A generous selection of illustrations, together with a list of surviving landscape sites accessible to the public, brings both the subjects and their art to life.

A rich portrait of a major figure in American art & architecture & his role in shaping American cultural identity.

This well-illustrated volume presents for the first time a fascinating and comprehensive view of the cultural evolution of the American landscape. Written by a team of leading scholars, the essays examine key historical forces in the settlement and human shaping of the land over the past 10,000 years, with an emphasis on the past three centuries. Through carefully chosen illustration, the book shows the reader how to "read" in today's landscape the record of this transformation. The major historical forces that shaped the American cultural landscape are viewed from the varied perspective of ethnic and cultural movements, environmetnal challenge and response, and urbanization. The contributors discuss a rich selection of themes including: the diverse influence of colonial powers on early settlement; the emergence of regional types of landscape; the impact of ideology on landscape; and the contributions of technological change to landscape development.

A generous selection of illustrations, together with a list of surviving landscape sites accessible to the public, brings both the subjects and their art to life.

Shaping the Postwar Landscape is the latest contribution to the Cultural Landscape Foundation's well-known reference project, Pioneers of American Landscape Design, the first volume of which appeared nearly a quarter of a century ago. The present collection features profiles of seventy-two important figures, including landscape architects, architects, planners, artists, horticulturists, and educators. The volume focuses principally on individuals whose careers reached their height during the period between the end of World War II and the American Bicentennial. In that postwar era, landscape architects played an important part in the revitalization of American cities, introducing new typologies for public spaces in the civic realm. Among these were parks that capped freeways, plazas and gardens atop buildings, promenades on revitalized waterfronts, "vest pocket" parks on tiny urban plots and derelict sites, and pedestrian-friendly downtown malls. Practitioners were also active on the new suburban frontier, their influence extending as far as Levittown and mobile-home communities. They created new outdoor living environments tailored to the California climate, and their work shaped landscaped in the American South, East, West, and Heartland. At a time when interest in midcentury architecture is flourishing, Shaping the Postwar Landscape offers a substantial parallel contribution to the field of landscape studies. It belongs not only on the bookshelves of serious students and scholars but in the office of every landscape architect sensitive to significant works of the recent past.

A rich portrait of a major figure in American art & architecture & his role in shaping American cultural identity.

The author, an English architect, tells how buildings, gas stations, and parking lots can be brought into a pleasing pattern, with many specific references to American cities.

This book argues that the design of built spaces influences civic attitudes, including prospects for social equality and integration, in America. Key American architects and planners—including Frederick Law Olmsted, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Moses, and the New Urbanists—not only articulated unique visions of democracy in their extensive writings, but also instantiated those ideas in physical form. Using criteria such as the formation of social capital, support for human capabilities, and environmental sustainability, the book argues that the designs most closely associated with a communally-inflected version of democracy, such as Olmsted's public parks or various New Urbanist projects, create conditions more favorable to human flourishing and more consistent with a democratic society than those that are individualistic in their orientation, such as urban modernism or most suburban forms.

Photographs and essays express "the way the American landscape has been forged by various cultures in the past and what the possibilities are for its future design."--Jacket.