Lecture date: 2009-02-09
Charles Waldheim suggests that the recent renewal of landscape architectures status as a design medium within leading design schools has coincided precisely with the rapprochement between planning programs and schools of architecture and design. This symmetrical re-engagement, rather than simple coincidence, derives from shifts within the built environment itself and the disciplines that describe it. For Waldheim, this promises a moment of tangency between the concerns and questions of landscape architecture and planning practice, one in which both disciplines promise to benefit from renewed commitments to subjects of mutually shared historical interest.
Charles Waldheim is Associate Dean and Director of the Landscape Architecture program of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto where his research focuses on contemporary urbanism and its relation to landscape. He coined the term ‘landscape urbanism’ to describe emerging design practices in the context of North American urbanism and has written extensively on the positions, practices, and precedents of the topic. He is the editor of the definitive account of this disciplinary realignment: The Landscape Urbanism Reader (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).
