ABSTRACT
Today there is wide agreement that the traditional subordination of landscape architecture to architecture is no longer acceptable. For centuries, landscape and architecture have been two interrelated ways of articulating culture, shaping and showing typical situations. The task of architecture, urban design and landscape architecture as topographical arts is to provide the prosaic patterns of our lives with durable dimension and beautiful expression. This chapter shows that contemporary design work points to the decisive role played by the situations and institutions of practical life in the restructuring of urban, architectural and landscape topography. Topography is important to landscape, architecture and urban design due to its attention to the materiality, spatiality, practicality and temporality of terrain. Recent arguments for urban ecology, landscape urbanism and ecological urbanism suggest that thinking about landscape will enable architects and planners to re-conceive the nature and task of designing buildings and cities, as if the whole of which buildings are part is environmental.
