Charles Birnbaum on ‘Redesigning Design to Make Room for Landscape’

My thoughts exactly on HuffPo, Noah, so much so that I don’t read it at all unless a particular article (usually commentary like this,written by someone I follow through other sources) comes to my attention.  For that reason I wondered about the potential drawbacks of TCLF using HuffPo, which has a credibility problem with many people, as a platform for Birnbaum’s excellent, now regularly-featured commentary. But then again, it’s a general interest platform that reaches a very wide, non-design audience so it just might be the perfect place for his posts (not to mention further to the exact point he makes in this piece).  And I think HuffPo has so much potential to be uniquely great (which is why the garbage they toss in the mix is so disappointing) that any initiative to raise the journalistic bar there is certainly welcomed!

I agree that he makes an incisive observation about the marginalization of landscape architecture criticism, and a persuasive argument about establishing the profession as influential in shaping communities/environments at the societal level.  Raising the cultural presence and influence of the profession among the general public is a key (if not primary) piece of the strategy to foster a better understanding/appreciation of what, exactly, we do.  No disrespect to snowplow drivers (particularly from my current vantage point in Queens!) but I wouldn’t be sad to retire that witty rejoinder that serves me so well when someone ponders, in all earnestness and ignorance, what it is that I DO during the winter months…