ABSTRACT
The humanities dimension of the field has been less and less emphasized in recent years, as landscape architects attempt to assert their status as ‘researchers’. This has entailed what might be called a ‘quantitative drift’ in which measurement of landscape phenomena is privileged over ‘subjective’ accounts when it comes to motivating and justifying design decisions. Cultivating the habits of such attention is quite simply the main task of landscape architecture education. Few things are more difficult to explain than the mental operations by which a private experience of landscape becomes a public argument about how that landscape should change. It is easy to understand why landscape architecture teachers might choose to rely on established methods, however great their distortions. One must acknowledge the possibility of undesired effects and take steps to avoid them. For example, integrating poetic methods into landscape architecture teaching would necessarily involve disentangling poetry from writing.
