Introduction
Both Barcelona and Paris exemplify an enthusiasm
for urbanism. Over the past decade landscape
architecture seems to have become predominantly
an urban profession, concerned above all with the
quality of life in cities and towns. Generalisations
are difficult, because, as Marc Treib’s recent book,
The Architecture of Landscape, 1940–1960, clearly
demonstrates,^1 the profession has very different
histories in different countries, but it nevertheless
seems safe to hazard that this focus upon city life
represents a shift. In Britain, during the middle
decades of the last century, landscape architects
used to be more concerned with the effects of
developments such as roads, dams, commercial
forests, power stations and oil refineries upon the
countryside. Although many landscape practices
still do similar work – many commissions are con-
nected in some way with steering development
proposals through the planning system – we hear
less about it than we do about new parks and
squares in cities. And this change is not unique
to Britain. Given a free choice of case studies,
the only truly rural project selected by any of our
contributors is the guest-house garden designed
by Gábor Szücs, which appears in Kinga Szilagyi’s
chapter on Hungary.
Wherever landscape architects have been concer-
ned with cities, the dominant ideology has often
beenrus in urbe, the countryside in the town, and
the picturesque or naturalistic park has been the
preferred model. In Barcelona, where many of the
new spaces were relatively small and had been
designed by architects rather than landscape archi-
tects, there was far less emphasis upon nature and
a far greater use of hard materials. This transition is
expressed perfectly by Luis Peña Ganchegui’s Parc
de L’Espanya Industrial, where banks of lawn sweep
softly down to one side of a pool, in a manner that
even ‘Capability’ Brown might have recognised,
while the other side of the same water body is hard,
sharp, angular and stepped, speaking of industry
and the city. In this book, Catalonian design is repre-
sented by the new botanic gardens in Barcelona.
The image presented is rather softer and more natu-
ralistic than we have come to associate with that
city, since the gardens are designed to show plants
in their natural associations, yet the organising prin-
ciple and the path layout depend upon a hard-edged
‘irregular triangulated grid’.
In Paris, Bernard Tschumi took things a stage
further, throwing down a gauntlet to all naturalistic
designers. The Parc de la Villette was not a park in
the traditional sense, he argued, it was ‘the biggest
discontinuous building in the world’. While all this
has been happening, landscape architects have also
had to recognise the rise of urban design, a sister
or brother profession perhaps, but one with which
there is certainly a degree of sibling rivalry.
