Landscape Architecture Criticism offers techniques, perspectives and theories which relate to landscape architecture, a field very different from the more well-known domains of art and architectural criticism. Throughout the book, Bowring delves into questions such as, how do we know if built or unbuilt works of landscape architecture are successful? What strategies are used to measure the success or failure, and by whom? Does design criticism only come in written form? It brings together diverse perspectives on criticism in landscape architecture, establishing a substantial point of reference for approaching design critique, exploring how criticism developed within the discipline. Beginning with an introductory overview to set the framework, the book then moves on to historical perspectives, the purpose of critique, theoretical positions ranging from aesthetics, to politics and experience, unbuilt projects, techniques, and communication. Written for professionals and academics, as well as for students and instructors in landscape architecture, it includes strategies, diagrams, matrices, and full colour illustrations to prompt discussion and provide a basis for exploring design critique.

On the heels of our groundbreaking books in landscape architecture, James Corner's Recovering Landscape and Charles Waldheim's Landscape Urbanism Reader, comes another essential reader, . Examining our shifting perceptions of nature and place in the context of environmental challenges and how these affect urbanism and architecture, the seventeen essayists in argue for an all-encompassing view of landscape that integrates the scientific, intellectual, aesthetic, and mythic into a new multidisciplinary understanding of the contemporary landscape. A must-read for anyone concerned about the changing nature of our landscape in a time of climate crisis.

Open urban spaces are an ideal stage for public events. An important prerequisite for their design in an increasingly heterogeneous multicultural cityscape is the relationship between design, use, and social function.The book documents both temporary as well as permanent installations of various kinds – from the open-air courtyard of a museum to the design of a river bank promenade, through to a city park.

Codify: Parametric and Computational Design in Landscape Architecture provides a series of essays that explore what it means to use, modify and create computational tools in a contemporary design environment. Landscape architecture has a long history of innovation in the areas of computation and media, particularly in how the discipline represents, analyses, and constructs complex systems. This curated volume spans academic and professional projects to form a snapshot of digital practices that aim to show how computation is a tool that goes beyond methods of representation and media. The book is organized in four sections; syntax, perception, employ, and prospective. The essays are written by leading academics and professionals and the sections examine the role of computational tools in landscape architecture through case studies, historical accounts, theoretical arguments, and nascent propositions.

Michael Sorkin's iconic list is now in a handsome printed package, a perfect gift for any architect, student of architecture, or design-savvy urbanist. By turns poetic and humorous, practical and wise, this book is a joyful celebration of the craft of architecture. A posthumous book by critic, architect, urban theorist, and educator, Michael Sorkin (1948-2020), 250 Things An Architct Should Know is filled with details that architects love to obsess over, from the expected (golden ratio and the seismic code) to the unexpected (the heights of folly and the prismatic charms of Greek islands.)

The papers presented in this volume range from proposals for new design approaches, historical analysis of the relationship between the practice of landscape architecture and environmentalism, to the theories of early practitioners of landscape architecture imbued by an environmentalist outlook. The issues above are addressed through topics as eclectic as the design of American zoos, the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority, road design and maintenance in Texas, and criticism of relationships between the words and works of select landscape architects. This volume provides a fresh approach to encounters between environmentalism and landscape architecture by reframing the issues through self-reflection instead of strategic debate.

The architecture and architectural culture of the Netherlands have been causing quite a stir in recent years: a great many remarkable new buildings and projects testify to the current flowering in Dutch architecture, urban planning, and landscaping that's so exciting to so many in and out of the field. Artificial Landscape illustrates the results of this late twentieth century surge of creativity and traces the background of its success, examining both the 'Dutch phenomenon' and its socio-historical context to find out what makes it work so well. What we find is that even in a period of globalization there is still such a thing as a Dutch 'climate, ' yet despite this culture's specific national character we have much to learn from it, particularly where its unique synthesis of architecture, urbanism, and landscaping is concerned. This exciting movement is represented by a selection of designs, built works, ideas, plans and manifestoes from such architects and firms as OMA/Rem Koolhaas, Neutelings Riedijk, MVRDV, Maunce Nio, and Max 1, to name only a few. Apart from recording the state of things in Dutch architecture, Artificial Landscape also serves as a survey of contemporary architectural criticism, collecting the most important critiques of Dutch architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture to have appeared in recent years.

A call for landscape architects to leave the office and return to the garden. Addressing one of the most repressed subjects in landscape architecture, this book could only have been written by someone who is both an experienced gardener and a landscape architect. With Overgrown, Julian Raxworthy offers a watershed work in the tradition of Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn, Kevin Lynch, and J. B. Jackson. As a discipline, landscape architecture has distanced itself from gardening, and landscape architects take pains to distinguish themselves from gardeners or landscapers. Landscape architects tend to imagine gardens from the office, representing plants with drawings or other simulations, whereas gardeners work in the dirt, in real time, planting, pruning, and maintaining. In Overgrown, Raxworthy calls for the integration of landscape architecture and gardening. Each has something to offer the other: Landscape architecture can design beautiful spaces, and gardening can enhance and deepen the beauty of garden environments over time. Growth, says Raxworthy, is the medium of garden development; landscape architects should leave the office and go into the garden in order to know growth in an organic, nonsimulated way. Raxworthy proposes a new practice for working with plant material that he terms “the viridic” (after “the tectonic” in architecture), from the Latin word for green, with its associations of spring and growth. He builds his argument for the viridic through six generously illustrated case studies of gardens that range from “formal” to “informal” approaches—from a sixteenth-century French Renaissance water garden to a Scottish poet-scientist's “marginal” garden, barely differentiated from nature. Raxworthy argues that landscape architectural practice itself needs to be “gardened,” brought back into the field. He offers a “Manifesto for the Viridic” that casts designers and plants as vegetal partners in a renewed practice of landscape gardening.

Written by a team of renowned practitioners and academics, this book offers a broad investigation of how the designed landscape is and has been represented: for design study, for criticism and even for its realization.

Twenty-two essays that provide a forum for assessing the tenets, accomplishments and limits of modernism in landscape architecture and for formulating ideas about possible directions for the future of the discipline These twenty-two essays provide a rich forum for assessing the tenets, accomplishments, and limits of modernism in landscape architecture and for formulating ideas about possible directions for the future of the discipline. During the 1930s Garrett Eckbo, Dan Kiley, and JamesRose began to integrate modernist architectural ideas into their work and to design a landscape more in accord with the life and sensibilities of their time. Together with Thomas Church, whose gardens provided the setting for California living, they laid the foundations for a modern American landscape design. This first critical assessment of modem landscape architecture brings together seminal articles from the 1930s and 1940s by Eckbo, Kiley, Rose, Fletcher Steele, and Christopher Tunnard, and includes contributions by contemporary writers and designers such as Peirce Lewis, Catherine Howett, John Dixon Hunt, Peter Walker, and Martha Schwartz who examine the historical and cultural framework within which modern landscape designers have worked. There are also essays by Lance Neckar, Reuben Rainey, Gregg Bleam, Michael Laurie, and Marc Treib that discuss the designs and legacy of the Americans Tunnard, Eckbo, Church, Kiley, and Robert Irwin. Dorothée Imbert takes up Pierre-Emile Legrain and French modernist gardens of the 1920s, and Thorbjörn Andersson reviews experiments with stylized naturalism developed by Erik Glemme and others in the Stockholm park system.