Editor’s Introduction

About this Issue

This issue of Landscape Journal comprises a scholarly sweep across knowledge horizons of landscape architecture. Taken together the authors in this issue cast a broad look at the manifold and complex lessons learned in the close observation of theoretical, historical, and pedagogical aspects of landscape transformation. Two pedagogically focused articles, each by multiple authors in interdisciplinary studio teaching settings, examine integration of different aspects in the broad spectrum of landscape planning and design. The contested values of conservation and recreation associated with the preservation of a sacred grove as a national park in Israel are described and analyzed comparatively in an article on Hurshat Tal. The historic landscape, and especially several aspects of the picturesque seen through different lenses, come into critical focus in three more articles. One author focuses on the picturesque and Japanese sources of Manitoga, an important American 20th century woodland garden design, now managed for ecological performance; a second scans a putative mismatch between 18th century aesthetic theories of landscape affect and the aims of contemporary ecological design, planning, and management; and the third article looks at the significance of the persistence of the impounded lake, a specific 18th century English landscape type common in the work of Capability Brown. At multiple sites in northern temperate settings, another author focuses the reader on the assessment of specific performance criteria for evaluating the ephemeral effects of seasonal plant changes on criteria of landscape preference as perceived by expert evaluators. In the final essay of this issue, our gaze is turned to the lessons of the roadside, as we also stare within to probe the phenomena of memory and reenchantment.

Sherene Baugher and George Frantz describe the evolution of a long-term, engaged studio planning and design process of making new parks on lands with embedded cultural historical meanings. The Inlet Valley project became for the instructors, their students, and the community a sustained examination of the nature of community values as manifest in park design proposals. Their cross-cultural service learning studios comprised an historical palimpsest of these values and constructed a community commitment to partnership bonded by a shared sense of the necessity of a contested past being present in the making of its parks.

G. Matthias Kondolf, Louise Mozingo, Karl Kullman, Joe McBride, and Shannah Anderson chronicle and provide rubrics for a process of interdisciplinary studio teaching that structures a pedagogical approach to stream restoration design. Students are schooled in stream morphology and function. They gather data across scales and systems, natural and built. Centrally, then, students are finally presented with the emerging challenges of reconciling their planning and designs for public access with scientific data and ecological performance.

Nurit Lissovsky’s article explains the impact of a pivotal episode in the history of the contested landscape of Israel. The contested conservation of Hurshat Tal exemplifies a cultural admixture of landscape meaning and utility. Lissovsky brings the rich narrative of the conservation battles in the young state of Israel into the framework of the development of landscape architecture in the country. Her article thus adds rich detail about this significant landscape to the emerging narrative of the formative work of making a national landscape and its aesthetic principles and organizational apparatus.

The problematic presence of the picturesque as a default landscape aesthetic of “ecological balance” provides Aaron M. Ellison with a point of departure to suggest that the concept of balance is not only misleading, but that modern and post modern visions provide a more expressive formal language of nature. He suggests specific images to demonstrate his premise as he also suggests related proposals for the kinds of designers and scientists needed “to redefine the nature of nature.”

Framing their examination of the causes of the persistence of Capability Brown’s impounded lakes in the context of Ian McHarg’s well-known contention that the 18th century landscape garden was consonant with nature, Kristen Podolak, G. Mathias Kondolf, Louise Mozingo, Keith Bowhill, and Margaretta Lovell study dredging cycles and other maintenance responses by owners on multiple estates to sediment loading in these water bodies. In dismantling the human-supported persistence of...