Landscape design is the practice that makes an idea of landscape manifest as a material project. By transforming the land and determining the distribution of activities in space and time, it functions as a symbolic intermediary between natural systems and the humans who inhabit them.
Landscape design is therefore both the activity of design and the reception of that design. It is a shared “commons” as well as a performative space in which various actors and natural systems engage in the unfolding of new landscapes. The landscape designer works in the midst of this feedback loop.
The material work of landscape design traditionally involves processes such as surfacing, cutting, filling, planting, draining, flooding, retaining, illuminating, and sheltering. These processes are worked towards the production of design elements that strategically affect the actor’s relationship to ground, horizon, and enclosure.
These elements are always understood to be experienced in continuous or discontinuous movement, for example ritual, stroll, or ramble.
The unfolding and transformation of materials through this movement in time allows for the shifting perceptions of users. The ways in which landscape design engages the site is the choice of the designer. One approach is a clear condition where the ground is assumed to be a neutral container that is overlaid with the designer’s proposition. Another is to assume that the site is latent with processes and precious life and to attempt to respectfully intervene with minimal interruption.
A more middle- ground approach is to recognize the performance and appearance of a site and transform those parts into new ecological relations that are resilient and remarkable. All of these approaches are based on an imagination of site as a bounded territory or a building lot. However, the understanding of what constitutes a site is also within the designer’s control. Any territory is embedded with nested and interconnected scales of organization, process, and value. Nesting and interconnection of scales also refer to the way cities have developed; that is, the local was nested in the regional, or the urban was nested in the agricultural hinterland.
Contemporary patterns of city growth are now strongly linked to global processes creating a more patchy landscape oriented around airports, transportation networks, tourist destinations, and centers of knowledge. This shift in the conception of scales is reflected in the various methods of drawing that inform and define ideas of landscape today.
Contemporary drawing tools such as satellite imagery, geographical information systems (GIS), scripting software, movies, and handheld devices are now used in a sophisticated dialogue with the more traditional tools of mapping, scenic painting, and Euclidean geometry. This results in multi-perspective depictions of the contemporary landscape that are able to reference connecting geometries as well as those forces that separate and create borders.
One territory in which contemporary landscape design projects are emerging is the postindustrial.
These are grounds that demand clean up and reprogramming. Another is the post-agricultural, where rapid development erases critical eco-social networks and processes. These grounds demand the cultivation of meaningful morphologies informed by existing traces of habitation.
Landfill transformation, shoreline stabilization, wetland restoration, new energy systems, and water management are all examples of contemporary landscape design project elements that have been invented in response to new ecosystems. Yet another territory in which contemporary landscape design projects are emerging is infrastructure.
The infrastructure of the city that is, the network that underlies and informs other urban systems has recently been reexamined as a landscape design element in itself (Urban Design). In this context, landscape design is informed by technological efficiency and standardization as well as the manipulation of natural processes.
It is within infrastructure projects, often called “landscape urbanism,” that the transformative effect of landscape is most clearly explored with determination through experimentation, monitoring, and reconstruction. In addition to city and regional parks, urban waterfronts, public plazas, and transit interchanges are all examples of this newly expanded field of professional practice. These projects are often public or public-private partnership- sponsored (Public Design).
As well as a professional design field, the activity of landscaping and gardening can be understood as a process to create knowledge, a form of therapy, a way to build social ties, or an indication of luxury and status. Multiple and dispersed, these collective individual actions alter the urban grain in often unintentional ways.
Estate planning, yard design, community gardens, memorials, and neighborhood-organized landscape restoration and preservation projects are examples of this often unrecognized landscape design project. The ecological theory of equilibrium and the idea that humans are separate from nature holds true for many people. This is reflected in the difficult goal of sustainable landscape design (Sustainability, Environmental Design). More recent ecological theory and non-western conceptions of landscape acknowledge that humans and nature are interconnected and that change is a healthy ecosystem process.
As this collective understanding of landscape is one that engages complex human dynamics as an inseparable aspect of the natural world, landscape design as a productive paradigm is enjoying a resurgence over other design fields such as architecture and planning.
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