An authoritative study of the interrelationship between modern architecture, landscape, and site strategy as viewed through the work of five prominent architects Modern architects are often condemned for a seeming disregard of site considerations such as climate, topography, and existing vegetation. Noted landscape and architectural historian Marc Treib counters this prevailing view in an authoritative and unprecedented survey of 20th-century buildings and their landscapes. Exploring a range of architectural, philosophical, and theoretical approaches, Treib investigates the site strategies of five prominent modern-period architects: Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), Richard Neutra (1892-1970), Alvar Aalto (1898-1976), and Luis Barragán (1902-1988). The character of the sites on which these architects worked dramatically affected their architecture and gardens, a fact illustrated by Wright's "organic" regard of the desert; Mies's evolving divorce of building from terrain; Neutra's transformation of the "realities" of the site; Aalto's use of the forest metaphor and interior landscapes; and Barragán's architectonic conversion of the land. Fully illustrated with rarely published archival drawings and plans, accompanied by the author's own exceptional photographs, this book presents the spectrum of architectural responses to the constraints of site, climate, client, program, building material, region, and nation. Taken as a group, the work of these five architects sheds important light on the consideration and influence of the site and landscape on the practice of architecture during the 20th century.

Examines the overlooked contributions of modern architects to landscape design

The past decade has been witness to a remarkable resurgence of interest in landscape. While this recovery invokes a return of past traditions and ideas, it also implies renewal, invention, and transformation. Recovering Landscape collects a number of essays that discuss why landscape is gaining increased attention today, and what new possibilities might emerge from this situation. Themes such as reclamation, urbanism, infrastructure, geometry, representation, and temporality are explored in discussions drawn from recent developments not only in the United States but also in the Netherlands, France, India, and Southeast Asia. The contributors to this collection, all leading figures in the field of landscape architecture, include Alan Balfour, Denis Cosgrove, Georges Descombes, Christophe Girot, Steen Hoyer, David Leatherbarrow, Bart Lootsma, Sebastien Marot, Anuradha Mathur, Marc Treib, and Alex Wall.

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander is one of the most important landscape architects of the twentieth century, yet despite her lasting influence, few outside the field know her name. Her work has been instrumental in the development of the late-twentieth-century design ethic, and her early years working with architectural luminaries such as Louis Kahn and Dan Kiley prepared her to bring a truly modern—and audaciously abstract—sensibility to the landscape design tradition. In Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape, Susan Herrington draws upon archival research, site analyses, and numerous interviews with Oberlander and her collaborators to offer the first biography of this adventurous and influential landscape architect. Born in 1921, Oberlander fled Nazi Germany at the age of eighteen with her family, going on to become one of the few women to graduate from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design in the late 1940s. For six decades she has practiced socially responsible and ecologically sensitive planning for public landscapes, including the 1970s design of the Robson Square landscape and its adjoining Provincial Law Courts—one of Vancouver’s most famous spaces. Herrington places Oberlander within a larger social and aesthetic context, chronicling both her personal and professional trajectory and her work in New York, Philadelphia, Vancouver, Seattle, Berlin, Toronto, and Montreal. Oberlander is a progenitor of some of the most significant currents informing landscape architecture today, particularly in the area of ecological focus. In her thorough biography, Herrington draws much-deserved attention to one of the truly important figures in landscape architecture.

"Dreaming Gardens is a work that provides, for the first time, a framework for understanding the contributions of landscape architecture in the creation of Israel. The development of the landscape architecture profession in Israel paralleled the development of the state, as immigrants brought skills and ideas from the Diaspora, creating a unique opportunity for designers to help shape their national identity. Helphand's clear writing, complemented by copious color illustrations, charts the shifting attitudes of this singular culture toward its land, landscapes, communities, and nation."--BOOK JACKET.

The complex story of modern landscape architecture remains to be written, as does its precise definition. Thinking a Modern Landscape Architecture, West and East, written by one of the field's most prolific and insightful authors, provides a rare cross-cultural study that examines the written and design contributions made by two of the movement's most influential early protagonists: Christopher Tunnard (1910-1979) in England--and later the United States, and Sutemi Horiguchi (1896-1984) in Japan. Tunnard's pioneering manifesto, Gardens in the Modern Landscape, first published in 1938, laid out the thinking and provided the direction for a landscape architecture engaged more strongly with contemporary life, adopting ideas from modern art as well as the historical gardens of Japan. Rather than a book, it was the architect Horiguchi's 1934 essay "The Garden of Autumn Grasses" that initiated a new direction for garden making in Japan, with a considered and artful use of seasonal plants and a stronger connection to the modern architecture it accompanied. Unlike Tunnard, who sought inspiration and sources in contemporary art, Horiguchi looked to the eighteen-century Rimpa School of painting for insights into the composition of the new garden by carefully placing individual plants against a simple background. Although the two theorists-practitioners never met, Tunnard's interest in Japan, and use of Horiguchi's work as illustrations, links them in a shared quest for a landscape architecture appropriate to their times and respective countries. Lavishly illustrated with 150 historical and contemporary photos and drawings, Thinking a Modern Landscape Architecture, West and East: Christopher Tunnard and Sutemi Horiguchi offers the first compressive study into their thinking, landscape designs, and consequent influence on landscape architecture in the years that followed.

This volume examines Le Corbusier's relationship with the topographies of five continents, in essays by thirty of the formeost scholars of his work and with contemporary photographs by Richard Pare.

The modern period in landscape architecture is enjoying the fascinated appreciation of scholars and historians in Europe and the Americas, and new themes, new subjects and new appraisals are appearing. This book contributes to the conversation by focusing on the work of a singular designer who spent his entire career in a province of the North Island of New Zealand. Ted Smyth practiced an assured landscape modernism without ever seeing the designs of his forebears or his contemporaries working in the UK, Europe and the United States. Designing in isolation from the mainstream of modernism, and a little after its high tide, Smyth produced a series of gardens that provoke a revaluation of the diffusionist model of influence. The book explains and describes the evolution of Smyth’s design vocabulary and relates it to the development of tropical landscape modernism in other Asia-Pacific sites. It shows how a culture of garden modernism can be generated from within a particular locale, and highlights Smyth’s engagement with Māori design traditions in search of a specific expression of the high modern essentialism of place.

Why do the cities of the late twentieth century look as they do? What values do their appearance express and enfold? Their sheer scale and the durability of their materials assure that our cities will inform future generations about our era, in the same way that gothic cathedrals and medieval squares tell us something of the Middle Ages. In the meantime, our urban landscapes can tell us much about ourselves. For E. C. Relph, the urban landscape must be envisioned as a total environment—not just streets and buildings but billboards and parking meters as well. The Modern Urban Landscape traces the developments since 1880 in architecture, technology, planning, and society that have formed the visual context of daily life. Each of these shaping influences is often viewed in isolation, but Relph surveys the ways in which they have operated independently to create what we see when we walk down a street, shop in a mall, or stare through a windshield on an expressway. Two sets of ideas and fashions, Relph argues, have had an especially important impact on urban landscapes in the twentieth century. An "internationalism" made possible by new building technologies and more rapid communications has replaced regional style and custom as the dominant feature of city appearance, while a firm belief in the merits of self-consciousness has imposed logical analysis and technical manipulation on such commonplace objects as curbstones and park benches. "As a result," writes Relph, "the modern urban landscape is both rationalized and artificial, which is another way of saying that it is intensely human."

Landscape architecture and architecture are two fields that exist in close proximity to one another. Some have argued that the two are, in fact, one field. Others maintain that the disciplines are distinct. These designations are a subject of continual debate by theorists and practitioners alike. Here, David Leatherbarrow offers an entirely new way of thinking of architecture and landscape architecture. Moving beyond partisan arguments, he shows how the two disciplines rely upon one another to form a single framework of cultural meaning. Leatherbarrow redefines landscape architecture and architecture as topographical arts, the shared task of which is to accommodate and express the patterns of our lives. Topography, in his view, incorporates terrain, built and unbuilt, but also traces of practical affairs, by means of which culture preserves and renews its typical situations and institutions. This rigorous argument is supported by nearly 100 illustrations, as well as examples of topography from the sixteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, through the heroic period of early modernism, to more recent offerings. A number of these studies revise existing accounts of decisive moments in the history of these disciplines, particularly the birth of the informal garden, the emergence of continuous space in the landscapes and architecture of the modern period, and the new significance of landform or earthwork in contemporary architecture. For readers not directly involved with either of these professions, this book shows how over the centuries our lives have been shaped and enriched by landscape and architecture. Topographical Stories provides a new paradigm for theorizing and practicing landscape and architecture.