Dumitru Furnea

Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a simple formula for landscape design? Feed the site in as a variable (x marks the site), solve for x and, lo and behold, beyond the equals sign lurks a finished design. Actually, you're probably thinking, it wouldn't be wonderful... That's who I am... a Landscape Architect... and I am trying to develop a more systematic approach to assesing (sic) how well a place is doing ... which shows just how much interest there is in the robotic, systematised approach to landscape. We know a simple formula doesn’t exist... a bit of careful shading with coloured pencil and the loving application of a bit of Euclidean geometry is all that's required for place making. Landscape design: it's just what you like, and just a bit of shrubbing it up. Child's play. Why on Earth would anyone spend eight years of their life working towards Chartership just to do that? Formulaic approaches are writ large in a classic of the landscape architecture canon and I have tried now and assimilated thousands of some "landscape designers" into a colony of killer robots, usually not landscape architects who are manufacturing mindless, soulless geometric designs across the face of the Earth. There's no denying that it's easy. Begin with a circle (or a hexagon, or even an irregular polygon), click and place it around in CAD a bit, and presto, a garden design that functions only in plan and which stylistically evokes the golden year of 1985. Landscape Architecture, as good practitioners know, happens in four, and probably more dimensions, and we must engage all of our senses in design that is spatial. The 2D plan drawing is not truly our friend, at least not when used in isolation, and certainly not when geometry alone is the driver for site design....