Landscape Architecture

Landscape architecture is an academic discipline and an area of professional practice that seemingly defies definition. Demarcating the field is a difficult endeavor since the breadth of the field is quite wide, dynamic, and far ranging. This piece focuses on landscape architecture in the United States and Canada (although landscape architecture is alive and well in the rest of the world). However, in the United States, the education of a landscape architect focuses primarily on North American and European studies. This persistence is unfortunate, as few students learn much more than a brief history of landscape architecture in a history survey course akin to the European Grand Tour of the 18th and 19th centuries. A broader, transdisciplinary approach is gaining a foothold, however, producing some ...