CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION DEFINITION OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE - ITS PROVINCE HIS - ITS DEVELOPMENT AS A SEPARATE PROFESSION - ITS REQUIREMENTS OF THE PRACTITIONER PREPARATION —HIS OPPORTUNITIES AND REWARDS. "Landscape architecture is primarily a fine art, and as such its most Definition of important function is to create and preserve beauty in the surroundings of Landscape human habitations and in the broader natural scenery of the country; but it Architecture is also concerned with promoting the comfort, convenience, and health of urban populations, which have scanty access to rural scenery, and urgently need to have their hurrying, workaday lives refreshed and calmed by the beautiful and reposeful sights and sounds which nature, aided by the landscape art, can abundantly provide." Architecture Man obtains from his environment two things which he desires, The Province usefulness and beauty, and all material progress in civilization has of Landscape consisted in his modification of his surroundings to serve these two needs. Very early in his history he shaped the economic changes which he made in the earth's surface so that they gave him also an esthetic satisfaction. This satisfaction was due in great measure to the fact that the changes were obviously man-made; they bore witness that he had impressed his ideas on the stubborn natural material. Much later in his development — almost, it might be said, in modern times came the period when man, instead of being isolated and overpowered in the midst of wild nature, found himself cramped and oppressed by the works of his own hands, and sought relief in the esthetic pleasure to be derived from landscape which expresses not man's will but the operation of natural forces. *From letter of President-Emeritus Charles W. Eliot to the Editors of Landscape Architecture, October, 1910, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 40. Development of Architecture as The province of landscape architecture is to guide man's modification of the landscape so that he may get the greatest possible esthetic satisfaction of one or both of these two quite different kinds. The resulting beauty might be, at one end of the scale, that of the formal surroundings of a palace. architecture in natural materials to show man's magnificence - or, at the other extreme, that of a woodland solitude - apparently an age-long natural growth -a place of rest from all the works of man. In this new province, there must be a new type of designer. In producing the formal setting of a palace, the landscape architect's equipment may indeed differ from that of the architect only in his knowledge of plants and what effects can be secured with them; in reproducing or in intelligently preserving a natural woodland, however, the landscape architect must have a knowledge of nature's processes, a familiarity with nature's materials, a sensitiveness to the natural beauty of rock and wood and water, which does not form the professional equipment of any other artist. When a new profession has come to be recognized, or when an old profession has been separated into several branches, the fundamental cause for this subdivision of field has always been the same: the discovery of so many new facts, or the increase in importance of so many known facts, that one man cannot master them all. With the handling of a newly segregated field of fact will come the acquisition of a new technique, the elaboration of theory in some new direction, even the growth of a new technical language, which also take time to master. This is what has happened in the case of landscape architecture. Within comparatively recent years, there has come a general recognition of the value to the public of designed and organized cities, and of parks, reservations, and other out-of-door spaces, and a greatly increased interest in private pleasure-grounds of various kinds. There is now an effective demand for designing skill using as materials ground forms and vegetation, and for designing skill in the arrangement of landscape and architectural forms- streets, parks, buildings, in larger unities, for public use. This demand has been met by the rise of a separate profession, because the materials and technique of this new field are not those of the older allied professions of architecture and engineering, and are quite as difficult to master within an ordinary lifetime. And in no field is it possible to design effectively "on general principles" without a detailed personal knowledge of the materials and technique. Like Architecture, its sister profession in the Fine Arts, Landscape Requirements Architecture requires of its practitioner diverse abilities not often of the Profession found in the same person: the esthetic appreciation and creative power of the artist, together with the executive skill of the business man. The landscape architect should know the materials of his art: ground forms, vegetation, and structures in their relation to landscape. He should know on the one hand what results are physically possible of accomplishment with these materials, and on the other hand what kinds of beauty these materials can best produce, and what kinds of beauty were better attained in the materials of some other art. Since, for the most part, the landscape architect cannot produce at will in his design all the forms which he might desire, but must choose from among the forms offered by nature those which will suit his purpose, he cannot be confident that his design is possible of execution unless he possesses an accurate first-hand knowledge of the plant materials and of the ground forms from which he must choose the elements of his composition. Since the beauty of vegetation is that of intricacy, of multiplicity, of growth and change, the landscape architect's experience and power in design will come to be quite different from that of the architect, who deals with definite, rigid forms and balanced masses. Since the fundamental organization of his naturalistic designs, of his preservation and enhancement of natural scenery, will be the real or apparent manifestation of the untrammeled forces of nature, the landscape architect must have humbly studied the forces which carve the valleys, and which direct the flow of the streams, and he must be keenly sensitive to the esthetic unity of a mountain or the perfect growth of a ground-covering fern, which may dominate or decorate his nature-inspired work. The landscape architect cannot carry out his designs with his own hand; so he must use some means of conveying his ideas to those who are to execute the work. As this work usually extends over a considerable period of time, it is necessary that the landscape archi |