If you consider the ASLA Annual Meeting the profession's "birthday", then the first weekend in October marked the 109th year of Landscape Architecture in the United States. So, we ask ourselves the quintessential existential question; why are we here?
As you move through the spaces that comprise your daily routines, take an inventory of the elements that compose these spaces. For most designers, especially landscape architects, we lament as to how the space should have been arranged, or how there should have been more plant materials utilized, or how there should be more sidewalks, and so on ad infinitum. From this point, the comments usually focus upon how civil engineers rule the earth and how planning departments bow down to the pressure of big business and so on.
Some of these statements are true, yet the question remains, why are we here? While it is true that landscape architecture has become more of a "household" term through the portrayal of landscape architects by Timothy Hutton and Jude Law in such films as Sunshine State and Just Like Heaven, most Americans still have little idea as to what a landscape architect does. This however, is not the point.
What the public needs to be educated on is not what landscape architects do, but what landscape architects can do. For far too long our profession, as a whole, has simply stood by while civil engineers rule the earth, and planning departments are run and populated by professionals with public administration and law degrees.
Landscape architects are unique professionals equipped to solve multi-faceted problems while maintaining an aesthetic beauty that compliments the existing context. The question becomes not why are we here, but why are we not solving the problems before they become problems?!
Take as an example the typical parking lot, as most of you have already enVisioned, the typical American parking lot is usually devoid of the following elements: shade trees, planting medians and sidewalks. Why? Not because civil engineers hate these elements, but because of the requirements prescribed by planning departments. The planning departments are not to blame, landscape architects are to blame! They are to blame because they failed to take charge as an allied design profession to ensure that a design-based code be developed in order to prevent what is essentially an unpleasant and unsustainable solution from being explored at all!
Consider this an overdue wake-up call. If landscape architecture is expected to survive an additional 109 years as a profession, then we should take a cue from the civil engineers and architects who have convinced the world that their solution is the only alternative. The $64,000 question, however, is how do we achieve this paradigm shift?
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