Spoiled for Choice

If debates over style are silly, false, and passé, they can also make clear what is at stake.

JUSTIN PARSCHER

By my count, it has been more than a decade since there’s been any well-defined debate over style and form in landscape architecture. That last argument, between the New Urbanists and Landscape Urbanists, came to a head with the publication of Andrés Duany and Emily Talen’s 2013 Landscape Urbanism and Its Discontents, a collection of parting shots from the New Urbanists at their Ivy League rivals. The Landscape Urbanist contingent returned the favor by largely ignoring the attack, and soon after collapsed under its own weight. While that battle was fought over urbanisms specifically, it flowed back more generally into the big questions of how landscape should appear: hard or soft, conventional or unprecedented. Should the typical public space be a neat triangle of lawn or an overflowing bowl of…

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Landscape Architecture (Digital) - 1 Issue, February 2025

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