ABSTRACT
Given the pervasiveness of contemporary writing about site, curiously little reflection exists on the history of site in modern landscape architecture. Granted, there has been significant scholarship on the importance of site in pre-nineteenth-century landscape theory. This essay, part of a larger project of recovering modern landscape architecture theory, extends such site stories into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in America. Site-reading and editing were central to establishing landscape architecture as a discipline separate from architecture, engineering, and horticulture. Counter to the historical narratives that reduce landscape practice to stylistic debates about the picturesque and the beautiful, or the formal and informal, the written record of park reports, treatises, journal articles, mono- graphs, and design primer is replete with designers’ positions about site. These sources substantiate the significance of site in modern landscape design theory and, as such, in differentiating landscape architecture from other disciplines.
