Landscape engineering
Defining scope and velocity
Civil engineering is said to come from military conquests. Originating from the French word (ingénieur - cleverness), to build civilization or to civilize land requires precise and accurate calculations. On the other hand, landscape architecture was born as a response to the harsh living conditions of urbanization and industrialization. While landscape architecture has remained cohesive as a single profession for over 250 years, civil engineering continues to branch and subdivide into smaller specialties (geotechnical, structural, coastal etc). Today, the legal territories of the two professions are converging, each claiming a higher authority to serve the public’s safety and health. While some aspects of each should remain separate, there is a great deal that the two share in common.
Hybridization 🪢
Landscape engineering is an attempt to blend two professions with vary different origin stories and trajectories. Instead of pitting the two against each other, landscape engineering creates it’s own categorization to balance the important priorities of the two.
Change Δ
Landscape architecture is typically thought of in relation to architecture. While the goal of architecture historically was to design timeless buildings, landscapes are inherently in flux due to human and non-human factors. Likewise, an engineers mandate is to define many variables in relation to time e.i flow (Q). Despite this fundamental overlap, the training of the landscape architecture and civil engineer remains siloed creating unnecessary professional clash. With a landscape engineering curriculum, these boundaries are dissolved enabling a more virtuous and ethical practice.
Panoramic 📷
The scope of the civil engineer is sometimes viewed as hyper-focused on a specific task or problem. The cook-book training is comprehensive however the engineer is funneled into specialization. To break this habit, applying the landscape architect’s broad perspective can push the landscape engineer to master a niche not as an isolated solution but as an entangled problem with many relationships or variables.
