In the process, he befriended Lady Bird Johnson, Stewart Udall, and Laurance Rockefeller, among others.Įspecially his early 1960s CBS television show The House We Live In emerged from, and then informed, his teaching and, in turn, put forth the theory in Design with Nature. Ian McHarg served on several important commissions and panels, including the influential 1966 White House Commission on Conservation and Natural Beauty. He hosted his own high-profile CBS talk show and later narrated a popular PBS documentary. From the early 1960s on, Ian McHarg became a public personality. What are the origins of his ecologically based theory?Īgain, it came from both within the academy and from experience.

While this clarion call-to-arms presents insightful case studies, it also advances a new theory for design and a new mandate for public policy. A synthesis of this dialogue is provided in Design with Nature. This work represented a meaningful dialogue between the academy and professional practice. Both the academic department and the firm engaged in action research advancing several disciplines and professions. For many years the boundaries between the Department of Landscape Architecture, then the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, and his consulting practice-Wallace and McHarg Associates, later Wallace McHarg Rogers and Todd-blurred. He explored these ideals through the design studios at Penn and through his growing practice. Furthermore, this action would result in better housing, more open space, more efficient transportation systems, and, in the end, healthier and safer communities. Specifically, he believed knowledge should guide action. He grew highly skeptical of the one-sizefits-all stylistic palette of modernism, instead remaining committed to the ideals of modernism. Influenced by his mentor Lewis Mumford, McHarg began to move away from the aesthetic dogma of the international style. At first, this practice was grounded in the modernist principles McHarg had learned at Harvard. His most important contributions derived from this reflective academic practice. There, McHarg fused his desire to practice with a new-found love for teaching. Holmes Perkins enticed him to build a new graduate program in landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. McHarg worked on housing and new town programs in Scotland and experienced a near-deadly bout with tuberculosis before Dean G. He left Harvard with the intent to help rebuild his war-ravaged homeland. After the war, Ian McHarg, 'the major' as he was called then, marinated in modernism at Harvard.

Before the war, he was a child of the Great Depression in industrial Glasgow, Scotland. He left military service after the war as a confident major in command of one of Britain's most elite combat units.

He entered the Second World War as a lanky teenage private. Ian Lennox McHarg (1920–2001) experienced the transition between adolescence and manhood as a warrior.

Ian l mcharg