This book tells the story of the Mount Songshan area architecture in simple terms, while also providing detailed information on the history of Buddhist architecture. The history of the Mount Songshan area can be traced back to the Xia Dynasty in the 23rd century B.C. The heritage architecture in this area has seen the rise and fall of various powers - including the Han Dynasty, Northern Wei Dynasty, Tang and Song Empires, Jin Dynasty, Yuan Dynasty, and the Ming and Qing Empires - and reflects the character of each historical period. Over the past 2,000 years, history has been continuously woven into the architecture. The Mount Songshan area is, therefore, a perfect representation of the perpetual Chinese civilization, and the most magnificent museum of ancient Chinese architecture. Most importantly, these various types of architecture offer valuable insights into the architectural design and technologies of each historical period. The products of ingenuity and innovation, they are marvellous creations that ancient Chinese people took great pride in.

Landscape architecture plays an important role in shaping the places in which we live and work. But what is it? Landscape architects are involved, amongst other things, in the layout of business parks, the reclamation of derelict industrial sites, the restoration of historic city parks, and the design of major pieces of infrastructure such as motorways, dams, power stations, and flood defenses, as well as the planning of parks and gardens. Taking a historical perspective, Ian Thompson looks at both the roots of landscape architecture and the people that established it.
This Very Short Introduction explores some of the misconceptions about landscape architecture and considers the discipline's origins in landscape gardening. Thompson takes a look at a number of areas, including the influence of Modernism, the difference between landscape design and landscape planning, and the way that planning legislation has driven the growth of the discipline. He also explores contemporary environmentalism, the debate as to whether landscape architecture is an art or a science, landscape architecture in the community, post-industrial projects, and its relationship with ecological urbanism.
About the Series:
Oxford's Very Short Introductions series offers concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects--from Islam to Sociology, Politics to Classics, Literary Theory to History, and Archaeology to the Bible. Not simply a textbook of definitions, each volume in this series provides trenchant and provocative--yet always balanced and complete--discussions of the central issues in a given discipline or field. Every Very Short Introduction gives a readable evolution of the subject in question, demonstrating how the subject has developed and how it has influenced society. Eventually, the series will encompass every major academic discipline, offering all students an accessible and abundant reference library. Whatever the area of study that one deems important or appealing, whatever the topic that fascinates the general reader, the Very Short Introductions series has a handy and affordable guide that will likely prove indispensable.

Architecture and Agriculture: A Rural Design Guide presents architectural guidelines for buildings designed and constructed in rural landscapes by emphasizing their connections with function, culture, climate, and place. Following on from the author's first book Rural Design, the book discusses in detail the buildings that humans construct in support of agriculture. By examining case studies from around the world including Australia, China, Japan, Norway, Poland, Japan, Portugal, North America, Africa and the Southeast Asia it informs readers about the potentials, opportunities, and values of rural architecture, and how they have been developed to create sustainable landscapes and sustainable buildings for rapidly changing rural futures.

A growing, living house, a building made of a plant seems to be a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, the Khasi in eastern India already knew how to connect the branches of rubber trees to form footbridges, and in southern Germany dance lime trees formed the centre of villages for centuries. Following on from this, the new discipline of Baubotanik is dedicated to designing with trees. Built projects, prototypes and visionary concepts point the way to a new green architecture. This introduction shows the possibilities of such living constructions and goes into the botanical growth laws that guide the design. The basics of constructing with trees are presented. The book encourages a whole new look at architecture that becomes part of urban nature.

This open access book traces the development of landscapes along the 414-kilometer China-Laos Railway, one of the first infrastructure projects implemented under China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and which is due for completion at the end of 2021. Written from the perspective of landscape architecture and intended for planners and related professionals engaged in the development and conservation of these landscapes, this book provides history, planning pedagogy and interdisciplinary framing for working alongside the often-opaque planning, design and implementation processes of large-scale infrastructure. It complicates simplistic notions of development and urbanization frequently reproduced in the Laos-China frontier region. Many of the projects and sites investigated in this book are recent "firsts" in Laos: Laos's first wildlife sanctuary for trafficked endangered species, its first botanical garden and its first planting plan for a community forest. Most often the agents and accomplices of neoliberal development, the planning and design professions, including landscape architecture, have little dialogue with either the mainstream natural sciences or critical social sciences that form the discourse of projects in Laos and comparable contexts. Covering diverse conceptions and issues of development, including cultural and scientific knowledge exchanges between Laos and China, nature tourism, connectivity and new town planning, this book also features nine planning proposals for Laos generated through this research initiative since the railway's groundbreaking in 2016. Each proposal promotes a wider "landscape approach" to development and deploys landscape architecture's spatial and ecological acumen to synthesize critical development studies with the planner's capacity, if not naive predilection, to intervene on the ground. Ultimately, this book advocates the cautious engagement of the professionally oriented built-environment disciplines, such as regional planning, civil engineering and landscape architecture, with the landscapes of development institutions and environmental NGOs.

Urban Roar argues for the existence of ‘autonomous affectivities’ that roar beneath the din of the urban, seeking the attention of us humans so captured by the environments of our own making. In hearing the urban roar, it is the mythic intention of this book to discover ways in which we can work with the intensities of more-than-human forces to vitalize our cities. The book explores methods by which artists, particularly those sound artists involved in fieldwork practices, might encounter and translate autonomous affectivities between different environments. Of particular interest is Jung’s concept of synchronicity and its relationship to artistic creation – as experience, flow and catalyst – in manifesting autonomous affectivities into diverse and affective environments. The book makes use of both theoretical and practical approaches: from a study of scholarship through which it is argued that an autonomous affectivity is equivalent to an archetype (via Jung) and an essence (via Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza), to theoretical considerations of the situated body in everyday contexts, to practical study of an artistic research experiment designed to reveal and index autonomous affectivities encountered during fieldwork practices, for the purpose of influencing urban design interventions. In this fresh analysis, Lacey reveals the possibilities in urban environments.

The studio and residential building at Wuhrstrasse 8/10 in Zurich is a unique place: Commissioned by the Painters & Sculptors Cooperative Zurich, founded in 1948, eminent Swiss architect Ernst Gisel (1922–2021) designed this ensemble of buildings comprising 8 apartments and twelve artist studios in 1953. Thus, a utopia of self-organised working and living space became reality. Since then, 54 artists have left their mark on the artistic and cultural life of Zurich and Switzerland from their home on Wuhrstrasse 8/10. This book recounts the history of this extraordinary structure, illustrated with archival plans and documents as well as new and historic photographs. It also examines the political and social dimension of the Wuhrstrasse model and its international impact. Further essays explore how the lives and works of the resident artists are interwoven with contemporary events, and address the artist studio as both an idealised myth and as a real place of work. In inserts created especially for the book, eleven Zurich-based artists, all members of the cooperative themselves, respond to the exemplary model that is the “Atelierhaus.”

This book is the first of its type on NEOM Region, NW of Saudi Arabia. This region has been designated in 2017 to be an international economic hub. However, no studies have been done on this region which occupies several natural resources including remarkable landscape with unique ecological species, ores and water resources. The region is also vulnerable to many aspects of threatening natural hazards. Based on her expertise, namely geomorphological processes, earth sciences, space techniques and natural risk assessment, the author made an initiative to produce this book using advanced tools, specifically satellite images and geo-information system. The book introduces several thematic maps obtained for the first time for NEOM Region. Hence, it represents a scientific guide for land management and urban planning approaches. This book is a very significant document for a variety of readers and researchers including decision makers, land managers and planners, as well as geographers and geologists. In addition, the basic concepts and new approaches attract researchers and academic teams including students, universities and research centers not only in Saudi Arabia, but in different parts of the World.

This book analyses the magnificent imperial necropolises of ancient China from the perspective of Archaeoastronomy, a science which takes into account the landscape in which ancient monuments are placed, focusing especially but not exclusively on the celestial aspects. The power of the Chinese emperors was based on the so-called Mandate of Heaven: the rulers were believed to act as intermediaries between the sky gods and the Earth, and consequently, the architecture of their tombs, starting from the world-famous mausoleum of the first emperor, was closely linked to the celestial cycles and to the cosmos. This relationship, however, also had to take into account various other factors and doctrines, first the Zhao-Mu doctrine in the Han period and later the various forms of Feng Shui. As a result, over the centuries, diverse sacred landscapes were constructed. Among the sites analysed in the book are the "pyramids" of Xi'an from the Han dynasty, the mountain tombs of the Tang dynasty, and the Ming and Qing imperial tombs. The book explains how considerations such as astronomical orientation and topographical orientation according to the principles of Feng Shui played a fundamental role at these sites.

This open access book outlines new concepts, development models, governance and implementation processes capable of addressing the challenges of transformative urban regeneration of cities at precinct scale.

This book discusses the protection, planning, and design of sustainable urban water environments. Against the backdrop of environmental changes, it addresses issues of water resource protection and sustainable development in China and Germany at different stages of urbanization, as well as relevant strategies and lessons learned. It focuses on three topics: balance between water environment protection and utilization in the urbanization process; sustainable use of water resources in the urbanization process; and water-related planning and design strategies in urbanization and local cultural development processes. In the context of water resources, China and Germany can learn from each other's experiences and can support one another in the fields of urbanization and locality. As such, the book brings together Chinese and Germans scientists from various disciplines, such as planning, geography, landscape, architecture, tourism, ecology, hydraulic engineering and history to provide a multicultural and multidisciplinary perspective on the topic and examine the challenges and opportunities as well as the planning and design strategies to achieve sustainable, water-related urban spaces. By combining theoretical and practical approaches, it appeals to academics and practitioners around the globe.

A beautifully illustrated history of the world famous landscape garden at Stourhead, created by generations of the Hoare banking dynasty. Cross the south lawn at Stourhead and descend through the ancient and rare trees. Soon you will see a great lake appear, decorated with classical temples and arched bridge that lunges to the other side of the water. Continue on and you will find a mystical, jagged grotto; a gothic hideaway; gods, muses and saints. This is how Henry Hoare - known as Henry the Magnificent - would have approached the garden he designed with Henry Flitcroft. Did he imagine himself as a journeying Aeneas, or was he recreating a Claud Lorrain landscape? This is the first history - in colour - of a unique landscape created by generations of the Hoare banking family. It follows its evolution, describing how flights of folly, individual flair and tastes, combined with careful stewardship, have formed a national treasure and one of the finest example of the English landscape garden. The book includes a foreword by James Stourton and newly commissioned photography by renowned garden photographer Marianne Majerus.

From the stone blade and the fire stick to the latest algorithms of genetic code, we shape our world through the act of design. With its roots in the Renaissance notion disegno, design is the ability not only to make something, but also to conceive of its invention and reflect on its meaning. Whether we valorise it as the democratisation of design or critique it as the perversion of the commodity fetish, designed things are now ubiquitous. Not only things but entire systems must now be designed and objects reconceived and redesigned as mere moments in unfathomably complex ecological flows. The planet itself, and even space beyond, is now presented as a design problem. What does landscape architecture bring to the broader culture of design? What lessons can be learned from other disciplines at the cutting edge of design? What role does design play in a time of transformative technological change? In LA+ Design we move beyond the designed outcome to explore the myths, methods, meanings, and futures of design. Engineer and physicist Adrian Bejan outlines his constructal theory, which predicts natural design and its evolution in engineering, scientific, and social systems. Design researchers Craig Bremner + Paul Rodgers take us through an A Z of design ecology. Architects Lizzie Yarina + Claudia Bode open our eyes to new ways of seeing things through subject-object relations. Jenni Zell explores life as a woman landscape architect through a Kafkaesque lens. Daniel Pittman interviews MoMA's curator of architecture and design, Paola Antonelli. Architect David Salomon explores methods of using data as both fact and fiction. Christopher Marcinkoski interviews Anthony Dunne + Fiona Raby (Dunne + Raby) to discuss how their practice continuously redefines the role of design in society. Thomas Oles challenges stereotypes of landscape architecture s professional identity. Richard Weller discusses the terrarium as the ultimate design experiment. Dane Carlson goes deep into the culture of Nepal s hinterlands to explore new modes and geographies for landscape architecture beyond the first world. Through LA's signage, anthropologist Keith Murphy shows how different groups of people interact with and give meaning to the landscapes they inhabit. Interviewed by Colin Curley, architect Andrés Jaque (Office for Political Innovation) discusses the role of technology and agency of architecture in society today. Game designer Colleen Macklin shows how public space can be redefined and subverted through the agency of play. Javier Arpa interviews urban design guru Winy Maas (MVRDV, The Why Factory) to discuss his views on the future of design and design education. Experimental psychologist Thomas Jacobsen describes current neurological research into the subjectivity of beauty. Landscape architect James Corner talks about the evolution of the profession of landscape architecture in a wide-ranging interview.

This book explores the moving qualities of mountains by utilising theories, ideas and processes which contribute to a larger understanding of these geological forms. In highlighting the fluid attributes of mountains the authors offer an alternative to the traditional approach of the sciences and the humanities, which address mountains as static geological or geographical features. The essays in this collection posit that movement impacts the relationship between society and mountains - travelling landscape objects, constructing design and artistic translations, climbing and experiencing changing atmospheres and the different ways of seeing from mountain peaks - and that physical, intellectual and spiritual motion is integral to their understanding. This innovative collection will be of great interest to scholars of geography, art, architecture, history, theology and philosophy.

This book focuses on Luis Frois, a 16th-century Portuguese Jesuit and chronicler, who recorded his impressions of Japanese gardens, cities and building practices, tea-drinking rituals, Japan's unification efforts, cultural traditions, and the many differences between Europe and Japan in remarkable manuscripts almost lost to time. This research also draws on other Portuguese descriptions from contemporary sources spanning the years 1543 - 1597, later validated by Japanese history and iconography. Importantly, explorer Jorge Alvares recorded his experiences of discovery, prompting St. Francis Xavier to visit Japan in 1549, thus ushering in the "Christian Century" in Japan. During this long period of accord and reciprocal curiosity, the Portuguese wrote in excess of 1500 pages of letters to European Jesuits that detail their impressions of the island nation-not to mention their observations of powerful public figures such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Sen no Rikyu. In addition to examining these letters, the authors translated and researched early descriptions of 23 gardens in Kyoto and Nara and 9 important cities-later visited by the authors, sketched, photographed and compared with the imagery painted on 16th-century Japanese screens. However, the data gathered for this project was found mainly within five large volumes of Frois' Historia do Japao (2500 pages) and his Treaty on Contradictions-two incomparable anthropological works that were unpublished until the mid-20th century for reasons detailed herein. His volumes continue to be explored for their insightful observations of places, cultural practices, and the formidable historical figures with whom he interacted. Thus, this book examines the world's first globalization efforts that resulted in profitable commerce, the introduction of Portuguese firearms that changed Japan's history, scientific advances, religious expansion, and many artistic exchanges that have endured the centuries.

Landskap Design was created just over 20 years ago in Bergen, Norway, by Professor of Architecture Arne Saelen, and is now a leading practitioner of landscape architecture and a unique inspiration for urban landscape artists world-wide. This is Loft's second book, about the work of architect Arne Saelen, focusing on the sketches, plans and details of his most relevant works, showing us their design process and exploring the sources, the influences and the reasoning behind the projects of one of today's most recognised landscape architects.

Inspired by the architects' tradition of passing on experience in conversation form, this paperback book provides insights into the ideas, methods, and memories of one of Europe's most innovative landscape architects. In twelve concise conversations, Vogt inquires into the meaning of landscape architecture in the context of the worldwide urbanization process, and tries to define this young discipline's position. To this day, our concept of landscape appears to be influenced by an Arcadian ideal. Only when landscapes are understood on several levels, as the product of natural, cultural, and social processes, can atmospheric and living urban landscapes appropriate to the specific situation be created. Gunther Vogt sees landscape architecture decidedly as part of a city, given its close relationship to topography, architecture, and infrastructure. Gunther Vogt is a landscape architect and owner of Vogt Landscape Architects Zurich, with branch offices in Munich, Berlin, and London. Since 2005, he is a professor for landscape architecture at ETH Zurich. Current work includes public realm and streetscape designs for the athletes' village for the Olympic Games in London 2012, now known as East Village."

Built environments are complex, emergent, systemic, and require contextual analysis. They should be understood before reconsidering how professionals and researchers of the built environment are educated and trained to reduce the gap between knowledge, practice and real-world circumstances. There is an urgent need to rethink the role of policy makers, researchers, practitioners and laypeople in the construction, renovation and reuse of the built environment in order to deal with numerous environmental/ecological, economic/financial and social/ethical challenges of providing a habitat for current and future generations in a world of continual change. These challenges are too complex to be dealt with only by one discipline or profession. Combinations of different types of knowledge, knowing in praxis and tacit knowledge are needed. This book presents and illustrates recent innovative contributions with case studies focusing on five strategic domains and the interrelations between them. These transdisciplinary contributions apply concepts, methods and tools that facilitate convergence and concerted action between participants collaborating in policy definition and project implementation. The methods and tools include experiments in living-labs, prototypes on site and virtual simulations, as well as participatory approaches including citizen science, the development of alternative scenarios, and visioning plausible futures.

Engendering Cities examines the contemporary research, policy, and practice of designing for gender in urban spaces. Gender matters in city design, yet despite legislative mandates across the globe to provide equal access to services for men and women alike, these issues are still often overlooked or inadequately addressed. This book looks at critical aspects of contemporary cities regarding gender, including topics such as transport, housing, public health, education, caring, infrastructure, as well as issues which are rarely addressed in planning, design, and policy, such as the importance of toilets for education and clothes washers for freeing-up time. In the first section, a number of chapters in the book assess past, current, and projected conditions in cities vis-a-vis gender issues and needs. In the second section, the book assesses existing policy, planning, and design efforts to improve women's and men's concerns in urban living. Finally, the book proposes changes to existing policies and practices in urban planning and design, including its thinking (theory) and norms (ethics). The book applies the current scholarship on theory and practice related to gender in a planning context, elaborating on some critical community-focused reflections on gender and design. It will be key reading for scholars and students of planning, architecture, design, gender studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, and political science. It will also be of interest to practitioners and policy makers, providing discussion of emerging topics in the field.

Originally published in 1963. The English Landed Estate in the Nineteeth Century: Its Administration deals principally with the administration of large landed estates during the years from 1830 to 1870. The book also throws new light on the work of the Inclosure Commissioners, who, as a department of the central government, supervised agricultural improvements made by landowners who borrowed from the government and from land companies. Author David Spring argues that the British government intervened in agriculture much more than is commonly thought. In describing the hierarchy of estate management, Spring relies, wherever possible, on hitherto unused family papers and estate documents. Especially important is his material on the Dukes of Bedford and on the domestic economy and financial position of the Russell Family. The chapter titled "The Landowner," based on the seventh Duke of Bedford's correspondence with his agent, is a case study of a single estate and provides insight into the workings of a great landowner's mind. The remaining chapters, dealing with lawyers, land agents, and the Inclosure Commissioners, include other individual portraits. Among these are Christopher Haedy, the Duke of Bedford's chief agent; James Loch, king of estate agents in nineteenth-century England; Henry Morton, the Earl of Durham's land agent; and William Blamire and James Caird, two of the Inclosure Commissioners.

Climb a mountain and experience the landscape. Try to grasp its holistic nature. Do not climb alone, but with others and share your experience. Be sure the ways of seeing the landscape will be very different. We experience the landscape with all senses as a complex, dynamic and hierarchically structured whole. The landscape is tangible out there and simultaneously a mental reality. Several perspectives are obvious because of language, culture and background. Many disciplines developed to study the landscape focussing on specific interest groups and applications. Gradually the holistic way of seeing became lost. This book explores the different perspectives on the landscape in relation to its holistic nature. We start from its multiple linguistic meanings and a comprehensive overview of the development of landscape research from its geographical origins to the wide variety of today's specialised disciplines and interest groups. Understanding the different perspectives on the landscapes and bringing them together is essential in transdisciplinary approaches where the landscape is the integrating concept.

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.

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.