LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE. «Land scape architecture is primarily a fine and as such its most important function is to create and preserve beauty in the surroundings of human habitations and in the broader natu ral scenery of the country; but it is also con cerned with promoting the comfort, conveni ence and health of urban populations, which have scanty access to rural scenery, and urgently need to have their hurrying, worka day lives refreshed and calmed by the beau tiful and reposeful sights and sounds which nature, aided by the landscape art, can abun dantly provide.) (C. W. Eliot).
Very early in his history man shaped the economic changes which he made in the earth's surface so that they gave him also an wsthetic satisfaction. This satisfaction was due in great measure to the fact that the changes were obviously man-made; they bore witness that he had impressed his ideas on the stub born natural material. Much later in his de velopment — almost, it might be said, in mod ern times — came the period when man, in stead of being isolated and overpowered in the midst of wild nature, found himself cramped and oppressed by the works of his own hands, and sought relief in the msthetic pleasure to be derived from landscape which expresses not man's will but the operation of natural forces. The province of landscape architecture is so to guide man's modification of the landscape that he may get the greatest possible wsthetic satisfaction of one or both of these two quite different kinds. The re sulting beauty might be, at one end of the scale, that of the formal surroundings of a palace — architecture in natural materials to show man's magnificence — or, at the other extreme, that of a woodland solitude — appar ently an age-long natural growth — a place of rest from all the works of man. Within comparatively recentyears, there has come a general recognition of the value to the public of designed and organized cities, and of parks, reservations and other out-of-door spaces, and a greatly increased interest in private pleasure grounds of various kinds. There is now an effective demand for designing skill using as materials ground forms and vegetation, and for designing skill in the arrangement of land scape and architectural forms — streets, parks, buildings—in larger unities, for public use.
This demand has been met by the rise of a separate profession, because the materials and technique of this new field are not those of the older allied professions of architecture and engineering, and are quite as difficult to master within an ordinary lifetime.
Like architecture, its sister profession in the fine arts, landscape architecture requires of its practitioner diverse abilities not often found in the same person: the aisthetic appreciation and creative power of the artist, together with the executive skill of the business man. The landscape architect should know the materials of his art; ground forms, vegetation and structures in their relation to landscape. He should know on the one hand what results are physically possible of accomplishment with these materials, and on the other hand what kinds of beauty were better attained in the materials of some other art. Since, for the most part, the landscape architect cannot pro duce at will in his design all the forms which he might desire, but must choose from among the forms offered by nature those which will suit his purpose, be cannot be confident that his design is possible of execution unless he possesses an accurate first-hand knowledge of the plant materials and of the ground forms from which he must choose the elements of composition. Since the beauty of vegeta tion is that of intricacy, of multiplicity, of growth arid change, the landscape architect's experience and power in design will come to be quite different from that of the architect, who deals with definite, rigid forms and bal anced masses. In his formal designs in close conjunction with buildings the type of beauty which he seeks will not be widely different from that sought by the architect. But since the fundamental organization of his natural istic designs, of his preservation and enhance ment of natural scenery, will be the real or apparent manifestation of the untrammeled forces of nature, the landscape architect who would attempt such design must have humbly studied the forces which carve the valleys, and which direct the flow of the streams, and he must be keenly sensitive to the esthetic unity of a mountain or the perfect growth of a ground-covering fern, which may dominate or decorate his nature-inspired work.