It was reserved for Calvert Vaux and Fred trick Law Olmsted to develop to meet this need a style of naturalistic landscape design which has had the most profound influence on the work of the last 50 years,— compositions of open • meadows enclosed and diversified by woods, in which the public may find a sense of seclusion and of relief from the insistence of urban sur roundings. In Central and Prospect parks in New York and Franklin Park in Boston we have this style at its best. The work of H. W. S. Cleveland extended the park movement in the West, and at the same time through his writings he pointed out the necessity for the application of the principles of landscape archi tecture to the planning of new towns. Charles Eliot, a disciple of Olmsted and later his part ner, continued the naturalistic tradition, and is especially known for his activities culminating in the park system of Boston, which has in fluenced extensively the park development of America. The private place design of the United States in the last half century has also deeply felt this same influence.. Large estates have been treated like parks; very small estates have in some of the best examples approached a style not unlike the Japanese, though less small in scale. Simple informal plantings have been the accepted treatment in many commu nities, and have naturally enough often degen erated in unskilful hands into meaningless curvilinear beds and needlessly indirect paths. In America there has also been a tradition of garden design dating from the colonial period, —gardens of trim hedges and fragrant flower borders, often overhung by fruit trees, usually near the houses and closely adapted to the uses of their owners, and often pleasantly naive in expression. With our present increasing ap preciation of colonial art there has been a re vival of outdoor design inspired by this period. As the number of country estates of wealthy owners has increased in America, we have fol lowed also the examples of English gardens and Italian gardens, originally designed for re quirements somewhat similar to ours. And also, both in America and in England, has arisen a comparatively new style,— the wild garden, the rock garden, the pond garden and so on,—an attempt to produce at small scale, and usually with a certain amount of symbolism almost Japanese, some striking type of wild nature. Quite different in spirit is the work of the last 25 years in Germany, which, ex pressing in formal terms the needs of the Ger man family for outdoor living, is consciously differentiated from all previous styles of land scape design. When handled by a designer with some inborn sensitiveness to beauty of form, this modern German work has great in terest, but in many cases even some of the Germans themselves would admit that unhappy esthetic results have arisen from their conscious seeking for an independent style peculiar to German "kultur.°• The modern landscape tect has in the examples of the styles of the put a treasury of inspiration and information to aid him in his present work; but he should study these styles not as an 'archeologist, not as a copyist, but as a workman providing him self with tools for future original use. He should endeavor to see how in each case the designer met a particular and individual prob lem; he should feel a brotherly and human interest in the way his predecessor has adapted means to ends, and he should thus get from an example in any style some inspiration for his own work however different its circumstances might be.
The Professional Practice of Landscape Architecture in America.— Not until recently has there been in this country sufficient demand for the services of the trained landscape archi tect to make it possible for any considerable body of men to carry on the practice of this profession. The American Society of Land scape Architects was founded in 1899, the first degree for the accomplishment of a designated collegiate course in landscape architecture was granted in 1901. But now (1918) professional degrees are offered by at least six institutions in the United States, and the field and scope of the profession and the technical knowledge which its practitioners should possess are being differentiated with considerable clearness from the tangent fields of other professions like architecture and engineering. The general prin
ciples of the proper professional conduct of a landscape architect are in effect the same as those governing the action of the architect, and are not essentially different from those relating to the work of the engineer, because they are fundamentally the principles of common hon esty applied to the relations of a man who sells skilled advice to a client, who directs for the client the carrying out of this advice, and who serves as arbiter as to the meaning of these directions between the client and the person who does the construction. According to the con stitution of the American Society of Landscape Architects, landscape architect, a landscape gardener, or a landscape designer, in good standing is one who practises the art of ar ranging land and landscape for use and enjoy ment, whose compensation is received directly from his client and not directly indirectly from labor, plants or other material used in fitting land for use, or from persons supplying the same.° The broadest field of Professional activity in which the landscape architect finds himself most frequently in co-operation with practitioners from other professions is the field of city planning, where the landscape architect works in collaboration with engineer, architect, sociologist, economist or lawyer. Unlike the case of co-operation of architect and landscape architect in the design of a building and its grounds, the delimitation of field in city plan ning cannot be territorial, hut must be according to the subjects in which the various collabo rators are severally skilled. It is, therefore, doubly important that each collaborator should appreciate the point of view of the others, and that all should have at least a sound funda mental conception of the subject of city plan ning as a whole. This necessity of collabora tion and mutual comprehension and the funda mental value of the contribution of the land scape architect in such a collaboration have been made especially plain in the case of gov ernment industrial housing projects for war workers during the European War, where the determination of the physical arrangements of the communities was arrived at usually by such a co-operation of professional skill.
Typical Problems of the Landscape Archi tect — The landscape architect tries to meet the demands of each problem with a design which, though almost necessarily sacrificing some factors which are theoretically desirable, combines on the whole the maximum of esthetic and economic excellence possible for him to create under the particular circumstances. These circumstances are the local conditions of topography, soil, climate and so on, the finan cial means available, the preferences of those whom the landscape architect serves as to the appearance and expression of the design and the economic uses to which the design is to be put, with their resultant fixing of the sizes and shapes of many parts of the composition. Beauty of appearance may be sought m many different ways, and where one kind of beauty proves to be impossible with the sizes and shapes necessary to be used in the design, an other kind may be attained, perhaps at a dif ferent scale and with a different esthetic ex pression. No two problems are ever exactly alike, but each typical well-defined use of the land has its more or less characteristic effect on the composition, no matter what the other circumstances may be. The ordinary work of the landscape architect falls, therefore, into classes most readily according to use. Some of the types of landscape designs which nat urally occur in the practice of landscape archi tects in our time and in our condition of society are the garden, the private estate, the *land subdivision* or development of land for residential use, the country club and country hotel grounds, the grounds of colleges and in stitutions, hospitals and other public or semi public building groups, the grounds of public buildings, exposition grounds, amusement parks, zoological parks and botanical gardens, ceme teries, playgrounds, the smaller intown parks, the larger country parks on the outskirts of our cities and the great landscape reservations, State and national, scattered throughout the country which are now being recognized as having a peculiar worth.