The view from above
Ian McHarg’s influence on American landscape architecture has been profound. In his seminal 1969 publication, Design with Nature, McHarg brought ecological thinking into the discipline, radically restructuring how the field approaches the site. Just as Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown jumped the garden fence to conceive of the landscape garden, McHarg extended the scope of landscape architecture to the territory, analysing the processes that construct landscape as a means of planning for development at a geographic scale.
The chapter, Sea and Survival, exemplifies the McHargian approach. 1 Using barrier island development along the U.S. Atlantic coast to demonstrate the conflict of a human contest with nature, McHarg illustrated how coastal processes construct the dunes of barrier islands in order to rank coastal areas according to their suitability for home construction. This case study was explored in design studios at the University of Pennsylvania, with students translating each category onto a vast spatially indexed spreadsheet, demonstrating the tendency of this conceptual approach to detach from the world and ‘occupy, virtually, the vantage point of the universe to understand what is happening on the planet’.2 The decision-making process is rational and the resulting map grants objectivity to the approach, but as any cartographer knows, ‘to avoid hiding critical information in a fog of detail, the map must offer a selective, incomplete view of reality’.3
Ian McHarg’s influence on American landscape architecture has been profound. In his seminal 1969 publication, Design with Nature, McHarg brought ecological thinking into the discipline, radically restructuring how the field approaches the site. Just as Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown jumped the garden fence to conceive of the landscape garden, McHarg extended the scope of landscape architecture to the territory, analysing the processes that construct landscape as a means of planning for development at a geographic scale.