Richard Weller on the new Landscape Declaration

This June, the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF), whose mission is to support the preservation, improvement and enhancement of the environment, brought more than 700 landscape architects together at Penn. Its goal: to hash out “The New Landscape Declaration,” an update on its celebrated manifesto from 1966. A few weeks ago at the annual meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in New Orleans, the resolution was adopted. 

“Legend has it that Ian McHarg, the famous professor of landscape architecture at PennDesign, and a handful of others, launched the original declaration on the steps of Independence Hall,” observes Richard Weller, Chair of Landscape Architecture and the credited author of the new document. This time, he adds, it took the better part of a year and the input of hundreds to reach a consensus. 

Weller and other leaders began planning the two-day summit months ahead, arranging for some 70 speakers to make impassioned pleas for what they thought the new declaration should include. Attendees then provided feedback and offered input via a variety of means—index cards, polls, and even an interactive app. Finally, the assemblage prioritized key points and fine-tuned language that was “appropriately broad without being platitudinous,” says Weller. In the months leading up to the ASLA meeting, he then led a task force of 12 LAF board members to arrive at the final draft.

“Fifty years later, the fundamental principal of designing with nature—to borrow the title of McHarg’s most famous book and one that is arguably the most important in the field—remains the same,” says Weller. “The big difference is that then we saw cities as the problem, now we see them as the solution.” 

During the June summit, Chris Marcinkowski, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, insisted that landscape architects must “work with the underlying systems of urbanization and adapt them.” Emeritus Professor and former Landscape Architecture Chair James Corner took the notion a step further, exhorting “if you love nature, live in a city,” and called for the profession to enhance cities with green space. As Corner demonstrated with his work on New York’s High Line, practitioners emphasized at the summit, these approaches need not be in the form of traditional parks. For instance, David Gouverneur, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, cited his own work in informal communities in Venezuela, arguing that new forms such as the planting armatures he used in South America could be adapted worldwide. 

Another key point of the new declaration is its acknowledgement that a new set of concerns face today’s landscape architects. In 1966, McHarg and his co-authors were imploring their peers to respond to the rampant pollution that was destroying America’s lakes and rivers, along with the use of poisonous pesticides that author Rachel Carson had spotlighted in her groundbreaking Silent Spring. A half-century later, different—and global—imperatives like mitigating climate change and striving for ecological and social justice in planning and designing the public realm have surfaced. “Landscape architecture is a profession that is well-positioned to apply design intelligence to meeting the challenge of adapting our built environment and related landscapes to combat these new pressures,” Weller observes. 

Recent movements in the field, such as landscape urbanism, favoring native plantings over ornamental ones, and designing roof gardens and living walls, all serve as “practical manifestations of the declaration’s statement that landscape architects give artistic physical form and integrated function to the ideals of equity, sustainability, resiliency, and democracy,” he adds.

And, Weller points out, even as America has for the most part learned the lessons of the ‘60s, much of the rest of the world still lags. “Particularly in the global south, extremely valuable biodiversity and cultural heritage is threatened by urbanization and industrialization,” he says. “This is manifested by the fact that landscape architectural education is almost entirely concentrated in the northern hemisphere. At PennDesign, we are making a conscious effort to export knowledge, collaborate with partners around the world, and open broader career pathways for our students.” In fact, during the ALA meeting, PennDesign Dean Frederick Steiner called for educational efforts that will “strengthen and diversify our global capacity” as a way of bringing new members into the fold of what remains a relatively small and centralized profession.

To hammer home that this is a worldwide initiative, the new document will be translated into 30 languages. “My view is that the 19th-century was the century of engineering, the 20th was architecture and the 21st is landscape architecture’s time,” Weller says, well, declaratively.