The Nature of Ian McHarg’s Science

Abstract

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 In promoting outdated ideas about science as a savior for landscape architecture, he used rhetorical devices suggestive of religious discourse.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.