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 promising results in terms of producing more collaborative and multidisciplinarily savvy landscape architects. The purpose here is to provide a means by which one can begin to see the wealth of research and practice in which landscape architects have been engaged since landscape architecture gained its professional standing in the late 1800s.

There are numerous similarities between landscape architecture and geography. Geography is generally divided into two areas, physical and human; unfortunately, these two domains are often considered oppositional. The same problem occurs in landscape architecture, which is similarly organized into two broad arenas, the physical and the human; now—as is also the case in geography—a third arena has emerged, geographic information systems (GIS) and other technologies. The field of landscape architecture is also divided in other ways, between academicians and practitioners, designers and nondesigners, and technicians and artists. Such divisions are not always constructive, though they do help differentiate the multiple focuses of the everyday work of a landscape architect. This entry provides a broad sense of landscape architecture: how it is defined; its history and theory, education and professional practice; and the current state of the field.