ABSTRACT
Materials – their use, handling, and assemblage – are critical dimensions of the designed landscape. Their criticality is due to the fact that people often come into direct contact with the materials of a landscape. Materials can also communicate. The landscape theorist Udo Weilacher contends, the “Material becomes the medium which influences the figurative and symbolic message of the work.”1 Since materials constitute the physical attributes of the landscape, how the material is produced – extracted, harvested, moulded, or grown – has powerful ecological and social consequences. After the Second World War landscape architects were eager to use materials made newly available to civilians. Previously restricted war-related materials and modes of fabrication became fungible resources for landscape architects and architects. Both professions employed post-war materials, commodities, and systems to generate a modern design vocabulary. Mass-produced and globally distributed, many materials came to symbolize modern landscape architecture. Consider Garrett Eckbo’s ALCOA Forecast garden from 1956. Sponsored by Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), the garden promoted aluminium as the perfect exterior material that was lightweight, non-rusting, and easily perforated for uses like overhead trellises.2 Yet by the late 1980s the Brundtland Report, coupled with the acknowledgment that the climate was rapidly changing due to human activities, prompted many landscape architects to consider the ecological consequences of their material selection.
