The Swans of Landscape Architecture

***Please forgive double post…but I think the readers here are mostly a different lot than on LArch-l.***

Dear Readers:

As the market, we serve most, goes through turbulent times again… …not the first since the era of FL Olmsted, I have noted that the profession, a unique blend of left and right brain activity, seems to move unaffected over the long run, like a swan moving through water, some ups and downs naturally.

Yet within the profession there is always a steady noise from its practitioners, whether academia, public or private sector, about the definition of landscape architecture and the ‘relevance’ of our name, landscape architects. Yet, the swan gracefully glides onward.

Despite the onset of calamitous world events, World War 1, the Great Depression, World War 2, despite the impact of social and technological events, the telephone, electricity, the automobile, airplanes, environmental activism, digital culture, the swan swims on; and it retains its solid yet lovely grace. That is landscape architecture, until I read about the Black Swan, works recently published by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Now this may be nothing more than a larger wave that our swan rides through; but lots of economic and social impacts seem to be headed toward some kind of warp change. And, hey, we will always need a small plot of ground to grow a few vegetables, fruits and flowers on, no matter what. But landscape architecture has ridden cartesian and platonic traditions fairly heavily into the present. We, in the western World have ridden these same traditions, and marketed them, with reasonable success, to all others as progress. And they indeed are moving humankind into more troubled waters.

Black swan, according to Taleb, is an event, like a scientific discovery, that is undirected and unpredicted. It is a large impact and rare event beyond the realm of normal expectations. His thinking behind this is traditional sceptism and throttles the types of ‘taken for granted’ institutional thinking, and statistical norms upon which most of us build our world picture and plans for the future.

I ask the readers here, is there a black swan in landscape architecture? By definition, black swan events are unpredictable and random…but for discussion…what would be a high impact black swan event in landscape architecture?

…heh, heh, heh…
Jus’ for fun,
Edward Flaherty