No comments about Une histoire sensuelle des jardins.

No comments about Fountains, Statues, and Flowers: Studies in Italian Gardens of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Dumbarton Oaks Other Titles in Garden History).

3 comments about The New American Village (Creating the North American Landscape).

1. In the 20 page written intro to Bob Thall's book of photographs, the author discusses the introduction of the new suburban areas surrounding large cities, specifically the ones surrounding Chicago, and even more specifically Schaumburg, Illinois. His description is admittedly subjective, but that doesn't make it negative. He addresses the pros and cons of both city life and suburban life, and details the way that his photographs will illutrate his points.
   
   The photographs themselves are stunning simply because they are of such typical subruban non-descript businesses, streets, homes, and parks. What is interesting is how new everything looks, and yet 8 years later, I wonder what it looks like. Thall considers what these neighborhoods will look like 20 years from their construction dates, considering they are built with such cheap material, and almost a decade later, we're close to finding out. It would be interesting to see a follow-up book about the same area, just to see how much can change in such a short amount of time in a rapidly growing suburban area.
   
   For anyone interested in the suburbs and the small cities full of strip-malls and housing developments that arise around major cities, this book is an excellent reference point.



2. Schaumburg, Illinois (incorporated 1956) is now on the map thanks to Bob Thall's excellent photos taken during the growth of the town in the Nineties. Divided into four chapters dealing with the landscape: corporate, commercial, domestic and natural, the photos carry on the deadpan format of Adams, Baltz, Gohlke and others associated with the New Topographics style.
   
   Despite appearing rather anonymous because there are no people in the photos Schaumburg does look a very reasonable place to live and Thall mentions in his short opening essay that many of the houses and corporate offices overlook small lakes and ponds, created by the developers to control flooding, this water obviously encourages wildlife. As is usual with suburbs/edge cities/New Villages, critics will assume that the inhabitants can't possibly be happy living in such an environment but I bet they are. Probably the best folks-at-home-in-the-suburbs book is Bill Owens stunning 'Suburbia' (ISBN 1881270408) photographed in Livermore, San Francisco.
   
   The sixty-five photos in 'The New American Village' are well presented (in 265dpi) in the standard art-photo landscape format though there is the usual photobook annoyance of having to turn to a page in the back to read each photo's caption. Unfortunately the captions say no more than place and date yet the images frequently, it seems to me, deserve more of an explanation than just resting on the page.
   
   Incidentally, it is worth looking down at Schaumburg on Google Earth, you will see a place that has matured over the years since Thall took his photos and especially look at the space between houses, the curved streets, the position of corporate and retail units in relation to domestic housing. A pretty good place to live!
   
   ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.



3. Thall is a photographer and his photographs are marvelous: lucid, lovely, tonally rich, beautifully constructed. What's astonishing, though, is the way he has applied his sensibility to the least-liked spaces that increasingly dominate America and the globe: the "edge cities" of prefab warehouses for outsourced products, of instant townhouse communities (really trailer courts stacked upright) of malls and corporate "campuses." Most writing about this new American landscape excoriates it or, more rarely, argues that it's the landscape we want (ignoring that "we" aren't the architects, the patrons, or the developers). Thall seeks simply to look, to see what's remarkable, and then to communicate it, in pictures that embody the complex history of our newly decentralized human habitations. On the cover is a picture of two shocking office towers shot from a parking garage. Only one car is there: a beat-up Toyota station wagon perched impudently at off-angle to the resolute order of the rest of the space. That must be Thall's car; certainly it's the embodiment of the position he takes when he makes these pictures.

1 comments about Landscape Professional Practice.

1. Although some of the information is broadly applicable to US practice, this is probably a much more useful reference if you practice in England. Wish there were a US equivalent of this book.

No comments about Landscape Construction: Materials, Steps, Ramps and Light Structures.

1 comments about The New Perennials Preferred.

1. Helen Van Pelt Wilson writes about her perennial gardens in such a way as to make one want to be out in the garden even as one reads the book. Read from cover to cover, or jump around the chapters - any way at all, it is the best reference book for gardeners I have ever found. And it reads so well - my friends always ask to borrow it again.

No comments about Baroque Gardens (Flora in Focus Series).

2 comments about Outdoor Decor: Decorative Projects for the Porch, Patio & Yard (Arts & Crafts for Home Decorating).

1. I checked this book out of the library. I love it and am now buying it online for myself. (The library seems to want their copy back).

   The fountain on the cover is the project I'm working on now; but there are so many others I want to do that I want my own copy.




2. It is a beautiful book for Patio's and Porch's but was lacking in yard landscaping.

No comments about Essay on Gardens: A Chapter in the French Picturesque (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture).

No comments about Ordinariness and Light.