Designing the garden of Geddes: The master gardener and the profession of landscape architecture

Abstract

The influence of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) on the landscape architecture profession has been widely acknowledged, but there is no critical review of the nature of this influence on theory and practice. Geddes appears to have been the first person in Britain to adopt the term landscape architect to denote a profession in the American sense as someone who dealt with city planning, civic design and parks systems. This profession seemed to encompass his wide ranging interests, providing a suitable vehicle for his transdisciplinary approaches, but which he later transferred to that of town and regional planning. His approach to understanding landscapes was to study towns and regions from a cultural, ecological and economic perspective in a systematic way of survey, analysis and design. Geddes's methods were gradually adopted by the landscape architecture profession, and purely Beaux Arts-architectural approaches phased out. By tracing contemporary references, this paper highlights key individuals who helped to promote his ideas in the landscape architecture profession then and now, and shows how his enduring influence and longstanding impact have to do with the systematic approach and methods he set forth. Today similar approaches are being promoted by other professions, but with a different perspective, and suggests that rather than various disciplines setting up silos, trying to defend their territories, with climate change and food security looming it is timely to promote more integrated approaches. This is well in line with Geddes's ideas who not only encouraged interdisciplinarity, but also warned against inadvertent specialisation. Landscape architecture, history, interdisciplinarity, cultural and ecological approaches A century after the publication of Patrick Geddes's Cities in Evolution (1915) changed the study of cities from a purely engineering, architectural and administrative one to one with an emphasis on social aspects, there have been significant changes to the way they have been conceived and designed. By emphasising sociological, ethical, factors he ensured rich and varied approaches that have affected various disciplines. Some of these disciplines were actually conceived by Geddes, while others have been and are being generated based on his ideas or principles in ways that he himself could not have foreseen. One of the professions that he initiated in Great Britain was that of landscape architecture c.1904. Yet it was not until 1930 before the profession was actually established with its own professional body. By this stage many of the intended tasks had been taken on by town planners, another new profession whose Town Planning Institute had been founded in 1914. Despite the fact that he did not partake in the actual creation of the profession he has been lauded as 'the most important landscape and planning theorist of the twentieth century', and as the 'founder of landscape planning in Britain'. While his contribution to various professions has been analysed, there is currently not one that specif...

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