ABSTRACT
In Ecology, Community and Delight, 1 I argued that contemporary landscape architecture is concerned with three overlapping fields of value – the aesthetic, the social and the environmental – and summarised this in a diagram (Fig. 3.1), at the centre of which was an area in which these overlapped, indicating the possibility of an approach to design which could create all three sorts of value, to which I attached the label ‘trivalent design’. Although the book took a pluralist position towards values, trivalent design was held to be the richest sort of design, although not one often encountered in practice. Of the 26 landscape architects I interviewed for the book, a handful made passing mention of the Roman notion of genius loci, but I did not make much of it, because so few of my interviewees made much of it to me. 2 This now seems like an omission. Genius loci might be the keystone that can lock trivalent design together, a possibility that this paper will explore.
