Central Park in New York City. The Blue

Ridge Parkway winding through Virginia and

North Carolina. These places arc two of the best-

known designed landscapes in America.

What is not generally known is the challenge

these sites posed to their designers. In what is

now Central Park was a blocks-long rubble pile.

Where the Blue Ridge Parkway today skirts the

mountain tops were eroded mountain lands, cut-

over forests and commercialized "scenic" areas.

What exists now--even years after their work

was completed--is so perfectly executed as to be-

lie the genius of the design, thc vision of the land-

scape architects and the work of collaborating

professions and trades that made these projects

possible.

These and many other sites detailed in this

book have become favorite places for people to

gather, to enjoy both actively and passively, to be

"in nature"--that is, in natural settings shaped by

landscape architects.

As with the great plazas and gardens of the Old

World, other designed landscapes in America have

paid less homage to nature and more attention to

the joy of created space. Landscape architects

have designed countless urban plazas, squares and

public spaces that, while obviously designed, are

indeed places for people.

Regardless of whether the ultimate landscape

design is natural or created, perhaps the most in-

teresting aspect of landscape architcctme today is

its diversity: the various sciences that are brought

together, the arts, the variety of "hard" paving

and structural materials and "soft" materials such

as water and plants, the differing,scales of the pal-

ettes on which landscape architects work. This

diversity ranges from planning for regions and

ecosystems to designing a vest-pocket park that

enriches an urban scene. Landscape architects are

trained to manage and coordinate projects that

cross professional lines from infrastructure to ar-

chitecture and crJ,gineering, sociolow to the fine

arts, irrigation to horticulture and biology.