David Moses: I agree, designers can foist didactic interpretations on a place, but they are rarely significant or successful in my opinion.

Topographer: I agree wholeheartedly that the practice of landscape/architecture can be furthered by meaningful criticism. That is what I intended to imply with my four points of what criticism should be and the statement at the end that criticism should exist to make the work (theory and practice) better. I think if criticism were more accessible it would invigorate praxis. We’re simpatico there, though for this piece I was focusing on what criticism should be, not praxis.

To your second point, it may be true that we are ultra-sensitive to the charge of being elitist, though I would argue that at least some of us relish it. “DesignSpeak” can certainly be good, but it can also be masturbatory which I would say is not helpful.

I’m not sure about your position on criticism as a representational entity. I think there is room for that, but that criticism should exist to improve the work, and not to explain it. I think landscape’s criticism does need a reason to exist. For me it doesn’t exist in its own right, but as a tool to further the practice of landscape/architecture.

How would criticism upend the processes of exclusivity?

Firstly, perhaps the reason for what you have rightly called conservative and superficial in landscape/architectural criticism; is that criticism, as we know it today, more often than not is content to be a post-facto commentary on praxis.
In the introduction to Recovering Landscapes (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) the editor rues the ‘concomitant loss of will or desire to forge new landscapes’- this loss of will unfortunately seems to stem from surrendering to the norms of praxis.
What about criticism’s capacity to instigate invention in praxis?
It is then perhaps the disjunction between praxis and criticism that can be used, productively to further the avant-garde in the discipline(s).

Secondly, as designers and critics we are too conscious of coming across as elitists because of the words we use, the terms that speak of design, that are often disparagingly called ‘designspeak’
What about criticism’s capacity as truly a representational entity that acquaints the ‘plebeians’ with the language of landscape/architecture. If landscape needs no apology; neither should its ‘criticism’. Criticism can, or rather should be the lever that upends the ‘processes of exclusivity’.