Architecture and Landscape, Landscape and Architecture

Garrett Eckbo Architecture is the design of buildings, groups of buildings, the spaces between them, and their structural extensions—the latter used to be called engineering and has now become urban design. Architecture focuses on shelter. structures for use hv people. It begins with separations between the project and the surrounding neighborhood and region. The environment is littered with impossible tangles that have resulted from the absence of foresight that such an end product would emerge from each develop­ ment project. The environmental art of the future will be kept busy trying to untangle such messes. The Landscape architecture is the occasional one-to-one collaboration between architect and beacon. landscape architect serves as guide and probablv huropean and Japanese as well) would prefer to live in the country, either in a small town or on a farm. There, the dominance of the construction would decline, and landscape elements -earth, rock, water, vegetation, animal life; meadow, savanna, forest, river, lake, marsh—would become more prominent. Kver since Work! War I, the promoters and developers oi suburban housing have described it as a return to country living. millions of units later that has The Some planning and design of open spaces and developed or developing lands not already preempted by the other spatial professions or merchants, hv law or energetic promotion. Its locus is outdoor space for use bv people. It begins with land. become clearlv a scam, except for a Developed places arc, of course, more than architecture out of total and come landscape. Thev include and few isolated star performances. nature as either agriculture or wilderness, remains a dream for most Americans trapped in metropolitan.''suburban complexes. These verv large places of miscel­ laneous urbanization are delimited roughly bv 50-mile, one-hour driving radii on more or less comprehensive free way/high way/ parkway svstems. These real twentieth-cemurv places are expanded job markets, shopping systems, centers, recreation facilities, dream of life m the eounlrv, with environments—regions Together these artists and profes­ within continents, major topo­ graphic and water elements, climate and weather, ecology and economv, tor society and culture, community and neighborhood. Construction and landscape rearrangement create sequences of spaces for social and sionals are concerned with project­ ing the optimum lorms, spatial sequences and land-use patterns in the next centurv. humanized environments now and Throughout most of my fifty-year individual use, plus connecting circulation patterns for pedestrians, b+evcles, horses and motorized vehicles. Storage for the ubiquitous and omnipresent automobile bulks large in urbanized places where people are concentrated. Furniture and graphics, artworks, and the persistent surprises of mechanical engineering all play a role. But the primary forces of life and identity- are people, that choreography of variation from poor to rich, timid to aggressive, sad to happy, cynical to believing, underdressed to overcostumcd, beautiful to ugly, with which we twentieth-century urbanites are so familiar. career, I have been convinced ol the need for ultimate integration of architecture and landscape, it is implied in every job we do, large or small. When it is not implied, it is because the job has no open space. In an intelligent urban society, there should be no such situations. educational and cultural in which almost all connections are made bv telephone, auto, or public transit. Architects, landscape architects, artists and designers struggle heroically but vainly to bring some meaning to these gargantuan and incoherent conti­ nuities. Development planning, aimed at more of the same, and engineering are the basic environ­ mental design processes. Expedient politics governs the whole convoluted game. In actual practice, this integration rarely happens through direct, one­ time, equal-base collaboration. Usually architecture/construction is there first—actually, conceptually, or economically. The landscape elements must adapt to, grow from, and extend the architectural/ structural concepts (whether or not they seem to lend themselves to Most indicators seem to tell us that most of the American people (and Nevertheless, within this iabynnrh, there are many shining and that), and establish connections or Pl.tct-s / Volume 4, Number