24 Facts About Ian McHarg

Ian L McHarg was a Scottish landscape architect and writer on regional planning using natural systems.

Ian McHarg was the founder of the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.

Ian McHarg's father was a manager and later a salesman in the industrial city of Glasgow, Scotland.

Ian McHarg showed an early talent for drawing and was advised to consider a career in landscape architecture.

Ian McHarg was admitted to the school of architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design where he received professional degrees in both landscape architecture and city planning in 1949.

Dean Perkins wanted Ian McHarg to build a new graduate program in landscape architecture at the University.

Soon thereafter, Ian McHarg began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, where he developed the department of landscape architecture, and developed a popular new course, titled Man and Environment in 1957.

The course featured leading scholars whom Ian McHarg invited to his class to discuss ethics and values, as well as other ideas ranging from entropy to plate tectonics.

Ian McHarg was interested in garden design and believed that homes should be planned and designed with good private garden space.

Ian McHarg promoted an ecological view, in which the designer becomes very familiar with the area through analysis of soil, climate, hydrology, etc.

Ian McHarg's focus was only partially on the visual and sensual qualities which had dominated the English picturesque movement.

In 1971 Ian McHarg delivered a speech at the North American Wildlife and Natural Resources Conference in Portland, Oregon, called "Man: Planetary Disease".

Ian McHarg discusses how in the Judeo-Christian traditions, the Bible says that man is to have dominion over the earth.

Ian McHarg says that for man to survive, this idea must be taken as an allegory only, and not as literally true.

Ian McHarg was the original co-designer of The Woodlands, Texas, an unincorporated community in Montgomery County, Texas.

The natural drainage system the firm designed was successful at limiting the runoff with which Ian McHarg was concerned, and was much cheaper than a conventional drainage system would have been.

In 1998, in his collection To Heal the Earth, Ian McHarg wrote that the Woodlands is one of the best examples of his ideals.

Ian McHarg favoured what became known as 'cluster development' with relatively dense housing set in a larger natural environment.

Ian McHarg was enthusiastic about this project, and greatly invested in the work.

Ian McHarg was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Harvard Lifetime Achievement Award, the Pioneer Award from the American Institute of Certified Planners, and 15 medals, including the 1990 National Medal of Arts, the American Society of Landscape Architects Medal, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture from the University of Virginia.

Ian McHarg received an honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University in 1992.

In 1996, Ian McHarg published his autobiography A Quest for Life.

Ian McHarg was instrumental in the founding of Earth Week, and participated on task forces on environmental issues for the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter administrations.

Ian McHarg died on 5 March 2001 at the age of eighty from pulmonary disease.