250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know Quotes

“Sure enough, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has a botanical aspect. Actions such as planting, uprooting, preferring one species over the other and even nature-protection laws reflect the conflict and impact on it. Perhaps the most notable of these actions is the massive foresting of lands nationalised by the state of Israel in the 1950s, previously belonging to Palestinians who fled or were forced out of their villages during the 1948 war. This transformed large parts of the country into coniferous forests, comprising mainly pines. The main objectives of this foresting action were political-tactical (obtaining control over the land) and economic (forestry as a work-fare programme for incoming Jewish immigrants). At the same time it was an act of erasing the previous landscape, with all its cultural meaning, and introducing a new monoculture landscape that was mean to represent the "melting pot" of the newly founded state. (34)”
― B. Cannon Ivers, 250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know

“The New Nature that we are designing in our cities is not a copy of old romanticized images or idealized perceptions of nature past; the New Nature is truly new. We call this New Nature City Nature. It is man-made nature to correct man-made errors. It is a New Nature designed equally on the basis of deep biological, anthropological, sociological and ecological knowledge and on a strong artistic knowledge, experience and approach. It is a New Nature optimized to solve today's hardest urban challenges while creating genuine quality of life for humans. It is a New Nature that is not too concerned with how it looks but rather how it feels and how it functions. (10)”
― B. Cannon Ivers, 250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know

“The build environment is the paradigm of structure, of rational order, of stable form; the grown environment is the paradigm of system, of the order of nature, of ever-changing matter. The built and the grown environments are complementary in that they are at once both interdependent and incomparable. (1)”
― B. Cannon Ivers, 250 Things a Landscape Architect Should Know

“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