Landscape Architecture has been written in response to the need for a book outlining the land-planning process in clear, simple, and practical terms. In a larger sense it is a guide book on how to live more compatibly on planet Earth.
It introduces us to an understanding of nature as the background and base for all human activities; it describes the planning constraints imposed by the forms, forces, and features of nature and our built environment; it instills a feeling for climate and its design implications; it discusses site selection and analysis; it instructs in the planning of workable and well-related use areas; it considers the volumetric shaping of exterior spaces; it explores the possibilities of site-structure organization; it applies contemporary thinking in the planning of expressive human habitations and communities; and it provides guidance in the creation of more efficient and pleasant places and ways within the context of the city and the region.
This book is not intended to explain all forms of the practice of the profession or to explicate the latest technology. Nor is it proposed that the reader will become, per se, an expert land planner. As with training in other fields, proficiency comes with long years of study, travel, observation, and professional experience. The reader should, however, gain through this book a keener and more telling awareness of our physical surroundings. The reader should also gain much useful knowledge to be applied in the design of homes, schools, recreation areas, shopping malls, trafficways … or any other project to be fitted into, and planned in harmony with, the all-embracing landscape.
This, at least, has been the express intent.