It is more and more evident that our living system is completely disturbed by human intrusion. Such intrusion affects the functioning of entire systems in ways we do not yet fully understand. We use paradigms such as the disturbance to cover large and deep gaps in our scienti?c knowledge. Human ecology is an uncertain terrain for anthropologists, geographers, and ecologists and rarely is expanded to include the social and economic realms. The integration of different disciplines and the application of their many paradigms to problems of environmental complexity remains a distant goal despite the many efforts that have been made to achieve it. Philosophical and semantic barriers are erected when such integration is pursued by pioneering scientists. Recently, evolutionary ecology has shown great interest in the spatial processes well described by the emerging discipline of landscape ecology. But this interest takes the form of pure curiosity or at worst, of skepticism toward the real capacity of landscape ecology to contribute to the advancement of ecological science. The past two centuries have been characterized by huge changes occurring in the entire ecosphere. Global changes are the effects of human intervention at a planetary scale, with consequent degradation of the environment creating an e- logical debt for future generations. On the other side of the issue, new technologies have improved the welfare of billions of people and have given hope to many other billions that they may also see such improvement in the near future.

Since the Garden of Eden, humanity has been concerned with shelter. Yet housing means different things to different people. This work is a comprehensive, historical reference guide that reviews housing concepts and issues. It introduces the reader to the current body of literature and seminal work in housing from a multidisciplinary perspective. The nature of the topic is multifaceted, fragmented, and demanding of serious study from diverse disciplines-this study spans the broad domains of housing knowledge in architectural history and theory; environment and behavior; design process and methods; and building and environmental technology. The book begins with a discussion of vernacular housing and American culture and makes the case that dwellings reflect the people of different regions, materials, techniques, and design traditions of an earlier time. The history of American housing is reviewed with biographies and bibliographies, setting the stage for the environmental and social science perspective of housing. Residential environments are then considered in the broad sense of home and housing. Neighborhood and community are examined with a special focus on people, behavior, and the physical setting. The arts and popular media chapter presents American popular housing as image and icon, focusing on the arts and popular media as channels of visual and symbolic information or communication. These channels include painting, prints, pattern books, photography, music, film, television and video, literature, how-to manuals, and newspapers and magazines. Taking a macro-level perspective, direct and indirect programs of public administration and policy for housing are discussed. Then, the complex systems of financing, and the prevalance and mechanisms for matching buyers with sellers is considered in the chapter that considers housing finance, marketing, economics and management. The chapter on environmental design, construction process, and technology reviews the professional disciplines and their perspectives on housing, special populations and accessibility needs, descriptions of building trades, terms, materials, construction processes and past industrial housing experiments, as well as issues of energy management, computer technology, futuristic housing, air quality and household hazards. Using current technology to conduct research, the final chapter breaks from the conventional ways of locating hard-copy, copyrighted references to a seemingly endless potential of electronic communication systems such as data tapes; on-line databases; other electronic databases; electronic mail; listserves, chat, and on-line communities; libraries; on-line electronic texts; software; and news and journals including electronic journals.

Postmodern architecture - with its return to ornamentality, historical quotation, and low-culture kitsch - has long been seen as a critical and popular anodyne to the worst aspects of modernist architecture: glass boxes built in urban locales as so many interchangeable, generic anti-architectural cubes and slabs. This book extends this debate beyond the modernist/postmodernist rivalry to situate postmodernism as an already superseded concept that has been upended by deconstructionist and virtual architecture as well as the continued turn toward the use of theming in much new public and corporate space. It investigates architecture on the margins of postmodernism -- those places where both architecture and postmodernism begin to break down and to reveal new forms and new relationships. The book examines in detail not only a wide range of architectural phenomena such as theme parks, casinos, specific modernist and postmodernist buildings, but also interrogates architecture in relation to identity, specifically Native American and gay male identities, as they are reflected in new notions of the built environment. In dealing specifically with the intersection between postmodern architecture and virtual and filmic definitions of space, as well as with theming, and gender and racial identities, this book provides provides ground-breaking insights not only into postmodern architecture, but into spatial thinking in general.

** This title was originally published in 2007. The version published in 2012 is a PB reprint of the original HB** The protection of natural resources and biodiversity through protected areas is increasingly based on ecological principles. Simultaneously the concept of ecosystem-based management has become broadly accepted and implemented over the last two decades. However, this period has also seen unprecedented rapid global social and ecological change, which has weakened many protection efforts.These changes have created an awareness of opportunities for innovative approaches to managing protected areas and of the need to integrate social and economic concerns with ecological elements in protected areas and parks management. A rare collection of articles that fuses academic theory, critique of practice and practical knowledge, Transforming Parks and Protected Areas analyzes and critiques these theories, practices, and philosophies, looking in-detail at the emerging issues in the design and operation of parks and protected areas. Addressing critical dynamics and current practices in parks and protected areas management, the excellent volume goes well beyond simple managerial solutions and descriptions of standard practice. With contributions from leading academics and practitioners, this book will be of value to all those working within ecology, natural resources, conservation and parks management as well as students and academics across the environmental sciences and land use management.

This book presents a set of new and innovative essays on landscape and garden culture in precolonial India, with a special focus on the Deccan. Most research to date has concentrated on the comparatively well preserved gardens and built landscapes of the celebrated Mughal empire, giving the impression that they have been lacking in other times and regions. Not only does this volume provide a corrective to such assumptions, it also moves away from traditional art-historical approaches by posing new questions and exploring hitherto neglected source materials.

The contributors understand gardens in two related ways: first as real or imagined spaces and manipulated landscapes that are often invested with pronounced semiotic density; and second as congeries of institutions and practices with far-reaching social ramifications for the constitution of elite societies. The essays here present a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of garden culture in precolonial India, and together suggest several new and exciting directions of enquiry for those working in the Deccan, Mughal India, and beyond.

A new facsimile edition of a classic work on New York’s architectural masterpiece—Central Park Central Park receives millions of visitors every year, tourists and locals alike. A Description of the New York Central Park, published in 1869, is recognized today as the most important book about the park to appear during its early years. The lively, often wry, text was written by Clarence C. Cook, a distinguished Victorian art critic, while the illustrations were drawn by the popular Albert Fitch Bellows. The author and artist examine many sites in the park that survive to this day as well as features that have vanished over time. In a new Introduction, Maureen Meister reveals how the book came about. In the mid-1860s, the park’s designers, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, were battling to defend their plan. Of greatest concern was a proposal to build ornate entrances, suggestive of French imperialism. If realized, the gates would have undermined the park’s natural and democratic image. At the same time, the park was threatened by a proliferation of monuments. Meister tells how Olmsted and Vaux advised Cook on what he wrote, and she has found evidence to suggest that they initiated the book’s publication. This book is their book. While the original volume offers much to delight the modern reader, Meister’s Introduction sheds light on how the book served a greater purpose. It was published to champion Olmsted and Vaux and to advocate for their vision—a dream for a magnificent public park that has come to be regarded as New York City’s achievement and a model for the nation.

Examines the general problems of designing and constructing sites for buildings. Coverage includes: site construction and planning, placing buildings on sites, landscape planning, drainage, site traffic for vehicles and pedestrians, parking, lighting, handicap facilities and much more.

Like their penchant for clubs, cricket, and hunting, the planting of English gardens by the British in India reflected an understandable need on the part of expatriates to replicate home as much as possible in an alien environment. In "Flora's Empire," Eugenia W. Herbert argues that more than simple nostalgia or homesickness lay at the root of this "garden imperialism," however. Drawing on a wealth of period illustrations and personal accounts, many of them little known, she traces the significance of gardens in the long history of British relations with the subcontinent. To British eyes, she demonstrates, India was an untamed land that needed the visible stamp of civilization that gardens in their many guises could convey.Colonial gardens changed over time, from the "garden houses" of eighteenth-century nabobs modeled on English country estates to the herbaceous borders, gravel walks, and well-trimmed lawns of Victorian civil servants. As the British extended their rule, they found that hill stations like Simla offered an ideal retreat from the unbearable heat of the plains and a place to coax English flowers into bloom. Furthermore, India was part of the global network of botanical exploration and collecting that gathered up the world's plants for transport to great imperial centers such as Kew. And it is through colonial gardens that one may track the evolution of imperial ideas of governance. Every Government House and Residency was carefully landscaped to reflect current ideals of an ordered society. At Independence in 1947 the British left behind a lasting legacy in their gardens, one still reflected in the design of parks and information technology campuses and in the horticultural practices of home gardeners who continue to send away to England for seeds.

'Charming - a love-letter to home, history, and nature.' LEAH BROAD, Author of Quartet 'A tender and illuminating history of an overlooked world.' HORATIO CLARE 'Truly a revelation on every page.' PETROC TRELAWNY 'A richly textured book, replete with illuminating discoveries and observations.' COUNTRY LIFE 'A wide-ranging meditation on place and past.' LITERARY REVIEW Gavin considered himself an urban being... until he met his husband, Alastair. Together, they bought Stepps House in Pembridge, Herefordshire - on love at first sight. But then came the question: 'How old is it?' With its ancient beams, the date they'd been given seemed out by centuries. As Gavin traced Stepps House through various hands and eras, he saw a past emerge that resonates powerfully with our present. Mixing history and art, memoir and landscape, A Home for All Seasons is grand in its sweep and intimate in its account of rural life.

This study examines how nineteenth-century industrial Lancashire became a leading national and international art centre. By the end of the century almost every major town possessed an art gallery, while Lancashire art schools and artists were recognised at home and abroad. The book documents the remarkable rise of visual art across the county, along with the rise of the commercial and professional classes who supported it. It examines how Lancashire looked to great civilisations of the past for inspiration while also embracing new industrial technologies and distinctively modern art movements. This volume will be essential reading for all those with an interest in the new industrial society of the nineteenth century, from art lovers and collectors to urban and social historians. -- .

Highly visual and containing contributions from leading names in landscape, architecture and design, this volume provides a rare insight into people's engagement with the outdoor environment; looking at the ways in which the design of spaces and places meets people's needs and desires in the twenty-first century. Embracing issues of social inclusion, recreation, and environmental quality, the editors explore innovative ways to develop an understanding of how the landscape, urban or rural, can contribute to health and quality of life. Open Space: People Space examines the nature and value of people's access to outdoor environments. Led by Edinburgh's OPENspace research centre, the debate focuses on current research to support good design for open space and brings expertise from a range of disciplines to look at: an analysis of policy and planning issues and challenges understanding the nature and experience of exclusion the development of evidence-based inclusive design innovative research approaches which focus on people's access to open space and the implications of that experience. Invaluable to policy makers, researchers, urban designers, landscape architects, planners, managers and students, it is also essential reading for those working in child development, health care and community development.

Specifically written for contractors and small businesses carrying out small works, this second edition of Spon's Estimating Cost Guide to Small Groundworks, Landscaping Work and Gardening contains accurate information on thousands of rates, each broken down to labour, material overheads and profit.
This is the first book to focus on this range of external work, including garden maintenance work on blocks of flats and individual houses, schools and sports fields, garden makeovers, laying patios and paths, small land drainage schemes on farmland, and small-scale local authority maintenance work.

Although the integration of sculpture in gardens is part of a long tradition dating back at least to antiquity, the sculptures themselves are often overlooked, both in the history of art and in the history of the garden. This collection of essays considers the changing relationship between sculpture and gardens over the last three centuries, focusing on four British archetypes: the Georgian landscape garden, the Victorian urban park, the outdoor spaces of twentieth-century modernism and the late-twentieth-century sculpture park. Through a series of case studies exploring the contemporaneous audiences of gardens, the book uncovers the social, political and gendered messages revealed by sculpture's placement and suggests that the garden can itself be read as a sculptural landscape.

Experiential Landscape offers new ways of looking at the relationship between people and the outdoor open spaces they use in their everyday lives. The book takes a holistic view of the relationship between humans and their environment, integrating experiential and spatial dimensions of the outdoors, and exploring the theory and application of environmental design disciplines, most notably landscape architecture and urban design. The book explores specific settings in which an experiential approach has been applied, setting out a vocabulary and methods of application, and offers new readings of experiential characteristics in site analysis and design. Offering readers a range of accessible mapping tools and details of what participative approaches mean in practice, this is a new, innovative and practical methodology. The book provides an invaluable resource for students, academics and practitioners and anyone seeking reflective but practical guidance on how to approach outdoor place-making or the analysis and design of everyday outdoor places.

This charming volume presents a rare opportunity to view the gardens of Meiji Japan from the inside, as seen through the eyes of an official of the Imperial Household in 1928. In Japan, the garden is considered a barometer of the nation's prosperity and character, and different periods in history have produced different kinds of gardens. Harada gives brief summaries of them all, including the Edo period (1603-1867), when professional gardeners first took over the design of gardens from priests, and reveals a few of the subtle distinctions that the Japanese use to distinguish between different kinds of gardens that appear identical to Western eyes. As a reaction to all things foreign, the gardens of the Meiji Restoration period (1868-1912), revived the earlier simpler "cha-no-yu" style of garden heavily influenced by Zen. Rare period photographs of famous parks and the now vanished gardens of Japanese aristocrats show gardens in a more naturalistic style than is common in Japan today.

This book offers an in-depth look at how changing ideas of what nature is and what it means for the United States, have been represented in buildings and landscapes over the past century.

The word "nature" comes from natura, Latin for birth - as do the words nation, native and innate. But nature and nation share more than a common root, they share a common history where one term has been used to define the other. In the United States, the relationship between nation and nature has been central to its colonial and post-colonial history, from the idea of the noble savage to the myth of the frontier. Narrated, painted and filmed, American landscapes have been central to the construction of a national identity.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203402030

The book when it first appeared was also well received by "House and Garden Architecture Forum" and "Landscape Architecture." "The handsome book will be a joy to possess for those who love beauty in architecture and cultivated nature," so wrote Pearl S. Buck. In 1940 Henry Inn of Honolulu, art collector, designer, and photographer, produced a collection of Chinese architectural pictures that is extraordinary.

Although probably the only record of its kind, many of the photographs were taken as recently as 1936. Of those locations very few remain if any. A veteran traveller to his ancestral homeland, Henry In had an extraordinarily wide set of acquaintances which gave him an entrance into some of the choicest homes and gardens throughout China. This combination of artistic shell and unusual opportunity are unique.

This professional reference covers in detail the specification of landscape works, giving descriptions, illustrations and standard clauses for the entire range of landscaping operations. It provides a back-up to "Spon's Landscape and External Works Price Book", and the new edition has been linked even more closely to both this and the new edition of "Spon's Landscape Contract Manual".

Britain's landscape, the product both of natural geological processes and some 10,000 years of human habitation, has a uniquely rich historical diversity. In "The Landscape of Britain," Michael Reed explains the forces at work in the evolution of the landscape, pointing out examples of surviving evidence from the past.
The landscape of late twentieth-century Britain is the end product of human effort directed not only towards satisfying basic physical needs for food and shelter, but also towards expressing profound spiritual and intellectual aspirations, whether by means of burial mounds or churches, schools or monasteries. This volume examines the endless processes of accretion which have created the urban and rural landscapes as today's inhabitants have inherited them, showing how each generation makes its own individual contribution without being able entirely to erase those of its predecessors, however remote or distant in time.

This wonderful resource for homeowners and landscapers is packed with fences and gates of every kind and description. Examples made of various metals, wood, masonry, stone, and concrete are all included. Styles run the gamut from the simplest to the most ornate, from practical and functional to purely ornamental, from rustic to sophisticated, from unusual to inspired. Ideas abound for enclosing entire properties, garden areas, or pools -- all with a creative flair that will set your home apart from others. For added interest, fences and gates used at famous homes and places of interest are also featured. Use this book to dream, to plan, to create... to enjoy!

Offers a new approach to landscape perception.This book is an extended photographic essay about topographic features of the landscape. It integrates philosophical approaches to landscape perception with anthropological studies of the significance of the landscape in small-scale societies. This perspective is used to examine the relationship between prehistoric sites and their topographic settings. The author argues that the architecture of Neolithic stone tombs acts as a kind of camera lens focussing attention on landscape features such as rock outcrops, river valleys, mountain spurs in their immediate surroundings. These monuments played an active role in socializing the landscape and creating meaning in it.A Phenomenology of Landscape is unusual in that it links two types of publishing which have remained distinct in archaeology: books with atmospheric photographs of monuments with a minimum of text and no interpretation; and the academic text in which words provide a substitute for visual imagery. Attractively illustrated with many photographs and diagrams, it will appeal to anyone interested in prehistoric monuments and landscape as well as students and specialists in archaeology, anthropology and human geography. 'Reception, perception and interpretation are key to understanding landscapes. This book provides a useful starting point for comprehension of these topics.'Dr. Stuart Prior, University of Bristol

Sports grounds are valuable assets which need to be constructed and maintained properly for the particular sport or sports they serve in order that they perform consistently well. This detailed, practical guide provides information on the construction and maintenance of sports grounds. In part one, the text explores the extent to which games differ in their requirements and how these various requirements can be met by growing grass in natural, modified or specifically constructed soils. Drainage design and choice of materials are first explored theoretically, but this then leads on to a relatively simple, cost effective approach to design, based on careful choice of a limited range of precisely defined but readily available materials. In the second part, the general principles are applied to specific examples of modern construction, described in detail sufficient to form the basis of actual specifications. The examples cover the construction and maintenance of grass pitches suitable for vigorous winter games such as rugby and soccer, contrasted with construction for golf and bowls where the nature of the game requires fine turf. Hockey and cricket are treated as games somewhat inte

Reveals new and previously unknown biographical material about an important figure in 19th-century American architecture and music Jacob Wrey Mould is not a name that readily comes to mind when we think of New York City architecture. Yet he was one-third of the party responsible for the early development of Central Park in New York. To this day, his sculptural reliefs, tile work, and structures in the Park enthrall visitors. Mould introduced High Victorian architecture to NYC, his fingerprint most pronounced in his striking and colorful ornamental designs and beautiful embellishments found in the carved decorations and mosaics at the Bethesda Terrace. Resurfacing the forgotten contributions of Mould, Hell on Color, Sweet on Song presents a study of this 19th-century American architect and musical genius. Jacob Wrey Mould, whose personal history included a tie to Africa, was born in London in 1825 and trained there as an architect before moving to New York in 1852. The following year, he received the commission to design All Souls Unitarian Church. Nicknamed "the Church of the Holy Zebra," it was the first building in America to display the mix of colorful materials and Medieval Italian inspiration that were characteristic of High Victorian Gothic architecture. In addition to being an architect and designer, Mould was an accomplished musician and prolific translator of opera librettos. Yet anxiety over money and resentment over lack of appreciation of his talents soured Mould's spirit. Unsystematic, impractical, and immune from maturity, he displayed a singular indifference to the realities of architecture as a commercial enterprise. Despite his personal shortcomings, he influenced the design of some of NYC's revered landmarks, including Sheepfold, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, the City Hall Park fountain, and the Morningside Park promenade. From 1875-1879, he worked for Henry Meiggs, the "Yankee Pizarro," in Lima, Peru. Resting on the foundation of Central Park Docent Lucille Gordon's heroic efforts to raise from obscurity one of the geniuses of American architecture and a significant contributor to the world of music in his time, Hell on Color, Sweet on Song sheds new light on a forgotten genius of American architecture and music. Funding for this book was provided by: Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund