Despite its importance to place-making, urban planning, and the environment, landscape design has often played an inferior role to architecture. Typically, as little as three percent of a project's construction budget is allocated to the space that surrounds a building, but that is changing. A greater desire to blend buildings into their contexts, ecological considerations, legislation, and new definitions of "scaping" have opened up exciting possibilities. Coinciding with heightened social sensitivities, advances in material application, data-driven mapping techniques, and digital technologies and construction methods, landscape designers are producing a new wave of work around the world, reshaping gardens, public squares, leisure areas, and industrial parks. Among the practices included in this survey are designers who have bridged modernism with newer forms (Emergent, West 8); architects whose work fuses with the earth's contours (Zaha Hadid, MVRDV); and a generation of designers only just emerging from universities. Nadia Amoroso is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Toronto and has lectured at Harvard and Cornell universities.
