250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know Quotes

“Marginalized, “subaltern” or oppressed communities all emanate from the non-reflexive lens, which prioritizes the world views of the mainstream, the colonizer, the oppressor. These embedded predilections create spaces that, at best, do not welcome or make comfortable a diversity of users and, at worst, systematically destroy the structures and networks that historically provided for the non majority’s needs. What happens when we push against that world view? When we center instead the deaf, the indigenous, the immigrant, the blind and the Black experience? We learn how people of wide-ranging abilities and backgrounds feel, smell, touch, remember and navigate the landscape, and we can create a responsive, intentional design that, in serving their needs first, enriches all our experiences. In so doing, we may gain the opportunity to investigate, reveal and coax out what can be called a “sixth sense,” known by some as the magical sense. Temporal, phenomenological, seasonal and sensory aspects of perception lend themselves to creating experiences that can be transformative, invigorating and life affirming. Whether we are acculturated to having five, six or fourteen of them–as landscape architects, we must learn to design for all our senses. (9, Sierra Bainbridge)”
― B. Cannon Ivers, 250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know

“For centuries philosophers and scientists have discussed this most pressing of questions: are humans part of nature - or are we above or beside (or indeed beneath) it? One of the most important things a landscape architect must know is that humans are not only part of nature - we are nature. This insight is at once the simplest and also the most startling and disturbing insight that Modernity can imagine. If humans are nature, that means we must completely reconfigure the way we think about our presence in the world. Gone are the days when humans could subjugate nature in our attempts to reshape the world in our own image. Instead we must realize that we are here on this planet on equal terms with trees, plants, animals, jellyfish and mountains - an ethical knowledge that we must treat everything on Earth (the whole system of which we are part) in a decent way. We must take this knowledge seriously and make landscapes, cities and societies such as we have never seen before. (4, Stig L. Andersson)”
― B. Cannon Ivers, 250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know