About this talk

Running time: 30 minutes

The late Ian McHarg, born a Scot but naturalised as citizen of the USA in 1960, trained at Harvard as a landscape architect and city planner. In 1954 he founded the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania where he has presided as Chairman and was still Chairman when this talk was recorded. From 1960 to 1981 he was a partner in the practice Wallace McHarg & Todd, and he is a registered landscape architect in eleven states in the USA. He has a long list of honours to his name and is author of innumerable learned articles on all things to do with the land. Over the years he undertook many large consultancy or research projects for governmental agencies and private organisations both in the USA and abroad.

As he says, his subject is ecological planning, the purpose of which is to describe any region under study as an interacting biophysical and social model so that it can be interpreted for planning purposes. It is a method quite independent of the problem whether it be the location of the new capital for Nigeria, or the design of a new town or of ten thousand square miles of N.W. Colorado, or the planning of a new system of national parks for Taiwan.

Professor McHarg's approach to his subject is unique and profound and very much to be commended to the attention of all who are concerned with planning the physical environment.

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