ABSTRACT
Conservation of natural areas has been a public concern since the turn of the twentieth century. In the United States, early efforts focused on the preservation of natural areas of great beauty, such as Yosemite Valley and Yellowstone, turning them into National Parks. Larger environmental concerns leapt to the forefront of public consciousness in the early 1960s spurred by a host of environmental ills, including air pollution, water pollution, pesticide poisoning, and dwindling energy sources. Books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1962) and Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle (New York: Knopf, 1971) eloquently called attention to these matters. Members of the design professions responded by shifting their attention to environmental issues. Architects explored passive solar and energy efficient building designs, urban planners became environmental advocates and began focusing on regional-scale environmental planning, landscape architects dug deeper into the ecological issues of landscape design, and urban designers began exploring the dimensions of environmental perception. In practice, designers and the communities they worked for grappled with how to address environmental concerns in projects of large and small scale. The tool they turned to was the new “ecological method” articulated by landscape architect Ian McHarg (1920–2001) in his seminal book Design with Nature (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969), which became an instant classic. McHarg critiques the effects of urban sprawl and advocates plan-making based on natural processes. He calls for landscape architects to act within design processes as “interpreters” of the land and its resources by engaging in comprehensive analysis of the study area’s geology, climate, slope, exposure, water regimens, soils, plants, animals, and land use. Such analysis, he argues, reveals appropriate sites for human land-using activities of various kinds as well as areas of particular environmental sensitivity or value that should be left untouched. Key to McHarg’s method is the use of layered transparency mapping which creates a graphic matrix that identifies compatibilities and incompatibilities between various human uses and between those uses and the aggregated ecological contexts. Going beyond matters of functionality, McHarg argues that design inspiration should derive from the perception of natural form that comes from this analysis.
