ABSTRACT
What makes something a landscape design? Answering this ontological question reveals an auspicious moment in the history of landscape architecture and Western aesthetics. During the eighteenth century key features of landscape design emerged – that it was a category of artistic practice in its own right (not to be confused with architecture or manual gardening), it demanded creative vision beyond practical skills, and that it was conceived through drawing or other representational means. In part this development can be attributed to philosophers in Germany, France, and England who included landscapes and gardens in their speculations on the nature of art. In fact, in 1790 Immanuel Kant added the practice of landscape gardening to the modern system of arts, a genealogy of the fine arts that philosophers and art critics struggled to define between 1680 and 1830 (Shiner 2001, 148). Kant’s division of the fine arts sought to distinguish art from craft by classifying it as a product of imaginative genius, elevated from the acts of manual labour, and with a purpose to spark our aesthetic appreciation. Moreover, it is not surprising that Kant’s addition is predated by the appearance of designers,
such as William Kent (1685-1748), who were increasingly distanced from the toils of manual gardening. Kent did not possess a great deal of horticultural knowledge; rather his genius emerged through the process of drawing and a careful handling of a landscape’s formal properties. This is evidenced by one of his most effusive proponents, Horace Walpole. In Walpole’s portrayal of Kent he surmises ‘the pencil of his imagination beflowed all the arts of landscape on the scenes he handled. The great principles on which he worked were perspective, and light and shade’ (Walpole 1894: 57). Thus, we can call something landscape design when it is a landscape that has been intentionally arranged using the imagination and with some form of representation – and this sense of the term owes much to these developments in the eighteenth century. This is not to say that those engaged in the manual practice of gardening have not con-
tributed knowledge to landscape design. During the nineteenth century the Irish gardener William Robinson introduced concepts, such as the ‘wild garden’, that were immensely popular with landscape designers (Robinson 1994). Likewise, small-scale gardens also contributed ideas to landscape design. John Dixon Hunt (2000: 11) argues that gardens function as the poetry of landscapes. They can provide an experimental space where conventions of landscape design can be tested and questioned. For example, during the twentieth century Gilles Clement (2006) urged landscape designers to notice the movement of plant material in the garden, over their fixed placement in specific locations. Indeed, Clement’s observations of the way plants move by
themselves in the garden prompted us to appreciate the subtle and sometimes disquieting narratives of survival that they make visible in their struggle for air, light, water and space. With the professionalization of landscape architecture in the twentieth century, landscape
design became more codified as educational programs, apprenticeship requirements, and licensing emerged to regulate practice. The act of design continued to be conveyed through two-or three-dimensional mediums, while design processes, such as site analysis, became more systematized as they were influenced by the natural and social sciences. Regardless of these developments, a continual problem facing those designing landscapes has been its status as an art, particularly given that designs were increasingly commissioned for public clients. Consider Fredrick Law Olmsted, who is thought to be the founder of landscape architecture in the United States. He struggled to have his artistic genius recognized, eventually quitting his position at Central Park with a letter of resignation entitled The Spoils of the Park: With a Few Leaves from the Deep-laden Note-books of ‘A wholly Unpractical Man’ (Olmsted 1882). Moreover, the physical material of landscapes confused matters regarding its status as
something designed. Landscapes often contain and are subject to natural processes that change the designer’s original plan. There are also landscape designers who intentionally seek to obscure the human act of design. These concerns deepened with the development of modern landscape architecture in the twentieth century. Borrowing many of its tenets from modern architecture, which distrusted allusion and stressed honesty of expression and truth of materials, modern landscape architects considered how their work could be a true evocation of modern times. This thinking is evident in the writing by one of its earliest proponents, Christopher Tunnard. For Tunnard (1948), gardens and landscapes that appeared to be the act of natural processes were not only old fashioned, but also deceiving. In his appraisal of the work of Swedish Garden Architects at the First International Congress of Garden Architects in Paris in 1937, he chided this Association for clinging to a romantic conception of nature when they suggested that planting should ‘give the impression that they have grown there spontaneously’ (ibid.: 77). Tunnard cautioned, ‘the imitation of nature is a long perpetuated fraud’ (ibid.: 80). Over the course of the twentieth century the extent to which designers thought that people
should recognize a landscape as designed varied wildly. Ian McHarg argued that design must take its cues from the natural sciences and thus mimic natural processes; an idea that captivated many landscape architects. On the other hand, Martha Schwartz built her career on the premise that people should know that landscapes are designed and they should not confuse them with nature. Alternatively, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe posited that people should be aware of a landscape’s design through their subconscious. Studying the psychology of Carl Jung and Taoism, Jellicoe sought to ‘sublimate’ his design work by ‘inserting within it an invisible idea that only the subconscious could comprehend’ (Jellicoe 1983: 124). Likewise, with the work of J.B. Jackson (1984) there was also a belief that studying vernacular landscapes, which are created by nondesigners and have accrued over time, would be useful to landscape designers because they might reveal people’s unaware needs and desires.
