One of the most renowned landscape architects in practice today, Laurie Olin has created designs for the grounds of the Washington Monument, the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, and New York's Bryant Park. Olin is also a prolific writer, and his span a wide array of subjects--from horticulture and education to urban history, the evolving state of the profession of landscape architecture, and many other topics of interest to a range of readers.
The past decade has been witness to a remarkable resurgence of interest in landscape. While this recovery invokes a return of past traditions and ideas, it also implies renewal, invention, and transformation. Recovering Landscape collects a number of essays that discuss why landscape is gaining increased attention today, and what new possibilities might emerge from this situation. Themes such as reclamation, urbanism, infrastructure, geometry, representation, and temporality are explored in discussions drawn from recent developments not only in the United States but also in the Netherlands, France, India, and Southeast Asia. The contributors to this collection, all leading figures in the field of landscape architecture, include Alan Balfour, Denis Cosgrove, Georges Descombes, Christophe Girot, Steen Hoyer, David Leatherbarrow, Bart Lootsma, Sebastien Marot, Anuradha Mathur, Marc Treib, and Alex Wall.
Is Landscape . . . ? surveys multiple and myriad definitions of landscape. Rather than seeking a singular or essential understanding of the term, the collection postulates that landscape might be better read in relation to its cognate terms across expanded disciplinary and professional fields. The publication pursues the potential of multiple provisional working definitions of landscape to both disturb and develop received understandings of landscape architecture. These definitions distinguish between landscape as representational medium, academic discipline, and professional identity. Beginning with an inquiry into the origins of the term itself, Is Landscape . . . .? features essays by a dozen leading voices shaping the contemporary reading of landscape as architecture and beyond.
Compiling nine authoritative essays spanning an extensive academic career, author Kenneth R. Olwig presents explorations in landscape geography and architecture from an environmental humanities perspective. With influences from art, literature, theatre staging, architecture, and garden design, landscape has come to be viewed as a form of spatial scenery, but this reading captures only a narrow representation of landscape meaning today. This book positions landscape as a concept shaped through the centuries, evolving from place to place to provide nuanced interpretations of landscape meaning. The essays are woven together to gather an international approach to understanding the past and present importance of landscape as place and polity, as designed space, as nature, and as an influential factor in the shaping of ideas in a just social and physical environment. Aimed at students, scholars, and researchers in landscape and beyond, this illustrated volume traces the idea of landscape from the ancient polis and theatre through to the present day.
Susan Fenimore Cooper (1813-1894), though often overshadowed by her celebrity father, James Fenimore Cooper, has recently become recognized as both a pioneer of American nature writing and an early advocate for ecological sustainability. Editors Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson have assembled here a collection of ten pieces by Cooper that represent her most accomplished nature writing and the fullest articulation of her environmental principles. With one exception, these essays have not been available in print since their original appearance in Cooper's lifetime. A portrait of her thoughts on nature and how we should live and think in relation to it, this collection both contextualizes Cooper's magnum opus, Rural Hours (1850), and demonstrates how she perceived her work as a nature writer. Frequently her essays are models of how to catch and keep the interest of a reader when writing about plants, animals, and our relationship to the physical environment. By lamenting the decline of bird populations, original forests, and overall biodiversity, she champions preservation and invokes a collective environmental conscience that would not begin to awaken until the end of her life and century. The selections include independent essays, miscellaneous introductions and prefaces, and the first three installments from Cooper's work of literary ornithology, "Otsego Leaves," arguably her most mature and fully realized contribution to American environmental writing. In addition to a foreword by John Elder, one of the nation's leading environmental educators, an introduction analyzes each essay in various cultural contexts. Brief but handy textual notes supplement the essays. Perfect for nature-writing aficionados, environmental historians, and environmental activists, this collection will radically expand Cooper's importance to the history of American environmental thought.
While many fields struggle to specify feminine contributions, the work of women has always played a fundamental role in American landscape architecture. Women claim responsibility for many landscape types now taken for granted, including community gardens, playgrounds, and streetscapes. This collection of essays by leaders in the discipline addresses the ways that gender has influenced the history, design practice and perception of landscapes. It highlights women's relation to landscape architecture, presents the professional efforts of women in the landscape realm, examines both the perception and experience of landscapes by women, and speculates on ways to re-imagine gender and the landscape.
Site, Sight, Insight presents twelve essays by John Dixon Hunt, the leading theorist and historian of landscape architecture. The collection's common theme is a focus on sites, how we see them and what we derive from that looking. Acknowledging that even the most modest landscape encounter has validity, Hunt contends that the more one knows about a site and one's own sight of it (an awareness of how one is seeing), the greater the insight. Employing the concepts, tropes, and rhetorical methods of literary analysis, he addresses the problem of how to discuss, understand, and appreciate places that are experienced through all the senses, over time and through space. Hunt questions our intellectual and aesthetic understanding of gardens and designed landscapes and asks how these sites affect us emotionally. Do gardens have meaning? When we visit a fine garden or designed landscape, we experience a unique work of great complexity in purpose, which has been executed over a number of years—a work that, occasionally, achieves beauty. While direct experience is fundamental, Hunt demonstrates how the ways in which gardens and landscapes are communicated in word and image can be equally important. He returns frequently to a cluster of key sites and writings on which he has based much of his thinking about garden-making and its role in landscape architecture: the gardens of Rousham in Oxfordshire; Thomas Whately's Observations on Modern Gardening (1770); William Gilpin's dialogues on Stowe (1747); Alexander Pope's meditation on genius loci; the Désert de Retz; Paolo Burgi's Cardada; and the designs by Bernard Lassus and Ian Hamilton Finlay.
Writing on the Landscape touches my mind, heart, body, and spirit. The author and I are kindred souls. My own thinking, writing, and nature-fueled philosophy of life resonate with Dr. Wilhoits entertaining and inspirational guide to writing and nature. Dr. Wilhoit narrates a journey, demonstrating how vital balance is in our pursuit of writing, as well as in our pursuit of life. And she evidences convincingly that we can achieve wholeness through conscious, reflective, and introspective immersion in nature. Dr. Wilhoit observes simply that the principal point of this book is the pairing of nature and writing toward being complete. Writing on the Landscape explores the sense of wholeness we feel when we engage a few simple, easy to exercise practices deep and guided, step-by-step interactions with nature and its elements: land-, sea-, and sky-scapes. The voices of the earth speak deeply and clearly to a writer. Dr. Wilhoit brings joy to writing through her own revelations: I am in love with writing; writing seduces me. I am in the landscape of my soul. I write from the very core of who I am. That is what the natural world does for me and for my writing no matter where I am. Join Dr. Wilhoit and begin your own journey through the terrain of writing and nature. Stephen B. Jones, PhD Author of Nature Based Leadership and Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading; Co-Founder of Antioch University New Englands Nature Based Leadership Institute; Founder of Great Blue Heron, LLC Writing on the Landscape is a practical, lyrical book aimed at helping blocked writers to become unstuck.
Twenty-one writers answer the call for literature that addresses who we are by understanding where we are--where, for each of them, being in some way part of academia. In personal essays, they imaginatively delineate and engage the diverse, occasionally unexpected play of place in shaping them, writers and teachers in varied environments, with unique experiences and distinctive world views, and reconfiguring for them conjunctions of identity and setting, here, there, everywhere, and in between. Contents I Introduction Writing Place, Jennifer Sinor II Here Six Kinds of Rain: Searching for a Place in the Academy, Kathleen Dean Moore and Erin E. Moore The Work the Landscape Calls Us To, Michael Sowder Valley Language, Diana Garcia What I Learned from the Campus Plumber, Charles Bergman M-I-Crooked Letter-Crooked Letter, Katherine Fischer On Frogs, Poems, and Teaching at a Rural Community College, Sean W. Henne III There Levittown Breeds Anarchists Film at 11:00, Kathryn T. Flannery Living in a Transformed Desert, Mitsuye Yamada A More Fortunate Destiny, Jayne Brim Box Imagined Vietnams, Charles Waugh IV Everywhere Teaching on Stolen Ground, Deborah A. Miranda The Blind Teaching the Blind: The Academic as Naturalist, or Not, Robert Michael Pyle Where Are You From? Lee Torda V In Between Going Away to Think, Scott Slovic Fronteriza Consciousness: The Site and Language of the Academy and of Life, Norma Elia Cantu Bones of Summer, Mary Clearman Blew Singing, Speaking, and Seeing a World, Janice M. Gould Making Places Work: Felt Sense, Identity, and Teaching, Jeffrey M. Buchanan VI Coda Running in Place: The Personal at Work, in Motion, on Campus, and in the Neighborhood, Rona Kaufman
Landscape and Agency explores how landscape, as an idea, a visual medium and a design practice, is organized, appropriated and framed in the transformation of places, from the local to the global. It highlights how the development of the idea of agency in landscape theory and practice can fundamentally change our engagement with future landscapes. Including a wide range of international contributions, each illustrated chapter investigates the many ways in which the relationship between the ideas and practices of landscape, and social and subjective formations and material processes, are invested with agency. They critically examine the role of landscape in processes of contemporary urban development, environmental debate and political agendas and explore how these relations can be analysed and rethought through a dialogue between theory and practice.
