PPS.org has identified 10 Principles for Successful Squares. Though sensible they remind me of 10 Qualities That Make Him A Perfect Husband  or ten qualities to make a Good Wife ‘smart, wise, beautiful, compassionate, funny, hard-working, aesthetically inspired, spiritual, passionately desirous‘.  The …

Public Open Space parks, squares, landscape character assessment Read more »

‘Consult the Genius of the Place’, now expressed as ‘design with sensitivity to context’ is the Single Agreed Law of landscape design. It embodies the conviction that we should, as NT Newton put it in the title of a book on the history …

Prof Richard Sennett attacks a basic principle of landscape architecture Read more »

A Google.com search on Olmsted “father of landscape architecture” produces 153,000 returns. But, of course, he was not the father of landscape architecture. As Norman T Newton wrote (Design on the Land, 1971 p. xxi) ‘Landscape architecture: a profession only …

Was Frederick Law Olmsted or Gilgamesh the father of landscape architecture? Read more »

This sign was outside the building where I studied studied landscape architecture in a University of Edinburgh building in George Square. The typography showed ARCHITECTURE above and in a larger font size than LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE. When the University destroyed the …

Should LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE be above, below or equal to ARCHITECTURE? Read more »