1 comments about Urban Design: Street and Square, Third Edition.

1. This book is basically a huge summary of all the Urban Design books writen in the past 100 years. Its nice to have it all in one place, the book is organized well and is a great reference to have in any professional library.

5 comments about Silent Screens: The Decline and Transformation of the American Movie Theater (Creating the North American Landscape).

1. This book has a lot of great pictures and does a good job of providing some history on theatres that were once important parts of the landscape and are now mostly forgotten. If you are looking for a history of the large movie palaces, there are many other books you should look at, but if you want to see a history of small town theatres with some great artwork, this is a book you need.



2. As a projectionist, I felt it my duty to research my trade in as many ways as possible, and one way was to learn about the movie palaces and hometown theatres that made my job exist.
   I actually cried as I read this book. The photos made me wish I had been around to experience these theatres in their prime.
   This book helped me to understand and respect the movie industry's history, and the history of the American hometown, far better than any factual history book ever has.
   This book also inspired me to support my local historical theatres and those around the nation. Mr. Putnam did a wonderful job on this book. The photographs are all of superb quality, and the Demolitions and Conversions Noted sections are extremely interesting. While the photos of the decaying cinemas are depressing, they also inspire one to save the historic theatres that we have left and to learn about their history.



3. I saw this exibit at the Smithsonian and loved it.



4. This is a wonderful, haunting book, which I think at least one of the previous reviewers here has missed the point of. The point is not to show these theaters in their prime, but rather, in pictures of their present state of decay, to hint at the glories that were. If you're looking for a picture book of grand movie palaces, this isn't it. But if you're looking for something that operates on a different plane, the romance of decay, and the melancholy of a world lost, this is definitely it. For all those who want to let their imaginations loose upon the ruins, this book should provide a field day.



5. This is not the first picture book of lost American movie houses, and I hope it will not be the last, but while the photo quality is excellent, the text and background leave much to be desired. It does indeed create a nostalgic empathy for its subject, those smaller structures made so famous by that memorable movie of 1971: "The Last Picture Show", and just as it featured a show house in a small Texas town, so this book favors black and white shots ("plates") of picture shows that stand as shadows of what they once were. No attempt is made to delve into the early life or the circumstances of the demise of these venues, so the photos leave the reader with much the vacant, lost, tumbling-tumble-weeds-driven-on-the-wind feeling of the movie.

   To its credit, the book does contain two 'necrologies' of sorts: the first is a four-page chapter called "Demolitions Noted" where several hundred movie houses around the nation are listed as gone, featuring, for example, an eight-page spread of the Pekin Th. of Pekin, Illinois being demolished, yet nothing is shown of it in its prime so that the reader could really appreciate that this was a unique Chinese-styled small movie palace of the 'atmospheric' (stars and clouds) type worthy of preservation. Had the author taken the trouble to locate a copy of one of the foremost books on the American movie theatre: AMERICAN MOVIE PALACES by David Naylor, he would have seen on its page 82 a photo of the Pekin Theatre in its pre-demolition prime, and then his photos of it in demolition would have had more context and impact had he sought to include this photo with his. Any research on his part would have disclosed that the photo was owned by one of the founders of the Theatre Historical Society of America which publishes a magazine of such theatre history: "Marquee", and no doubt that photo and many others could have been obtained, but neither the Society nor its magazine are mentioned in the book. Such research is what sets a quality book apart from others of lesser stature, picture book or not.

   The second 'necrology' is the chapter entitled: "Conversions Noted" which is perhaps the least depressing in the book since it shows, within its seven pages of listings, that theatres large or small can have other useful lives. An overlooked conversion was the unusual one which occurred in Milwaukee when the 1920 Riviera Th. was converted to a bicycle emporium cum velodrome with a planned bike racing track to be constructed atop the balcony and around the walls under the old chandelier positions with inverted bicycle frames supporting high intensity up-lights as the new 'chandeliers'!

   The comentaries by several notables do little to advance scholarship, something one would have expected from a book published by a university press. When the author/photographer explains in the "Conclusion" that he knew nothing of the documented locations of movie houses (few of these here could really qualify to use the term 'theatre') until someone introduced him to the standard of such guides: "The Film Daily Yearbook", it is obvious that scholarship or any real contribution to the body of knowledge was not the genesis of this work. Even one afternoon in any real library would have introduced him to the many volumes on the subject as well as magazines, and had such limited research been done, no doubt the author would have been able to do more than stumble about the towns of America hoping to find a dead show house; he could have given us some background to the origins of this genre and thus put meat on the bones of the photos, good ones though they are.

   The book's 100 some pages in the long format are nicely produced, and they may create a longing for more information so absent from this opus, in which case one is well advised to consult the landmark book which its Forward writer described as the "appropriate epitaph" of the movie house: "THE BEST REMAINING SEATS: The Golden Age of the Movie Palace" by the late Ben M. Hall (several editions available here at Amazon). "SILENT SCREENS" is a clever title, and in some depressing way it is more of an epitaph than the former title, yet it is unfulfilling, unless one is satisfied with a vagabond's jaunt with a camera down so many main streets.

No comments about Plant-Driven Design: Creating Gardens That Honor Plants, Place, and Spirit.

No comments about Water Gardens in a Weekend: Projects for One, Two or Three Weekends.

No comments about Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives.

No comments about Seashore Paspalum: The Environmental Turfgrass.

No comments about Grounds for Knowledge: A Guide to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Landscapes & Buildings.

2 comments about The New American Garden: Innovations in Residential Landscape Architecture : 60 Case Studies (Landscape Architecture).

1. This is an excellent book that looks at many exciting designers and some of their gardens (A.E. Bye, Raymond Jungles, Dan Kiley, Steve Martino, Susan Child, Rios Assoc., Murase, Cardasis, Delaney, Isobelle C. Greene, etc). It is a great inspiration to a landscape designer, and is helpful in that it tells the reader the plant and hard materials that have been used in the featured gardens. It also cites the project brief as well as the site limitations for each garden. A really great book that looks nice on my coffee table AND is useful to me in my work as a landscape designer. Truly inspirational, well-researched, and beauftifully presented. BUY IT!



2. James Trulove knows Landscape Architects and has selected a wide ranging group of styles and projects from some of America's best Landscape Architects. To the point text forces the reader to focus on the garden as image, as environment, as designed space! I particularly liked the refreshing, bold, and imaginative tropical gardens of Raymond Jungles, Inc.

No comments about Sprawl and Suburbia: A Harvard Design Magazine Reader (Harvard Design Magazine).

No comments about Northern cityscape: Linking design to climate.