. It was originally based in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania where Spirn was professor from 1986 until 2000 when she moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston. From the outset the programme sought to integrate research with teaching and community service. In particular it involved the design and construction of a series of community gardens in the socially deprived neighbourhoods of West Philadelphia. These were small, incremental improvements which could not hope to solve all the problems of poor housing stock, inadequate infrastructure, poverty, and unemployment, yet in addition to brightening up the urban landscape they served as catalysts for other forms of community development. After 1995, the project produced an offshoot, the Mill Creek Project, which was a collaboration between students and researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and teachers and pupils at the Sulzberger Middle School in West Philadelphia. It was organized around the creation of a new middle-school curriculum entitled ‘The Urban Watershed’. It sought to raise environmental awareness of the school’s locality and was centred on the presence of a culverted stream, the Mill Creek, which had once run through the field upon which the school playground had been built. The presence of this buried watercourse had caused numerous problems of flooding, subsidence, and outright collapse. The landscape architects involved in the project were able to draw attention to the difficulties which ensue when urban development takes place upon a flood plain. They were also able to suggest ways in which undeveloped land might be redesigned to detain storm water, thus reducing the risk of flooding while providing socially valuable open space.

I cannot give an end date for the West Philadelphia Landscape Project. The timeline on its website runs out in 2009, but it has a blog which still carries the occasional post and it seems likely that the influence of the project upon these troubled neighbourhoods and their residents will play out over generations, while the gardens created are a tangible legacy. By any measure, the West Philadelphia Landscape Project must count as one of the longest-running community engagement projects in the field of landscape architecture, and certainly the most recognized and celebrated. In 2001, it was cited as a ‘Model of Best Practice’ at a White House summit for 40 leading scholars and artists in public life. In 2004, it won the Community Service Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects. Spirn’s current book project, Top-Down/Bottom-Up: Rebuilding the Landscape of Community, is based upon her experiences of the project over 25 years.

Is there a core?

Quite deliberately, I selected four projects for this chapter which seemed to have little in common, except that landscape architects played the leading role in each. Perhaps, on further reflection, we might start to find commonalities. The designers of the Gardens on the Bay and Les Boules Roses were each trying to create a visual spectacle and a sense of festival which would appeal to visitors. The West Philadelphia Landscape Project and the wind farm study in Wales were both concerned with the consequences of siting development and infrastructure. Nevertheless, it would be easy to find another batch of landscape architectural projects, apparently as diverse as these four, and then to find four more. The variety of projects is mirrored by a diversity of approaches. Some landscape architects take pride in the invisibility of their work. When mitigating the impact of a proposed motorway or power transmission line they want their work to blend into the surrounding landscape as harmoniously as possible. Others strive for effects that are startling, amusing, or theatrical and would be dismayed if they thought their artistry was being overlooked. Some place great importance upon working in collaboration with communities, sublimating any egotistical urges to which they might be prone in favour of a socially sustainable outcome. Others cannot abide compromise and feel that the best design work expresses a singular vision. Still others may combine attributes within a practice, or shift their approach depending upon the site, client, or brief.

If there is such diversity of opinion and if the sorts of projects landscape architects work on are so varied, is it possible to come up with a definition of the discipline or to say what is essential to it? The call for definitions and boundaries, I would argue, is often a symptom of insecurity. The professionalization of a discipline involves setting standards for entry controlled by examination and with this there is an urge to determine what should be the core knowledge and skills that practitioners should possess. The positive side of this is that it offers protection to clients and the public; professionals should know what they are doing. The case is easy to make for medicine, where no one would trust an unlicensed brain surgeon, and for civil engineering where building a bridge without carrying out the necessary calculations has obvious implications for public safety, but it is not so easy where the skills involved may be widely available in the community and where some possible harms are diffuse and may not be identifiable in the short term. The fact that architects, urban planners, and landscape architects engage, to various degrees, in public consultation and participatory engagement shows that lay knowledge and opinions are valued. One might even say that the discipline is based on professionalized lay knowledge. Indeed, some of the longer term harms that manifest in badly planned or designed housing areas or new towns are often blamed upon a failure to understand what people actually want or need from such developments. The downside of professionalization, then, is that it can lead to a protectionist attitude or an exclusionary ‘closed shop’ which keeps clients, users, and members of kindred professions outside. Much of the talk about standards, codes of conduct, and accreditation is an attempt to control particular areas of work and is thus commercially motivated and often suspect.

One of the manifestations of professionalization is the urge to define a core curriculum, but in a discipline as diverse and wide-ranging as landscape architecture, this is becoming an impossible demand. Landscape architecture may have a fluid core but it does not have a fixed essence. It has borders with other disciplines, including engineering, art, architecture, urban planning, and urban design, but these are not fixed boundaries and they are permeable. Nevertheless, it remains its own discipline and cannot be assimilated by its neighbours. A useful way to conceptualize this is to think of landscape architecture as an extended family. In this family, there will be people who do the same sorts of things that Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux once did: they will design parks or systems of parks, although they may not necessarily share Olmsted’s views about the appropriateness of pastoral scenery in the midst of the city. There will be others who have never designed a park, although they have worked with engineers designing transport infrastructure. Others have specialized in the domestic market and work almost entirely on gardens. Some have spent their careers working alongside foresters, helping them to plan their plantations and their operations in ways that are visually and environmentally harmonious. Others still are happiest when working in the city, designing or refurbishing urban squares and pedestrianized streets. Pick two individuals from this range and you might find that their working lives are so different that it is difficult to conceive of them as members of the same profession, but between them, and linking them to the rest, are webs of resemblance. Landscape architecture’s openness is perhaps its greatest strength and its permeable boundaries should be a model for other disciplines.