Until now, writings about the architect/landscape architect Georges Descombes have been relatively limited, appearing primarily in publications in Switzerland and abroad as conversations, interviews, and conference proceedings; most of them have appeared only in French. However, during his forty years of practice, Descombes has developed and applied a method unique to landscape architecture, one in which an extremely broad vision, both scientifically and culturally, shapes his thinking and projects. Descombes enters each project by attempting to understand the existing conditions on site and how, using minimal means and interventions, those conditions can be modified to meet the requirements of the programme and those appropriate to the natural or urban environment. To some critics it would appear that Descombes has always done too little on and to the site, and in some instances have condemned him for 'doing almost nothing'. Although simplicity usually demands greater concentration and study, it often yields greater rewards that result from just that restraint. Perhaps how we approach the world is more important that how we shape the world. Descombes's landscapes are instructive in this regard.

Evolving Public Space in South Africa discusses the transformation of public space highlighted in the country. Drawing on examples from major cities, the author demonstrates that these spaces are not only becoming wasted space, but are also adapting and evolving to accommodate new users and uses in various parts of the city. This process of evolution tends to challenge the more traditional visions and general global views of declining public space in cities and argues that it rather resembles the resilience of these spaces and the potential for regeneration through continuously emerging and mutating forms, functions and meanings. Including over 20 black-and-white images, this book would be beneficial to academics and students of urban planning and design and those interested in the regeneration of cities.

Increasingly, we live in an environment of our own making: a 'world as design' over the natural world. For more than half of the global population, this environment is also thoroughly urban. But what does a global urban condition mean for the human condition? How does the design of the city and the urban process, in response to the issues and challenges of the Anthropocene, produce new ethical categories, shape new moral identities and relations, and bring about consequences that are also morally significant? In other words, how does the urban shape the ethical-and in what ways? Conversely, how can ethics reveal relations and realities of the urban that often go unnoticed? This book marks the first systematic study of the city through the ethical perspective in the context of the Anthropocene. Six emergent urban conditions are examined, namely, precarity, propinquity, conflict, serendipity, fear and the urban commons.

Potential insights and inexpensive tools for converting small, vacant lots to community green space. Vacant lots, so often seen as neighborhood blight, have the potential to be a key element of community revitalization. Sandra Albro offers practical insights through her experience leading the five-year Vacant to Vibrant project, which piloted the creation of green infrastructure networks in Gary, Indiana; Cleveland, Ohio; and Buffalo, New York. Vacant to Vibrant provides a point of comparison among the three cities as they adapt old systems to new, green technology. Albro offers insights from every step of the Vacant to Vibrant project, including planning, design, community engagement, implementation, and maintenance successes and challenges of creating a green infrastructure network from vacant lots in neighborhoods. Landscape architects and other professionals whose work involves urban greening will learn new approaches for creating infrastructure networks and facilitating more equitable access to green space.

Like his famous stepfather and mentor Frederick Law Olmsted, who designed New York's Central Park, landscape architect John Charles Olmsted believed that pastoral spaces were integral to a healthy urban life. The success of Central Park brought attention to the company and sparked a nation-wide movement to beautify cities. By 1884, John Charles Olmsted had become a full partner in the Olmsted firm. In 1903, he traveled to Portland and Seattle, submitting master plans for park systems in both. He produced designs for several of the region's university campuses and smaller cities, as well as Spokane's premier Manito Park. Yet success was jeopardized by political and practical mine fields such as changing park boards, escalating land costs, and dwindling funds. John Charles Olmsted's finesse with members of the societal elite influenced property purchases, political appointments, and municipal funding levels. Careful attention to natural vistas, topography, and native plants allowed his verdant havens to provide a renewing connection to the outdoors. Each green retreat was unique, compatible with surroundings and intended uses, and skillfully crafted to take full advantage of a specific site. Some had playgrounds, ball fields, and expansive lawns. Others provided leafy passageways for travel by foot, horse, or car. Hilly woodlands were often layered to offer a lush, textural backdrop with dappled areas of light and shade. Meticulous, intensely observant, industrious, and visionary, he left a legacy that is still enjoyed daily by people across the Pacific Northwest.

Adaptations of the Metropolitan Landscape in Delta Regions is about environmental quality and the long term livability of urban areas. In decades to come, climate change will affect cities everywhere, but nowhere have the effects of climate change already been felt as strongly as in low-lying coastal cities, cities located in large river deltas and near tidal estuaries. This book reflects on the contribution that spatial planning and urban design can make to a complex discussion about how city form and landscapes will need to adapt within metropolitan areas. The book's focus is on the urban form of three delta regions: the Pearl River Delta in Southern China; the Rhine, Maas, and Scheldt Delta in the Netherlands; and the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. The three regions differ greatly, but despite their different political systems, history, culture and locations in three different climate zones, all three regions will be forced to respond to similar issues that will trigger transformations and adaptations to their urban form. Richly illustrated in color with detailed diagrams, models, photographs and sketches, the book is written for students, scholars and practitioners of environmental planning, and designers who need to respond to the future form of cities in light of climate change. For the professions shaping the physical world of cities and regions, the challenge is not only one of designing physical geometries but of social consequences.

This essential publication reintroduces the importance of learning to `see by hand', to visualize large-scale design schemes and explain them through drawing, before using the digital tools that are so crucial to efficient and cost-effective building solutions. Combining traditional drawing techniques with those from CAD rendering, Drawing for Landscape Architecture guides practitioners from their very first impression of a site, through concept and schematic design and client presentation to construction and site drawings, concluding with two case studies that show the final result. Just as hand-drawing returns to design courses around the world, this welcome publication celebrates the best aspects of traditional techniques while incorporating them into today's digital design methods.

A superlative analysis of contemporary gardens as well as a fascinating collection of landscapes around the world, "Making the Modern Garden" is a definitive study of the philosophy and practice of garden design at the outset of the twenty-first century. Author Christopher Bradley-Hole, himself a landscape designer of note, discusses the process of garden design in a presentation of modern landscapes at all sizes and locations. Among the designers in the book are Fernando Caruncho, Peter Walker, Kathryn Gustafson, and Vladamir Sitta; different types of gardens include roof gardens, courtyards, urban and country gardens, and dramatic landscapes.
Bradley-Hole also reviews the ever-changing palette of plants used in the modernist garden as well as materials and landscape features. A point of reference throughout is the modern art, design, and landscape architecture of the twentieth century, represented by artists and architects including Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Roberto Burle Marx.

For over 50 years between the 1760s and the early 19th century, the pioneers who sailed from Europe to explore the Pacific brought back glimpses of this new world in the form of oil paintings, watercolours and drawings - a sensational view of a part of the world few would ever see. Today these works represent a fascinating and inspiring perspective from the frontier of discovery. It was Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, who popularised the placement of professional artists on British ships of exploration. They captured striking and memorable images of everything they encountered: exotic landscapes, beautiful flora and fauna, as well as remarkable portraits of indigenous peoples. These earliest views of the Pacific, particularly Australia, were designed to promote the new world as enticing, to make it seem familiar, to encourage further exploration and, ultimately, British settlement. Drawing on both private and public collections from around the world, this lavish book collects together oil paintings, watercolours, drawings, prints and other documents from those voyages, and presents a unique glimpse into an age where science and art became irrevocably entwined.

Russell Page, one of the legendary gardeners and landscapers of the twentieth century, designed gardens great and small for clients throughout the world. His memoirs, born of a lifetime of sketching, designing, and working on site, are a mixture of engaging personal reminiscence, keen critical intelligence, and practical know-how. They are not only essential reading for today's gardeners, but a master's compelling reflection on the deep sources and informing principles of his art.
"The Education of a Gardene"r offers charming, sometimes pointed anecdotes about patrons, colleagues, and, of course, gardens, together with lucid advice for the gardener. Page discusses how to plan a garden that draws on the energies of the surrounding landscape, determine which plants will do best in which setting, plant for the seasons, handle color, and combine trees, shrubs, and water features to rich and enduring effect. To read The Education of a Gardener is to wander happily through a variety of gardens in the company of a wise, witty, and knowledgeable friend. It will provide pleasure and insight not only to the dedicated gardener, but to anyone with an interest in abiding questions of design and aesthetics, or who simply enjoys an unusually well-written and thoughtful book.

Robert Brown helps us see that a 'thermally comfortable microclimate' is the very foundation of well-designed and well-used outdoor places. Brown argues that as we try to minimise human-induced changes to the climate and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels - as some areas become warmer, some cooler, some wetter, and some drier, and all become more expensive to regulate - good microclimate design will become increasingly important. In the future, according to Brown, all designers will need to understand climatic issues and be able to respond to their challenges. Brown describes the effects that climate has on outdoor spaces - using vivid illustrations and examples - while providing practical tools that can be used in everyday design practice. The heart of the book is Brown's own design process, as he provides useful guidelines that lead designers clearly through the complexity of climate data, precedents, site assessment, microclimate modification, communication, design, and evaluation. Brown strikes an ideal balance of technical information, anecdotes, examples, and illustrations to keep the book engaging and accessible. His emphasis throughout is on creating microclimates that attend to the comfort, health, and well-being of people, animals, and plants. "Design with Microclimate" is a vital resource for students and practitioners of landscape architecture, architecture, planning, and urban design.

The Good Gardener? Nature, Humanity, and the Garden illuminates both the foundations and after-effects of humanity's deep-rooted impulse to manipulate the natural environment and create garden spaces of diverse kinds. Gardens range from subsistence plots to sites of philosophical speculation, refuge, and self-expression. Gardens may serve as projections of personal or national identity. They may result from individual or collective enterprises. They may shape the fabric of the dwelling house or city. They may be real or imagined, literary constructs or visions of paradise rendered in paint. Some result from a delicate negotiation between creator and medium. Others, in turn, readily reveal the underlying paradox of every garden's creation: the garden, so often viewed as a kinder, gentler, 'second nature, ' results from violence done to what was once wilderness. Designed as a companion volume to Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia, and the Garden, this richly illustrated collection of provocative essays is edited by Annette Giesecke, Professor of Classics at the University of Delaware, and Naomi Jacobs, Professor of English at the University of Maine. Contributors to this wide-ranging volume include photographer Margaret Morton, landscape ethicist Rick Darke, philosopher David Cooper, environmental journalist Emma Marris, and food historian William Rubel.

The Chesapeake region of eastern Virginia and Maryland offers a wealth of evidence for readers and researchers who want to discover what life was like in early America. In this eagerly anticipated volume, Camille Wells, one of the foremost experts on eighteenth-century Virginia architecture, gathers the discoveries unearthed during a career spent studying the buildings and plantations across this geographic area. Drawing on the skills and insights of archaeologists and architectural historians to uncover and make sense of layers of construction and reconstruction, as well as material evidence and records ranging from ceramics, furniture, and textiles to estate inventories and newspaper advertisements, Wells poses meaningful questions about the past and proposes new ways to understand the origins of American society. The research gathered in this cohesive and engaging collection views the wider history of the colonial and early national periods through the lens of lauded as well as previously unrecorded sites in the Tidewater and Piedmont regions. The subjects are equally wide-ranging, from the way domestic architecture articulates problems and possibilities that found forceful expression in the Revolution; to the values and choices made by those who lived in unprepossessing circumstances as well as those who built statement gentry houses intended to dominate the landscape. Other essays address the challenges of discovering historically accurate room functions and furnishings as well as the way Colonial Revival attitudes still dominate much of what is imagined about the early Virginia past. Taken together, these beautifully written and accessible essays will be essential reading for those interested in architecture, material culture, and the ways they reveal the complexities of the nation's history.

Islamic gardens are enchanting places. Just the names of some of the most beautiful gardens in the world - the Alhambra, the Generalife, the Shalimar - conjure up images of calm and even divine beauty. No visitor is left untouched by their magic. This new paperback edition of The Art of the Islamic Garden is an introduction to the design, symbolism and making of an Islamic Garden and it examines that magic, describes the component parts which allow a deeper understanding of the beauty.

Drawing on first-hand accounts of action research in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, The Heart of Community Engagement illustrates the transformative learning journeys of exemplary catalysts for community-based change. Practitioners' stories of community engagement for social justice in the Global South elucidate the moments of insight and transformation that deepened their practice: how to deal with uncertainty, recognize their own blind spots, become aware of what is emergent and possible in the moment, and weave an inclusive bond of love, respect, and purpose. Each successive narrative adds a deeper level of understanding of the inner practice of community engagement. The stories illuminate the reflective, or inner, practice of the outside change agent, whether a planner, designer, participatory action researcher, or community development practitioner. From a shantytown in South Africa, to a rural community in India, or an informal settlement in peri-urban Mexico, the stories focus attention on the greatest leverage point for change that we, as engaged practitioners, have: our own self-awareness. By the end of the book, the practitioners are not only aware of their own conditioned beliefs and assumptions, but have opened their minds and hearts to the complex and dynamic patterns of emergent change that is possible. This book serves as a much-needed reader of practice stories to help instructors and students find the words, concepts, and examples to talk about their own subjective experience of community engagement practice. The book applies some of the leading-edge concepts from organizational development and leadership studies to the fields of planning, design, and community engagement practice. Key concepts include the deep dive of sensing the social field, seeing the whole, and presencing the emergent future. The book also provides a creative bridge between participatory action research and design thinking: user-based design, rapid prototyping, and learning from doing.

For decades, landscape architecture was driven solely by artistic sensibilities. But in these times of global change, the opportunity to reshape the World comes with a responsibility to consider how it can be resilient, fostering health and vitality for humans and nature. Landscape Architecture Theory re-examines the fundamentals of the field, offering a new approach to landscape design. Drawing on his extensive career in teaching and practice, Michael Murphy begins with an examination of influences on landscape architecture: social context, contemporary Mamas, and the practicalities of working as a professional landscape architect. He then delves into systems and procedural theory, while making connections to ecosystem factors, human factors, utility, aesthetics, and the design process. He concludes by showing how a strong theoretical understanding can be applied to practical, every-day decision making and design work to create more holistic, sustainable, and creative landscapes.Students will take away a foundational Understanding of the underpinnings of landscape architecture theory, as well as how it can be applied to heal-world designs; working professionals will find stimulating insights to infuse their projects with a greater sense of purpose.

This book is the first study of the portico and its decorative program as a cultural phenomenon in Renaissance Italy. Focusing on a largely neglected group of porticoes decorated with painted pergolas that appeared in Rome and environs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, it tells the story of how an element of the garden-the pergola-became a pictorial topos in portico decoration, and evolved, hand in hand with its real cousin in the garden, into an object for cultural emulation among the educated patrons of early modern Rome. The liminality of both the portico and the pergola at the interface of architecture and garden is key to the interpretation of these architectural and painted forms, which rests on the intersecting frameworks of the classical tradition, natural history, and the cultural identity of the aristocracy. In the mediating space of the Renaissance portico, the illusionism pergola created an art gallery, a natural history museum, and a virtual garden where one could engage in leisurely strolls, learned conversations, appreciation of art, and scientific investigation, as well as extensive travel across time and space. The book proposes the interpretation that the illusionistic pergola was an artistic formula for the early modern perception of nature.

Situated at the intersection of public realm, urban design and site specific art, Martha Schwartz Partners has over 35 years of experience designing and implementing installations, gardens, civic plazas, parks, institutional landscapes, corporate headquarters, master plans, and urban regeneration projects. MSP works with city leaders, planners and builders at a strategic level so as to advocate for the inclusion of the public landscape as a means to achieve environmental, economic and social sustainability. With offices in London, New York and Shanghai, the practice is engaged in projects and consultation around the globe and has to date worked on projects in over 20 countries and five continents. This monograph is the first publication to document 55 built projects and a selection of master plans by this internationally acclaimed practice.

Well established as a valuable source of reference for architects, landscape architects, professionals and students designin external works. This volume covers water features and offers drawings detailed to scale, unlike many of the other books on the market which only deal in sketch forms.Covers landscape ponds, streams and waterfalls, fountains, edges, bank protection, revetments, dams, weirs and sluices, island rafts and jetties and drainage. Each section begins with technical guidance notes on design and construction. This is followed by a set of drawn-to-scale detail sheets. These details can be traced for direct incorporation into the set of contract drawings. A ready reference for landscape designers and an indispensable time-saving tool, Landscape Detailing is an essential for the design office.