How the land lies - Theory in Landscape Architecture - Book Review

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 2003 by Sutherland Lyall

THEORY IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

Edited by Simon Swaffield. Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press. 2002. [pounds sterling]19.50. $27.50

This is a really important book for landscape design because it gives the lie to the notion that landscape theory has mainly to do with technical things like plant taxonomy or hydrology or, on the design front, a weak affection for 'naturalism'. The collection of texts in this book knock that firmly on the head which is why so many landscape designers might feel it a good idea to read it.

Compiler Simon Swaffield is landscape professor at Lincoln University, New Zealand. He explains his two objectives. The first is to provide 'a teaching resource ... which introduces students to a range of concepts and authors and situates them within the discipline'. The second is 'to explore the proposition that there exists a coherent core body of theory in landscape architecture'.

Swaffield succeeds pretty well on both counts. And calling him merely a compiler is to diminish the importance of his engagement with the issues. For this is his own construct of the modern state of thinking and writing about landscape design. For reasons of space and because they are quite well covered elsewhere, he excludes theories of environmental perception and behaviour and landscape ecology. He concentrates on design theory rather than planning or management theory because he takes the view 'that "design" captures best the distinctive activity of configuring landscape which lies at the heart of landscape architecture'. With that nailed to the mast you want to read on.

There are five sections. The first discusses the nature of landscape theory and starts off with a 1950 extract from Garrett Eckbo's 'Landscape for Living' and ends with a difficult and somewhat self-important 1992 piece by Elizabeth Meyer called 'Situating Modern Landscape Architecture'. The second section is about the discipline's procedural theory from the early problem-solving approach to a more current fine art approach and the slightly mystical line of Bernard Lassus whose 'The Obligation of Invention' concludes the line of thought. The third section is to do with that long-discussed theme of the interrelationships between form, meaning and experience and art from such people as the Jellicoes and Nan Fairbrother through Peter Walker via an amusingly bitchy and nicely observed essay from practitioner Marc Trieb, 'Must Landscape Mean?'. His edge is that he can talk the structuralist and decon jabber although he takes, one feels, too grumpily against some of the nicer and wackier work of his contemporaries. The fourth section is about the representation of landscape which includes such issues as the idea of landscape as language and the notion of 'reading' landscapes. The final section is titled 'Ecological Design and the Aesthetics of Sustainability' which Swaffield thinks is 'one of the most significant shifts in the theoretical orientation of the discipline'. It implicitly raises that old issue of beauty arising naturally from fitness to purpose. And, if you follow Robert Thayer towards the end of the collection it is positive: 'sustainable landscapes are likely to express a unique sense of visual and spatial pluralism ... there may be no distinct style, since "style" itself necessarily separates surface from core'.

As in all good collections, there is a great cross section here which is to say there are writers you agree with, some you don't feel much at all about and some you absolutely hate. There has been a change over the last half century from the somewhat missionary yet sub-architectural writing of the 1950s through to the remarkably diverse positions of the present. Inevitably in academic writing, some of it will be primarily directed at the academic appointments market rather than being much concerned with clarity--using landscape architecture without understanding very much about it as a vehicle to deal with something completely different. That is true for a small selection of the texts here. But it is not some thing which should detain the reader. Swaffield has a last word: 'While there are many horizons yet to explore and tangled thickets, barren fields and perilous areas within the intellectual landscape, there is also, to my mind, an emerging structure. Much interesting exploration awaits us over the next fifty years.'