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Landscape architecture has become very fashionable ... to architects.

Moreover, its co-option and absorption into architectural practices has resulted in a revealing turf war with Andrés Duany as a vocal protagonist. He's the Princeton-trained architect who, as a founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, adopted the ideas, vision and values of the early 20th century landscape architects/planners John Nolen and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., to launch a movement that led to more than 300 new towns, regional plans, and community revitalization project commissions for his firm. It also exerted a significant influence on planning and development practices in the United States and abroad. New Urbanists, as a coalition, support regional planning, open space, context-appropriate architecture and planning, and they believe their strategies can reduce traffic congestion, increase the supply of affordable housing, and rein in sprawl.

Well, with suburban home values hemorrhaging and new home construction reeling, there's a societal buyer's remorse about New Urbanism, or "sprawl in drag," as the architect and Harvard Professor Alex Kreiger calls it. Rather than reflect on and address the situation, Duany instead throws stink bombs at Charles Waldheim, Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design (GSD). Why? Waldheim is a proponent of Landscape Urbanism, which sees landscape architecture rather than architecture as the design medium more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience.

Recently in , Duany went after Waldheim: "Last April, upon attending a remarkable conference at the Harvard GSD, I predicted that it would be taken over in a coup. I recognized a classic Latin American-style operation. It was clear that the venerable Urban Design program would be eliminated or replaced by Landscape Urbanism. Today, it is possible to confirm that the coup was completed in September -- and that it was a strategic masterpiece."

Wow -- that's a lot of drama!

Could it be that New Urbanism and the design of well-dressed, context sensitive new communities is no longer the reliable source of work for many architects -- in fact, over the past few years the New in New Urbanism has been dropped while the term Urbanism is rapidly gaining traction as its own movement. In , Michael Mehaffy notes that the new New Urbanism includes: "'X' Urbanism: Everyday Urbanism, Real Urbanism, Now Urbanism, and so on."

What next? Fragrance Free Urbanism or New and Improved Urbanism? Perhaps calling it Green Urbanism like Green Roofs will accommodate further usurpation by architects.

Wanting to go deeper in understanding this turf war, I called Mark Rios, a licensed architect and landscape architect. He said,

"Architects are trained to design objects. They go through desi