Moment of Silence:
Michael Hough 1928-2013

Michael Hough founded the University of Toronto's Landscape Architecture Program in 1965.

Michael Hough passed away in Jan. 2013 at the age of 84. Hough left his mark in the field of landscape architecture through an approach to urban landscape design that went beyond aesthetics. He incorporated urban ecology and biological principals along side sound urban planning and development strategies. The Canadian Society of Landscape Architects recognized his contributions in 2009 with its Lifetime Achievement Award.

Hough headed the University of Toronto's landscape architecture program, and became a professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University. He designed the landscape for Ontario Place (1975 Merit in Design from the Canadian Society of Architects), Scarborough College (Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects), and the University of Toronto's College Quad and Earth Sciences Courtyards, among numerous other award-winning projects. Hough was a long-standing emeritus member of the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects.

He is the author of a number of texts that become required reading for landscape architecture and urban planning students: The Urban Landscape (1971); City Form and Natural Process: Towards a New Urban Vernacular (1984); Land Conservation and Development (1984); Out of Place (1990); and Cities and Natural Process (1995). His writing was included In Celebration of Play (1980), edited by Paul Wilkinson, and in People & City Landscapes (1987).

Many Torontonians know him as the author of Bringing Back the Don (1991), written on behalf of the Task Force to Bring Back the Don, a citizen group sponsored by the city to bring back a clean, green and accessible Don River watershed. His report won a Canadian Institute of Planners Award for Planning Excellence.

As reported in "The Life and Times of Michael Hough" in Toronto Life, when Hough received the 1991 City of Toronto Arts Award for Architecture and Design, then-Mayor David Crombie told the audience: "He loves cities, he loves nature, he insists on a link between the two, and he'll tell you, every day if you ask him, the regeneration of one is the salvation of the other. He loves ideas and his ideas always surprise you. They startle you at the start, because they're new, but after a while they become inevitable. He is, I think, a gentle revolutionary."

Crombie hired Hough to serve on the Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront; he later made Hough chair of a working group formed to study the future of the Lower Don.

"Michael Hough was one of a number of leaders who transformed the profession of landscape architecture in Canada and brought international attention to Canadian Design and the Profession," said Robert Wright, director of the landscape architecture program at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. "He pioneered environmental and ecological-based design through his work, through all the scales of design, from region, to city and to site. As an academic he was influential in educating four subsequent generations of both practitioners and academics. His influence never waned throughout his whole career and he continued to be a strong champion of the environment and the social responsibilities of landscape architecture. We owe Michael a debt that can never fully be repaid except through our own continued commitment to the issues he so dearly believed in and demonstrated through his work."

In 2003, the OALA provided an endowment to support the Michael Hough / OALA Visiting Critic in Landscape Architecture at the Daniels Faculty. This position was establish in honor of Hough to enrich the academic experience of students in the landscape architecture program through the creative input of a visiting professor, practitioner, or critic in the field. Today, the John Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto offers two options in the Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA): a first professional degree and a post-professional degree.

Though Hough's work in Toronto was important, it goes largely unnoticed today. He and architect Eberhard Zeidler designed Ontario Place, for instance, which was "ruined," Hough said, when the Molson Amphitheatre replaced the old Forum.

As Toronto continues to grow the need for environmental awareness has never been greater. Hough embraced regional planning, watershed integrity and the need to consider cities as urban landscapes. He observed that Toronto street trees fail "because they are seen as specimen objects instead of being part of a larger system."