Why History for Designers? (Part 1)
This essay is the first of a two-part series. Follow the link to read part 2.
In the wake of the New York Times 1619 project, what response might we see from landscape architects? Recently interviewed by Landscape Architecture Magazine, I noted that “race and difference . . . and the history of our public realm” are of utmost importance in practice today. In response, a landscape architect wrote suggesting that this attention to history was merely an academic endeavor and, furthermore, wondered why I would suggest that we might want to change our present conditions.[1] This exchange reflects the assumption that we design landscapes as if each site serves as a blank slate, where we inscribe our best ideas. And while many might argue this view may not be representative, when one reviews the attention given to history in design curricula, I wonder whose and selectively which values are shaping our educational programs. Where is the voice and imagination of the designer in grappling with the legacy of enslavement, indigenous genocide, Japanese internment, the oppression of women, LGBQT, or those with a different range of abilities? Do we truly think we can address the root causes of climate change without considering how we have come to be a society dependent on fossil fuels? Or, how can we provide clean water without acknowledging a long history of neglecting the public health of our most vulnerable communities?
To design a landscape is to assume a weighty responsibility, one thick with aspirations, intentions, needs and consequences. This has never been more evident than today as we face the immense challenges of climate change and environmental degradation, social and political inequities, and environmental and economic injustices that pervade our built and natural environments. To respond requires far more than beautiful or sustainable or resilient design. It requires more than storm-water treatment or toxic soil remediation. It requires more than engagement with the current community or the local government. It requires a deep knowledge of history and its methods of inquiry.
Essays by Jessica Ellen Sewell and Andrew Scott Johnston argued on this same PLATFORM for the richness of engaging a history of materials in architectural pedagogy, as a core course in the education of architects. Students and schools alike tend to address pedagogy from a pragmatic point of view, rather than starting from the question of how to educate designers who can be both critical and persuasive. I would like to build on that argument, although by returning to the question of why history in design. History is too often treated as a box to be checked; this necessary but inconsequential requirement taught, as Sewell and Johnson note, by those with an interest in history as a “storehouse in which one can find forms to imitate.” And yet the practice of design and its history investigate far broader questions of social, political, and cultural inscriptions alongside environmental and natural systems. We have had this discussion many times before.
Whether one listens to reports on the protests of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and their communities of supporters against the Dakota Access Pipeline, or you consider recent debates around plantation tourism, or the role of black landscape architects in the profession or browse the vast array of new scholarship on the historical legacies of policies and practices grounded in assumptions about race, gender, or disabilities, among others, and their impact on the practice of democracy, it is clear that history is increasingly at the center of public discourse in powerful ways. So where are landscape architects in this discussion?
Figure 2: Sacred Stone Camp, Dakota Access Pipeline protest at the Sacred Stone Camp near Cannon Ball, North Dakota, licenced under CC BY 2.0. Photo by Tony Webster from Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Design has long been shortchanged as merely making beautiful, and often expensive, places and objects, and yet design can accomplish so much more, and should. This is not to suggest that design alone can solve society’s problems, an equally naïve aspiration, but rather to argue for a more robust participation by designers in tackling the challenges that are so deeply embedded in our built and natural environments. In fact, no one discipline or profession will solve the challenges facing us, but design holds the potential to significantly contribute to a future that more fully fosters human and environmental health and wellbeing.
This is not a role to take lightly. The contributions of design need to be framed responsibly, requiring both broad cross-disciplinary and deep locale-specific knowledge. Designers need to be prepared to fully engage in the discourse, practice, and policy-making necessary to catalyze real and enduring change. This work demands critical thinking, and the capacity to pursue robust examinations of the questions we ask and the observations we recognize as well as the responses we imagine. Designers need to know not only their histories writ large, but how to engage in history as a method of inquiry.
Students are eager to take on such challenges. And yet we are not equipping them appropriately to realize such aspirations by leaving a broad gap in the domain of the humanities. In neglecting the humanities, students are deprived of a deep understanding of how design is in fact a humanist practice, a deeply human act that shapes the relationship of cultures to the world in which they emerge, thrive, and decline. When students are deprived of a humanist education, and, in particular, of the discipline of history, they are deprived of the opportunity to learn essential skills and bodies of knowledge relevant to the complexities of twenty-first-century challenges. They do not become the informed, articulate, and powerful leaders that we need them to be. These are serious deficiencies in their education.
Instead we should be educating students with methods of historical inquiry to prepare and equip them as thought leaders and agents of remarkable change. In fact, history and design share important approaches. History requires, as E.H. Carr once described, the capacity to have an “imaginative understanding of the people” studied. In his book “What is History” he argues that “history cannot be written unless the historian can achieve some kind of contact with the mind of those about who he is writing.”[2] Design also requires an imaginative understanding of the people for whom the design is intended. This is plainly evident when we consider the writing of landscape scholars including Peirce Lewis, Ann Whiston Spirn, Dell Upton, Elizabeth Meyer, Dianne Harris, and Rebecca Ginsburg among others, to curate social, political, and cultural histories of environment and place. While history looks to the past, design focuses on the future. In their interchange, history is a foundation for the future just as designs of the future draw from the past.
“To design a landscape is to assume a weighty responsibility, one thick with aspirations, intentions, needs and consequences.”
History is equally essential at a more specific level. When we neglect to offer courses in design history, students are not learning the history of their own profession and practice, one that dates to the first gardens that were carved out of a landscape. They don’t learn about the breadth and depth of practice, whether one starts with the emergence of ancient cities as responses to both environmental and cultural forces, or with André Le Nôtre and the application of the science of optics to landscape design, or the role of the scholar and non-scholar gardens in China, or with Frederick Law Olmsted and the importance of public parks and their contributions to democracy. To not know the profession means students don’t know of the significant contributions of women to the profession, or of indigenous practices to forest management, or about the Negro Garden Clubs, or the complex histories of Zimbabwe or Machu Picchu, and so many other legacies of cultures who shaped their landscapes with intention and purpose. They are unlikely to recognize the role of landscape architects in colonialization across the globe nor the contributions of designers to framing utopian ideals. They don’t know that landscape architects in the Americas have been thinking about climate change for over a century, and on some continents for a lot longer, and yet have only recently been recognized for this body of work. Too often instead of history, students are taught how to create a timeline as a means to check the history box. They are asked to complete a precedent study as if history were a grab bag of ideas that can be randomly applied. History challenges the student and the designer to question their own imagination and to think differently. This is knowledge that should ground design practice today, but how can it if we don’t teach it?
And there is even more critical body of knowledge and skills that we neglect when we de-emphasize history in the curriculum. This is the capacity to understand the root complexity of our contemporary issues, to ask questions and understand place through its relations of natural and cultural systems. To design well requires engaging the often convoluted past of any site and its sense of place. This means asking who was here before and what did this place mean to them? This requires revealing the histories that have been erased or re-written to support an alternative narrative. This necessitates seeking understanding for how we got to where and who we are. It mandates us to ask about the context of relationships between natural and cultural systems across and between every scale. It demands an imaginative understanding of the people and place at the time of their emergence. Every site holds memories both remembered and forgotten, both acknowledged and erased. All places have meaning and thus have a history, in fact multiple histories. Every site is thick with history.
Notes
[1] See Landscape Architecture Magazine, November 2019, 32.
[2] Carr, E.H. “What is History” in Arnold, Dana, ed., Reading Architectural History: An Annotated Anthology. New York: Routledge, 2002: 20.
