No comments about Transforming the American Garden.

1 comments about Outdoor Living: Designing a Garden for Relaxation, Entertaining and Play.

1. Well, that may not be entirely true. There is a lot of advice here if you have a palatial estate and want to know what to tell the contrator you like. Those of us with modest homes looking to do the work ourselves would be better served by other books.

   There are some interesting ideas here and the photography is absolutely stunning. People who have no idea what they want to do on their property will come away from this volume with at least some inspiration and I have to admit that seeing it has made me want more land around my home to play with on the weekends. Someday I'll have use for this book, but right now it's sitting on a coffee table and not getting dirty in the back yard with me.

No comments about Charmed Places: Hudson River Artists and Their Houses, Studios, and Vistas.

1 comments about Michael Van Valkenburgh/Allegheny Riverfront Park: Source Books in Landscape Architecture.

1. Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates
   Allegheny Riverfront Park
   Source Books in Landscape architecture 1.
   Jane Amidon, Series Editor.
   Princeton Architectural Press, 2005.
   ISBN 1-56898-504-5
   
   The two main models of design publication that we are used to: the collection of projects or the corporate monograph are both neatly avoided in this, the first in a series of booklets from Princeton Architectural Press. The series is a really nice, unpretentious idea - one that has already been successful for Princeton Press in regard to architecture and one the series editor, Jane Amidon describes as a response to the `hunger for transparency'. Amidon promises that the series will take us backstage and give us an unvarnished view of the design process.
   
   The idea is this. Each booklet is a synthesis of a seminar series held within the Knowlton School of Architecture. The seminars bring students, critics and one eminent or as they say, `emerging' designer together in the spirit of open and `critical inquiry'. Each consequent booklet then contains a mix of (very) short solicited essays, crisp interviews with the designer(s) and illustrations that divulge the process of the project's realization. The students who apparently bring the information for the booklet together have of course vanished by this stage.
   
   Each issue is soft back, squared off, printed on nice paper and can be read from start to finish in about an hour or so. Each includes project time-lines the odd technical detail and a bit of site history. They are neat little educational documents - catalogues to be precise and one looks forward to further installments and being able to buy the box set after all is said and done.
   
   Despite being 160 pages this particular volume feels like half that. It is very light on text and there is an excess of meaningless photography soaking up space which in my view should have stayed on theme and shown us more of things backstage. There is, for example virtually no documentation of the creative process of designing this park. There is the proverbial shot of people on site in hard hats and other ones of people in the office staring down at models but the content of the book doesn't quite meet the series mandate.
   
   Even though I prefer the idea of focusing on a particular project and getting in to one designer's head than what has been a recent spate of global collections, I'm not convinced that the Allegheny Riverside Park by Michael Van Valkenburgh and Associates (MVVA) really needed a book(let) all of its own. As such this booklet goes very close to worshiping the banal. Having said that, the Allegheny Riverfront Park is a brilliantly controlled piece of work, one with three important sub-texts.
   
   First, even if its hard to really see it as a park in the grand democratic tradition that he places it, Valkenburgh has made a functional, generous and simply beautiful sliver of public space out of what seemed like an impossible site. Valkenburgh fattens up the river edge with a clear infrastructural intervention and breathes a naturalistic, yet urbane poetic in to what was otherwise Pittsburgh's lifeless edge.
   
   Second, whereas collaborations with artists have become something of a cliché, in this project it is genuine and the book accounts for why. The art is not a spilled souvenir shelf, rather, it is embedded and the resultant details are subtle. As art however it could be criticized for its limited representational scope, but landscape architects like art that is based on what they call `nature'.
   
   Third, through the interview format Valkenburgh muses on his design philosophy. In what is a thinly veiled swipe at emerging `landscape urbanism' in some prominent north American schools, Valkenburgh expresses skepticism about programmatic open-endedness. He advises that landscape architects assert their traditional design skills and return to their core skills and know their essential materials--not least of all plants. His use of plants, and for that matter his attention to materials in general, manifests beautifully in the project at hand. Apparently an artist as well as a landscape architect, Valkenburgh likens his current direction to that of the mid-century abstract expressionists who rejected representational content and returned art to its essence.
   
   The critics, who have the last say, are unanimously enamored by the warm glow of authenticity that Valkenburgh exudes. Gary Hilderbrand writes a lovely endorsement, although I think he struggles a bit to place the work historically. Another (so called) critic, Ethan Carr thinks the project gets to the quintessence of its location (the holy grail of landscape architecture) and Erik de Jong concludes that the project is the embodiment of beauty; not just beauty as we know it, but as the Greeks did. Unfortunately she is cut off before she can flesh out this vast claim.
   
   I don't think this booklet has really described the messiness and the struggle of design processes and nor has it completey avoided the style of the corporate monograph or advertorial. Still, the series is a good idea and the landscape profession and discipline will be better for it. Perhaps the singularly most successful thing in this booklet and no doubt from those to come in the series, is that the gap between theory and praxis is compressed.

No comments about 20th Century garden and landscape architecture in the Netherlands.

No comments about Bird Conservation on Golf Courses: A Design and Management Manual.

No comments about The Art of Golf Design.

1 comments about Stone, Wood, Glass and Steel.

1. a very original book with loads of very nice pictures. I have never seen another book about the same topic and the design ideas here are great. For those who like art and materials in their gardens

4 comments about Great Streets.

1. i love the drawing styles and methods presented in this book. i recommend it for anybody who loves buildings and great streets of our world.



2. This wonderful book consideres the civic street from many perspecitives and describes it with poetic attention. The author has spent days on these great streets and brings careful measurement and observation to his carefully crafted text. If everyone planning streets and highways in America read this book and visited one of two of these great streets, it would enable a huge improvement.

   This book studies the street not from the simple American perspecitve of high velocity traffic sewar, but from the realities of a place to hang out. eat lunch, shop, socialize, people watch, court, celebrate and be. The read how these places work in this book is to realize how much our desperate focus on the automobile costs us.

   Buy this book and photocopy some of its illustrations for your next public hearing on town planning.




3. This is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in the study of urbanism.



4. ...this is a reference book in the sense that it mentions so many important and peculiar streets in the world, many of which, I'm sure, you've heard about or possibly even visited. Mr. Jacobs' accounts of his own travels and his feelings while strolling down those streets could even put this book in the travel journal caegory, complete with beautiful sketches by the author himself. Not only the sketches, but the technical and historical information, (like street dimensions, the schematic comparison of several different city plans worlwide and the decline of once great streets) establish this book as a constant source of information for Architects and Urban Planners, as well as students.

   I could clearly recognize the Traveler, the Urban Scholar and the Artist in Mr. Jacobs as I took a stroll down these great streets through the drawings and heartfelt passages of his book.

3 comments about A Quest for Life: An Autobiography.

1. Ian McHarg has written an autobiography that informs while successfully capturing his bold character. Ian McHarg minces no words. He recalls the incident where he gave public testimony claiming that highway engineers seem to "have a deep insecurity as to their masculinity which can only be appeased by mutilating nature", among other similar ventures.
   This autobiography informs us how a person of such outspokenness has emerged and gained respect. His childhood outside Glasgow, Scotland at the city's edge where homes met nature made him realize, at an early age, the advantages of an environment outside of blocks of treeless tenement homes. Possessing neither an undergraduate degree nor a high school diploma, he entered Harvard's graduate program in Landscape Architecture by telegraphing them and requesting that arrangements be made for his arrival and entrance into their school. He repaid his department by becoming Student Council Chairman and pushing through a resolution of no confidence in his department. Upset that the Landscape Architect faculty focused on designing gardens for the wealthy, Ian McHarg became an advocate that landscape architecture is for all. Further, he would argue, we all should respect nature.
   People familiar with projects where Ian McHarg had a hand will appreciate learning about his eventful life. Among the projects where Ian McHarg was involved include Baltimore's Inner Harbor, the creation of 110 more acres in Manhattan through landfill, the first Earth Day, and his milestone book "Design with Nature". Many credit "Design with Nature" as a major force in creating legislation requiring ecological considerations when planning construction.
   People unfamiliar with Ian McHarg's work will appreciate reading of his life's struggles, from combat in World War II, fighting tuberculosis four decades ago when survival rates were much lower, and founding the Landscape Architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania with no faculty, no office, and no students. A fascinating person has written an excellent book.



2. Ian McHarg is both famous and infamous. Well-known among environmentalists, ecologists, landscape architects and designers, he is Peck's bad boy, even persona non grata, to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, developers, numerous (all?) corporate executives, governmental officials (all levels), and a few university departments. No one believes McHarg to be a benign force, and his autobiography testifies to his lifelong snappish testiness. Born in Scotland on November 20, 1920, he grew up in the thrall of nature and became a Naturist (sic). His long, active, and productive career as a "nature-intoxicated" landscape architect is recorded in this detailed solo cantata, a well-deserved forte encomium of one man's dedication to his own odyssey, his quest for life. It will be a surprise if this tome fails to become a rallying point for future ecological revolutions, for future Earth Days, for a Cult of the Living Gaia. McHarg is 18 months younger than I. Many of us "American" GIs of WWII who grudgingly served a mere 3 or 4 years (1942-1945) must stand aside for our European brothers. McHarg, along with uncounted fellow Brits and other allies, served in sometimes hellish combat conditions for six or seven years, a long period out of young lives. McHarg's account of his war experiences are alone worth reading his story, told in dramatic, gripping terms. Come to realize, so is the entire book. McHarg's besetting sins are his arrogance and his conceptual pugilism. On the other hand, his modus vivendi, that determined his astoundingly productive successes, are his arrogance and conceptual pugilism. As he fights for the right, he generally is right-not exactly a social or political asset. Recipient of numerous academic and civic honors, he includes an impressive bibliography of his publications and works. Design with Nature (1969) is his other important book-to date. A tenacious survivor, he no doubt will yet fire off another volley worth hearing. (Reviewed by Allan Shields in Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol 15 No 2, Winter 1999-2000. Copyright © by Allan Shields.)



3. Ian McHarg is the founder of the field of environmental design, a branch of or approach to Landscape Architecture. His book "Design With Nature" opened the eyes of a generation of planners and architects to the possibilities of environmentally sane design and planning. McHarg's autobiography makes a wonderful read for anyone who read and loved "Design With Nature". And is is a first class read! He has never been a man who pulled his punches, and this book is full of hilarious stories of his run-ins with the establishment. I loved it!