Introduction

In addition to issues of historical interest, Peter Shepheard’s forward-looking text raises issues that remain topical or have become even more topical: issues about collaborations between architects and landscape architects, about the appropriate use, grouping and maintenance of plants both in aesthetic and in ecological terms, about different types of drawing in architecture and in landscape architecture, about factory-produced hard materials and surfaces, about post-industrial landscapes. He defines very precisely the role of the landscape architect with the result that ‘the landscape architect needs to be not less but something more than an architect.’ Because our global environment consists of processes and that the role of the landscape architect involves harmonizing and balancing these processes, and because architecture exists within that world of environmental and global processes, architecture too is a complex system of processes-of heating, of cooling, of condensation, and so on. In this respect, architecture is a kind of landscape architecture. Sir Peter Shepheard himself writes:

My Modern Gardens was published by the Architectural Press in 1953. At the time, after World War II, England was full of optimism. Government, led by ‘philosophical’ politicians, had laid the foundations for the reconstruction of Britain 15 with the new Ministry of Town and Country Planning and the Planning Act of 1947. But now the small band of landscape architects who had survived the war found themselves as key players in multifarious environmental tasks. They were already involved in the New Towns, in the rebuilding of the bombed towns, and in many rural problems. The Festival of Britain, with its South Bank Exhibition, had played a vital part in showing what could be done with a derelict urban site when all the environmental professions truly collaborate. The Architectural Press saw Modern Gardens as a sequel to F.R.S.Yorke’s The Modern House, but I saw it as a chance to state some principles at a time when the future held such promise.