1 comments about Site Analysis: Linking Program and Concept in Land Planning and Design.

1. As a first year Landscape Architecture student, this book was very helpful for clearly laying out the site analysis concepts. You can't beat the graphics as well.
   
   Apparently, there is a new edition coming out, which might have been nice to wait for, but I needed it for a class. overall, a very good book.

No comments about Paradise Gardens.

1 comments about The Garden Lover's Guide to the West.

1. Featuring 114 gardens from thirteen western states, Kathleen McCormick's The Garden Lover's Guide To The West explains how gardens of these Western states ranging from the diverse climates of Alaska and California to Nevada and Wyoming, are often situated in spectacular natural settings and are the most varied of any geographic region of the United States. An experienced garden writer and certified master gardener, McCormick provides a vivid and informative guide to the best gardens of the West including those of grand estates, botanical gardens, city parks, and private gardens open and available to the general public. Profusely illustrated with full color photography, The Garden Lover's Guide To The West is an ardently recommended addition to any personal or academic collection of gardening and horticultural reference guide books.

No comments about Backyards and Boulevards: A Portfolio of Paver Projects.

1 comments about The Garden Lover's Guide to Canada (Garden Lover's Guide).

1. This is one of an excellent series covering both North America and Europe. This particular volume is larger than the European volumes (194 pages as opposed to 144 pages in European guides), but the regional maps are very inferior and of limited use. The paper is also much thicker and therfore heavier to bring around. There are no bird's eye views of the quality one sees in the European series and while the photographs are colourful and plentiful, as we expect from this series, most are not acknowledged. There is an index but no glossary or biographies. Most of the gardens featured appear to be public parks and gardens, which is fine except that there are also first class private gardens in Canada open to the public. For example the Milner gardens in BC, created by the late Veronica Milner from the 1950s surely deserves a place in this book - I could name others. Faults notwithstanding, this is a worthwile addition to the series, all of which I possess.

No comments about The Tea Garden.

No comments about Hawaiian Gardens are to Go to, A Treasury of Tropical Plants and Gardens.

No comments about Emerald Journey: A Walk Through Northwest Gardens.

1 comments about In Gardens: Profiles of Contemporary European Landscape Architecture.

1. In Gardens: Profiles of Contemporary Landscape Architecture
   
   Udo Weilacher
   2005 Birkhauser
   ISBN-10:3-7643-7084-X
   183 pp
   
   Udo Weilacher is a Professor of Landscape architecture at the University of Hannover in Germany and will be known to many for his book `Between Landscape architecture and Land Art (1996). Whereas that book had a timely theoretical and practical intention (as well as the support of eminent essayists such as Stephen Bann and John Dixon Hunt), this small and relatively unattractive book offers a collection of designs without an explicit curatorial purpose and starts with a short, but nonetheless thoughtful introductory essay by Weilacher himself.
   
   In this book Weilacher takes the reader on a journey through 28 contemporary landscapes, many of them already well known to consumers of Topos and other Birkhauser publications. Although the book's title stresses "Gardens" most of the works are, to be precise, public civic landscapes. They are nonetheless connected to both the intellectual and material traditions of gardens, particularly in a European context where garden design (Garten Kunst) remains a fine art, a legitimate category of landscape architecture that includes themed public places where form and meaning are intentionally refined. Additionally, for Weilacher, the poetic lineage of the work in this collection emanates from the ur-metaphor of paradise, (something he confuses with utopia) one of several underdeveloped themes nestled in his essay.
   
   According to a note in the jacket, the material for this book derives from Weilacher's monthly garden column in the `New Zurcher' newspaper. Each of the 28 projects is not only explained, but also discussed in a lightly philosophical manner and if the text in the book is as it was in his original column, then one envies a culture that consumes landscape architecture in this manner. Indeed, Weilacher's design journalism is generally more engaging and insightful than much of what is typically written in landscape architectural trade journals and for that matter, designers' own web sites.
   
   Setting aside the niggling sense that this book happened simply because it could and not for any pressing academic reason, Weilacher's take on the projects does give the book moments of originality. Moreover, to experience all the projects at once with Weilacher as a guide is to gain a rounded understanding of contemporary or rather, recent European landscape design. But surely the coffee table is now full under the weight of journalistic landscape design books? Birkhauser, it seems, think not.
   
   In doing this book, Birkhauser have not only risked rerunning a lot of old copy but they have also allowed Weilacher to exclusively (and no doubt cost effectively) use his own unprofessional photography. Most of the shots are relatively high quality, yet some struggle for spark under a pallid northern European sky. Despite the book feeling somewhat drab, a condition exacerbated by a particularly uninspired layout, I found it refreshingly honest to witness well known designs from less flattering angles and without the frames and filters of professional photography. Adding to the book's atmosphere of realism and its emphasis on embodied experience is also the fact that there are no drawings of the projects.
   
   Certainly, some readers will baulk, as I did, at the prospect of yet again revisiting places such as, among others, Peter Latz's Duisburg Nord and Ian Hamilton Finlay's Little Sparta. (Isn't it odd that a remote Scottish garden by an eccentric who makes gnomes for fine arts academics is quite probably the most publicized garden in the world!). Weilacher regales how while in Scotland he persevered storms to get to the 13th century estate of `Portrack Gardens' where Charles Jencks and his (late) partner Maggie Keswick have moved the earth into shapes that embody contemporary physics. Weilacher is rightly astounded and impressed by this ambitious continuation of an aristocratic tradition to reflect cosmology in landscape form. Weilacher argues that irrespective of its complex symbolism the design works viscerally. The design's overt symbolism does however prompt him to lightly question the limits of landscape architectural representation.
   
   But this book is not a book of criticism, on the whole Weilacher sincerely loves contemporary landscape architectural design and his journalistic role is that of advocate: some thing we could do with in Australia.
   
   In the flatlands of the north, Weilacher takes us to old projects such as the West 8's Interpolis Garden in Tilburg and Christoph Girot's Invalidenpark in Berlin, both of which are looking a bit worse for wear. On our way south to Kathryn Gustafson's Les Jargins de l'Imaginaire in France we pass by well built moments on the streets of Zurich by Dieter Kienast, (a man Weilacher holds in great esteem and likes to quote). The southern extreme of Weilacher's rader is the good old Parc del Clot in Barcelona by Dani Freixes and Vicente Miranda, a gutsy project that seemed the quintessence of the Catalonian landscape renaissance in the late 1980's.
   
   There is no Eastern Europe work in this collection but bizzarely enough, Weilacher concludes his tour by leaving Europe altogether and touching down in Nek Chand's Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India. Since it has nothing to do with the sub title of the book, "Profiles in Contemporary European landscape Architecture" one can only assume it is tacked on as an Asian relation to Niki de Saint-Phalles `Tarot Garden' where like Nek Chand she has obsessed over tile mosaics. Alternatively, perhaps Weilacher just couldn't resist telling readers of his column and now his book about what he did on his holidays. Nek Chand's lifetime of making figurines from the shrapnel of Le Corbusier's modernist monuments is, of course, a wonderful story- a landscape architectural version of David and Goliath.
   
   In the vertical axis we reach the heights of Paolo Burgi's gorgeous `Osservatorio Geologico' in Orselina and then plumb the depths in Bad Oeynhausen's Aqua Magica by Agence Ter. Other less well known projects in the book are that way for a reason.
   
   One project that is not well known but memorable is a district park in Bijlmermeer, Holland by Georges Descombes that commemorates the crash of a Boeing 747 into a poor housing estate. Descombes' work is intelligent, rugged, and unspectacular, a welcome reprieve from the studied elegance we have become accustomed to from Europeans since Topos rallied their cause and pegged back the slapstick dominance of the Americans.
   
   With this book Weilacher demonstrates that he is a good journalist and doing his tour is a worthwhile experience but what I find paradoxical is that books like this are the product of the very culture of consumption and imagery that Weilacher, in his introductory essay, says good landscape architecture resists. One looks forward to Weilacher getting back to academic work and developing the suggestive ideas in his introductory essay. Not least of all because my coffee table just collapsed.

No comments about Victoria Moments in the Garden.