History of landscape architecture

The discussion of the history of landscape architecture is a complex endeavor as it shares much of its history with that of

Earliest history

For the period before 1800, the history of landscape architecture, formally landscape gardening, is largely that of master planning and

The first person to write of "making" a landscape was Joseph Addison in a series of essays entitled "On the Pleasures of the Imagination" in 1712^[2]

The term landscape architecture was first used by Gilbert Laing Meason in his book On The Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy (London, 1828). Meason was born in Scotland and did not have the opportunity to visit Italy, but he admired the relationship between architecture and landscape in the great landscape paintings and drew upon Vitruvius' Ten Books on Architecture to find principles and the relationship between built form and natural form.^[3] The term was then taken up by John Claudius Loudon and used to describe a specific type of architecture, suited to being placed in designed landscapes.^[1] Loudon was admired by the American designer and theorist Andrew Jackson Downing and landscape architecture was the subject of a chapter in Downing's book A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America (1841).^[4]

First years

This led to its adoption by

Landscape architecture has since become a worldwide profession, submitted for recognition by the International Labour Organization^[7] and represented on a world-wide basis by the International Federation of Landscape Architects.^[8]

Several landscape architects practicing in the 1980s and 1990s moved the discipline beyond its roots in High Modernism. These include Martha Schwartz, Peter Walker, and Michael Van Valkenburgh. Starting in the mid-1990s, a new disciplinary shift occurred toward what has been called Landscape urbanism, a term that attempts to merge urban design, infrastructure design and landscape.

Publications

Three remarkable histories of the landscape architecture profession were published in the 1970s.

A first comprehensive history of landscape architecture, as distinct from the

A second comprehensive history of landscape architecture with the title History of Landscape Architecture was published in 1973 by George B Tobey. It extends from 5000 BC, through the development of agriculture and towns to the design of gardens, parks and garden cities. This represents a broader view of landscape architecture than that of Newton and would have been well suited to Newton's title 'Design on the land'.[10]

A third comprehensive history of landscape architecture was published by

The fine arts and landscape architecture have been interwoven in the outstanding professionals' methods. A history of landscape architecture, including the natural and designed the landscape and of public and private gardens: also includes the crucial professional component of artistic and technical representation, which have always been responsible for visualizing and communicating – the creative concepts, ideas, designs, options, 'manifested theories', and guiding aesthetic principles – between the landscape architect and the clients, builders, and interested parties.

A few of the media and methods are unchanged, while most have evolved over the centuries to reflect new artistic methods and graphic supplies. Almost timeless are the fine arts media of charcoal sketch, oil paint,

• History of gardening
• Landscape architecture
• Landscape planning
• History of Parks and Gardens of Paris

References