ABSTRACT
The radical position which Bernard Lassus has come to occupy in the spectrum of contemporary landscape architecture can be summed up in a single phrase. Asked by Udo Weilacher in a recent published interview how he managed to ‘reconcile the dichotomy between art and landscape architecture’, he replied: ‘It’s quite simple. Art and landscape architecture are the same thing for me.’1 But the implications of Lassus’s statement need to be followed up in order for the full meaning to be grasped. It is not simply that he was originally trained as a painter, in Léger’s studio, as Weilacher points out. The underlying issue is that garden artists of the past took it for granted that a creator of landscape would have a basis of instruction in the plastic arts; only in the present century has it become customary for a landscape architect to have little or no training in aesthetics. To defend the identity of art and landscape architecture is therefore a polemical stance, inevitably historicist in its recourse to earlier examples, but also impinging directly on the very concept of professional practice as it exists at present.
