For many thousands of years, our predecessors have gathered the bounty of the grasslands, waterways, and forests without causing significant damage. As they fished, set their snares, or hunted game, they left the land and waters as they found them. Their canoes glided silently through
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the unspoiled wilderness, their horses were tethered, and their herds grazed without lasting disruption of the natural cover. Their early encampments left no lasting scars and were soon overgrown. Even the first settlements and clearings fitted to the slopes and water edges were of little ecologic consequence.
As populations increased, however, the effects of people’s working have become more and more evident. Blazed trails have become roadways.
Scattered farms have been consolidated to push back the marsh and woodland, sometimes to extinction. The early villages on the banks of a stream have swallowed the stream and usurped the banks of the nearby river. Village and town limits have been extended relentlessly outward to be interconnected with additional roads and with railways and, often canals. Within a few bustling centuries, our native American landscape has been transformed into an expanse of farmsteads, subdivisions, bur-geoning cities, sprawling industrial complexes, and far-flung transporta-tion systems. Often the only vestiges of wilderness left are those isolated fringes too difficult of access, too deep in the ooze, too dry, or too close to the rock for economic development.
Where the uses of land have been well suited to the sites, the resulting farms, roadways, and communities may be in all ways agreeable. We have flown over such settlements that seem nestled into the countryside.
Every day some 12 square miles of American farmland is usurped by development.
In the past decade we have lost farmlands equivalent to the combined areas of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey and Delaware.
Peter J. Ognibene
34 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
Mount Moran, Grand Tetons.
Tijmen Van Dabbenburgh
We have traveled inviting roads that weave pleasantly through the land-scape, introducing us to woodland, meadow, streams, well-ordered fields, orchards, and abundant valleys. We have delighted in towns that seem to have blossomed spontaneously upon the crown of a hill or in cities terraced gracefully down to the river edge or harbor.
Well-suited developments intelligently planned can produce an integra-tion of designed forms and modified landscape superior to the original.
The best of the indigenous features can be preserved and incorporated.
Or they may be conserved for limited uses and to maintain the native set-ting. The natural attractions may thus be enjoyed and appreciated daily to enrich the living experience. Such installations convey a sense of stabil-ity and fitness. They “sing” in the landscape, and they sing in harmony.
Adapt to the landforms:
To diminish landscape disruption To reduce the costs of earthwork To prevent the wasting of topsoil To preclude the need for erosion control
and replanting
To make use of existing drainageways To blend into the natural scene
By means of site reconnaissance and soil surveys the most productive land can be designated for lawns, gardens, or crop production or be preserved in its natural state. Areas of thin soil, poor or excessive drainage, or underlying rock are prime candidates for projected development.
Homes, roadways, and cities belong on areas of low productivity.
The natural ground forms are best accepted as givens. They are the resolution of myriad forces at work over a long period of time. To adapt to them is to harmonize with the forces and conditions by which they have evolved.
Land 35
The code of the American subdivider and homebuilder (as it would seem to the casual observer)
Axiom 1. Clear the land.
Axiom 2. Strip the topsoil (or bury it and haul in new if this saves one operation).
Axiom 3. Provide a “workable” land profile (that is, as flat as possible).
Axiom 4. Conduct all water to storm sewers (or else to the edge of the lot).
Axiom 5. Build a good wide road—inexpensive but wide.
Axiom 6. Set the house well back for a big front yard.
Axiom 7. Keep the fronts even (this looks neat).
Axiom 8. Hold to a minimum side yard.
Axiom 9. Throw on some lawn seed.
The American suburbanite dream (as seemingly interpreted by the suburban builder and by our present building restrictions)
A revised topography by courtesy of the bulldozer and carryall. The boulders are buried, the natural cover stripped, the brook “contained” in storm sewer or culvert. The topsoil is redistributed as a 4-inch skin over sand, clay, or rock.
There sprouts a new artificial fauna of exotic nursery stock.
This is our constructed paradise.
A better way is building with nature and in compression, which provides the human scale and charm we find so appealing in the older cultures, in which economy of materi-als and space dictated a close relationship of structure and landscape form.
Where, however, the uses imposed are unsuited, where they are awkward in plan or clumsy in execution, the result is distressing to both the eye and the intellect. Moreover, the disruptive consequences may be costly, even catastrophic. For the immutable forces of nature have a way of rejecting those built intrusions which violate the land.
If humankind is to thrive—yea, even survive—it is incumbent upon us to study and apply those principles by which we can bring our species and nature into symbiotic balance. The problems of encroaching civi-lization, the imperiled land, and the increasing need for its care have together become our heritage.