Personal and private outdoor space is becoming ever-more elusive as urban areas become more crowded due to population growth and increasing development. Urban Oasis: Tranquil Outdoor Spaces at Home explores projects from London to New York and Sydney to San Francisco that reveal inspirational designs of rooftops, garden spaces, outdoor rooms, terraces and courtyards, and provide refuge from the modern world with private pockets of paradise. These outdoor spaces provide relaxing, sociable, and plant-filled settings for residents to savor peace and calm, and the company of family and friends.

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.

Summers at the Vauxhall pleasure garden in London brought diverse entertainments to a diverse public. Picturesque walks and arbors offered a pastoral retreat from the city, while at the same time the garden's attractions indulged distinctly urban tastes for fashion, novelty, and sociability. High- and low-born alike were free to walk the paths; the proximity to strangers and the danger of dark walks were as thrilling to visitors as the fountains and fireworks. Vauxhall was the venue that made the careers of composers, inspired novelists, and showcased the work of artists. Scoundrels, sudden downpours, and extortionate ham prices notwithstanding, Vauxhall became a must-see destination for both Londoners and tourists. Before long, there were Vauxhalls across Britain and America, from York to New York, Norwich to New Orleans. This edited volume provides the first book-length study of the attractions and interactions of the pleasure garden, from the opening of Vauxhall in the seventeenth century to the amusement parks of the early twentieth. Nine essays explore the mutual influences of human behavior and design: landscape, painting, sculpture, and even transient elements such as lighting and music tacitly informed visitors how to move within the space, what to wear, how to behave, and where they might transgress. The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island draws together the work of musicologists, art historians, and scholars of urban studies and landscape design to unfold a cultural history of pleasure gardens, from the entertainments they offered to the anxieties of social difference they provoked.

Winner, J. B. Jackson Book Prize from the Foundation for Landscape StudiesIn this insightful biography, Bruce Stephenson analyzes the details of John Nolen's experiments, illuminating the planning principles he used in laying out communities from Mariemont, Ohio, to Venice, Florida. Stephenson's conclusion discusses the potential of Nolen's work as a model of a sustainable vision relevant to American civic culture today.John Nolen (1869-1937) studied economics, philosophy, and public administration at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where his keen intelligence and remarkable administrative abilities were immediately recognized. In 1903, at the age of thirty-four, Nolen enrolled in the new Harvard University program in landscape architecture, studying under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Arthur Shurcliff. Two years later, Nolen opened his office in Harvard Square.Over the course of his career, Nolen and his firm completed more than 400 projects, including comprehensive plans for twenty-nine cities and twenty-seven new towns, all of them in the United States. Like other reformers of the Progressive Era, Nolen looked to Europe for models to structure the rapid urbanization defining modern life into more efficient and livable form. Nolen's mutually influential relationship with Raymond Unwin, England's preeminent garden city planner, typified the "Atlantic Crossings" that produced a host of intensely interesting planning experiments in England, Europe, and the United States during the first decades of the twentieth century. "Nolen has never received the systematic assessment that he deserves despite being the subject of so much writing--the Stephenson biography stands alone. The author makes a convincing case that Nolen was a pivotal figure in the profession of city planning and that his contributions were uniquely situated to bridge the fields of landscape architecture and planning. This is an exceptionally fine work."Christopher Silver, author of Planning the Megacity: Jakarta in the Twentieth Century"The long overdue and definitive biography of one of America's most prominent and influential urbanists. . . . Stephenson effectively positions Nolen between the classical practitioners of the nineteenth century and the modern ecological focus of the twentieth century (which he helped to establish)."Keith N. Morgan, coauthor of Community by Design: The Olmsted Office and the Development of Brookline, MassachusettsIn this deeply researched and richly detailed biography . . . Stephenson focuses attention on a figure who has been curiously understudied and who arguably deserves additional scrutiny on several topics from his ideas about race and class to his proto-environmentalism, all key interests among Progressive reformers.Journal of Southern HistoryStephenson offers a richly developed biographical portrait of Nolen interwoven with a detailed discussion of his numerous planning projects. . . . [The] biographical component allows the reader to see how Nolen's life experiences shaped his professional work. Especially impressive is Stephenson's discussion of Nolen as a progressive during his work at ASEUT and his early travels to Europe. . . . The numerous color photographs make the book a visual delight and the excellent index makes referencing the book a breeze.Journal of Planning History

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.

As climate, culture, and technology evolve and become increasingly unpredictable, architecture's stasis becomes more incongruous. Werewolf explores an emerging but under-investigated branch of architecture that embraces the transformation of form, performance, and the responsiveness to environments and context. These ideas are studied through architectural precedents and framed by critical essays by Jesse Reiser, Greg Lynn, Jimenez Lai, Spyros Papapetros, Kari Weil, as well as the editors. The shift from passive buildings to reactive structures is now imperative, as climate change and political turmoil exacerbate the unpredictability of environments. Werewolf expands on the architect's agency to critically address political, social, and environmental unrest. Revealing the cunning and agile ways in which architecture can negotiate rather than resist change, this book departs from the fixed Vitruvian man and uses the figure of the werewolf to propose a model where changes of state, mutation, and decomposition are conceptually fundamental.

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.

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.

Leading with Aesthetics: The Transformational Leadership of Charles M. Vest at MIT examines the role of aesthetics, design, and architecture in organizational transformation and leadership, particularly in the context of academic institutions. Leadership has been thus far predominantly examined from the perspective of function (performance) and position in the organizational structure (such as a CEO or a president). Relatively little work has been done in studying leadership of academic institutions, let alone from the perspective of aesthetics, both of which this book aims to rectify. Although aesthetic dimension is important in any organizational context, it is particularly important for academic institutions. Leading with aesthetics would empower leaders in any organizational setting. Daas examines the aesthetic dimension of transformational leadership through an eclectic blend of lenses drawn from the fields of architecture, political science, organizational aesthetics, and organizational psychoanalysis. A detailed case study of the leadership of Charles Marstiller Vest (1941-2013), who served as the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology for fourteen years between 1990 and 2004, illustrates the importance of the aesthetic dimension in leadership and organizational change.

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.

A visual journey through the history of landscape design

For thousands of years, people have altered the meaning of space by reshaping nature. As an art form, these architectural landscape creations are stamped with societal imprints unique to their environment and place in time.

"Illustrated History of Landscape Design" takes an optical sweep of the iconic landscapes constructed throughout the ages. Organized by century and geographic region, this highly visual reference uses hundreds of masterful pen-and-ink drawings to show how historical context and cultural connections can illuminate today's design possibilities.

This guide includes:

Storyboards, case studies, and visual narratives to portray spaces

Plan, section, and elevation drawings of key spaces

Summaries of design concepts, principles, and vocabularies

Historic and contemporary works of art that illuminate a specific era

Descriptions of how the landscape has been shaped over time in response to human need

Directing both students and practitioners along a visually stimulating timeline, "Illustrated History of Landscape Design" is a valuable educational tool as well as an endless source ofinspiration.

Human beings have been transforming Mediterranean landscapes into art for at least thirty thousand years. Today's artists, sculptors, designers, architects and gardeners explore age-old vernacular materials, skills and sites to produce extraordinary landscape art that affirms an ideal of partnership with nature while celebrating layers of living in this multifaceted region. Each work observes the logic of place as determined by climate, geology, flora and fauna, architecture and land use. Illustrated with hundreds of exceptional photographs by award- winning photographer Clive Nichols, and drawing on nearly forty years of exploration by Louisa Jones, this book offers a fresh vision of the Mediterranean, past and future, linking cultural diversity and natural balance as discovered in its gardens, landscape design, literature, art and architecture.

This book provides extensive information on craftsmen-built houses in China. Though some inroads have been made in studying this folk custom, this work represents the first comprehensive and systematic monograph. The book examines the topic at the two main levels of "history" and "theory". Combining historical textual research, contemporary textual research, and field study, the book presents systematic information on the folk custom of craftsmen-built houses in China. At the level of theoretical research, it puts forward some original opinions on the major theoretical issues, such as the folk custom of religious belief, the boundary between superstition and religion, and the relationship between oral literature and ritual. The book provides a guide to help readers systematically understand the folk custom of craftsmen-built houses in China. Sharing valuable insights into Chinese architectural history, as well as religious studies, cultural anthropology, and folklore, it will appeal to researchers in the fields of folklore, cultural anthropology, and architecture and can also serve as a popular science book for understanding Chinese architectural culture.

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.

This book explores the importance of freedom and liberalism in the context of socialities, individualities and materialities. The authors provide a highly unusual and innovative blending of concepts about space and landscape through a deeply theoretical exploration of liberalism. Liberalism is often problematized in contemporary discussions with regard to gentrification, environmental problems and inequality. In contrast, this book refers to a liberalism that maximizes life chances in the context of dealing with spaces. A connection between freedom and space, based on liberal ideas, provides a much needed theoretical intervention in the fields of social and spatial sciences.

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.

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.

This book focuses on sustainability concepts in architecture and urban design, environmental issues, and natural resources. Today it has become essential to reduce carbon emissions, protect habitats, and preserve the delicate ecosystems of our planet. Accordingly, sustainable development has to be improved by decreasing the consumption of non-renewable resources, in order to help nature replenish itself. Further, it highlights the efforts that have been made by architects, environmentalists, engineers, students, planners and everyone in between in order to improve sustainability in various developing communities and countries.

SUPERB EXECUTION RELIES UPON RIGOROUS PROJECT DOCUMENTATION A project will only be built as well as it is documented. This publication focuses on the key documentation needs of the landscape architectural design and construction documentation process. That includes both "design documentation" and "construction documentation" as well as all that which occurs in the transition from one phase to the other. Documentation requirements include those components necessary to explore and define design intent, logic, physical proposals, and ultimately, the specific components included within construction and bid documents. * Discover how proper documentation facilitates every stage of the design process from pre-planning to construction, and leads to a highly resolved built outcome. Understand the principles behind these documentation practices. * Implement best practices specific to each documentation phase and drawing, from title block and cover sheet design to soil plans and plant protection. * Organize keynoting systems, cross-referencing and interdisciplinary coordination amongst multiple consultants and vendors. * Study sample project documents from a leading landscape architecture firm to better understand the elements and benefits of complete and well-coordinated project documentation. These standards have been time-tested by over 150 designers at the industry leading landscape architecture firm Design Workshop, reflecting a range of project types, including parks, streetscapes, urban spaces and over-structure construction. This guide shares the methods behind the success, to facilitate exceptional built outcomes through principled documentation practices.

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.

Acetate film, an exhaust fan, lollipops, a bicycle, paper and pens-in Group Efforts: Changing Public Space, vital voices in art and design use everyday objects to transform surroundings in remarkable ways. An illustrated chronicle of projects organized by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in collaboration with Elastic City, this volume contains interviews with Todd Shalom and Hayal Pozanti, who assemble new shapes from Manhattan's West Village streetscape; Greta Hansen, Kyung Jae Kim, and Adam Koogler, who host spontaneous political forums in a pavilion built with plastic and blown air; and Karen Finley, who detourns Columbus Circle into an urban-scale mandala of resistance, reparation, and discovery. An incisive essay by designer and cultural historian Mabel O. Wilson positions these creative occupations alongside recent acts of protest.

Following official protection of natural environments for public benefit in Fontainebleau Forest in France (1861) and in Yosemite (1864) and Yellowstone (1872) in the USA, the New Forest Act of 1877 marked the first major instance in Britain. Art and artists were involved in this achievement to a greater extent than in all preceding cases. For the first time, and within an ecocritical framework, this study examines the role played by art during the previous anti-enclosure campaign - highlighting both the hitherto-unacknowledged extent of German influence in terms of the original artistic initiative and of German artists' participation in the cause, as well as the significance of connections between landscape art of the day and priorities of the early Open Spaces movement. Ecocriticism in art history With works by the German and British artists George Bouverie Goddard, Wilhelm Kumpel, Alfred Pizzi Newton, Wilhelm Trautschold, Edmund George Warren