Characteristics of modern landscape architecture and its education

Landscape architecture must keep the advantage it has gained because of its wide use of the knowledge of landscape which no other related disciplines have. Detailed landscape design, creation of new spaces—new landscapes, and use of characteristic, alive landscape material as well as nature protection, landscape ecology and regional landscape planning require both a creative and a scientific approach. The essential ability that landscape architects have, i.e. the capability of switching between concrete details and even global landscape interactions—enables them to achieve different and often better results than might be developed by architects, artists, urban planners, biologists, ecologists and other colleagues when dealing with similar landscape problems. Examples of our work, deriving from “the layer-cake method” and applied to recent studio projects, are used to illustrate key statements in the paper. A link to the teaching process is made in order to offer small but important solutions on how to teach landscape students the most characteristic and useful landscape basics.