Grace’s Reviews > 250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know > Status Update

231: “Privileging sensory experience over interpretation offers the landscape architect ever-new inputs for visions of each site’s potential” SORRY? PRIVILEGING SENSORY-? YOU GUYS HEARING THIS? THATS SO FRICKIN COOL!!! IMAGINE THAT AS A PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION!!!!

“Over a period of revival, the native ecology of the sites, which is truest to their nature, is restored.” Again, agree to disagree. Seeing historical nature as something that is the “truest” representation of the land is a dangerously uninformed notion. Landscapes evolve, with or without our efforts; trying desperately to adhere to a lost landscape may prove a waste of effort in the context of evolving land

218: “[deforested areas] become inert sites with no ecological value or benefit.” Agree to disagree. Every piece of land has ecological value and benefit, even though it may not seem like it to us. Even the most anthropologically damaged pieces of land are still hubs of potential. Future homes for the more daring enterprising species. We’ve gotta be wary of viewing ecology as something that is ever stagnant.

106-110: Marcial Jesus did NOT get the memo about this book’s Vibe wowza. The book is all romantic poetry of landscape design in nature and then all of the sudden, almost right in the middle, enter Jesus with the YOU GOTTA BE BETTER STRONGER SMARTER THAN THE COMPETITION language. Like good god man please take a seat we were just chatting about pretty trees can you maybe chill.

163: Policy is Design by Other Means “As Michael Sorkin showed in local codes, bringing creativity – even humor – to the banal documents of government can mitigate the limitations of both the drawings of designers and the texts of planners.” THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT!! HUMOR IN ACADEMIA AND POLITICS! HECK YEA!

“It takes strategic talent, humour and a level of stubbornness to keep translating the complex pile of requested issues and impossibilities back into the basic and well-substantiated concept that you believe in with conviction.” !!!!!!!!!!

“As landscape architects become more focused on ‘problem-solving’, they risk losing their capacity to become ‘complete designers’. Literacy, if not proficiency, in other cultural, visual, or spatial practices is necessary in order to keep their work responsive—and relevant— to the world around them. Equally important is a knowledge of how policy interacts with design.”

The graphic on 9: The Fourteen Senses?? WOAH???