Almost, Not: The Architecture of Atelier Nishikata is the story of a remarkable architecture practice in Tokyo. Partners Reiko Nishio and Hirohito Ono have built just four residential works, until now remaining little-known outside of Japan. But the extraordinary, almost-ordinary quality of their work warrants the spotlight. It has much to teach students of architecture and experienced architects alike. This book is a hybrid between an architectural monograph and a magic instruction book. Author Leslie Van Duzer, a former magician's assistant and author of four monographs on 20th-century architecture, draws parallels between the effects and methods of architects and magicians. The introductory essay, "Almost, Not," presents an overview of Atelier Nishikata's approach, describing the effects engendered by their architecture and the methods behind the them. The essay is followed by four detailed project descriptions that elaborate on the strategies behind the work. These texts are richly illustrated with process work, diagrams, detailed drawings, and photographs, including before and after views of the renovated spaces, and views post-inhabitation. The volume closes with a lengthy interview with the architects to help flesh out the methods behind their madness.

If this were a novel, the tales of astounding wealth, sexual perversion, murder, munificence, rape, insanity, brutality, slavery, religious mania, selfishness, snobbery, charity, suicide, generosity, theft, madness, wickedness, failure and eccentricity which unfold in these pages would be too concentrated to allow for the willing suspension of disbelief. All these sins and virtues, and more, are displayed by the characters in this book, some exhibiting several of them simultaneously. Folly builders were not as we are. They never built what we now call follies. They built for beauty, utility, improvement; it is only we, struggling after them with our imperfect understanding, who dismiss their prodigious constructions as follies. Follies can be found around the world, but England is their spiritual home. Having written the definitive books on follies in Great Britain, Benelux and the USA, Headley & Meulenkamp have turned their attention to the folly builders themselves, people so blinded by fashion or driven by some nameless ideology that they expended great fortunes on making their point in brick, stone and flint. Most follies are simply misunderstood buildings, and this book studies the motives, characters, decisions and delusions of their builders. If there was madness in their building, fortunately there was no method in it.

Lavishly illustrated with over 470 images - 129 of them in color, this book reveals Frederick Law Olmsted's design concepts for more than seventy public park projects through a rich collection of sketches, studies, lithographs, paintings, historical photographs, and comprehensive descriptions. Bringing together Olmsted's most significant parks, parkways, park systems, and scenic reservations, this gorgeous volume takes readers on a uniquely conceived tour of such notable landscapes as Central Park, Prospect Park, the Buffalo Park and Parkway System, Washington Park and Jackson Park in Chicago, Boston's "Emerald Necklace," and Mount Royal in Montreal, Quebec. No such guide to Olmsted's parks has ever been published. Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) planned many parks and park systems across the United States, leaving an enduring legacy of designed public space that is enjoyed and defended today. His public parks, the design of which he was most proud, have had a lasting effect on urban America. This gorgeous book will appeal to landscape professionals, park administrators, historians, architects, city planners, and students-and it is a perfect gift for Olmsted aficionados throughout North America.

This title features a stunning array of residential design, from a simple cottage on a remote island to a luxurious home set in a spectacular landscape. The private homes featured in Paradise Found boast a rich variety of different architecture and interior styles, but they all share a similar spirit. Fusing traditional European design with Asian, African, and Caribbean influences, the resulting unique homes reflect a keen sense of style. Featuring full colour photography, Paradise Found visits a selection of glorious houses and hideaways that are guaranteed to enchant and inspire.

The World of Andre Le Notre Thierry Mariage. Translated by Graham Larkin "A stimulating effort to contextualize Le Notre's career and to relate the 'French formal garden' to the cultural and political environment of Louis XIV's reign."--"French History" "This ambitious book is intellectually significant, well researched, and cogently presented. . . . Excellent."--"Geographical Reviews" "A substantial contribution to the study of seventeenth-century French garden practice."--"Landscape Architecture" The gardens of Versailles--along with the name of their chief creator, Andre Le Notre (1613-1700)--have become synonymous with the French style of "formal" garden. This style in its turn would succumb to another "national" mode, the English school of naturalistic and picturesque landscapes. But as Thierry Mariage makes clear, the garden style that Le Notre brought to perfection need not be seen in opposition to the later "English" one. Rather, he claims, they represent two points along a continuum that exists between the natural and cultural worlds. Published originally in Belgium as "L'univers de Le Nostre," Mariage's examination of Le Notre moves beyond traditional art historical documentation and appreciation into a realm of interpretation. He situates Le Notre's garden art in a complex social and cultural world, where the practices of land management, surveying techniques and hydrology, military practice, and both scientific and literary perspectives on land use and experience brought into being a unique form of landscape architecture. His analysis opens up the fashion in which design techniques and garden philosophy are shaped by material culture. Thierry Mariage is Architect for National and Historical Monuments, in charge of Versailles Museum, Park, and Gardens. Graham Larkin is Curator of European and American Art at the National Gallery of Canada. Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture 1998 168 pages 7 x 10 38 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-2136-7 Paper $26.50s 17.50 World Rights Architecture Short copy: Mariage's examination of Andre Le Notre moves beyond traditional art historical documentation and appreciation into a realm of interpretation. He situates Le Notre garden art in a complex social and cultural world.

How can we achieve and promote well-being? Drawing on examples from the arts, humanities and design, this book brings together work from a wide range of areas to reveal the unique ways in which different disciplines approach the universal goal of supporting well-being. Pathways to Well-Being in Design recognises that the distinction between academics and practitioners often becomes blurred, where, when working together, a fusion of thoughts and ideas takes place and provides a powerful platform for dialogue. Providing new insights into the approaches and issues associated with promoting well-being, the book's multi-disciplinary coverage invites readers to consider these ideas within the framework of their own work. The book's 12 chapters are authored by academics who are involved in practice or are working with practitioners and features real world case studies which cover a range of situations, circumstances, environments, and social groups. Pathways to Well-Being in Design responds to those wishing to enquire further about well-being, taking the reader through different circumstances to consider approaches, discussing practice and theory, real world and virtual world considerations. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand well-being, including students and professionals in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, design and health sciences.

While we all live our lives in designed landscapes of various types, only on occasion do we consider what these landscapes mean to us and how they have acquired that significance. Can a landscape architect or garden designer really imbue new settings with meaning, or does meaning evolve over time, created by those who perceive and use these landscapes? What role does the selection and arrangement of plants and hard materials play in this process and just where does the passage of time enter into the equation?

These questions collectively provide the core material for Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens, a compendium of four landmark essays written over a period of twenty years by leading scholars in the field of landscape architecture. New commentaries by the authors accompany each of the essays and reflect on the thinking behind them as well as the evolution of the author 's thoughts since their original publication.

Although the central theme of these writings is landscape architecture broadly taken, the principal subject of several essays and commentaries is the garden, a subject historically plentiful in allusions and metaphors. As a whole Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens offers the general reader as well as the professional a rich source of ideas about the designed landscape and the ways by which we perceive, consider, react, and dwell within them and what they mean to us.

The essays have been perennial favorites in landscape courses since their original publication in Landscape Journal. Bringing them together bolstered by the new commentaries creates a book valuable to all those creating gardens and landscapes, as well as those teaching and studying these subjects.

Build a natural pond for wildlife, beauty, and quiet contemplation Typical backyard ponds are a complicated mess of pipes, pumps, filters, and nasty chemicals designed to adjust pH and keep algae at bay. Hardly the bucolic, natural ecosystem beloved by dragonflies, frogs, and songbirds. The antidote is a natural pond, free of hassle, cost, and complexity and designed as a fully functional ecosystem, ideal for biodiversity, swimming, irrigation, and quiet contemplation. Building Natural Ponds is the first step-by-step guide to designing and building natural ponds that use no pumps, filters, chemicals, or electricity and mimic native ponds in both aesthetics and functionality. Highly illustrated with how-to drawings and photographs, coverage includes: Understanding pond ecosystems and natural algae control Planning, design, siting, and pond aesthetics Step-by-step guidance for construction, plants and fish, and maintenance and trouble shooting Scaling up to large ponds, pools, bogs, and rain gardens. Whether you're a backyard gardener looking to add a small serene natural water feature or a homesteader with visions of a large pond for fish, swimming, and irrigation, Building Natural Ponds is the complete guide to building ponds in tune with nature, where plants, insects, and amphibians thrive in blissful serenity. Robert Pavlis , a Master Gardener with over 40 years of gardening experience, is owner and developer of Aspen Grove Gardens, a six-acre botanical garden featuring over 2,500 varieties of plants. A well-respected speaker and teacher, Robert has published articles in Mother Earth News , Ontario Gardening magazine, the widely read blog GardenMyths.com, which explodes common gardening myths and gardening information site GardenFundamentals.com.

The Singing Crane Garden in northwest Beijing has a history dense with classical artistic vision, educational experimentation, political struggle, and tragic suffering. Built by the Manchu prince Mianyu in the mid-nineteenth century, the garden was intended to serve as a refuge from the clutter of daily life near the Forbidden City. In 1860, during the Anglo-French war in China, the garden was destroyed. One hundred years later, in the 1960s, the garden served as the "ox pens," where dissident university professors were imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution. Peaceful Western involvement began in 1986, when ground was broken for the Arthur Sackler Museum of Art and Archaeology. Completed in 1993, the museum and the Jillian Sackler Sculpture Garden stand on the same grounds today. In Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden, Vera Schwarcz gives voice to this richly layered corner of China's cultural landscape. Drawing upon a range of sources from poetry to painting, Schwarcz retells the garden's complex history in her own poetic and personal voice. In her exploration of cultural survival, trauma, memory, and place, she reveals how the garden becomes a vehicle for reflection about history and language. Encyclopedic in conception and artistic in execution, Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden is a powerful work that shows how memory and ruins can revive the spirit of individuals and cultures alike.

One of the functions of Louis XIV's Versailles was to provide a setting for the receptions of ambassadors, heads of state, and other visiting dignitaries who conducted diplomatic and political business with France. These activities became particularly important after Versailles was proclaimed the new seat of the monarchy and government in 1682."Diplomatic Tours in the Gardens of Versailles Under Louis XIV" is the first book to examine how the vast gardens of Versailles were used for these diplomatic receptions during the reign of the Sun King (1661-1715). The gardens were the final mise en scene of an elaborate ritual, which included the housing of the foreigners in Paris, their journey to Versailles, and their official audience with the king in the palace. A showcase for the achievements of royal artists, landscape architects, and hydraulic engineers, the gardens were soon regarded as one of the wonders of the modern world, proclaiming the wealth, power, and artistic taste of France and the French monarchy.The diplomatic tours were programmed every step of the way, with trained guides leading their guests on prescribed itineraries. Beginning in 1689, the king himself drafted a series of comprehensive itineraries, collectively called the "Maniere de montrer les jardins de Versailles," for the use of his guides (a newly discovered version of the "Maniere" appears for the first time in this book). These itineraries changed over the years in concert with modifications and additions to the gardens, attesting to a constant search for an ideal itinerary--a subtheme of "Diplomatic Tours."

Ornamental Lakes traces the history of lakes in England, from their appearance in the early eighteenth century, through their development in the 1750s, and finally to their decline in the nineteenth century. Aside from the natural lakes in the Lake District, the bodies of water we see in England today are man-made, primarily intended to ornament the landscapes of the upper classes. Through detailed research, author Wendy Bishop argues that, contrary to accepted thinking, the development of lakes led to the dissolution of formal landscapes rather than following changes in landscape design. Providing a comprehensive overview of lakes in England, including data on who made these lakes, how, and when, it additionally covers fishponds, water gardens, cascades and reservoirs. Richly illustrated and accompanied by case studies across the region, this book offers new insights in landscape history for students, researchers and those interested in how landscapes evolve.

Medici Gardens: From Making to Design challenges the common assumption that such gardens as Trebbio, Cafaggiolo, Careggi, and Fiesole were the products of an established design practice whereby one client commissioned one architect or artist. The book reverses the usual belief that a garden is the practical application of theoretical principles extracted from garden treatises, and suggests that, in the case of the gardens in Florence, garden making preceded its theoretical articulation. Drawing from Medici tax returns, inventories, and correspondence, Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto examines the transformation of these gardens from functional and pleasurable kitchen gardens to symbols of political power and family prestige. The Medici gardens of the fifteenth century were the result both of everyday living and of a poetic activity that was influenced by cultural expectations and societal demands. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, the author compares the making of actual gardens to that of the literary pleasances described by Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ficino. Although the fictional gardens appear "designed" in that their place within literary works is carefully thought through, their actual counterparts are the product of a modus operandi, indebted to horticultural knowledge handed down from one generation to another in a slowly evolving tradition.

Ecology of Fire-Dependent Ecosystems is brimming with intriguing ecological stories of how life has evolved with and diversified within the varied fire regimes that are experienced on earth. Moreover, the book places itself as a communication between students, fire scientists, and fire fighters, and each of these groups will find some familiar ground, and some challenging aspects in this text: something which ultimately will help to bring us closer together and enrich our different approaches to understanding and managing our changing planet. -- Sally Archibald, Professor, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Most textbooks are as dry as kindling and about as much fun to sink your teeth into. This is not that kind of textbook. Devan Allen McGranahan and Carissa L. Wonkka have taken a complex topic and somehow managed to synthesize it into a comprehensive, yet digestible form. This is a book you can read cover to cover - I know, I did it. As a result, I took an enlightening journey through the history and fundamentals of fire and its role in the natural and human world, ending with a thoughtful review of the evolving relationship between humans and wildland fire. -- Chris Helzer, Nebraska Director of Science, The Nature Conservancy, and author of The Prairie Ecologist blog Ecology of Fire-Dependent Ecosystems: Wildland Fire Science, Policy, and Management is intended for use in upper-level courses in fire ecology and wildland fire management and as a reference for researchers, managers, and other professionals involved with wildland fire science, practice, and policy. The book helps guide students and scientists to design and conduct robust wildland fire research projects and critically interpret and apply fire science in any management, education, or policy situation. It emphasizes variability in wildland fire as an ecological regime and provides tools for students, researchers, and managers to assess and connect fire environment and fire behaviour to fire effects. Fire has not only shaped social and ecological communities but pushed ecosystems beyond previous boundaries, yet understanding the nature and effects of fire as an ecological disturbance has been slow, hampered by the complexity of the dynamic interactions between vegetation and climate and the fear of the destruction fire can bring. This book will help those who study, manage, and use wildland fire to develop new answers and novel solutions, based on an understanding of how fire functions in natural and social environments. It reviews literature, synthesizes concepts, and identifies research gaps and policy needs. The text also explores the interaction of fire and human culture, demonstrating how fire policy can be made adaptable to cultural and socio-ecological objectives.

This volume presents the discipline 's best thinking on sustainability in written, drawn, and built form, drawing on over fifteen years of peer-reviewed essays and national design awards published by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA).

Providing a primer on sustainability, useful to teachers and students alike, the selected essays address a broad range of issues. Combined with design projects that highlight issues holistically, they promote an understanding of the principles of sustainability and further the integration of sustainable methods into architectural projects.

Using essays that alternately revise and clarify twentieth century architectural thinking, The Green Braid places sustainability at the centre of excellent architectural design. No other volume addresses sustainability within the context of architectural history, theory, pedagogy and design, making this book an ideal source for architects in framing their practices, and therefore their architectural production, in a sustainable manner.

Celebrated landscape architect Gilles Clement may be best known for his public parks in Paris, including the Parc Andre Citroen and the garden of the Musee du Quai Branly, but he describes himself as a gardener. To care for and cultivate a plot of land, a capable gardener must observe in order to act and work with, rather than against, the natural ecosystem of the garden. In this sense, he suggests, we should think of the entire planet as a garden, and ourselves as its keepers, responsible for the care of its complexity and diversity of life. "The Planetary Garden" is an environmental manifesto that outlines Clement's interpretation of the laws that govern the natural world and the principles that should guide our stewardship of the global garden of Earth. These are among the tenets of a humanist ecology, which posits that the natural world and humankind cannot be understood as separate from one another. This philosophy forms a thread that is woven through the accompanying essays of this volume: "Life, Constantly Inventive: Reflections of a Humanist Ecologist" and "The Wisdom of the Gardener." Brought together and translated into English for the first time, these three texts make a powerful statement about the nature of the world and humanity's place within it.

Elwes takes a journey through the twin histories of landscape art and experimental moving image and discovers how they coalesce in the work of artists from the 1970s to the present day. Drawing on a wide geographical sampling, Elwes considers issues that have preoccupied film and video artists over the years, ranging from ecology, gender, race, performativity, conflict, colonialism and our relationship to the nonhuman creatures with whom we share our world. The book is informed by the belief that artists can provide an embodied, emotional response to landscape, which is an essential driver in the urgent task of combating the environmental crisis we now face. The book comprises a series of essays that explore how the moving image mediates our relationship to and understanding of landscapes. The focus is on artists’ film and video and draws on work from the 1970s to the present day. Early chapters map the theoretical terrain for both landscape and artists’ moving image creating a foundation for the chapters that follow devoted to practice. These address themes of identity politics, performativity and animals and examine examples of British ‘weather-blown films’ and work from around the world including Indigenous Australian film landscapes. The book offers an informed, personal view of the subject and threaded through the narrative is a concern with the environment and the vexed question of whether an appreciation of nature’s aesthetics undermines a commitment to ecology. The book is written in a clear, engaging style and is enlivened by Elwes's own experiences as a video artist, writer and curator, and the primary material she draws on derived from conversations with fellow practitioners across the years. As a practitioner, Elwes was a key figure in the early phases of video art in the UK as well as a curator and critic. She was professor of moving image art at the University of the Arts London; and is founding editor of the Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ) This book will appeal to students, undergraduate and post-graduate, Ph.D. candidates, researchers, practitioners, teachers and lecturers and a general readership of interested gallery-going public.

Known internationally as the epitome of the classic English country garden, it is perhaps less well known that Hidcote's creator was an enigmatic American. Lawrence Johnston, an expatriate and one of the so-called "Henry James Americans," a pedigreed member of old New York, left no diaries or significant correspondence. What he did leave, however, is a garden that continues to inspire horticulturists, gardening enthusiasts, and everyone who appreciates the beauty of nature. First published in 1989, the book was the first biography of Johnston; for this revised and enlarged edition Clarke, the author of 15 books on landscape history and gardening, has collected much new, original material that illuminates the creation of the garden and presents Johnston's life in the context of the period that set the seal on England's preeminence in garden design and plantsmanship.

Design-Build provides everything you need to know about how to embark on a design-build project within a studio or professional practice setting. Design-build models have increased across academic programs worldwide, allowing students to address the real-world challenges of working in the community using a participatory design process. In practice, they offer a full partnership between the designer and builder to elevate design concepts and reduce project costs. Written by an experienced practitioner and educator, this book offers contextual background on the development of the design-build model in pedagogy and practice, guidance from inception to conclusion for classroom and field usage, discussions on the shift to community-engaged design and inspirational examples from international case studies. Illustrated in full color throughout, it looks at structuring a design-build firm, best-practice, efficiency and the limitations of design-build as a practice model. This is the fundamental guidebook for those interested in developing or working for a design-build professional practice, academics leading design-build programs and students interested in social and environmental justice, education, and practice through a design-build model.

Pairs is a student-led journal at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) dedicated to conversations about design that are down to earth and unguarded. Each issue is conceptualized by an editorial team-including GSD students-that proposes guests and objects to be in dialogue with one another. Pairs is non-thematic, meant instead for provisional thoughts and ideas in progress. Each issue seeks to organize diverse threads and concerns that are perceived to be relevant to our moment. Thus, Pairs creates a space for understanding and a greater degree of exchange, both between the design disciplines and with a larger public. Pairs 02 features conversations with Emmanuel Admassu, Rashid bin Shabib, Irma Boom, Gareth Doherty, David Foster, David Hartt, Sara Hendren, Jane Hutton, Sharon Johnston, Zachary Mollica, Lyndon Neri, Malkit Shoshan, Jorge Silvetti, John R. Stilgoe, Paola Sturla, Sumayya Vally, Terry Tempest Williams, and Kathryn Yusoff. Contributors include the editors and Emma Lewis, Elisa Ngan, and Maxwell Smith-Holmes.

In this multi-authored book, senior practitioners and researchers offer an international overview of landscape character approaches for those working in research, policy and practice relating to landscape. Over the last three decades, European practice in landscape has moved from a narrow, if relatively straightforward, focus on natural beauty or scenery to a much broader concept of landscape character constructed through human perception, and transcending any of its individual elements. Methods, tools and techniques have been developed to give practical meaning to this idea of landscape character. The two main methods, Landscape Character Assessment (LCA) and Historic Landscape Characterisation (HLC) were applied first in the United Kingdom, but other methods are in use elsewhere in Europe, and beyond, to achieve similar ends. This book explores why different approaches exist, the extent to which disciplinary or cultural specificities in different countries affect approaches to land management and landscape planning, and highlights areas for reciprocal learning and knowledge transfer. Contributors to the book focus on examples of European countries - such as Sweden, Turkey and Portugal - that have adopted and extended UK-style landscape characterisation, but also on countries with their own distinctive approaches that have developed from different conceptual roots, as in Germany, France and the Netherlands. The collection is completed by chapters looking at landscape approaches based on non-European concepts of landscape in North America, Australia and New Zealand. This book has an introductory price of GBP125/$205 which will last until 3 months after publication - after this time it will revert to GBP140/$225.

This book is oriented on testing and developing the neopragmatic approach of horizontal geographies, in which we follow approaches of natural sciences, social sciences, and cultural studies. Regional focus is thereby put on a rapidly changing elemental space and its social representations, characterized by unstable and not well-defined hybridities: coastal Louisiana. This region is highly dynamic: the Mississippi River in particular, with its extensive sediments, has shifted the coastal fringe of present-day Louisiana into the Gulf of Mexico. This land gain is contrasted by natural processes, but also by processes resultant of human intervention which cause marine encroachment. A complex interplay of different aspects is directly and indirectly leading to coastal land loss which makes the question of how to describe emerging hybrid spaces virulent and highlights the limits of a positivist understanding of boundaries that is also physically geographical. In the neopragmatic tradition, positivist research findings will be framed in social constructivist terms and supplemented by phenomenological approaches to Louisiana's coastal space, thus suggesting the need for and potentials of horizontal geographic integration of different theoretical and methodological approaches as well as researcher perspectives and data bases.

Doing research is an essential element of almost all programmes in planning studies as well as related areas such as geography and urban studies, from undergraduate, through Masters to doctoral programmes. While most texts on such research emphasise methodologies, this book is unique in addressing how theoretical frameworks and perspectives can inform research activity. Providing both a concise introduction to a wide range of such theories and detailed engagement with cases of planning research, it provides the reader with the insights necessary to conduct theory-informed research. It offers an understanding of how the choice of a theoretical framework has implications for the focus of the research, the precise research questions addressed and the methodologies that will be most effective in answering those questions. Through practical advice and published examples it will support planning researchers in doing stronger, more widely-applicable research, which answers key questions about planning systems and their role within our societies.