Farmscape

Routledge 2020

2021 ASLA-TX Honor Award

Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes situates agriculture as a design practice and proposes lessons for contemporary landscape architects who are interested in engaging agriculture. Using case studies across the modern era, the book describes the history of agriculture within landscape architecture and reveals the diversity of current design practices that use the rhythms and forms of agriculture to create productive farms that are also sites of beauty, community, ecological conservation, remediation, and pleasure. 

Agricultural processes, technologies, and cycles have long shaped landscape architectural projects, from the ornamented farm of the eighteenth century to Frederick Law Olmsted’s nineteenth-century scientific farming experiments. Some contemporary design firms seek to integrate farming practices within multifunctional design, and to use design as a tool to connect society to the nutritional, economic, social, ecological and aesthetic implications of food production. But contemporary design practice largely reflects the cultural separation of most people’s daily landscape from the landscape of food production. Reintegrating food production with domestic, educational, and recreational landscapes is critical in light of contemporary questions of food security and ecological health. Farmscape recovers food production as an integrated practice, exposing a long tradition of agriculture orchestrated as design strategy.

Farmscape was the cover feature of the June 2020 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine, accompanied by an article, in the form of a conversation between Phoebe Lickwar and Roxi Thoren, that explored the impact of the pandemic on food security and the potential of landscape architects to contribute to a post-COVID food system.