This volume has been designed to complement a second guidebook in the Buildings of the United States series that will focus on the buildings of Massachusetts from Cape Cod to the Berkshires.

Botany 101 for professionals who want a summary of planting design fundamentals. Plants are among the most important materials for effective landscape design. Yet the fundamentals of plant biology and growth; their morphology, color, and functional assets; and details such as planting, pruning techniques, and maintenance practices are surprisingly absent from our education and training, which tend to focus on other core principles like drainage, grading, and spatial relationships. What do you need to know about how plants grow and function? How can you determine appropriate plants for a particular site? How can you use their distinct design features effectively? What are the real design considerations to keep in mind? This book—a Botany 101 course for professionals and students alike—walks you through all the answers, equipping you with the ability to be not just an informed landscape designer but also an effective planting designer. Kimberly Duffy Turner, a landscape architect and horticulturalist, explains the essentials of planting design, exploring form and function and showing how various characteristics of plants and trees—shape, pigment, leaf veination, texture, fragrance, sound, height, and more—can be used to achieve effective site-appropriate designs. Specifying appropriate plant material and examining stock at the nursery—drawing up a planting schedule of the species or cultivar, sizes, and quantities—and evaluating modes of transplantation (when to ask for bare root, balled and burlapped, or containerized) are other key “on-the-job” concepts covered. A chapter on green design outlines some of the sustainable trends in botany: the role of LEED certification in landscape design; mitigating environmental problems with plants and open space; the emergence of green roofs and vertical gardens; biomimicry; and sensitive material selection, like composite wood products and plant-derived, soy-based paints. Both a handy appendix of common Latin and Greek terms used in horticulture and a comprehensive list of plant palettes are included. With more than 150 color photographs and schematic drawings illustrating key strategies, Botany for Designers is the professional’s go-to guide, showing you how an appreciation of plant fundamentals can lead to more inspired, well-designed landscapes.

For 60 years, Fletcher Steele practised landscape architecture as a fine art, designing nearly 700 gardens. Often brilliant, always original, Steele's work is considered by many as a link between 19th century beaux arts formalism & modern landscape design.

Based upon the best-selling book Architectural Detailing by Edward Allen and Patrick Rand, Landscape Architectural Detailing applies the same organization to the three major concerns of the landscape architecture detailer—function, constructability, and aesthetics. Richly illustrated, this book approaches landscape architecture detailing in a systematic manner and provides a framework for analyzing existing details and devising new ones. Landscape Architectural Detailing includes material on details related to aesthetics, water drainage and movement, structures, construction assemblies, sustainable resources, and more.

The evolution of the Boston metropolitan area, from country villages and streetcar suburbs to exurban sprawl and “smart growth.” Boston's metropolitan landscape has been two hundred years in the making. From its proto-suburban village centers of 1800 to its far-flung, automobile-centric exurbs of today, Boston has been a national pacesetter for suburbanization. In The Hub's Metropolis, James O'Connell charts the evolution of Boston's suburban development. The city of Boston is compact and consolidated—famously, “the Hub.” Greater Boston, however, stretches over 1,736 square miles and ranks as the world's sixth largest metropolitan area. Boston suburbs began to develop after 1820, when wealthy city dwellers built country estates that were just a short carriage ride away from their homes in the city. Then, as transportation became more efficient and affordable, the map of the suburbs expanded. The Metropolitan Park Commission's park-and-parkway system, developed in the 1890s, created a template for suburbanization that represents the country's first example of regional planning. O'Connell identifies nine layers of Boston's suburban development, each of which has left its imprint on the landscape: traditional villages; country retreats; railroad suburbs; streetcar suburbs (the first electric streetcar boulevard, Beacon Street in Brookline, was designed by Frederic Law Olmsted); parkway suburbs, which emphasized public greenspace but also encouraged commuting by automobile; mill towns, with housing for workers; upscale and middle-class suburbs accessible by outer-belt highways like Route 128; exurban, McMansion-dotted sprawl; and smart growth. Still a pacesetter, Greater Boston has pioneered antisprawl initiatives that encourage compact, mixed-use development in existing neighborhoods near railroad and transit stations. O'Connell reminds us that these nine layers of suburban infrastructure are still woven into the fabric of the metropolis. Each chapter suggests sites to visit, from Waltham country estates to Cambridge triple-deckers.

Often problematically labeled as “Brutalist” architecture, the concrete buildings that transformed Boston during 1960s and 1970s were conceived with progressive-minded intentions by some of the world’s most influential designers, including Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, I. M. Pei, Henry Cobb, Araldo Cossutta, Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, Paul Rudolph, Josep Lluís Sert, and The Architects Collaborative. As a worldwide phenomenon, building with concrete represents one of the major architectural movements of the postwar years, but in Boston it was deployed in more numerous and diverse civic, cultural, and academic projects than in any other major U.S. city. After decades of stagnation and corrupt leadership, public investment in Boston in the 1960s catalyzed enormous growth, resulting in a generation of bold buildings that shared a vocabulary of concrete modernism. The period from the 1960 arrival of Edward J. Logue as the powerful and often controversial director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority to the reopening of Quincy Market in 1976 saw Boston as an urban laboratory for the exploration of concrete’s structural and sculptural qualities. What emerged was a vision for the city’s widespread revitalization often referred to as the “New Boston.” Today, when concrete buildings across the nation are in danger of insensitive renovation or demolition, Heroic presents the concrete structures that defined Boston during this remarkable period—from the well-known (Boston City Hall, New England Aquarium, and cornerstones of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University) to the already lost (Mary Otis Stevens and Thomas F. McNulty’s concrete Lincoln House and Studio; Sert, Jackson & Associates’ Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School)—with hundreds of images; essays by architectural historians Joan Ockman, Lizabeth Cohen, Keith N. Morgan, and Douglass Shand-Tucci; and interviews with a number of the architects themselves. The product of 8 years of research and advocacy, Heroic surveys the intentions and aspirations of this period and considers anew its legacies—both troubled and inspired.