No Longer Misunderstood Landscape Architects Enjoy Renaissance
Submitted by Brad Moulton on Thu, 10/08/2009 - 4:34pm.
Long considered more landscaper than architect, LAs are finding their role increasingly more significant.
By Alex Padalka
Landscape architects are shaping the future of our cities as seen from the sidewalk – and the roof, and the internal courtyard and along the highway. They are responsible for keeping human waste out of our beaches, our cities from burning up in a haze of melting asphalt and our fragile psyches from self-destructing due to too much stress.
Yet there remains an image of the landscape architect as little more than the guy that, well, mows your lawn.
“I still get called a landscaper – a huge pet peeve,” says Karen Twisler, a landscape architect at the Haddonfield, N.J.-based Remington & Vernick Engineers and the president of the New Jersey chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects. “They’ll ask, ‘what do I do with my grass?’”
While 10 or 20 years ago landscape architects were brought to “green wash” projects, often as an afterthought, they are now spearheading massive city parks such as Governor’s Island and Hudson River Park. They’re being brought in from the outset on million-sq-ft residential developments, such as the 200-acre Port Imperial in New Jersey or the 20-acre public space component on the Hudson Yards in New York. And they’re consulted on the redesign of entire neighborhoods, such as Brooklyn’s Coney Island. The American Society of Landscape Architects, founded in 1899 with little more than a dozen members, now counts 17,600 professionals from every state in the United States. They are in demand.
