Thinking the Contemporary Landscape

Thinking the Contemporary Landscape
Author: Christophe Girot
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2016-10-25
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1616895594

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.

Recovering Landscape

Recovering Landscape
Author: James Corner
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 1999-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781568981796

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.

Topology

Topology
Author: Christophe Girot
Publisher: Jovis Verlag
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN: 9783868592122

"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"--

Contemporary Urban Landscapes of the Middle East

Contemporary Urban Landscapes of the Middle East
Author: Mohammad Gharipour
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2016-03-17
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317534077

The Middle East is well-known for its historic gardens that have developed over more than two millenniums. The role of urban landscape projects in Middle Eastern cities has grown in prominence, with a gradual shift in emphasis from gardens for the private sphere to an increasingly public function. The contemporary landscape projects, either designed as public plazas or public parks, have played a significant role in transferring the modern Middle Eastern cities to a new era and also in transforming to a newly shaped social culture in which the public has a voice. This book considers what ties these projects to their historical context, and what regional and local elements and concepts have been used in their design.

The Landscape Urbanism Reader

The Landscape Urbanism Reader
Author: Charles Waldheim
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 296
Release: 2012-03-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1568989490

In The Landscape Urbanism Reader Charles Waldheim—who is at the forefront of this new movement—has assembled the definitive collection of essays by many of the field's top practitioners. Fourteen essays written by leading figures across a range of disciplines and from around the world—including James Corner, Linda Pollak, Alan Berger, Pierre Bolanger, Julia Czerniak, and more—capture the origins, the contemporary milieu, and the aspirations of this relatively new field. The Landscape Urbanism Reader is an inspiring signal to the future of city making as well as an indispensable reference for students, teachers, architects, and urban planners.

Landscape as Urbanism

Landscape as Urbanism
Author: Charles Waldheim
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2022-03-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0691238308

A definitive intellectual history of landscape urbanism It has become conventional to think of urbanism and landscape as opposing one another—or to think of landscape as merely providing temporary relief from urban life as shaped by buildings and infrastructure. But, driven in part by environmental concerns, landscape has recently emerged as a model and medium for the city, with some theorists arguing that landscape architects are the urbanists of our age. In Landscape as Urbanism, one of the field's pioneers presents a powerful case for rethinking the city through landscape. Charles Waldheim traces the roots of landscape as a form of urbanism from its origins in the Renaissance through the twentieth century. Growing out of progressive architectural culture and populist environmentalism, the concept was further informed by the nineteenth-century invention of landscape architecture as a "new art" charged with reconciling the design of the industrial city with its ecological and social conditions. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as urban planning shifted from design to social science, and as urban design committed to neotraditional models of town planning, landscape urbanism emerged to fill a void at the heart of the contemporary urban project. Generously illustrated, Landscape as Urbanism examines works from around the world by designers ranging from Ludwig Hilberseimer, Andrea Branzi, and Frank Lloyd Wright to James Corner, Adriaan Geuze, and Michael Van Valkenburgh. The result is the definitive account of an emerging field that is likely to influence the design of cities for decades to come.

Big Plans

Big Plans
Author: Kenneth L. Kolson
Publisher: JHU Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2003-11-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780801877308

This work springs from the idea that human aspirations for the city tend to overstate the role of rationality in public life. The author explores the part serendipity plays in urban experience.

Walls

Walls
Author: Thomas Oles
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2015-01-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 022619924X

This book about walls is genuinely exciting and alive with insights, elegance, rigor, style, and thoughtful humanism. It reveals and interrogates the social, political, and historical complexities of one of our most common landscape features, demonstrating how we misconstrue or fail to appreciate the nature and possibilities of physical boundaries. Oles shows that our societies and our politics are shaped by the nature and quality of the divisions we make on and among landscapes, and he interrogates practical, theoretical, and ethical aspects of our landscapes and the boundaries between them. This leads him into stark discussions of barriers such as the USMexico border fence, Israel s fortifications in the West Bank, and the kinds of residential barriers that define neighborhoods by their edges in communities worldwide, from Johannesburg to Levittown. Oles further locates counternarratives of walls, showing how people have lived in walls or used them in seemingly contradictory ways, letting permeability become a form of strength."