On Rivers and Drawing Practice

This work flows from two propositions: sites and settings are interdependent, and understanding why and how is fundamental and inexhaustible for landscape architecture. It builds on the work of Scottish–American landscape architect Ian McHarg and Scottish town planner Patrick Geddes. Although separated in time by nearly half a century, their shared belief in the role of regional knowledge for local design and planning led to parallels in their canon relative to subject matter and approach. Prompted by a recent comparative study of two rivers influential to McHarg’s work—the Clyde and the Delaware—the essay reflects on transect modeling and related drawing practice that engage incremental change, accumulation, and time. It begins with a discussion of relief maps and their application to river basin research in the United States, Italy, and Scotland. This is followed by a brief retrospective on the contributions of McHarg and Geddes to regional planning theory and practice. The interdisciplinary usefulness of transect-based practice for observing and analyzing landscape phenomena is then presented, and provides context for a recent exhibition by the author, which explored both analog and digital drawing techniques. The essay concludes by reasserting the importance of field study to landscape architecture and other works of environmental imagination.