Productive landscapes, slow landscapes and sustaining beauty

Abstract

Elizabeth Meyer influentially argues that aesthetic dimensions, in particular beauty, are a vital component of landscape architecture’s capacity to create sustainable environments. This article identifies four positions in her presentation of prominent North American landscape architect Thomas Woltz’s Orongo Station as an exemplar of ‘Sustaining Beauty’ that constrain landscape architecture’s relevance in terms of sustainable design. It then presents, as an alternative manifesto, a generative programme for both Orongo Station and the discipline of landscape architecture that incorporates challenges of provenance, identity, experimentation and farm-to-plate-to-farm logistics; suggesting opportunities not only for sustaining landscape in this century, but landscape - in its connective, instrumental, practised and scalable sense - better sustaining us.