Landscape architecture has lost its roots in intellectual thought, culture, and literature.
Landscape architecture hardly resembles its former incarnations. This loss of identity has occurred mainly because of its loss of vital connections to other fields. Historically landscape architecture maintained integral and dynamic relationships to a variety of pursuits, from painting to sewerage. These relationships were not static or one- way streets; rather, they included an exchange of information that allowed the fields to dynamically play off each other, to evolve and expand. In 18th century England, for example, landscape architecture was, in concert with painting and poetry, one of the three graces, which together influenced broader artistic ideas. In the 19th century, landscape architecture was tied to literary ideas and transcendentalism; practitioners like Olmsted and Cleveland worked alongside Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau, extrapolating literature and philosophy into built form.
Landscape architecture today has no such reciprocal connections to current music, literature, or even popular culture. Unlike 18th century practitioners in the Kit Kat Club, whose ideas were central to artistic discussion, landscape architects today are relegated to the sidelines. Even professional connections to art and architecture are weak: Landscape architects may imitate the land artists of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, but these artists do not look to landscape architecture for inspiration. Similarly, architects still largely view landscape architects as mere helpmates, to be ignored and abandoned when the economy is tight.
The relationship of landscape architecture to its allied professions is today parasitic rather than mutualistic: it takes more than it gives. Landscape architecture has replaced original and inventive thought with shameless, superficial borrowing from other, seemingly “cooler” and more “cutting edge” disciplines, often without really understanding what it borrows. Landscape architecture today no longer creates new ideas; it simply interprets those of other disciplines in the media of turf and trees, earth and concrete pavers.
Heidi M. Hohmann & Joern Langhorst, An Apocalyptic Manifesto (2004)
landscape theory 