Is landscape architecture?

Extract

I was not the first to pose this question; it was first asked in print by Garrett Eckbo, one of the most important landscape architects in America in the twentieth century. One could equally reverse the question and ask: ‘Is architecture landscape?’. In either formulation the question is about the relationship between two arts that are normally understood as separate professions these days. In fact, Eckbo was not the first to puzzle over this issue, even if his exact formulation had no antecedents. The question had already been posed in the nineteenth century, when landscape architecture emerged as a distinct discipline. The early theorists of the field, Humphry Repton and John Claudius Loudon in England, Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy in France, and Andrew Jackson Downing in the USA, all wondered about the relationships between these two practices – if indeed they were two. The professional accrediting and licensing bodies that were formed subsequently tried to settle the matter and institutionalise the distinction. But the question may be older, for it is possible to say that the distinction between these disciplines, at least the suggestion of fundamental differences, was debated even earlier in the eighteenth century. The cases I have in mind include the Abbé Laugier and William Chambers; the first compared the routes through a forest to the streets of a town, while the second used landscape aesthetics to evaluate the merits of a building's facade. Despite this tradition and indeed maybe because of it, the questions these theorists asked have not disappeared in our time.