The discussion of the history of landscape architecture is a complex endeavor as it shares much of its history with that of

landscape gardening Landscape architecture is the design of outdoor areas, landmarks, and structures to achieve environmental, social-behavioural, or aesthetic outcomes. It involves the systematic design and general engineering of various structures for constructio ...

and

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing buildings ...

, spanning the entirety of man's existence. However, it was not until relatively recent history that the term "

landscape architecture Landscape architecture is the design of outdoor areas, landmarks, and structures to achieve environmental, social-behavioural, or aesthetic outcomes. It involves the systematic design and general engineering of various structures for constructio ...

" or even "landscape architect" came into common use.

Earliest history

For the period before 1800, the history of landscape architecture, formally landscape gardening, is largely that of master planning and garden design for

manor houses A manor house was historically the main residence of the lord of the manor. The house formed the administrative centre of a manor in the European feudal system; within its great hall were held the lord's manorial courts, communal meals with ...

palaces A palace is a grand residence, especially a royal residence, or the home of a head of state or some other high-ranking dignitary, such as a bishop or archbishop. The word is derived from the Latin name palātium, for Palatine Hill in Rome whic ...

and royal properties, religious complexes, and centers of government. An example is the extensive work by

André Le Nôtre André Le Nôtre (; 12 March 1613 – 15 September 1700), originally rendered as André Le Nostre, was a French landscape architect and the principal gardener of King Louis XIV of France. He was the landscape architect who designed the gard ...

for King

Louis XIV of France , house = Bourbon , father = Louis XIII , mother = Anne of Austria , birth_date = , birth_place = Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France , death_date = , death_place = Palace of ...

at the

Palace of Versailles The Palace of Versailles ( ; french: Château de Versailles ) is a former royal residence built by King Louis XIV located in Versailles, about west of Paris, France. The palace is owned by the French Republic and since 1995 has been managed, u ...

. The first person to write of "making" a landscape was

Joseph Addison Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright and politician. He was the eldest son of The Reverend Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend Richar ...

in a series of essays entitled "On the Pleasures of the Imagination" in 1712 The term ''landscape architecture'' was first used by

Gilbert Laing Meason Gilbert Laing Meason of Lindertis FRSE FSA (3 July 1769 – 14 August 1832) was a Scottish merchant and agricultural improver, best remembered as the originator of the term landscape architecture. Life He was born Gilbert Laing in Kirkwall, the s ...

in his book ''On The Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy'' (London, 1828). Meason was born in Scotland and did not have the opportunity to visit Italy, but he admired the relationship between architecture and landscape in the great landscape paintings and drew upon

Vitruvius Vitruvius (; c. 80–70 BC – after c. 15 BC) was a Roman architect and engineer during the 1st century BC, known for his multi-volume work entitled '' De architectura''. He originated the idea that all buildings should have three attribut ...

' ''Ten Books on Architecture'' to find principles and the relationship between built form and natural form. The term was then taken up by

John Claudius Loudon John Claudius Loudon (8 April 1783 – 14 December 1843) was a Scottish botanist, garden designer and author. He was the first to use the term arboretum in writing to refer to a garden of plants, especially trees, collected for the purpose of ...

and used to describe a specific type of architecture, suited to being placed in designed landscapes. Loudon was admired by the American designer and theorist

Andrew Jackson Downing Andrew Jackson Downing (October 31, 1815 – July 28, 1852) was an American landscape designer, horticulturist, and writer, a prominent advocate of the Gothic Revival in the United States, and editor of ''The Horticulturist'' magazine (1846–5 ...

and landscape architecture was the subject of a chapter in Downing's book ''A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, Adapted to North America'' (1841).

First years

Central park manhattan 2 New York photo D Ramey Logan

This led to its adoption by

Frederick Law Olmsted Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822August 28, 1903) was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is considered to be the father of landscape architecture in the USA. Olmsted was famous for co- ...

and

Calvert Vaux Calvert Vaux (; December 20, 1824 – November 19, 1895) was an English-American architect and landscape designer, best known as the co-designer, along with his protégé and junior partner Frederick Law Olmsted, of what would become New York Ci ...

. Olmsted and a man named George Oskar gave a different slant to the meaning of 'landscape architecture', using the term to describe the whole professional task of designing a composition of planting, landform, water, paving and other structures. Their first use of the term was in the winning entry for the design of

Central Park Central Park is an urban park in New York City located between the Upper West and Upper East Sides of Manhattan. It is the fifth-largest park in the city, covering . It is the most visited urban park in the United States, with an estimated ...

in New York City. Olmsted and Vaux then in 1863 adopted

landscape architect A landscape architect is a person who is educated in the field of landscape architecture. The practice of landscape architecture includes: site analysis, site inventory, site planning, land planning, planting design, grading, storm water manage ...

as a professional title and used it to describe their work for the planning of urban park systems. Olmsted's project for the Emerald Necklace in Boston was widely admired and led to the use of landscape architect as a professional title in Europe, initially by

Patrick Geddes Sir Patrick Geddes (2 October 1854 – 17 April 1932) was a British biologist, sociologist, Comtean positivist, geographer, philanthropist and pioneering town planner. He is known for his innovative thinking in the fields of urban planning ...

and

Thomas Mawson Thomas Hayton Mawson (5 May 1861 – 14 November 1933), known as T. H. Mawson, was a British garden designer, landscape architect, and town planner. Personal life Mawson was born in Nether Wyresdale, Lancashire, and left school at age 12. ...

. Frederick Law Olmsted and

Beatrix Farrand Beatrix Cadwalader Farrand (née Jones; June 19, 1872 – February 28, 1959) was an American landscape gardener and landscape architect. Her career included commissions to design about 110 gardens for private residences, estates and country ho ...

, with eight other leading practitioners

Modern time

Landscape architecture has since become a worldwide profession, submitted for recognition by the

International Labour Organization The International Labour Organization (ILO) is a United Nations agency whose mandate is to advance social and economic justice by setting international labour standards. Founded in October 1919 under the League of Nations, it is the first and o ...

and represented on a world-wide basis by the

International Federation of Landscape Architects The International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) is an organisation which represents the landscape architectural profession globally. It aims to provide leadership and networks to support the development of the profession and its effe ...

. Garrett Eckbo and

Dan Kiley Daniel Urban Kiley (2 September 1912 – 21 February 2004) was an American landscape architect, who worked in the style of modern architecture. Kiley designed over one-thousand landscape projects including Gateway Arch National Park in St. Louis ...

were prominent modernist landscape architects in the mid-20th century. Their work is represented by a shift away from what might be termed the wild garden aesthetic of earlier landscape architects influenced by Romantic Naturalism, and toward a more spare and rectilinear aesthetic. Both studied under Warren Manning at Harvard, who in turn had studied under Frederick Law Olmsted. Several landscape architects practicing in the 1980s and 1990s moved the discipline beyond its roots in High Modernism. These include Martha Schwartz, Peter Walker, and

Michael Van Valkenburgh Michael Robert Van Valkenburgh (born September 5, 1951) is an American landscape architect and educator. He has worked on a wide variety of projects in the United States, Canada, Korea, and France, including public parks, college campuses, sculpt ...

. Starting in the mid-1990s, a new disciplinary shift occurred toward what has been called

Landscape urbanism Landscape urbanism is a theory of urban design arguing that the city is constructed of interconnected and ecologically rich horizontal field conditions, rather than the arrangement of objects and buildings. Landscape Urbanism, like Infrastructural ...

, a term that attempts to merge urban design, infrastructure design and landscape.

Publications

Three remarkable histories of the landscape architecture profession were published in the 1970s. A first comprehensive history of landscape architecture, as distinct from the

history of gardening The early history of gardening is largely entangled with the history of agriculture, with gardens that were mainly ornamental generally the preserve of the elite until quite recent times. Smaller gardens generally had being a kitchen garden as t ...

was written by Norman T Newton with the title ''Design on the land: the development of landscape architecture'' (Belknap/Harvard 1971). The book has 42 chapters. The first three chapters are on Ancient Times, The Middle Ages, and The World of Islam. The last three chapters are on Urban Open-Space Systems, Variations in Professional Practice and the Conservation of Natural Resources. This reflects the development of landscape architecture from a focus on private gardens, in the ancient world, to a focus on the planning and design of public open space in the modern world. Since kings used to be responsible for the provision of

public goods In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)Oakland, W. H. (1987). Theory of public goods. In Handbook of public economics (Vol. 2, pp. 485-535). Elsevier. is a good that is both non-excludable and non-riv ...

(irrigation, streets, town walls, parks and other

environmental good Environmental goods are typically non-market goods, including clean air, clean water, landscape, green transport infrastructure ( footpaths, cycleways, greenways, etc.), public parks, urban parks, rivers, mountains, forests, and beaches. ...

s) the distinction between public and private was not quite the same in the ancient world as it is in the modern world. A second comprehensive history of landscape architecture with the title ''History of Landscape Architecture'' was published in 1973 by George B Tobey. It extends from 5000 BC, through the development of agriculture and towns to the design of gardens, parks and garden cities. This represents a broader view of landscape architecture than that of Newton and would have been well suited to Newton's title 'Design on the land'. A third comprehensive history of landscape architecture was published by Geoffrey and Susan Jellicoe in 1975 with the title ''The landscape of man: shaping the environment from prehistory to the present day'' (Thames and Hudson, 1975). The book has 27 chapters and is more comprehensive than its predecessors, geographically, artistically and philosophically. Like Bannister Fletcher's ''History of Architecture'', the book has introductory sections (e.g. on environment, social history, philosophy, expression, architecture, landscape) and then a series of examples with plans and photographs. Many of the examples are parks and gardens but the book also includes the layout of temples, towns, forests and other projects concerned with 'shaping the environment'.

Related fine arts and representation

The fine arts and landscape architecture have been interwoven in the outstanding professionals' methods. A history of landscape architecture, including the natural and designed the

landscape A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or man-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal.''New Oxford American Dictionary''. A landscape includes the ...

and of public and private gardens: also includes the crucial professional component of artistic and technical representation, which have always been responsible for visualizing and communicating – the creative concepts, ideas, designs, options, 'manifested theories', and guiding aesthetic principles – between the landscape architect and the clients, builders, and interested parties. A few of the media and methods are unchanged, while most have evolved over the centuries to reflect new artistic methods and graphic supplies. Almost timeless are the fine arts media of charcoal sketch, oil paint,

watercolor Watercolor (American English) or watercolour (British English; see spelling differences), also ''aquarelle'' (; from Italian diminutive of Latin ''aqua'' "water"), is a painting method”Watercolor may be as old as art itself, going back to ...

, pen and ink drawing,

sculpture Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable ...

, and

etching Etching is traditionally the process of using strong acid or mordant to cut into the unprotected parts of a metal surface to create a design in intaglio (incised) in the metal. In modern manufacturing, other chemicals may be used on other types ...

. Those were joined by: print-making; by film photography for prints, slides, and movies; collage and built-up layered images; model making, and other techniques. Since the late 20th century the introduction of computers, numerous formatting uses for scanning and printing, the wide array of options with digital technology for drawing, images and site videos; and the nearly infinite reach of the internet have revolutionized how to explore and interact to share creative intent. These have also facilitated effective communication collaboratively within the project team, clients, and involved people of the world.

Related fine arts

Two-dimensional arts

Printmaking Printmaking is the process of creating artworks by printing, normally on paper, but also on fabric, wood, metal, and other surfaces. "Traditional printmaking" normally covers only the process of creating prints using a hand processed techniqu ...

frescos Fresco (plural ''frescos'' or ''frescoes'') is a technique of mural painting executed upon freshly laid ("wet") lime plaster. Water is used as the vehicle for the dry-powder pigment to merge with the plaster, and with the setting of the plaste ...

Oil painting Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest ...

Drawing Drawing is a form of visual art in which an artist uses instruments to mark paper or other two-dimensional surface. Drawing instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, various kinds of paints, inked brushes, colored pencils, crayo ...

, sketching

Photography

Black-and-white Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white in a continuous spectrum, producing a range of shades of grey. Media The history of various visual media began with black and white, and as technology improved, altered to color. ...

and

Color Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associ ...

(prints, slides) *

Full spectrum ''Full Spectrum'' is a series of five anthologies of fantasy and science fiction short stories published between 1988 and 1995 by Bantam Spectra. The first anthology was edited by Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy; the second by Aronica, McCarthy, ...

Ultraviolet Ultraviolet (UV) is a form of electromagnetic radiation with wavelength from 10 nm (with a corresponding frequency around 30 PHz) to 400 nm (750 THz), shorter than that of visible light, but longer than X-rays. UV radiation ...

, and

Infrared Infrared (IR), sometimes called infrared light, is electromagnetic radiation (EMR) with wavelengths longer than those of Light, visible light. It is therefore invisible to the human eye. IR is generally understood to encompass wavelengths from ...

(art & site analysis)

Digital art

Computer art Computer art is any art in which computers play a role in production or display of the artwork. Such art can be an image, sound, animation, video, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, video game, website, algorithm, performance or gallery installation. Many tradit ...

, Multimedia art,

New media art New media art includes artworks designed and produced by means of electronic media technologies, comprising virtual art, computer graphics, computer animation, digital art, interactive art, sound art, Internet art, video games, robotics, 3D pri ...

Digital art Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process, or more specifically computational art that uses and engages with digital media. Since the 1960s, various name ...

Digital photography Digital photography uses cameras containing arrays of electronic photodetectors interfaced to an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to produce images focused by a lens, as opposed to an exposure on photographic film. The digitized image ...

(images, videos)

Three-dimensional arts

Sculpture

Environmental sculpture Environmental sculpture is sculpture that creates or alters the environment for the viewer, as opposed to presenting itself figurally or monumentally before the viewer. A frequent trait of larger environmental sculptures is that one can actually en ...

Sculpture Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable ...

Sculpture garden A sculpture garden or sculpture park is an outdoor garden or park which includes the presentation of sculpture, usually several permanently sited works in durable materials in landscaping, landscaped surroundings. A sculpture garden may be privat ...

social sculpture Social sculpture is a phrase used to describe an expanded concept of art that was invented by the artist and co-founder of the German Green Party, Joseph Beuys. Beuys created the term "social sculpture" to embody his understanding of art's potentia ...

Public art Public art is art in any media whose form, function and meaning are created for the general public through a public process. It is a specific art genre with its own professional and critical discourse. Public art is visually and physically acce ...

Land or Earth art

Environmental art Environmental art is a range of artistic practices encompassing both historical approaches to nature in art and more recent ecological and politically motivated types of works. Environmental art has evolved away from formal concerns, for example ...

Land art Land art, variously known as Earth art, environmental art, and Earthworks, is an art movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely associated with Great Britain and the United StatesArt in the modern era: A guide to styles, schools, & mov ...

Earthworks (art) Land art, variously known as Earth art, environmental art, and Earthworks, is an art movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely associated with Great Britain and the United StatesArt in the modern era: A guide to styles, schools, & mov ...

* Land Arts of the American West *

Sustainable art Sustainable art is art in harmony with the key principles of sustainability, which include ecology, social justice, non-violence and grassroots democracy. Sustainable art may also be understood as art that is produced with consideration for the wide ...

References

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