Environmental Art and Its Implications for Design Practice of Landscape Architecture in The United States

Abstract

Landscape architectural design practice in the United States has been explo-ring a wide variety of resources in its visual expression since the early portion of 1980s.Earthworks or land art projects which came into being as an offspring of the conte-mporary American art in the 1960s provided the profession with a solid basis of refer-ence rich in expression of both their physical form and the artist's idea. In particular, the way the artists articulated (1) space and scale in landscape of the remote setting of American southwest region, (2) human perception of space and time in their pieces of art work, (3) an ideological discourse evoked among the artists who advocated ecological ethics and those charged themselves with the task of land reclamation as an art work for industrially devastated sites, and (4) the process of creation which involves large amount of time, human participation, and budget that gave rise to socio-economical and political concerns, seems to have given critical inspirations to small number of landscape architects who conducted experimental but highly progressive design practices throughout 1980s.