"A Word for Landscape Architecture" by John Beardsley, in Harvard Design Magazine (Fall 2000), Harvard Univ., Graduate School of Design, 48 Quincy St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.

Unlike architecture and the fine arts, becoming perhaps "the most consequential landscape architecture seldom appears in art of our time," claims Beardsley, a senior the limelight. But that may be about to lecturer in landscape architecture at the change. The low-profile discipline is fast Harvard Graduate School of Design. No longer concerned simply with arranging places for safe, healthful, and pleasant use, landscape architecture has become a means of expressing "individual and societal attitudes toward nature," and it is transforming "our public environments."

Embracing ecology as "a moral compass," landscape architects, says Beardsley, now take up a host of challenges—environmental, social, technological, and artistic. In cleaning up the contaminated site of a former iron and steel plant in Germany, landscape architects Peter Latz and Anneliese Latz made the site’s "problematic history" part of their design, Beardsley notes. They preserved the blast furnaces and surrounded them with trees, "making them appear like craggy mountains glimpsed through a forest"—and offering an environmental lesson to park visitors.

Environmentalism and the ethic of "sustainable design," says Beardsley, now encourage landscape architects to develop " ‘green’ infrastructure for improved energy efficiency, storm water management, waste water treatment, bioremediation, vegetal roofing, and recycling." For architect Renzo Piano’s DaimlerChrysler complex in Berlin, landscape designer Herbert Dreiseitl devised an unusual plan featuring rooftop gardens that capture and filter rainwater. The water is used in the building and also feeds a big lagoon.

Perhaps the best example of the new role of landscape architecture is the Parque Ecológico Xochimilco, an early1990s environmental restoration project in Mexico City. Dating to the 10th century, the prized landscape consisted of some 7,400 acres of rectangular artificial garden islands set amid a network of canals. But the canals were clogged with aquatic plants, and the islands were sinking as the aquifers beneath them became increasingly depleted. Runoff from developed areas nearby caused frequent floods.

Landscape architect Mario Schjetnan’s design "was guided by hydraulic strategies," says Beardsley. Water was pumped back into the aquifer; polluted surface water was treated, then used to regulate water levels in the canals, which were cleared of harmful vegetation. The eroded islands were built back up, more than one million trees were planted, and agriculture was reintroduced to the islands. Today, the canals of Xochimilco are full of pleasure boats, and the city’s people can wander a 743-acre park "whose different zones emphasize natural, recreational, and interpretive areas."

"The ways in which we meet the challenges of urban sprawl, open space preservation, resource consumption and waste, and environmental protection and restoration are crucial to the quality of our lives—maybe even to the survival of our species," asseverates Beardsley. "It is landscape architecture that confronts these challenges."