Land Matters
In a preview of July's Land Matters column, Landscape Architecture magazine editor Bill Thompson, FASLA, asks if the magazine should be a "bubbling cauldron of critical thought," or a vehicle for promoting landscape architecture to the general public.

In times of great change, finding the best path forward often requires looking back. Such is the case with Landscape Architecture, whose progress, I believe, lies in part in understanding and drawing on the editorship of Grady Clay.

How did Grady Clay, Honorary ASLA, shape Landscape Architecture during his long tenure from 1960 to 1985, and why is his example still pertinent?

Although he was a journalist, not a landscape architect, Grady turned the magazine toward confronting substantive issues faced by this profession. Even as he increased coverage of the annual ASLA award-winning projects and other significant built works, Grady’s blunt editorials forced landscape architects “to take a broader look at their own profession and their own future,” as he put it. (For example, he once forecast that the design profession with the best information was going to dominate the others—and he wasn’t at all sure that landscape architecture had the capacity to generate the best information.) Landscape architects wrote most of the articles under Grady’s tenure, and readers responded to them and to his editorials with outspoken letters to the editor. Finally, Grady set information precedents for the profession: LAM was the first professional journal to publish Ian McHarg’s work on ecological planning, and it scooped the popular press on coverage of earth sculpture, native plantings, and adventure playgrounds, among other innovations.

Does this profession really want a critical LAM that’s a bubbling cauldron of questions and critical thought—or would landscape architects be better served with a snazzy magazine focused exclusively on publicizing and marketing this still little-known profession?

In the late 1980s, however, LAM veered away from Grady’s emphasis on professional concerns. As the editors attempted to reach a larger lay audience, they watered down LAM’s content. Generalist writers wrote almost all the articles, lending LAM a gloss of impeccable prose but providing little insight into the practice of making landscapes. Technical articles were relegated to a few pages at the back, and the editors viewed ecological concerns with considerable disdain. Letters to the editor dwindled, reflecting the disaffection landscape architects increasingly felt as LAM diluted any content of interest to working designers. Instead, the editors promoted a “glam” image of landscape architecture, touting each built project as better than the last. LAM published glowing profiles of a favored few designers, minting celebrities whom it labeled “geniuses.” In short, LAM in the 1990s lacked an essential element of any good magazine—a critical voice.

Does any of this sound familiar, reader? I was an editorial staffer during those years and, in my search for alternatives to that frustrating status quo, I gradually realized that Grady had had a better idea. When I became editor in 2000, I consciously took him as my role model. As I got to know Grady a bit, I learned of some odd commonalities: He grew up in Atlanta, just a few miles from where I did, and his father was an eye surgeon at Emory Hospital, where my father, a pediatrician, treated many of his patients and where I was born.

But these convergences are mere happenstance. More important is the example Grady set as editor, which has helped me to fashion a set of operating principles for today’s LAM. I won’t bore you by listing them all, but let me just highlight one: To create a forum for dialogue through balanced, responsible critiques of built work and critical examination of key issues affecting landscape architecture.

The key words here are “critical” and “dialogue.” But does this profession really want a critical LAM that’s a bubbling cauldron of questions and critical thought—or would landscape architects be better served with a snazzy magazine focused exclusively on publicizing and marketing this still little-known profession? Personally, I believe landscape architecture needs thoughtful criticism in order to grow—but what do you think?

And Grady himself? At 89, he’s still writing—and still gardening at his home in Louisville, Kentucky. See this month’s “Shared Wisdom.”

J. William “Bill” Thompson, FASLA
Editor / bthompson@asla.org