1984-2024

Abstract

The 73rd issue of the 4D Journal of Landscape Architecture and Garden Art is a special issue in honour of the 35th IFLA Europe Conference in Budapest, 17-20 October 2024, and provides an insight into the 40 years of Hungarian landscape architecture between the IFLA Europe Conferences in Hungary, in Siófok in 1984 and Budapest in 2024. The special issue is structured in five major chapters, each of which has been coordinated by a colleague and compiled by several authors with expertise in each of the priority themes. As the length of the journal does not allow for a detailed and exhaustive coverage of each topic, the aim was to provide an overview of the most important changes and developments in planning, research, education and legislation over the last four decades, with a special chapter on volunteering, which also highlights the social significance of landscape architecture.

The main theme of the XXII IFLA conference, held in Siófok from 26 to 29 September 1984, was 'The Urban Fringe', as translated by Mihály Mőcsényi, which has been a recurring central theme of many landscape architecture (and other) conferences since then. The conference was memorable in more ways than one. It was the first time that landscape architects from the 'socialist countries', including the Soviet Union, participated in an IFLA event. In addition to its professional, friendship building and financial aspects, the Congress was also a political success. The Western participants called it the 'Congress of the Heart', while the Central and Eastern Europeans called it the 'Congress of Druzhba (Friendship in Russian)'.

In the 40 years since the Siófok conference, Hungary's political and economic situation and the priorities in landscape architecture have changed a lot. The political squeeze, which slowly eased towards the end of the 1980s, was replaced by the social and ecological challenges of the millennium, which, in addition to the continuous development of training content in a quality-oriented manner, aimed at harmonising the professional output of graduates with economic needs. The traditional landscape architecture training and practice has been maintained and developed throughout. As a result of the harmony and good relations between academic training, professional organisations and market players, landscape architects in Hungary today play a major coordinating role in multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary projects, in addition to their strictly professional tasks.

The achievements of the last 40 years have also brought international recognition, and the recognition and regulation of Hungarian landscape architecture education and practice provides the profession a good position not only at home but also at EU level. Hungary is one of only eleven European countries where the profession of landscape architecture is legally protected, enjoys professional recognition within the Hungarian Chamber of Architects and has licenses for planning assigned. In terms of student numbers, there has also been a huge increase: while in 1984 the total number of students on the five-year course in landscape architecture was 71, today it is ten times that number, at over 720. Our Institute is the second largest landscape architecture school in Europe and has more than 65 bilateral international cooperations, with prestigious schools such as those in Wageningen, Munich, Florence, Versailles, Vienna and Copenhagen.

If we consider that beyond this IFLA Europe conference in Budapest, we organised here the annual conference of the Council of Europe's European Route of Historic Gardens a year and a half ago, and the prestigious international conference and workshop of the Le Notre Landscape Forum will be held in Budapest next year, the conference of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS) in 2027, we can say that our international professional recognition will bring the most prestigious European professional events, colleagues and market players to Budapest.

In the context of the 35th IFLA Europe conference, we are reflecting on the redefinition of landscape architecture for the 21st century. We will focus on the interdisciplinarity of landscape architecture, reinterpreting the past-present, urban-rural, art-ecology, aesthetic-utilitarian contraries, and reasserting the Olmstedian idea of landscape architecture as an aesthetic basis for sustainable, nature-based solutions for the common good and a liveable world.