The outsiders: landscape architects are not your enemies. In fact, they may be your best aesthetic allies

Residential Architect, Nov-Dec, 2002 by Cheryl Weber

The landscape of coastal Massachusetts is a mixture of wooded uplands, rocky outcrops, and long, low meadows that sweep down to the sea. Substantial new homes stand tall on bluffs, their windows filled with water views. Not so the house at Hawk Rise, designed by Philadelphia-based Lyman S. A. Perry Architects. Working with the landscape architecture firm Stephen Stimpson Associates, the design team sited the building 500 feet back from its first, intuitive placement on the coastal bank. The landscape architects gently regraded the land, giving the house a higher elevation and a richly layered landscape as a foreground to the view, and prevented the potential for future erosion problems.

"When I look at the land, I see meadows, hills, and valleys," says architect Jill Neubauer, who is married to Stephen Stimpson, ASLA, Falmouth, Mass. "Steve sees the glaciers, the outwash plains, the extra history and layer and structure. He can see how you structure the land the way I see how to structure a client's program. Landscape architecture is building that landscape almost to the equal intensity that we're building the house."

Marriage notwithstanding, it isn't always easy for architects and landscape architects to forge supportive relationships. Both sides can be obstinate aesthetes, playing tug-of-war over a project's budget and boundaries. To add to the conflict, landscape architects have traditionally been called the poor cousins of architects; their work, particularly on residential projects, relegated to the realm of leftovers. But when they collaborate as equals, the result is significantly more than the sum of its parts.

"I got out of Harvard Graduate School of Design and realized that if landscape architects are to be successful, they must collaborate with architects," says Vancouver landscape architect Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, FASLA. She has left her stamp all over Canada and the U.S. with such projects as the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology and the Canadian Chancery in Washington, D.C., both with Arthur Erickson Architects; and the National Gallery of Canada in Ontario, with Moshe Safdie Architects.

Neubauer, who runs her own Falmouth, Mass., firm, Neubauer Associates, also believes a shared design process is critical. "Even if my clients don't officially hire a landscape architect, I hire one and bill it through my time because I feel so strongly about the connection of the house to the landscape," she says. "I figure either I will think about it or a landscape architect will think about it. If a landscape architect thinks about it, they'll be more efficient and produce better results."

site specific

The landscape architects interviewed for this story all emphasized that the relationship is most productive when architects are open-minded and respect what landscape architects know. "It's important for an architect to figure out what is a landscape architect's knowledge base," says landscape architect Warren Byrd, FASLA, of Nelson-Byrd Landscape Architects in Charlottesville, Va. "It's more than just plants, though we should know our plants."

Landscape architects see the land as a system rather than simply a canvas. But they look at it with a more aesthetic eye than a civil engineer does, identifying and repairing site problems while fitting the buildings, the gardens, and the journey into the larger landscape. "More and more as we move into the 21st century, the sites we come to are highly disturbed," says landscape architect Carol Franklin, FASLA, of Andropogon Associates in Philadelphia. "Unless you have some background in understanding a landscape's components, there's a tendency on the part of designers to come up with an idea and try to put it on a site where it may or may not fit. If you obliterate the terrain, the water system and drainage channels, instead of taking advantage of it or if you erase the natural vegetation, there's a visual and ecological loss. From air conditioning to storm-water management, the natural landscape can provide a number of services for free. It doesn't mean you won't have to manage water runoff, but it means you're going with the flow rather than fighting it."

Franklin also is interested in expressing individual lifestyles in the landscape, developing it to fit the way the client lives. Since the architect does that inside the house, she says, there can be a highly creative dialogue. The contractor joins in the partnership, too. "We try to have only creative contractors on residential projects, which don't have to have competitive bids," Franklin says. "The walls of the building as they extend into the landscape become part of the discussion. It becomes a back and forth and a building up, a synergistic process." On larger properties, the work expands to designing journeys through the site to be taken visually and on foot.

equal opportunity

The truth is that not all projects have the need or the budget for such extensive work. Architects themselves have strong ideas about siting houses. And when it comes to organizing space, they may not stop at the drip line. "If there aren't many different locations for a house, and if the project doesn't have an ambitious program that involves built landscape, a case can be made for very little landscape architect involvement," says Stimpson. "We do work with architects interested in doing some or all of the site masonry, like terraces or porches. Others would rather share that process or turn it over to the landscape architects."