1 comments about Practical Ecology for Planners, Developers, and Citizens.

1. This is an interesting and articulate book for both the specialist and the general reader who cares about a healthy world. It is of significant practical value while at the same time it presents a coherent background of information on which to base action.

1 comments about Creeping Bentgrass Management: Summer Stresses, Weeds and Selected Maladies.

1. This is the most comprehensive book dealing with creeping bentgrass management. The author covers all aspects of bentgrass management from disease identification, management and control to the control of annual bluegrass with various growth regulators and chemicals. Unlike other books, however, this one talks about common problems that arise that are mistaken for disease issues and lead to the application of wasted chemicals. If you are a golf course superintendent or a turf student there are two books that you must have; The Turf Compendium and this one. You will not be disappointed.

   The Turf Guy

1 comments about Penelope Hobhouse's Gardening Through the Ages: An Illustrated History of Plants and Their Influence on Garden Styles-From Ancient Egypt to the Pres.

1. Every page is packed with color plates and useful (fun) information on gardening.
   Contents:
   * The origins of Gardening in the West
   * The Gardens of Islam
   * The Medieval Gardens of Christendom
   * Botanists, Plantsmen and Gardens of Renaissance Europe
   * The Gardens of the Italian Renaissance
   * The Origin and Development of French Formality
   * The Eighteenth-century English Landscape
   * Expansion and Experiment in the Nineteenth Century
   * The twentieth Century: Conservation of Plants in Gardening
   
   If you are a Brother Cadfael fan you will appreciate the section on "Medieval Gardens of Christendom."

1 comments about Opportunities in Landscape Architecture, Botanical Gardens and Arboreta Careers (Opportunities in).

1. This book is pretty helpful, even if you already know quite a bit about the subject. It is informative and helps with narrowing down the career options you have.

5 comments about Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape.

1. Don't waste your money on this book- states the obvious in
   an over-inflated language that serves to make the authors appear deeper than they really are. If they actually took the time to look around at the world and stop looking at design magazines they would realize that this topic is a more complex one globally rooted in the vernacular of farms, military architecture and the way people have lived and worked. Again shows the insecurity of landscape architects who feel they have to fabricate theory (and demonstrate their ignorance of the subject) in order to be taken seriously rather than address the realities of their own field.



2. Don't waste your money on this book- states the obvious in
   an over-inflated language that serves to make the authors appear deeper than they really are. If they actually took the time to look around at the world and stop looking at design magazines they would realize that this topic is a more complex one globally rooted in the vernacular of farms, military architecture and the way people have lived and worked. Again shows the insecurity of landscape architects who feel they have to fabricate theory (and demonstrate their ignorance of the subject) in order to be taken seriously rather than address the realities of their own field.



3. Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape (Gloucester, MA: Rockport Publishers, 1999), by Linda Pollak and Anita Berrizbeitia, explores the dance between the environment and buildings in a series of strategic critical operations and is both an analytical and discursive tour of significant modernist and post-modernist projects ranging from Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum (1966-1972) to Villa Dall'Ava (1984-1991) by Rem Koolhaas. The former is discussed under the rubric "Threshold", the latter "Reciprocity". The remaining conceptual operations include "Materiality", "Insertion", and "Infrastructure". These terminologies unveil the manifold stratagems utilized in bringing architecture down to earth.

   In the case of Dan Graham's Two-Way Mirror Cylinder (1991), high atop Manhattan's Dia Center in Chelsea, this involves bringing architecture to the light and to the sky. In the clamor for height in Manhattan, architecture that embraces nature must struggle all the more to find purchase, that archimedian point of exacting leverage (and revenge). Graham's reflective glass pavilion is a lyrical-polemical exercise staged outside the white box of the contemporary art gallery, on the roof with views of the Hudson River, and engages in a clever doublespeak regarding its surroundings. The cylinder is half mocking the water tower nearby and the mirrored glass is certainly an outgrowth of Graham's ascerbic critique of the modernist skyscraper and its pretension to omniscience.

   Pollak and Berrizbeitia's discursus embarks into the nebulous region of the antitheses that have driven architecture mad for the last several generations: the object-subject dialectic of modernist space and the obsfucation of context perpetrated by dogmatists such as Philip Johnson, during his reign at MoMA with Alfred Barr. These latter two protagonists perpetrated a hoax on the public by denaturing the denatured modernist forms - a doubled denaturing - that excised the contingent and immanent factors of modernist architecture in favor of the universal and abstract. Pollak and Berrizbeitia's book seeks to restore this suppressed entelechy. The quest for the Absolute was (and remains) a provisional program to pull human artifice towards the stars while gesturing at the earth with secret hand signals of a cursory sort (Johnson's garden at MoMA or the ubiquitous, appalling inhumane plaza beneath the signature office tower). Johnson famously excised the landscape aspects of Mies van der Rohe's buildings - villas included - as a means of exacting even more profound anomie in his personal campaign to inflict architectural pain. Architecture has been exorcising this demon - this repression - for decades. It is only now that we are finding in Mies an aesthetic benevolence prefigured in his attempts to unveil the tectonic of modern, industrial-strength architectural form in association with landscape [...]

   From "Architecture's Clay Feet" (2001)




4. While I'll not dispute the other reviewers comments, it is worth mentioning that a) most of the structures profiled are commercial buildings and b) virtually everything is very modern architecture.

   What my wife and I hoped to see was something more in tune with the residential, traditional homes most people live in.

   One need only think of courtyards in southwestern architecture, decks and outdoor living areas, living rooms with French doors and transom windows overlooking a woodsy area, and the verandas on southern homes to picture what we were looking for.

   If this is what *you* are looking for, this isn't the book for you.




5. I recently purchased this book in preparation for my thesis. Finally, a collaboration between an Architect and a Landscape Architect has advanced the architectural relationship of Inside vs. outside for the first time in decades. This subject has been long overlooked, and dubbed only pertinent for "Green" architects, yet I, like the authors believe that these are pertinent investigations for any design that is sited in the outdoor environment. Technology has progressed to the point that Architecture no longer needs to dominate the outdoors,.. it no longer needs to be the "machine in the garden", as the book puts it. Architecture can mean more to its environment, and vice/versa. This book is well thought out, well written, and the highlighted projects are exteremely well selected. I only hope that in another 20 years there might be a new volume of this book, filled with new, and even better examples of the "operations" that this book employs.

No comments about Digital Land: Integrating Technology into the Land Planning Process.

No comments about Green Roofs in Sustainable Landscape Design.

No comments about Grading for Landscape Architects and Architects.

2 comments about Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture.

1. Paul is everything Nietzsche screamed about being without necessarily proving that he was himself what he would enjoin others to become: Genuinely cheerful, high-thinking, irreverent about the past, just big, and "Greek." Paul has written a wonderful book--seemingly all the more wonderful for confirming so many of my own observations about the subject.

   Here in this book he expands on the ideas he presented in his earlier book "What is Architecture?" and he does so in a way that delights,informs, teaches, and shocks. No small feat, mate.
   And he pulls this off by writing in a style that is nonexistent in the field. The book reads like a diary--of the kind 19th century biologists and anthropolgists used to keep: accurate, subjective, poetic when wrong, speculative, eloquent, filled with arcane data, and connected to LIVED LIFE.
   And to tell his story, he brings in his family, his students, his house, his travels, ants in his backyard, etc --whatever he's got at his fingertips.

   For Paul there is no past: No dinosaurs, no pyramids in the past for him because they are all right here right now--as they cannot but be otherwise. (His brand of "optimism" about machines and technology cannot even be called optimism--since optimism is an attitude that comes from acknowledging that cause for pessimism does exist but would rather not focus on it.) In Pauls's view, there is also no future but only NOW. A rather Zen attitude, ain't it.

   In this book, Paul makes no attempt to restrain his joy and wonderment at the sheer fact of existence of EVERYTHING including us and our irrepressible urge to tinker to make ourselves in different material other than flesh and blood only.

   The title of the book, ARTIFICIAL LOVE comes from a conversation in which his friends, Maria and Jaques are debating whether machines are indeed alive: Maria says machines are 'artifical life.' Jaques wonder if all this time what he felt for them was, then, 'artificial love.'

   Written like a novel, this book is weird in that it contains REAL architecture talk that ACTUALLY takes place between real smart and fun architects when they are just shootin' the breeze.
   If you think about all the pretentious archi-babble that fills the pages of so many "high-theory" architecture books today, it kinda makes you go, "wassupwitdat?"

   Highly recommended for all smart people but especially for small-minded as well as big-minded architects--but for totally different reasons.




2. Paul Shepheard's wonderful, witty new book is about architecture and machines in the broadest sense. "Artificial Love" provides a biting, brilliant commentary on our times. It's not only the best architecture book, it's the best book that I've read this year.

No comments about Creative Home Landscaping: How to Plan and Beautify Your Yard With a Guide to More Than 400 Landscape Plants.