Landscape Architecture

The book I read to research this post was Landscape Architecture A Very Short Introduction by Ian Thompson which is a very good book which I bought on kindle. The term landscape architecture is known to have been first used in a book title in 1828. It is a bit of an ambigous term that has little to do with architecture and there is a lot more to it than mere gardening or landscaping. In America you must have a degree in the subject before you can call yourself a landscape architect. They design a lot more than gardens, often whole towns and will often do things like study the impact a wind farm will have so it is quite technical. It is a very old profession easily going back to Roman times at least and interestingly China leads the world in this subject with its huge urban redevelopment since 1979. In China the tradition is as old as in the west with things like Feng Shui incorporated into it and although at the moment there is much western influence in years to come we may find Chinese ideas influence the west a lot more. In France there landscape architecture prior to the French Revolution was uniform which you can see at Versailles Palace and after the revolution Europe as a whole started to steer towards a more natural look. Hampton Court in London around this time had a huge amount of money spent on landscaping it. In Britain in the 1960's there were new towns built like Telford that incorporated the latest landscaping architecture and in one way that it failed was in the huge amount of tower blocks that were built and low cost housing in general. There was at least planning in things like shops and park space. Many of the so called futuristic buildings have come to be seen as follies that in many cases look worse with age than conventional buildings. The most important aspect of this planning is usability which is often forgotten when they are giving out awards for landscaping. I did really enjoy as it is very interesting and is written by a leading landscape architect. It is part of the A Very Short Introduction which has around 300 in the series and they get an expert to write around 150 pages on a subject. They are quite concise and informative.