Landscape Architecture Australia — February 2018

With the growth of landscape architecture in the region,

Australian landscape architecture programs have become

increasingly popular with Asian students, particularly from China.

Helen Armstrong reflects on how this growing demand

has changed and challenged landscape architecture education.

—

Tex t Helen Armstrong

INTERNATIONALISM

IN LANDSCAPE

EDUCATION

F

ormal landscape architectural education in Australia
only began in the late 1960s and it seemed to adopt a
relatively unmediated British approach, with an overlay
of Australian environmentalism.

Historically, landscape design has a long tradition of
chauvinistic nationalism. The Brits were always scathing
about the axiality of French-designed landscapes and Aussie
landscape architects took on this attitude without question,
with the design ethos of the 1960s Sydney Bush School style.
The Chicago adaptation of French Beaux-Arts was grudgingly
accepted in the designs of Walter Burley Griffin, despite
attempts to turn the triangulated pivot points into eighteenth-
century English landscape follies, and Marion Mahony Griffin’s
drawings were heavily mediated by nationalistic bush icons.

We admired the restraint in Japanese gardens and Roberto
Burle Marx’s exuberant Brazilian designs and in the late 1970s,
we also became interested in the practice of landscape
planners in the USA and started to teach about their work in
landscape programs. But in the main, we maintained an
Australian focus on plants, the environment and design. It was
not until mid-1980s postmodernism that emerging Australian
landscape architects allowed for wider international
influences in design. The student profile at this time typically
reflected Australia’s wider multicultural community, but there
was little encouragement to explore such cultural diversity in
design and planning.

All this changed in the late 1980s, when universities began to

take on economic rationalist policies. Through the 1990s and

2000s, universities attempted to break down discipline silos by

rationalizing course units into university-wide uniform credit

points, which assisted with costing the delivery of degrees. A

program was established for efficient marketing of Australian

degrees, particularly to China and South-East Asia. As the

Australian Government pursued this model for funding the

tertiary sector, more and more Chinese and South-East Asian

students enrolled in full-fee-paying degrees. Economic

rationalism also included outsourcing English teaching for

overseas students.

The University of New South Wales (UNSW), with its long

history of accepting overseas students through the Colombo

Plan, was quick to enrol Chinese and South-East Asian

students. When I left UNSW in 1996, there was a growing

number of full-fee students in landscape architecture master’s

degrees. These were new master’s by coursework degrees that

could be completed in a year, with an extra six months for

individual projects.

In the competitive environment to enrol full-fee-paying

overseas students, Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

did not have the pull of the “sandstones” in Sydney and

Melbourne. In 1997, the new dean of the built environment

faculty, who was Chinese but educated in the USA, proposed

that QUT design students go to China for a month-long studio

at a design school in Hangzhou. In return, QUT would host

LANDSCAPE ISSUE 157 016 — 017

ASIA IN AUSTRALIA