[Ruthie Wanjiku]

Jay,
Your article is great and i identify with especially the practising on someone back yard. Most of the times when i tell someone am a landscape Architect,they either assume am a gardener with a fancy name, or they may just pick the architecture part and assume I am an architect.

You are right we need to alldoourpart in promoting and making our profession well known.
Jay Everett said:

I agree that the title is confusing and that it is a problem that has been with us from the start.

Olmstead struggled with the awkwardness of the title, at one point refering to the practice as “sylvan art.”
Biographer Witold Rybczynski writes of Olmsted’s response to Vaux’s attempt to get him to move back to New York and partner with him in 1865:

“The art is not gardening nor is it architecture,” he wrote. It was certainly not “landscape architecture.” “If you are bound to establish this new art,” he wrote Vaux, “you don’t want an old name for it.”*

the author adds: *twenty-five years earlier, John Claudius Loudon had published a book titled “The landscape gardening and landscape architecture of the late Humphry Repton. According to landscape historian John Dixon Hunt, this is the first documented use of the term landscape architecture.

I also agree that we have been using the title for too long to change it now (way too much trouble). I think the real underlying issue is the relatively low profile of the profession as a separate and distinct vocation. I have written about this before.

>http://media.http://www.reflector-online.com/media/storage/paper938/news/2006/04/05/Opi…

My opinion is that the profession is simply too small in size relative to engineering or architecture and I think the only way to solve our frustration is to grow in numbers and work to elevate the profile of the profession.

If our generation of would focus on recruitment and public awareness then maybe the next generation of landscape architects would have the resources to invest more time and money into scientific research and methods of practice. Unless we can quantify our contribution and definitively document what we “feel” we contribute to society, we will continue to be a service industry on the margins.

The question should not be “who are we?” the question should be “how do we shed our reputation as a luxury item?”

[Ruthie Wanjiku]

i would love to drop the “landscape”,it always gives the wrong first impression..in that most people tend to assume all landscape architects do is landscape design. So i always have to explain that we do more than that ,maybe we should go for land architect exterior architect.

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