Landscape as Urbanism

Landscape as Urbanism is a timely and fascinating book. It seeks to describe and situate contemporary practice and theory that redefines disciplinary boundaries in relation to the city at multiple scales larger than the architectural. The book, written by a professor and chair of landscape architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, has a particular focus on avant-garde projects and protagonists whose work has developed over the past couple of decades. In doing so, the book expands into a wider and more holistic exploration of the role of landscape in urban thinking over many centuries.

As a consequence, Landscape as Urbanism provides a compelling overview of internationally-recognised urbanists, landscape architects and architects whose practices share a common underpinning in their relationship to nature and ecological systems in the broadest sense. The book establishes a chain of relationships between current practice, the 20th century (Fordist and Post-Fordist) city and deeper origins in earlier developments of landscape architecture as a distinctive discipline. This is dated back to conceptions of landscape and nature in Renaissance thinking and engages with particularly pressing contemporary issues such as the simultaneous conditions of explosive East Asian urban growth and the managed decline of once-thriving Detroit.

A number of recent and contemporary forces are tied into the conceptual framework, including the multi-scalar implications of containerisation, airport landscapes and industrialisation across a series of thematic chapters. Names from the early Modern Movement, such as Ludwig Hilberseimer and Frank Lloyd Wright, are reappraised and assessed for their contribution to an emerging body of activity that links current designers and practices including Adriaan Geuze (West 8), Rem Koolhaas (OMA) and Bernard Tschumi. Linking their practice to that of their disciplinary predecessors, the role of Frederick Law Olmsted in shaping the landscape and city form of nineteenth century New York is brought into a broad narrative that posits a design priority of ‘ground’ over ‘figure’. For those involved in academia alongside practice, the book raises interesting pedagogical questions regarding disciplinary definition and professional education, identifying a growing movement that can be classified as ‘landscape urbanism’ taught at the intersections of architecture, urban design, ecological sciences and landscape design.

Fascinating as it is, this is also a challenging book written in dense prose for an advanced academic reader. The language at time veers into impenetrability; it requires high levels of concentration and careful reading. But the effort is worthwhile. It establishes an intellectual framework that explores the boundaries between disciplines that are at the heart of the questions and challenges of current urban theories and practices. It does have a focus on the avantgarde and more discussion could perhaps follow about the relationship between elite activity and global dissemination of forms and ideas in a highly connected academic and design culture. Graphically the book is very well designed and styled, with copious reference images throughout that fully support the argument. Referencing is thorough and rigorous but is subservient to the primary narrative rather than dominant and distracting in the way that undermines too many academic texts. The book is a heavy read, but fully worth the effort.