Ian McHarg’s Legacy

Blame it comprehensive exams, but last week I was half asleep when I mumbled something about who Ian McHarg was. The truth is he was an incredibly influential educator and landscape architect who changed the field. I learned quite a bit about him during my undergrad and own a copy of Design With Nature.  Without his legacy of building up landscape architecture professions, we wouldn’t have awesome educators like Frederick Steiner, Richard Weller and Billy Fleming or landscape wunderkinds like James Corner.** 

We now associate landscape architecture with ecological activism and being grounded in science as design based on observations, studies and data, but this was not always the case. McHarg was a student of Lewis Mumford, but soon realized one-size-fits-all international style was not working. McHarg was revolutionary as he turned the profession on its head changing everything  about the field of landscape architecture: its methods of inquiry, its impact, and, most importantly, its cultural and political orientation. He was a trailblazer using research to guide his practice and studios. McHarg is known as one of the pioneers for layering in  GIS-esque technology into his design proposals.

McHarg went out of his way to make a difference and impact those beyond his classroom.  In 1960, he even hosted a tv show on CBS that echoed his class “Man & Environment” where he would interview scientists and theologians about human’s role in the world.  He was instrumental in the movement to recognize Earth Day and was a vocal early climate activist. His book, Design with Nature, was instructional in how to understand the qualities of the land (soil, climate, hydrology, etc) and design in harmony with them. It’s been over fifty years and I still flip through this book and see can see the origins of some of the best landscape architecture graphics.

**I highly recommend listening to any lectures from these guys. I had a 3hr weekly lecture class "Culture of Nature" by Richard Weller and sometimes I'd miss lunch and be late to my next class because he would lose track of time and lecture an extra hour, but it was always amazing.