Designing a Garden
Designing a Garden

Author: Michael Van Valkenburgh

Publisher: The Monacelli Press, LLC

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 1580935524

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The intimate Monk's Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston embodies the design principles that inform the work of noted landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh. In Designing a Garden, Van Valkenburgh presents the design of the Monk's Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, an intimate, walled garden that Laurie Olin has described as "a masterpiece, and not a minor one." The book documents the evolution of the garden's design, which is based on the concept of meandering paths through a dreamlike woodland to create a contemplative space. Sketches and models show how the idea was worked out, and lush photographs reveal the completed garden through the seasons. Van Valkenburgh's text explores the origins of his love of landscape and plants in his family farm in Upstate New York and how this has influenced his intuitions as a designer. He shares the full background story of the Monk's Garden, focusing on the experimental nature of design work as well as the challenges and satisfactions of the small scale and the historic and cultural context. Designing a Garden provides a unique first-person account of the design process from the most prominent landscape architects in the country.

Nature, Landscape, and Building for Sustainability
Nature, Landscape, and Building for Sustainability

Author: William S. Saunders

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 0816653585

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The complexity and scale of the environmental problems confronting humanity today provoke a wide range of responses, from indifference to anger to creativity. Among a growing number of architects, landscape architects, and planners, however, these problems have inspired a new vision-sustainability-to guide their practices. In Nature, Landscape, and Building for Sustainability, a diverse group of contributors considers the concept of sustainability, both philosophically and practically. Some take a broad view of the divisions between nature and humanity, exploring the incomprehensible scale of human intervention in the natural world, the relationship between how we feel about nature and what we do about it, and the commodification of the natural world. Other essays focus on sustainable design practices: sustainability's roots in the American conservation tradition, its utility as a framework for future design practice, and the necessity of moving beyond demonstration projects into the mainstream. Together, these essays suggest that the gap between the promise and reality of sustainable design, although significant, can be bridged through diligence and practice. Contributors: D. Michelle Addington, Yale U; John Beardsley, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Albert Borgmann, U of Montana, Missoula; Peter Buchanan; Peter Del Tredici, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Robert France, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Susannah Hagan, U of East London; Kristina Hill, U of Virginia; Catherine Howett, U of Georgia; Niall Kirkwood, Harvard Graduate School of Design; Lucy R. Lippard; Bill McKibbin; Michael Pollan; Rossana Vaccarino, Vaccarino Associates, St. Thomas. William S. Saunders is editor of Harvard Design Magazine and assistant dean for external relations at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He is editor of five previous Harvard Design Magazine Readers published by the University of Minnesota Press. Robert L. Thayer Jr. is emeritus professor of landscape architecture and founder of the landscape architecture program at the University of California, Davis.

The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays
The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays

Author: Colin Rowe

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1982-09-14

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780262680370

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This collection of an important architectural theorist's essays considers and compares designs by Palladio and Le Corbusier, discusses mannerism and modern architecture, architectural vocabulary in the 19th century, the architecture of Chicago, neoclassicism and modern architecture, and the architecture of utopia.

Platform 12
Platform 12

Author: Carrie Bly

Publisher: Gsd Platform

Published: 2020-01-07

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9781948765367

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Offering questions of the past to ground questions of the present, How About Now? summons the enduring concerns and preoccupations that designers constantly revisit, reconsider, and redefine in response to a changing world. This installment of the GSD Platform series celebrates--and places itself within--the rich tradition of student publications at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Produced annually, this compendium highlights a selection of work from the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design, and design engineering, and exposes a rich and varied pedagogical culture committed to shaping the future of design. Documenting projects, research, events, exhibitions, and more, Platform offers a curated view into the emerging topics, techniques, and dispositions within and beyond the Harvard GSD.

Formulations
Formulations

Author: Andrew Witt

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2022-01-11

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0262543001

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An investigation of mathematics as it was drawn, encoded, imagined, and interpreted by architects on the eve of digitization in the mid-twentieth century. In Formulations, Andrew Witt examines the visual, methodological, and cultural intersections between architecture and mathematics. The linkages Witt explores involve not the mystic transcendence of numbers invoked throughout architectural history, but rather architecture’s encounters with a range of calculational systems—techniques that architects inventively retooled for design. Witt offers a catalog of mid-twentieth-century practices of mathematical drawing and calculation in design that preceded and anticipated digitization as well as an account of the formal compendia that became a cultural currency shared between modern mathematicians and modern architects. Witt presents a series of extensively illustrated “biographies of method”—episodes that chart the myriad ways in which mathematics, particularly the mathematical notion of modeling and drawing, was spliced into the creative practice of design. These include early drawing machines that mechanized curvature; the incorporation of geometric maquettes—“theorems made flesh”—into the toolbox of design; the virtualization of buildings and landscapes through surveyed triangulation and photogrammetry; formal and functional topology; stereoscopic drawing; the economic implications of cubic matrices; and a strange synthesis of the technological, mineral, and biological: crystallographic design. Trained in both architecture and mathematics, Witt uses mathematics as a lens through which to understand the relationship between architecture and a much broader set of sciences and visual techniques. Through an intercultural exchange with other disciplines, he argues, architecture adapted not only the shapes and surfaces of mathematics but also its values and epistemic ideals.

Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping
Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping

Author: Chuihua Judy Chung

Publisher: Taschen America Llc

Published: 2001-01

Total Pages: 800

ISBN-13: 9783822860472

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SHOPPING is arguably the last remaining form of public activity. Through a battery of increasingly predatory forms, shopping has infiltrated, colonized, and even replaced, almost every aspect of urban life. Town centers, suburbs, streets, and now airports, train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the Internet, and the military are shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. The voracity by which shopping pursues the public has, in effect, made it one of the principal-if only-modes by which we experience the city. The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping explores the spaces, people, techniques, ideologies, and inventions by which shopping has so dramatically refashioned the city. Perhaps the beginning of the twenty-first century will be remembered as the point where the urban could no longer be understood without shopping. The PROJECT ON THE CITY, formerly known as "The Project for What Used to be the City," is an ongoing research effort that examines the effects of modernization on the urban condition. Each year the Project on the City investigates a specific urban region or a general urban condition undergoing virulent change. It tries to capture and decipher ongoing mutations in order to develop a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for phenomena that can no longer be described within the traditional categories of architecture, landscape, and urban planning. The first project, Great Leap Forward, focuses on the new forms and speeds of urbanization in the Pearl River Delta, China. The second project investigates the impact of shopping on the city. The third project explores the urban condition of Lagos, Nigeria. The fourth project treats the invention and expansion of the "systematic" Roman city as an early version of modernization and a prototype for the current process of globalization.

Pioneers of Modern Design
Pioneers of Modern Design

Author: Nikolaus Pevsner

Publisher: ePenguin

Published: 1949

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13:

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A book on artists and architects from Britain, USA and Europe and how the best remains today where laid by a small group of people who thought and taught as well as designed.

Spatializing Politics
Spatializing Politics

Author: Delia Duong Ba Wendel

Publisher: Harvard Graduate School of Design

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781934510469

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Spatializing Politics is an anthology of emerging scholarship that treats built and imagined spaces as critical to knowing political power. Essays illustrate how buildings and landscapes as disparate as Rust Belt railway stations and rural Rwandan hills become tools of political action and frameworks for political authority.

Inscriptions
Inscriptions

Author: K. Michael Hays

Publisher: Harvard Graduate School of Design

Published: 2022-05-17

Total Pages: 632

ISBN-13: 9781934510797

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In the wake of architecture's digital turn, contemporary practices have taken up archaic, even "prehistoric," models for the practice of architecture and how it might develop trenchant relationships to contemporary audiences. Underneath a wildly diverse and variable set of appearances, Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech reveals architectures that evince a stable and shared set of commitments to design as an act before speech--that is, they exceed the structural and semiotic propositions of the twentieth century which have long served as a point of beginning for the imagination of architectural thought itself. Featuring essays from Catherine Ingraham, Lucia Allais, Stan Allen, Phillip Denny, Edward Eigen, Sylvia Lavin, Antoine Picon, and Marrikka Trotter, Inscriptions rethinks architecture at the moment just before it is presupposed as the material of an indeterminably meaningful mark, the moment just before text becomes speech and before architecture becomes building--the site of inscription.