Invisible Gardens is a composite history of the individuals and firms that defined the field of landscape architecture in America from 1925 to 1975, a period that spawned a significant body of work combining social ideas of enduring value with landscapes and gardens that forged a modern aesthetic. The major protagonists include Thomas Church, Roberto Burle Marx, Isamu Noguchi, Luis Barragan, Daniel Urban Kiley, Stanley White, Hideo Sasaki, Ian McHarg, Lawrence Halprin, and Garrett Eckbo.
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.
John Dixon Hunt is widely considered one of the foremost of today's writers on the history and theory of gardens and landscape architecture. Gardens and the Picturesque collects eleven of Hunt's essays—several of them never before published—that deal with the ways in which men and women have given meaning to gardens and landscapes, especially with the ways in which gardens have represented the world of nature "picturesquely."
This is an entirely different garden book: a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards.
One voice imagines, the other analyzes in this elegant literary excursion through the history of garden art in France from medieval times to the present. Alternating discursive accounts, or allées, with fictional vignettes that recreate time and place, the Le Dantecs skillfully integrate the history of French gardens with the modern history of ideas. They incorporate literary criticism and art history with social and political history and raise questions about the present development of garden and landscape art.
Robert Harbison reads architecture as one would read poetry for meaning. Meaning, he finds, resides especially in those works of architecture that are unnecessary, having outlived their physical functions or never having been intended to have any. Gardens, monuments, historic fortifications, and ruins are among the examples he uses to reveal the secret meanings of this architecture "freed from function."
Gardens reveal the relationship between culture and nature, yet in the vast library of garden literature few books focus on what the garden means - on the ecology of garden as idea, place, and action. The Meaning of Gardens maps out how the garden is perceived, designed, used, and valued. Essays from a variety of disciplines are organized around six metaphors special to our time - the garden muses of Faith, Power, Ordering, Cultural Expression, Personal Expression, and Healing. Each muse suggests specific inspirations for garden and landscape design.
Our cities are on the move again. Pioneering observers of the urban landscape Bernard Frieden and Lynn Sagalyn delve into the inner workings of the new public entrepreneurship and public private partnerships that have revitalized the downtowns of such cities as Boston, San Diego, Seattle, St. Paul, and Pasadena. They bring a unique combination of political and economic expertise to their analysis of this hot new marketplace, depicting a generation of mayors and administrators who differ in style from their predecessors and who have a more informed relationship with developers.
AAAI proceedings describe innovative concepts, techniques, perspectives, and observations that present promising research directions in artificial intelligence.
A garden classic, The Genius of the Place reveals that the history of landscape gardening is much more than a history of design and style; it opens up a wide perspective of English cultural history, showing how landscape gardening was gradually transformed over two centuries into an art that has been widely imitated throughout Europe and North America.
