An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design

ΤΟ

OUR FELLOW-STUDENTS

OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

PREFACE

WE mean this book to present a general conception of landscape design which may enable a designer better to determine for himself the relations of the objects and ideas with which he is dealing, and better to prepare and use in a decisive way, in the individual problems of his profession, the natural aptitudes and acquired knowledge which are the tools of his trade. The book may also serve as a general introduction to the subject for those whose interest in it is purely that of appreciation and enjoyment of landscape designs and of natural landscapes.

The rapid growth of landscape architecture as an independent profession has been very recent. Nearly all the trained men in the field are giving their energies to active practice rather than to theorizing or to writing. It is natural, therefore, that the bulk of the detailed printed information on construction and planting which the landscape architect uses should have originated in the older fields of architecture and engineering and horticulture, that the discussions of general esthetics should have little specific reference to the problems of the landscape architect, and that, while there have been many books on special problems and special aspects of the field, there should have appeared up to this time no book, treating generally of landscape design, adequate to the modern development of the subject and of the profession.

This book is not a compendium of useful information as to the practicalities of landscape construction, though such a book is much needed; nor is it primarily a book of pictures of completed work to which the designer may go to see how problems similar to his own have been met before. It is emphatically not a book of rules which are supposed automatically to produce good design if religiously followed; there are no such rules, and no esthetic theory is final. We make no attempt at any original contribution to the subject of general

esthetics; we merely take an esthetic theory which seems — to us at least consistent and capable of general application, and use it as the basis of an organization of the subject matter of the field of landscape design.

In the light of this theory, we discuss the various materials of which landscape compositions are made, and then, to make this discussion more definite and directly useful, we treat at some length certain examples of the problems of the modern landscape designer; considering briefly also, in the appendix, how the landscape architect may handle some parts of his professional practice, and giving a series of plans of actually constructed work.

We have chosen the illustrations primarily to show points in the discussion which cannot so well be expressed in words; also, as far as we were able, consistently with their other uses, we have tried to have the pictures in themselves good examples of composition in various modes. We have been content to forego, in many instances, the use of pictures of subjects already well covered in other books, for instance gates, garden furniture, steps, fountains and so on.

Since we intend this book to be useful also as a textbook, we have made the subject-index unusually full.

We include a list of references to the more important literature of landscape architecture. Taken together with the footnotes, this gives the reader an opportunity further to pursue aspects of the subject not treated at length in this book, or to find a statement of them in the clearest or most authoritative form.

We are well aware that no designer was ever made by the study of theory alone, and that most of the essential fire of emotion in appreciation and design is forever untransmutable into written words, but there still should be a place for a theoretical conception of the subject, even in the minds of the most inspired designers, and we are writing this book in the hope of adding something to the clarity of this conception.

H. V. H.
T. K.

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
June, 1917.