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Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape
Anuradha Mathur , and
Dilip da Cunha
Manufacturer: Yale University Press
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Taking Measures Across the American Landscape
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Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture
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Reclaiming the American West
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Praxis, Journal of Writing and Building, Issue 4: Landscape
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The Landscape Urbanism Reader
ASIN: 0300084307 |
Book Description
Each time the waters of the mighty Mississippi River overflow their banks, questions arise anew about the battle between "man" and "river." How can we prevent floods and the damage they inflict while maintaining navigational potential and protecting the river's ecology?
The design of the Mississippi and how it should proceed has long been a subject of controversy. What is missing from the discussion, say the authors of this extraordinary book, is an understanding of the representations of the Mississippi River. Landscape architect Anuradha Mathur and architect/planner Dilip da Cunha draw together an array of perspectives on the river and show how these different images have played a role in the process of designing and containing the river landscape. Analyzing maps, hydrographs, working models, drawings, photographs, government and media reports, paintings, and even folklore, Mathur and da Cunha consider what these representations of the river portray, what they leave out, and why that might be. With gorgeous original silk screen prints and a fine selection of maps, the book joins historic, scientific, engineering, and natural views of the river to create an entirely new portrait of the great Mississippi.
Book Description
Hailed as a landmark in its field since its first publication in 1984, Denis E. Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape has been influential well beyond geography. It has continued to spark lively debate among historians, geographers, art historians, social theorists, landscape architects, and others interested in the social and cultural politics of landscape.
Book Description
How do landscapes--defined in the broadest sense to incorporate the physical contours of the built environment, the aesthetics of form, and the imaginative reflections of spatial representations--contribute to the making of politics? Shifting through the archaeological, epigraphic, and artistic remains of early complex societies, this provocative and far-reaching book is the first systematic attempt to explain the links between spatial organization and politics from an anthropological point of view.
The Classic-period Maya, the kingdom of Urartu, and the cities of early southern Mesopotamia provide the focal points for this multidimensional account of human polities. Are the cities and villages in which we live and work, the lands that are woven into our senses of cultural and personal identity, and the national territories we occupy merely stages on which historical processes and political rituals are enacted? Or do the forms of buildings and streets, the evocative sensibilities of architecture and vista, the aesthetics of place conjured in art and media constitute political landscapes--broad sets of spatial practices critical to the formation, operation, and overthrow of polities, regimes, and institutions? Smith brings together contemporary theoretical developments from geography and social theory with anthropological perspectives and archaeological data to pursue these questions.
Customer Reviews:
An excellent book.......2004-07-02
This book is the best comparative treatment of early state political dynamics yet published. Smith (no relation) is erudite and a sophisticated thinker. He has great insight into all sorts of issues relating to ancient and modern states and political systems. Many past archaeological works on early states are in for serious criticism here. The level or thinking and writing can be difficult in places, but the book is well worth the effort.
In brief, Smith devotes a chapter to each of four major political relationships: geopolitics, polities, regimes, and institutions. Each of these is considered through three perspectives on human dimensions of the landscape: experience, perception, and imagination. Each chapter includes a single extended case study plus general remarks on theory and other cases.
Political Landscapes and Plain English.......2004-03-25
There are some extremely interesting ideas within this book, and Adam T. Smith also provides some useful discussion of past landscape (and archaeological) theory. However, my big complaint is about the language the author uses throughout. While I agree that sometimes it is necessary to express complex ideas in a complex way, as a general rule the simpler the language, the better the work. It is almost always harder to write well using simple words and sentence structures, but surely being instantly intelligible makes this effort worthwhile?
I'm sure academics will find this a useful volume, but only the most persistent students will benefit from it.
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- Look out the window on road trips!!
- Everyday America / eds. Wilson and Groth
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Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson
Manufacturer: University of California Press
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Understanding Ordinary Landscapes
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A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time
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Discovering the Vernacular Landscape
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Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America (Center Books on Contemporary Landscape Design)
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Landscape in Sight: Looking at America
ASIN: 0520229614 |
Book Description
As old as a roadway that was once a Native trail, as new as the suburban subdivisions spreading across the American countryside, the cultural landscape is endlessly changing. The study of cultural landscapes--a far more recent development--has also undergone great changes, ever broadening, deepening, and refining our understanding of the intricate webs of social and ecological spaces that help to define human groups and their activities. Everyday America surveys the widening conceptions and applications of cultural landscape writing in the United States and, in doing so, offers a clear and compelling view of the state of cultural landscape studies today.
These essays--by distinguished journalists, historians, cultural geographers, architects, landscape architects, and planners--constitute a critical evaluation of the field's theoretical assumptions, and of the work of John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the pivotal figure in the emergence of cultural landscape studies. At the same time, they present exemplary studies of twentieth-century landscapes, from the turn-of-the-century American downtown to the corporate campus and the mini-mall. Assessing the field's accomplishments and shortcomings, offering insights into teaching the subject, and charting new directions for its future development, Everyday America is an eloquent statement of the meaning, value, and potential of the close study of human environments as they embody, reflect, and reveal American culture.
Customer Reviews:
Look out the window on road trips!! .......2006-03-05
J. B. Jackson's legacy lives on in geographers, historic preservationists and others, and is alive and well. This book is a great introduction to Jackson's lifelong study of the American landscape, including the modern, vernacular everyday things that many scholars ignore or criticize.
A variety of authors tell Jackson's story, and about how his influence has impacted their lives and careers. A must-read for cultural landscape students, historic preservationists, architectural historians, or anyone who appreciates a good road trip on the roads of the U.S... the ones travelled before the construction of the interstate highway system...
Everyday America / eds. Wilson and Groth.......2005-10-16
A collection of reflections on how to see, interpret, and appreciate the American cultural landscape. After reading this book the term "the middle of nowhere" will never leave your mouth or enter your thoughts. The front porch of the local house will be as interesting as Time's Square. Read this book and understand your ordinary environment. Not just for cultural geographers, but everyone with eyes or a heart for how we live and organize our spaces and places.
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James Duncan
Manufacturer: Routledge
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Key Thinkers on Space and Place
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The Production of Space
ASIN: 0415094518 |
Book Description
Discussing authorial power, landscape metaphor and the notions of community and sense of place, this explores the ways in which spatial and cultural analysis have found much common ground in making sense of ourselves and the landscape we inhabit.
Amazon.com
Many of us go "back to nature" to get away from civilization. But as often as not, our expectations and actions are shaped by idealized notions of natural order, purity, and even neatness that are in fact impositions of civilization on nature. This is a highly insightful, sometimes ironic study of the influence of such paradoxes in the early 20th-century love affair with nature: anthropomorphized animal stories, summer camps, wildlife protection, landscaped cemeteries, wilderness novels and scenic turnoffs that imposed an industrial ethic of order, neatness, and regularity on natural systems. Recommended.
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The Visual and Spatial Structure of Landscapes
Tadahiko Higuchi
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
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ASIN: 0262580942 |
Book Description
In this imaginative and generously illustrated book, Tadahiko Higuchi applies a methodology to landscape that is similar to that developed by Kevin Lynch for investigating the extent to which urban settings are legible and "imageable" to their inhabitants. He identifies features such as landmarks, boundaries, paths, and nodes that enable people moving through a landscape to piece together a reliable mental map of their surroundings, beginning with major structural elements and filling in with successively finer detail.
Tadahiko Higuchi is Associate Professor of Environmental Engineering at Yamanashi University.
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"The language of landscape," writes ecologist Anne Whiston Spirn, "is our native language." She elaborates: humans lived in natural landscapes well before they knew how to build houses; knew how to read the movements of clouds and birds well before they developed grammars and symbols. Anyone with a keen sensibility can recover that language, she suggests: "A person literate in landscape sees significance where an illiterate person notes nothing. Past and future fires, floods, landslides, welcome or warning are visible to those who can read them in tree and slope, boundary and gate." Spirn goes on to discuss human interactions with the landscape, taking as cases in point such matters as the dolmens of prehistoric Europe, environmentally friendly houses in Denmark and Australia, fountains in Paris, and tree-lined city streets in Philadelphia. Along the way she cites scholars, architects, and artists, learning lessons in how to read place and built form from the likes of Christopher Alexander, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Rachel Carson. She closes with an appeal to landscape architects, builders, and designers to study the natural details of place more closely before they set about changing it: "In landscapes ... the key is to establish a framework that provides overall structure--a structure not arbitrary but congruent with the deep context of a place, to define a vocabulary of forms that expresses the natural and cultural processes of the place." --Gregory McNamee
Book Description
This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape and thereby to avoid making profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes in landscape design. Using examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Anne Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes and calls for change in the way we shape and respond to them.
"This remarkable book urges readers to understand the common language of landscape which speaks to all our senses every day. Primitive peoples lived closely within the landscape and instinctively understood that landscape was the source and matrix of their lives. Anne Spirn strives to describe the permutations of this shared language as a resource to enrich modern man`s dialogue with nature as well as with the man made landscape."--Lawrence Halprin, Fellow of the Americna Society of Landscape Architects
"Anne Whiston Spirn brings to her reading of landscapes the eye of an artist, the mind of a scholar, and the pen of a gifted writer. What she has produced is nothing less than a field guide for all who share her belief that the language of landscape is among the richest and most meaningful that any of us can ever hope to understand. The result is a triumph. There are a few books that have the power to change the way one sees the world. This is one of them."--William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Landscape speaks to us. But how? Anne Spirn`s superb and unique achievement is to spell out the "how" so that we can better understand landscape`s variant dialects--its distinctive personalities--and respond intelligently, with appropriate emotion."--Yi-Fu Tuan, emeritus professor of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Customer Reviews:
Frustrating... but.......2003-08-19
Anne Whiston Spirn has a lot of truly important and enlightening things to say in "The Language of Landscape". Unfortunately, she makes the reader slog through an indulgent and contrived writing style in order to understand her. At the end of the chapter, "Language of Landscape", she explained how a person fluent in its elements could "read" a landscape, and how this is crucial to understanding the world. Yet she never fully articulates this in the following chapter, "Elements of Landscape and Language", with anything more than impressionistic vignettes of places she has visited. It was not at all what I was expecting, and left me frustrated and wondering what point she was trying (and failing) to make.
I soldiered on, and found that there are flashes of clarity, specifically when writing about specific case studies and experiences with students. In these passages, the writing is more direct and very readable. The second half of the book was excellent, especially the study of landscape and memory in Berlin. These passages are what "saved" the book for me, kept me reading, and finally earned it 3 stars.
For contrast, I think that JB Jackson does a better job of weaving his theory with his stories and experiences. Beginners to landscape studies may find him more accessable. Spirn's points are there for those who want to dig for them, but sometimes it's unclear if it's worth it.
The Nowadays City Health in Urban Processes........2000-04-11
The Language of Landscape regads to a very important subject - the new values that has composed the urban drawing - which has contributed a lot for the enviromental health of the nowadays cities. Finding new ways to focus on the physic enviroment of the urban areas, Spirn offers a philosophic and conceptual base for the Urban Drawing, while illustrates, with real examples, the practical application of the theory. It is a good masterpiece, reflecting the result of years of experience in treating the lack of attention with the enviroment nowadays, the lack of comprehension of the natural processes - which has contributed to the physical shapes of the cities, and has invaded virgin areas, as forests, making this areas sterile - the recuperation of landscapes, according to the natural regeneration, and also themes reflecting directly the urban processes, like water, energy, nutritive resources - which are subproducts of the urban draining - and other functions of the urban processes which has not received attention and has contributed a lot for the contamination of the overburden enviroment. It is a good tool for urban planners and enviromental designers, while treating the esthetic values on which the formal landscape of the cities has based-developed. This values have a little connexion to the natural process dinamics and lead to mistaken attitudes, if they are not well known. It is also rich in questions like values enviromental perceptions and how we answer to the enviroment around us , if we can demonstrate that there are ways to adjust the urban landscapes in a very cheaper way, and with much more social value than the tradicional ones.
Book Description
An extraordinary book that explores how the earth itself has shaped the Western imagination and how, as a result, our interaction with the environment is far richer and more complex than today's doomsayers would have us believe.
Customer Reviews:
Schama does it again.......2007-01-25
Simon Schama writes in a clear, concise and interesting way. As a purely fiction reader I never thought I could plough through factual stuff - in fact I'd tried and failed many times - then i read my first Schama - about the Slave trade - Rough Crossings - and now I'm working my way through his works. If a philistine like me can read, learn and enjoy from them then they must be good.
The world seen on another sphere.......2007-01-04
I love Schama's work ! His approach is always original and this book is proof of his creative mind, once again, at work. I have lived and worked on both sides of the Atlantic for more than 25 years and I thoroughly appreciate the way Schama has brought me to see the rhyme & reason to the cultural quirks I've come across in all these countries. The umbrella effect in action ! For a younger adult today, studying art, social dynamics, economics or even psychiatry there is food for thought !
450 pages too long.......2005-06-08
The author had a great idea for a book. He collected enough 'meat' for about 30-50 pages and then exploded it into almost 500 pages of boring talk, so typical of many historians.
There are a few gems in this book and those few who manage to persevere through the boredom of the text may find it somewhat rewarding. Had the author written a 50-page book that covers the essence of what he has to offer, this would have been a four or five star book.
Excellent historically-informed philosophy from a great mind.......2003-07-15
Surprisingly, the other reviewers on this site seem to have missed the point of the book. The point is that our perceptions of nature are not merely historically informed, but historically constituted. The irrespressable Lithuanian Bison was the formative metaphor for the Lithuanian pagan cultural ideal of freedom. Ultimately, it's a cultural case for the preservation of wilderness because that wilderness is part of who we are in the deepest sense. Agree or disagree with Schama's thesis, but you should try to comprehend the book before you review it. Personally, I think it's brilliant.
A must read.......2001-10-28
This is one book "to keep besides you" for ever. Each of the esays is so engaging that you are sorry to see it coming to a close. The essay on foutains "water paths" at Casserta and Versailles have changed my view for-ever. I only wish to visit or re-visit the paces mentioned with tis book in hand to really appreciate them with a more cultured view.
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Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience
Everyday America: Cultural Landscape Studies after J. B. Jackson
