landscape matters volume 5 - Flipbook - Page 15
3.
The genesis and genius of
landscape design:
The evolving design principles of landscape architecture
William J. Cairns
WHEN I ENTERED the field of landscape architecture in
William J Cairns
Fellow of the Landscape Institute,
Dip LD (Dunelm), Master of
Horticulture (RHS) DH(Edin),
Master of City Planning (MIT),
1959 as a post graduate student on Professor Brian Hackett’s
course at Durham University, we were imbued with an appreciation of the great designed landscapes of Northumbria and in
all of England hugely inspired by Kent, Capability Brown, and
Repton each of whom worked collaboratively and creatively
engaging in deep philosophical debates with their landowner
clients. Our design projects at Durham were located on one of
the large estates as our key study ‘laboratory’ taken all the way
through from survey, analysis, assessment, and synthesis of
context, to increasing scales and detailed design. In my year it
was Dissington Park, Northumberland.
Fellow Royal Society of Arts,
PPIPRE (Past President of the
International Association of
Environmental Affairs, Brussels)
Our whole analytical approach was based on ecological
principles with design solutions emanating from landscape
forms made by rivers, their catchments, and the dendrological patterns of their drainage, natural and man-influenced;
the underlying surface and deeper geological structures and
derived soils, glacial, transported, or sedentary, all clothed by
an ecology, natural or man-contrived reaching out for aesthetic
justification. We sought to understand the inter-relationship
between the great house, its formal and woodland gardens,
policies and farming and forestry all created as an integrated
land management system influenced by the agricultural reforms and innovations which reached their zenith in the 19th
Century. Our case studies in design and planning extended
into comparative assessments of the UK new towns, Radburn
layouts in urban regeneration , and industrial estates site
planning principles.
The theoretical part of the course took us back into the ancient
gardens of the Egyptian, Chinese; and Indian dynasties, to
Spain, Italy, and France as the substance of those fortunate
enough to do the Grand Tour. The influence of these on a progression from formal classical design influences which had
given rise to the great Florentine design of Villa Gamberaia
and its famous Tuscany gardens, the Generalife at the
Alhambra Palace Gardens of heavenly paradise, the incredible
scale of Palace of Versailles and its infinite axial perspectives
and the formal gardens of Hampton Court, England. Then along
came the philosophical and classical landscape influences
portrayed by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin in the late
16th and the 17th Century recognising nature as ‘something to
be admired’ and not abhorred and when discovered almost a
century later overwhelmed England to form the ethos of
English School of Landscape replicated throughout the British
Isles then exported to the United States. It is not surprising
at all to reflect on the original principles in the design and
layout of Central Park New York or Boston’s Fenway that they
were adopted by Frederick Law Olmsted (the greatest
landscape architect of his time) and replicated in his numerous
other projects, including the US Capital in Washington, the
Biltmore Estate in North Carolina, and the 1893 Word’s
Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It is more than noteworthy
to mention that it was through Olmsted’s inspiration that the
world’s first university degree course in Landscape
Architecture was established by Harvard University in 1900,
two years prior to his death.
The applied side at Durham of our landscape education
included the principles and practice of landscape design, law
relating to landscape, civil engineering, hydrology, building
design, surveying, and landscape construction. Underpinning
these were accredited courses in geology, minerology,
geomorphology, hydrology, ecology. My dissertation was on
the post glaciation succession boreal and sub-boreal of woodland ecosystems based on pollen analyses-essentially the
work of Neanderthal and Blitt.
I give fleeting reference to all the above, because these were
the taught elements in the beginning stages of formalised
landscape education in the UK of which Brian Hackett and
Frank Clark were the founding fathers. As post graduate
students, we were immensely inspired and hugely excited by
having discovered landscape architecture as the new basis of
our professional careers and the plurality of its subject,
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