A Quest for Life: An Autobiography

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1996. 445 pages, hardcover, $34.95.

Near the top of that list is Ian McHarg, a Scottish war hero who went on to found the landscape architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania.

In this fascinating autobiography we get to know McHarg and understand the dynamism that led him to change the course of landscape architecture. McHarg first became interested in his future career when, as a teenager, he left high school to apprentice with a Scottish landscape architect. His course of study was interrupted by World War II, however. He enlisted as an 18-year-old and quickly rose up through the ranks, serving as a paratrooper, engineer, and participant in several key invasions of the war.

After the German surrender and eight years of active duty, Major McHarg left the armed services and resumed his pursuit of landscape architecture. He decided that studying at Harvard University would be a wise move, but he lacked the necessary credentials to enroll in Harvard’s graduate program—he had neither an undergraduate degree nor a high school diploma. His strategy for getting into Harvard demonstrates the brazen style that became his hallmark: “I sent a telegram to the chairman of the department, one Bremer Whidden Pond, which read: ‘Dear Professor Pond, I propose to begin studies toward a Master in Landscape Architecture with effect from September 1946. Please make necessary arrangements. (Signed) Ian L. McHarg, Major.’”

Following his Harvard studies, where he earned Master’s degrees in both landscape architecture and city planning, and several years back in Scotland, McHarg was invited to the University of Pennsylvania in 1954 to establish a department of landscape architecture. Under his guidance, Penn’s Department of Landscape Architecture became the premier program in the country and turned out many of today’s leading practitioners—including

EBN Advisory Board member Carol Franklin.

McHarg is best known as author of

Design with Nature, the classic 1969 book on environmental design and planning that has sold more than 200,000 copies and been called by

Landscape Architecture “this century’s most influential landscape architecture book.” (A large-format 25th anniversary edition of

Design with Nature was reissued in 1992 by John Wiley & Sons.) The book evolved out of McHarg’s emphasis on ecological landscaping at Penn, an approach that integrated various natural and physical sciences in helping to understand the landscape and build on it in a manner that minimizes negative impact. His basic premise, since the early 1960s, has been that ecology should be “the fundamental basis for the practice of landscape architecture and regional planning.”

A Quest for Life provides a real sense of who Ian McHarg is and the influences in his life that led him into the role of being one of the environment’s earliest and most vocal champions. Along the way he hosted the first television series on the environment (The House We Live In, which was aired on CBS affiliates in 1960-1961 and later by PBS), he led dozens of pioneering planning efforts throughout the U.S., he had a major influence on highway planning (though he failed in his goal to get his ecological landscape strategies fully integrated into the Federal Highway Administration), he butted heads with the Army Corps of Engineers and like establishments, he played a key role in the 1970 Earth Day celebration in Philadelphia (the nation’s largest such gathering—for which

EBN’s editor was the Earth Day coordinator at his suburban Philadelphia junior high school), and he helped to lay the foundation for what would become the Geographic Information System. During an address to

Fortune magazine’s annual gathering of the Fortune 500 in 1972, he told it like he saw it with his characteristic bluntness: “Gentlemen, the time has come for American industry to be toilet trained.”

At 76, Ian McHarg is still active in Chester County, Pennsylvania, though he has slowed down considerably in recent years. Sadly, since his departure from Penn after 30 years, the Landscape Architecture Department has lost its leadership position in ecological landscaping, having shifted its focus into design. But McHarg’s ideas are being pursued widely by the many progeny of his teachings and philosophy.