Ian McHarg

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Ian L. McHarg was born in Clydebank, Scotland and became a landscape architect and a renowned writer on regional planning using natural systems. He was the founder of the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. His 1969 book Design with Nature pioneered the concept of ecological planning. It continues to be one of the most widely celebrated books on landscape architecture and land-use planning. In this book, he set forth the basic concepts that were to develop later in Geographic Information Systems. His father was a local minister in the industrial city of Glasgow. McHarg showed an early talent for drawing and was advised to consider a career in landscape architecture. His early experiences with the bifurcated landscapes of Scotland the smoky industrial urbanism of Glasgow and the sublimity of the surrounding environs had a profound influence on his later thinking. It was not until after his term in the British Parachute Brigade, serving in war-stricken Italy during World War II, however, that he was able to explore the field of urban landscape architecture.