Hospitality

Landscape architecture remains in thrall to the discipline whose name it has borne for over a century. In the academy, landscape studies are typically housed in schools of architecture and taught using conventions established in the Bauhaus and Ecole des Beaux Arts. Students learn to think like architects, to fit landscape into boxes made by Vitruvius and Alberti, to model it with bits of chipboard and surface-modeling programs like Rhinocerous 3D. After leaving school they encounter a profession whose practice is based on, and whose remit is secondary to, architecture. “Vogue” notwithstanding, landscape architects are still cast as pliant helpmeets in the service of architects and their clients: the developers, the speculators, the boosters.