ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to establish the validity for landscape history study and what might constitute a valid purview. The cultural landscape is the milieu in which students have lived and experienced, and the greater realm in which the designed landscape resides. Hoskins, in contrast, was more academic, with an agenda of social and environmental continuance, decrying the continued despoiling and degradation of the English landscape and denouncing the negative forces that caused that decline. The history of landscape architecture per se has traditionally focused on the stylistic and ideological progression of gardens, parks, motorways, and plazas, among other landscape types. New programs with advanced academic degrees in landscape history, paired with the concern for issues such as sustainability, have stimulated coursework with greater breadth and depth than many of those taught in the past. Until the late 1960s one never—or only very rarely—heard of “theory” in either architecture or landscape architecture.
