The Nature of Ian McHarg’s Science

Ian McHarg undoubtedly will be remembered as one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th century. His charismatic personality, grand narrative Design with Nature, and unwavering conviction that science would provide meaning and purpose for landscape architects placed him at the center of debates concerning nature, design, and planning. Yet his visions have been criticized as well as praised. Rarely straying from the ideas he synthesized in the 1960s, McHarg consistently contradicted himself. He criticized humans for privileging man over all other considerations, but he himself was autocratic, asserting his views as absolute and superior to all. His vision of nature was that of dynamic process, yet he sought to plot and rank natural phenomena on static maps. In promoting outdated ideas about science as a savior for landscape architecture, he used rhetorical devices suggestive of religious discourse. This paper attempts to unravel the complexity and contradictions of McHarg’s views on science. After reviewing the contributions of McHarg, it examines problems with his assertions relating to the ecological superiority of English landscape gardens, promotion of the map-overlay method as a scientific process, and the combination of Lawrence Henderson and Charles Darwin’s work for his theory of creative fitting.

[1]  L. Neckar.  Developing Landscape Architecture for the Twentieth Century: The Career of Warren H. Manning , 1989, Landscape Journal.

[2]  D. Cosgrove.  Social formation and symbolic landscape , 1984 .

[3]  C. Bicchieri,et al.  PSA: proceedings of the biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , 2002 .

[4]  Michael Hough,et al.  Cities and natural process , 1994 .

[5]  J. Edwards.  Denying Evolution. Creationism, Scientism and the Nature of Science , 2002, Integrative and comparative biology.

[6]  Frederick Steiner,et al.  The Essential Ian McHarg: Writings on Design and Nature , 2006 .

[7]  P. Walsh.  The Power of Maps. , 1998 .

[8]  Eugene P. Odum,et al.  THE GRANITE GARDEN: URBAN NATURE AND HUMAN DESIGN , 1984, Landscape Journal.

[9]  S. McNaughton.  Diversity and Stability of Ecological Communities: A Comment on the Role of Empiricism in Ecology , 1977, The American Naturalist.

[10]  S. Gould.  An Evolutionary Perspective on Strengths, Fallacies, and Confusions in the Concept of Native Plants , 2002 .

[11]  J. B. Harley,et al.  DECONSTRUCTING THE MAP , 1989 .

[12]  Stan Openshaw,et al.  A View on the GIS Crisis in Geography, or, Using GIS to Put Humpty-Dumpty Back Together Again , 1991 .

[13]  A. Gray,et al.  I. THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION , 1963 .

[14]  Peter Blaze Corcoran,et al.  Fifty key thinkers on the environment , 2001 .

[15]  M. Denton.  Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe , 1998 .

[16]  D. Cosgrove.  Geography and Vision: Seeing, Imagining and Representing the World , 2008 .

[17]  James Corner,et al.  Representation and landscape: Drawing and making in the landscape medium , 1992 .

[18]  Paul Theerman,et al.  The History of Cartography. Vol. 1: Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean ed. by J. B. Harley, David Woodward (review) , 1990, Technology and Culture.

[19]  I. Duncan,et al.  Travel Writing 1700-1830: An Anthology , 2005 .

[20]  Richard Weller.  An Art of Instrumentality: Thinking Through Landscape Urbanism , 2006 .

[21]  O. Loucks,et al.  From Balance of Nature to Hierarchical Patch Dynamics: A Paradigm Shift in Ecology , 1995, The Quarterly Review of Biology.

[22]  J. Hedgpeth.  Man and Nature: Controversy and Philosophy , 1986, The Quarterly Review of Biology.

[23]  P. Taylor.  A distorted world of knowledge , 1991 .

[24]  Derek Turner,et al.  The functions of fossils: inference and explanation in functional morphology , 2000 .

[25]  Ron Johnston,et al.  GIS and Geography , 1995 .

[26]  C. Darwin.  The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life , 1859 .

[27]  J. Reider.  The Revised Standard Version , 1953 .

[28]  Alessandra Capuano,et al.  Architecture and Landscape , 2000 .

[29]  K. Shrader-Frechette,et al.  Community Ecology, Scale, and the Instability of the Stability Concept , 1992, PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association.

[30]  J. A. Steers,et al.  Man and Environment , 1968 .

[31]  Christopher Alexander.  Notes on the Synthesis of Form , 1964 .

[32]  C. Girling,et al.  Yard, Street, Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space , 1994 .

[33]  James Corner,et al.  A Discourse on Theory II: Three Tyrannies of Contemporary Theory and the Alternative of Hermeneutics , 1991, Landscape Journal.

[34]  I. Mcharg.  Design With Nature , 1969 .

[35]  M. Monmonier.  How to Lie with Maps , 1991 .

[36]  Kristina Hill,et al.  Ecology and design : frameworks for learning , 2002 .

[37]  L. Henderson.  The Fitness of the Environment: An Inquiry Into the Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter , 1913 .

[38]  P. Dayton,et al.  ON THE EVOLUTION OF ECOLOGICAL IDEAS: PARADIGMS AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS , 2002 .

[39]  J. B. Harley,et al.  Cartography, ethics and social theory , 1990 .

[40]  Myke Gluck,et al.  Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative , 1997, Inf. Process. Manag..

[41]  Ian L. McHarg,et al.  Human ecological planning at Pennsylvania , 1981 .