Landscape architecture design styles

It is easier to think about design styles in garden design than in landscape architecture. But the two fields of design tend to run in parallel. I agree with John Dixon Hunt that their relationship parallels that between poetry and prose. So which is the leader and which the follower?

In the evolution of literary styles—especially during periods like the Renaissance and Baroque—poetry generally led prose, though the relationship is dynamic and context-dependent.

Poetry as the Stylistic Vanguard

  • Renaissance poetry was often the first to reflect new aesthetic ideals, such as humanism, classical revival, and elaborate rhetorical forms. Poets like Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Ronsard helped define the tone and texture of the era before prose caught up.
  • Baroque poetry embraced complexity, ornamentation, and emotional intensity—traits that later influenced prose styles in sermons, philosophical treatises, and even early novels.

Prose Follows, Then Innovates

  • Prose tended to absorb and adapt poetic innovations, especially in rhythm, metaphor, and structure.
  • However, by the late Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, prose began to assert its own stylistic leadership, especially in essays, satire, and emerging novel forms.

Why Poetry Often Leads

  • Poetry is more formally constrained, which encourages experimentation within tight boundaries.
  • It’s often closer to oral tradition, making it a natural vehicle for cultural shifts.
  • Poets were frequently at the center of intellectual movements, shaping language before prose formalized it.

 Exceptions and Crosscurrents

  • In some cases, prose led stylistic change—especially in philosophical or scientific writing (e.g., Montaigne’s essays or Bacon’s aphorisms).
  • The rise of the novel in the 18th century marked a turning point where prose began to dominate literary innovation.

Garden design and landscape architecture

It’s a comparable story: developments in garden design usually lead those in landscape architecture.

  • Renaissance gardens, based on grids and squares, came before Renaissance cities – you see this in Florence, in Rome, in Paris and in London
  • Baroque gardens, based on avenues, vistas and round-points, came before Baroque cities – you see this in the same four cities and, of course, elsewhere
  • Landscape gardens, based on serpentine geometry, came before ‘landscape cities’, as planned by John Nash and Frederick Law Olmsted and the Garden Cities Movement
  • Modernist gardens and modernist cities probably developed in parallel between, say, 1920 and 1950.

What is likely is landscape architecture’s next design style likely to be?

  • It’s too early so say what it likely to be in physical terms, but it is already apparent that it will be based on the related principles of sustainability, conservation, low-carbon usage and nature-based biodiversity.
  • Sticking my neck out, in 2013, I published a 2D diagram of what I called the Sustainable Style. It was in a book on the history of British gardens but I believe it applies equally to landscape architectural design. See: British Gardens: History, philosophy and design Hardcover  (Routledge 2013) by Tom Turner
  • I said more about this style in my lecture to the Hal Moggridge Symposium on 11th September 2025 and will say more about it when my lecture is published on the Landscape Architecture YouTube Channel. The URL is:
    🔗 https://www.youtube.com/c/LandscapeArchitecture
    .