ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 , titled “Toward a New Landscape,” concludes the set of five chapters that examine the ideas that Ian McHarg assembled to create his concept of environmental design. The discussion positions McHarg’s actions in relationship to the concept of paradigm shift developed by Thomas Kuhn, and it argues that the evidence McHarg accumulated to address perceived deficiencies and fill conceptual voids in the modernist project ultimately led to an ecological design paradigm that precluded a return to a formalist view of design that failed to consider the agency of natural processes and change over time. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the essay “An Ecological Method for Landscape Design,” in which McHarg calls on his conversations with Louis Kahn to justify an ecologically inspired approach to design.
