Landscape Architecture Quotes

“You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“A garden path,' write the landscape architects Charles W. Moore, William J. Mitchell, and William Turnbull, 'can become the thread of a plot, connecting moments and incidents into a narrative. The narrative structure might be a simple chain of events with a beginning, middle, and end. It might be embellished with diversions, digressions, and picaresque twists, be accompanied by parallel ways (subplots), or deceptively fork into blind alleys like the alternative scenerios explored in a detective novel.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes, with lawns and banks and forest-covered hills." — Daniel Burnham talking about Frederick Law Olmstead”
― Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City

“The tragedy of feminine design is that it receives so little official support. Most of the world's design schools, having been organized by men, encourage a masculine approach, even when they are run by women. Yet many designers who are male in the biological sense have a feminine approach to design.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“In town and in country there must be landscapes where we can walk in safety, pick fruit, cycle, work, sleep, swim, listen to the birds, bask in the sun, run through the trees and laze beside cool waters.”
― Tom Turner, Landscape Planning And Environmental Impact Design

“Landscape design theory has been rotting away, peacefully, like a garden temple, since the close of the eighteenth century.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“The arts which we now call garden design and landscape design have three separate origins: sacred space, horticultural space and domestic space. Like Homo sapiens, the arts of garden and landscape design probably spread to Europe from West Asia.”
― Tom Turner, British Gardens: History, philosophy and design

“The world is moving into a phase when landscape design may well be recognized as the most comprehensive of the arts. Man creates around him an environment that is a projection into nature of his abstract ideas. It is only in the present century that the collective landscape has emerged as a social necessity. We are promoting a landscape art on a scale never conceived of in history (Geoffrey Jellicoe, Landscape of man)”
― Tom Turner

“To achieve these goals [of making good landscapes}, there is but one necessity: when preparing and approving plans for new places, or spending money on old places, we must look beyond the confines of each and every project. Gazing at these wider horizons, we shall see that development projects are initiated by specialists who have been imprisioned within "closely drawn technical limits" and "narrowly drawn territorial boundaries" (Weddle 1967; vii).”
― Tom Turner, Landscape Planning And Environmental Impact Design

“I like landscape architecture. And I studied horticulture the old-fashioned way—by watching golf on TV.”
― Jarod Kintz, Me and memes and memories

“The strengths landscape architecture draws from its garden design heritage include: the Vitruvian design tradition of balancing utility, firmness and beauty; use of the word 'landscape' to mean 'a good place' - as the objective of the design process; a comprehensive approach to open space planning involving city parks, greenways and nature outside towns; a planning theory about the contextualisation of development projects; the principle that development plans should be adapted to their landscape context.”
― Tom Turner, Garden History: Philosophy and Design 2000 BC – 2000 AD

“Modernism', as a label, has currency in the arts, architecture, planning, landscape, politics, theology, cultural history and elsewhere.”
― Tom Turner, City as Landscape

“It’s a tree in the strictest sense of the word — deciduous and woody enough it wasn’t some freakish weed, tall enough it wasn’t a shrub, but its scrawniness wasn’t really something I thought added a huge amount of curb appeal.”
― Matt Puchalski, A Pandemic Gardening Journal