After beginning his career as an architect in London, Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) came to the Hudson River valley in 1850 at the invitation of Andrew Jackson Downing, the reform-minded writer on houses and gardens. As Downing's partner, and after Downing's death in 1852, Vaux designed country and suburban dwellings that were remarkable for their well-conceived plans and their sensitive rapport with nature. By 1857, the year he published his book Villas and Cottages, Vaux had moved to New York City. There he asked Frederick Law Olmsted to join him in preparing a design for Central Park. He spent the next 38 years defending and refining their vision of Central Park as a work of art. After the Civil War, he and Olmsted led the nascent American park movement with their designs for parks and parkways in Brooklyn, Buffalo, and many other American cities. Apart from undertakings with Olmsted, Vaux cultivated a distinguished architectural practice. Among his clients were the artist Frederic Church, whose dream house, Olana, he helped create; and the reform politician Samuel Tilden, whose residence on New York's Gramercy Park remains one of the country's outstanding Victorian buildings. A pioneering advocate for apartment houses in American cities, Vaux designed buildings that mirrored the advance of urbanization in America, including early model housing for the poor. He planned the original portions of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History and conceived a stunning proposal for a vast iron and glass building to house the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. Especially notable are the many bridges and other charming structures that he designed for Central Park. Vaux considered the Park's Terrace, decorated by J. W. Mould, as his greatest achievement. An active participant in the cultural and intellectual life of New York, Vaux was an idealist who regarded himself as an artist and a professional. And while much has been written on Olmsted, comparatively little has been published about Vaux. The first in-depth account of Vaux's career, Country, Park, and City should be of great interest to historians of art, architecture, and urbanism, as well as preservationists and other readers interested in New York City's past and America's first parks.

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.

Widely acknowledged as the most influential land- scape designer of his age, Lancelot Capability Brown was to England what Frederick Law Olmsted was to America responsible for shaping the very ideal of the nation s parkland. Brown s ambition was to bring out of a landscape the best of its potential rather than impose his own ideas upon it. His designs are organic, weaving gestures of colour and perspective into the features that the country already afforded. So natural are his designs, and so perfectly do they complement the houses within them, that for many a Capability Brown landscape is the epitome of the English estate. His gardens and park- lands as much as the houses themselves would become icons of British country life. Published to coincide with the tercentenary of his birth, this remarkable book illuminates fifteen of Brown s most celebrated landscapes. To love the great English estates is to love the settings with which Brown surrounded them from idyllic parklands at Milton and Broadlands to structured landscapes around iconic houses at Blenheim, Burghley, Wake- field, and Chatsworth. With photography commissioned for the book, and including rarely seen archival drawings that shed light on Brown s process, this book serves as a guide to Britain s most beloved landscapes and an exploration of the masterful mind behind their creation.

This Cultural Landscape Report draws together the varied knowledge of the physical history and current condition of the Preserve landscape into a synthetic document that suggests appropriate means for implementing the overarching management approach laid out in the GMP.

Modern Urban Landscapes is a significant contribution to the conversation on sustainable landscape design, providing energy efficient models and water saving landscape ideas. There are many factors that would help realise energy efficient landscapes, including (but not limited to) the use of energy saving lamps, such as LED; the integration and adoption of renewable energy, including solar-powered and wind-powered landscape lighting; energy-efficient landscape design, particularly through the correct placement and selection of shade trees, and the creation of wind breaks. This book shows techniques for creating landscapes that also save water, for example by choosing correct planting materials; reducing stormwater run-off through the use of bio-swales, rain gardens and green roofs and walls; reducing water usage in landscapes through best-practice water-wise garden techniques, including irrigation using gray water. Permeable paving materials can also help to reduce stormwater runoff and allow rainwater to infiltrate into the ground and replenish groundwater rather than run into surface water systems.

How can an abstract term like "Topology" become pertinent and effective to landscape thinking today? There is a schism between the way landscape is understood scientifically, either as a normative network or an environmental system, and the way the same place exists emotionally for people. This disparity which prevails in today's landscape calls for a change of approach, both in terms of action and perception. Topology, in this instance, is not confined to the science of continuous surfaces in mathematics, it can pay greater attention to deeper spatial, physical, poetic and philosophical values embedded in a long tradition of designed nature. The strength of landscape topology is that it can weave together and integrate heterogeneous fields of action into a single meaningful whole. It brings disciplines together on a common topological "vellum" capable of improving our understanding of landscape as a cultural construct with all its inherent beauty and strength.

Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) remains one of the most important landscape architects in the history of the field. His distinctive and widely acclaimed work has been featured and referenced in numerous sources, yet few of Burle Marx's own words have been published. This collection of a dozen of Burle Marx's lectures, most of which have never before been available in English, fills that void. Delivered on international speaking tours, they address topics such as Concepts in Landscape Composition, Gardens and Ecology, and The Problem of Garden Lighting. Their publi- cation sheds light on Burle Marx's distinctive ethic and aesthetic of landscape, as "the real art of living." The lectures paint a picture of Burle Marx not just as a gardener, artist, and botanist, but as a land- scape architect whose ambition was to bring radical change to cities and society. The lectures are framed by photographs, by Leonardo Finotti, of a selection of Burle Marx's realized projects.

Primarily tranquil places to bury the dead and to grieve, churchyards are important for many other reasons. They tell us of our past, protect plants and animals for the future and provide peaceful spaces in which to sit and think. "The Churchyards Handbook" gives practical advice on all aspects of churchyard management and should be of use to parish priests, churchwardens and archdeacons as well as those involved with the funeral business. It explains the law relating to churchyards and offers constructive guidance on the difficult subjects of memorials and cremated remains. The proper care of the archaeology and history of churchyards is discussed, as is the importance of the churchyard as a haven for wildlife.

The complete-and-ready reference for establishing, managing, and running a successful and sustainable, profitable public garden

As unique museums with living collections of plants, public gardens offer visitors aesthetically beautiful landscapes combined with educational programming and scientific research that promote the value and understanding of plants. In the twenty-first century, public gardens are in the forefront of organizations and institutions committed to promoting the conservation of plants and their habitats, developing sustainable practices that support the environment, and providing green spaces where our increasingly stressed and urbanized citizens can reconnect with the natural world. It is critically important that such institutions have trained, knowledgeable staff members. Because of its comprehensive examination of public gardens, "Public Garden Management" is the ideal guide for staff members at public gardens, anyone considering a career in public gardens, groups starting a botanical garden or arboretum, and students discovering how these complex institutions work.

"Public Garden Management" is an all-in-one professional reference and textbook that clearly shows how to develop, establish, manage, and maintain a sustainable--both economically and environmentally--public garden. Offering practical coverage of relevant topics, along with useful tools for reinforcing study, this insightful and forward-thinking guide is:

Copublished by the American Public Gardens Association

Written by a panel of leading experts in the field

Filled with dozens of case studies that are real-world illustrations of the principles explored in the text

Illustrated throughout with line drawings, figures, and photographs that assist in conveying critical information

Students and professionals will benefit greatly from the management principles outlined in this book, helping them establish and maintain new and existing public gardens that engage, inspire, and connect with their communities.

Juan Grimm is considered the father of landscape architecture in Chile. His designs persistently underscore the sublimities of nature and incorporate the environments surrounding them. Although he works mainly with local flora, he creates breathtakingly new landscape textures. As South America's most important landscape architect, he has designed and built nearly one thousand hectares of garden, as well as private and public parks in Chile, Argentina, Peru, and Uruguay, including the gardens of the Baha'i Temple in Santiago and of a Benedictine abbey.Featuring drawings, photographs, interviews, and extensive companion essays, this book presents Grimm's body of work, his methods, his sources of inspiration, and his artistic aims. Selected examples, ranging from small gardens to large parks, illustrate Grimm's development over the course of thirty years. At the same time, it is not only Grimm's work that is on display, but the model of Chilean landscape architecture of which his work is exemplary.

The Shape of the Land: Topography & Landscape Architecture - the first book to centre on this subject - presents the contributions of 13 well-known practitioners and academics who discuss the forms and ramifications of reconfiguring terrain. The essays range in content from pre-industrial precedents in the work of Humphry Repton to new digital topographic modelling systems without the use of contour lines, the treatment of waste products to the land art of the American Southwest. Practicing landscape architects focusing on the modelling of topography in the works considering both utility and aesthetics. In all, the book reviews the history, reasons, and results of at least three centuries of topographic interventions, while suggesting pathways into the future - as new technology and new necessities increase the functional demands placed upon landscape architects, while at the same time potentially offering new forms of artistic expression.

Since the turn of the millennium, there has been a burgeoning interest in, and literature of, both landscape studies and food studies. Landscape describes places as relationships and processes. Landscapes create people's identities and guide their actions and their preferences, while at the same time are shaped by the actions and forces of people. Food, as currency, medium, and sustenance, is a fundamental part of those landscape relationships. This volume brings together over fifty contributors from around the world in forty profoundly interdisciplinary chapters. Chapter authors represent an astonishing range of disciplines, from agronomy, anthropology, archaeology, conservation, countryside management, cultural studies, ecology, ethics, geography, heritage studies, landscape architecture, landscape management and planning, literature, urban design and architecture. Both food studies and landscape studies defy comprehension from the perspective of a single discipline, and thus such a range is both necessary and enriching. The Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food is intended as a first port of call for scholars and researchers seeking to undertake new work at the many intersections of landscape and food. Each chapter provides an authoritative overview, a broad range of pertinent readings and references, and seeks to identify areas where new research is needed-though these may also be identified in the many fertile areas in which subjects and chapters overlap within the book.

Site, Sight, Insight presents twelve essays by John Dixon Hunt, the leading theorist and historian of landscape architecture. The collection's common theme is a focus on sites, how we see them and what we derive from that looking. Acknowledging that even the most modest landscape encounter has validity, Hunt contends that the more one knows about a site and one's own sight of it (an awareness of how one is seeing), the greater the insight. Employing the concepts, tropes, and rhetorical methods of literary analysis, he addresses the problem of how to discuss, understand, and appreciate places that are experienced through all the senses, over time and through space. Hunt questions our intellectual and aesthetic understanding of gardens and designed landscapes and asks how these sites affect us emotionally. Do gardens have meaning? When we visit a fine garden or designed landscape, we experience a unique work of great complexity in purpose, which has been executed over a number of years-a work that, occasionally, achieves beauty. While direct experience is fundamental, Hunt demonstrates how the ways in which gardens and landscapes are communicated in word and image can be equally important. He returns frequently to a cluster of key sites and writings on which he has based much of his thinking about garden-making and its role in landscape architecture: the gardens of Rousham in Oxfordshire; Thomas Whately's Observations on Modern Gardening (1770); William Gilpin's dialogues on Stowe (1747); Alexander Pope's meditation on genius loci; the Desert de Retz; Paolo Burgi's Cardada; and the designs by Bernard Lassus and Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Collage and Architecture remains an invaluable resource for students and practitioners as the first book to cover collage as a tool for analysis and design in architecture. Since entering the contemporary art world over a century ago, collage has profoundly influenced artists and architects throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. In Collage and Architecture, Jennifer A.E. Shields explores its influence, using the artworks and built projects of leading artists and architects, such as Mies van der Rohe, Daniel Libeskind, and Teddy Cruz to illustrate the diversity of collage techniques. This new edition includes: A stronger focus on contemporary practices, including digital methods New designers and architects, including Marshall Brown, WAI Architecture Think Tank, and Tatiana Bilbao, bringing their methods and work to life An expanded global and diverse perspective of architecture as collage Collage is an important instrument for analysis and design. Through its 290 color images, this book shows how this versatile medium can be adapted and transformed in your own work.

Shunmyo Masuno, Japan's leading garden designer, is at once Japan's most highly acclaimed landscape architect and an 18th-generation Zen Buddhist priest, presiding over daily ceremonies at the Kenkoji Temple in Yokohama. He is celebrated for his unique ability to blend strikingly contemporary elements with the traditional design vernacular. He has worked in ultramodern urban hotels and in some of Japan's most famous classic gardens. In each project, his work as a designer is inseparable from his Buddhist practice. Each becomes a Zen garden, "a special spiritual place where the mind dwells."
This beautiful book, illustrated with more than 400 drawings and color photographs, is the first complete retrospective of Masuno's work to be published in English. It presents 37 major gardens around the world in a wide variety of types and settings: traditional and contemporary, urban and rural, public spaces and private residences, and including temple, office, hotel and campus venues. Masuno achieved fame for his work in Japan, but he is becoming increasingly known internationally, and in 2011 completed his first commission in the United States which is shown here.
The book, divided into three chapters, covers: "Traditional Zen Gardens," "Contemporary Zen Gardens" and "Zen Gardens outside Japan." Illustrated with photographs and architectural plans or sketches, each garden is described and analyzed by author Mira Locher, herself an architect and a scholar well versed in Japanese culture.
Celebrating the accomplishments of a major, world-class designer, "Zen Gardens" also serves as something of a master class in Japanese garden design and appreciation: how to perceive a Japanese garden, how to understand one, even how to make one yourself. Like one of Masuno's gardens, the book can be a place for contemplation and mindful repose.

The Miami estate of Vizcaya, like its palatial contemporaries Biltmore and San Simeon, represents an achievement of the Gilded Age, when country houses and their gardens were a conspicuous measure of personal wealth and power. In Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, a celebrated architecture critic and writer and an award-winning landscape architect explore the little-known story of Vizcaya, an extraordinary national treasure. Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin use a rich collection of illustrations, historic photographs, and narrative to document the creation of this stunning house and landscape. Vizcaya was completed in 1916 as the winter retreat of Chicago industrialist James Deering. The cosmopolitan bachelor, who chose Miami for its warm climate, enlisted the guidance of artist Paul Chalfin, with whom he traveled throughout Italy to survey houses and gardens. With the assistance of architect F. Burrall Hoffman, Jr., and garden designer Diego Suarez, the 180-acre site on Biscayne Bay was transformed into a grand estate, complete with lagoons, canals, citrus groves, a farm village, a yacht harbor, and a 40-room Baroque mansion. The lure of this architectural and landscape masterpiece, named for a Spanish Basque province, is undeniable. John Singer Sargent planned a short visit in 1917 but stayed for several months, producing an inspired series of watercolors, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. The book is further enriched by archival material and by the color images of noted photographer Steven Brooke, paying homage to Vizcaya as a lens through which readers learn about architecture, landscape and garden design, interior decoration, and art.

Monsters, grotesque creatures, and giants were frequently depicted in Italian Renaissance landscape design, yet they have rarely been studied. Their ubiquity indicates that gardens of the period conveyed darker, more disturbing themes than has been acknowledged. In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Monsters were ciphers for contemporary anxieties about normative social life and identity. Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts, as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a broader framework of inquiry. Developing a new conceptual model of Renaissance landscape design, Morgan argues that the presence of monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the experience of gardens.

Today, there is a growing demand for designed landscapes - from public parks to back gardens - to be not only beautiful and functional, but also sustainable. With "Principles of Ecological Landscape Design", Travis Beck gives professionals and students the first book to translate the science of ecology into design practice. This groundbreaking work explains key ecological concepts and their application to the design and management of sustainable landscapes. It covers topics from biogeography and plant selection to global change. Beck draws on real world cases where professionals have put ecological principles to use in the built landscape. For constructed landscapes to perform as we need them to, we must get their underlying ecology right. "Principles of Ecological Landscape Design" provides the tools to do just that.

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.

There are three standard methods to visually represent a building: the plan, elevation, and section. The section drawing is a vertical slice of a building, depicting the relationships between interior and exterior as well as any level changes. While the section can serve as merely a functional drawing for construction, it can also be an exciting, revelatory drawing that can artfully depict a building, landscape, or object. Throughout history, many individuals have used the cross section as a tool to create, explore, or investigate. Visual Discoveries: A Collection of Sections is an image-forward book that is devoted to showcasing notable section drawings throughout history and demonstrating that the section drawing, while having roots in architecture, has spread to many other professions and disciplines. These professions include medicine, transportation, product design, geology, and landscape architecture. Some of the greatest thinkers and inventors in history like Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Darwin, and Robert Fulton, have created remarkable section drawings for their investigations, research, and work.

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.

"What does the landscape architect actually do as a designer?" The authors of this book investigate this question, which only seems easy - and address some fundamental ideas about design in landscape architecture: What resources are available for designing open spaces? What role do natural conditions play? What principles are applied? This book identifies and analyses the elements that come together to create landscape architecture. Based on their experience in practice and education, the authors reveal the core components of landscape design. In the introduction to the new edition, Stefan Bernard opens up about the book's origins and reflects on its continuing importance for the design of high-quality outdoor spaces.

From Francis Alys and Ursula Biemann to Vivan Sundaram, Allora & Calzadilla, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy, some of the most compelling artists today are engaging with the politics of land use, including the growth of the global economy, climate change, sustainability, Occupy movements, and the privatization of public space. Their work pivots around a set of evolving questions: In what ways is land, formed over the course of geological time, also contemporary and formed by the conditions of the present? How might art contribute to the expansion of spatial and environmental justice? Editors Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten Swenson bring together a range of international voices and artworks to illuminate this critical mass of practices. One of the first comprehensive treatments of land use in contemporary art, Critical Landscapes skillfully surveys the stakes and concerns of recent land-based practices, outlining the art historical contexts, methodological strategies, and geopolitical phenomena. This cross-disciplinary collection is destined to be an essential reference not only within the fields of art and art history, but also across those of cultural geography, architecture and urban planning, environmental history, and landscape studies.

In his most provocative writing yet, the radical urban theorist Mike Davis explores the combat zone that is contemporary urban America, the site of a perpetual battle waged within cities and against nature. Davis examines themes of urban life today - white flight, housing and job segregation and discrimination - and looks at areas he calls national sacrifice zones, military landscapes that simulated warfare and arms production have rendered uninhabitable. Davis begins his apocalyptically inflected tour with a trip to New York's Ground Zero and to the diabolic miracle of Las Vegas.