Towards Regional Landscape Design

Abstract

In a logical sequence, architects have proceeded from the design of individual houses for the family or the small community to planning the environment of these basic cells: street, square, park, the neighborhood, the town as a whole. From here a further step has led to the problems of whole regions. It gives hope for the future of architecture, that architects overcame the boundaries of their professional specialism, collaborated with sociologists, economists and geographers, and began to study the larger geographical environment - in order to find the right form and location of the smaller architectural object of the people’s homes and amenities. Today a concern for Planning has become in fact a condition for the development of a new architecture of social concern and quality.

This article is written in 1954 in honor of Benton MacKaye, on the occasion of the 75th birth of this American forester, conservator, geographer and thinker Mac Kaye is the originator of the Appalachian Trail, a pioneer of Regional Planning, the author of “The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning” (1928), and, not least, the outstanding interpreter in his generation of the applied science of Geotechnics, which in his words “… is our emulation of nature in her successful effort to make the earth more habitable.” In a logical sequence, architects have proceeded from the design of individual houses for the family or the small community to planning the environment of these basic cells: street, square, park, the neighborhood, the town as a whole. From here a further step has led to the problems of whole regions. It gives hope for the future of architecture, that architects overcame the boundaries of their professional specialism, collaborated with sociologists, economists and geographers, and began to study the larger geographical environment — in order to find the right form and location of the smaller architectural object of the people’s homes and amenities. Today a concern for Planning has become in fact a condition for the development of a new architecture of social concern and quality.