Marc Treib - Böcker

An illuminating study of the architecture of one of the 20th century’s most important tropical modernistsVladimir Ossipoff (1907–1998), known as the “master of Hawaiian architecture,” was at the forefront of the postwar phenomenon known as tropical modernism. Although he practiced at a time of rapid growth and social change in Hawai`i, Ossipoff criticized large-scale development and advocated environmentally sensitive designs, developing a distinctive form of architecture appropriate to the lush topography, microclimates, and vernacular traditions of the Hawaiian islands. This stunning book, now available for the first time in paperback, surveys Ossipoff’s buildings, which demonstrate a striking interplay of indoor and outdoor space, as well as a vibrant and glamorous architectural style that has proven delightfully particular to its place and durable over time.Published in association with the Honolulu Museum of ArtExhibition Schedule:Honolulu Academy of Arts, Hawaii (November 29, 2007 – January 27, 2008)Yale School of Architecture, New Haven (Fall 2008)Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt (Spring 2009)

While we all live our lives in designed landscapes of various types, only on occasion do we consider what these landscapes mean to us and how they have acquired that significance. Can a landscape architect or garden designer really imbue new settings with meaning, or does meaning evolve over time, created by those who perceive and use these landscapes? What role does the selection and arrangement of plants and hard materials play in this process and just where does the passage of time enter into the equation?These questions collectively provide the core material for Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens, a compendium of four landmark essays written over a period of twenty years by leading scholars in the field of landscape architecture. New commentaries by the authors accompany each of the essays and reflect on the thinking behind them as well as the evolution of the author’s thoughts since their original publication.Although the central theme of these writings is landscape architecture broadly taken, the principal subject of several essays and commentaries is the garden, a subject historically plentiful in allusions and metaphors. As a whole Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens offers the general reader as well as the professional a rich source of ideas about the designed landscape and the ways by which we perceive, consider, react, and dwell within them – and what they mean to us.The essays have been perennial favorites in landscape courses since their original publication in Landscape Journal. Bringing them together – bolstered by the new commentaries – creates a book valuable to all those creating gardens and landscapes, as well as those teaching and studying these subjects.

Representing Landscape Architecture offers a broad investigation of how the designed landscape is and has been represented: for design study, for criticism and even for its realization. It has been said that we can only realize what we can imagine. But in order to realize we must convey ideas to others as well as to ourselves. Representation is by no means neutral and the process of communication, the process by which the imagination takes its first form, itself necessarily limits the range of our design possibilities. Computers further remove from cognitive processes and raise new questions about methods and limits. Written by a team of renowned practitioners and academics, this book is the best available reference to date on the many dimensions of landscape representation.

Representing Landscape Architecture offers a broad investigation of how the designed landscape is and has been represented: for design study, for criticism and even for its realization. It has been said that we can only realize what we can imagine. But in order to realize we must convey ideas to others as well as to ourselves. Representation is by no means neutral and the process of communication, the process by which the imagination takes its first form, itself necessarily limits the range of our design possibilities. Computers further remove from cognitive processes and raise new questions about methods and limits. Written by a team of renowned practitioners and academics, this book is the best available reference to date on the many dimensions of landscape representation.

These collected works represent twenty-five years of study of the designed landscape which the author here takes to include gardens, cemeteries, plazas and other shared spaces. Asking essential questions about the nature of order and its perception, this book includes in its impressive scope analyses of both historic and modern works with a geographical distribution that extends across Europe, Asia and North America. With unique depth in many areas of study, Treib brings his expertise to bear on a range of inter-related and mutually influential issues within the subject, taking in an assessment of the lives and contributions of a number of leading figures in the field, the contents of a landscape and the meanings ascribed to it, and a theoretical formulation of the ideas from which or by which landscape architecture is produced.

These collected works represent twenty-five years of study of the designed landscape which the author here takes to include gardens, cemeteries, plazas and other shared spaces. Asking essential questions about the nature of order and its perception, this book includes in its impressive scope analyses of both historic and modern works with a geographical distribution that extends across Europe, Asia and North America. With unique depth in many areas of study, Treib brings his expertise to bear on a range of inter-related and mutually influential issues within the subject, taking in an assessment of the lives and contributions of a number of leading figures in the field, the contents of a landscape and the meanings ascribed to it, and a theoretical formulation of the ideas from which or by which landscape architecture is produced.

Architecture and designed landscapes serve as grand mnemonic devices that record and transmit vital aspects of culture and history. Spatial Recall casts a broad net over the concept of memory and gives a variety of perspectives from twelve internationally noted scholars, practicing designers, and artists such as Juhani Pallasmaa, Adriaan Geuze, Susan Schwartzenberg, Georges Descombes and Esther da Costa Meyer. Essays range from broad topics of message and audience to specific ones of landscape production. Beautifully illustrated, Spatial Recall is a comprehensive view of memory in the built environment, how we have read it in the past, and how we can create it in the future.Please note this is book is now printed digitally.

Architecture and designed landscapes serve as grand mnemonic devices that record and transmit vital aspects of culture and history. Spatial Recall casts a broad net over the concept of memory and gives a variety of perspectives from twelve internationally noted scholars, practicing designers, and artists such as Juhani Pallasmaa, Adriaan Geuze, Susan Schwartzenberg, Georges Descombes and Esther da Costa Meyer. Essays range from broad topics of message and audience to specific ones of landscape production. Beautifully illustrated, Spatial Recall is a comprehensive view of memory in the built environment, how we have read it in the past, and how we can create it in the future.Please note this is book is now printed digitally.

Born in Florence in 1910, Pietro Porcinai grew up on the classic grounds of the Villa Gamberaia in Settignano where his father served as head gardener. Although he studied agriculture in college, Porcinai’s true interest lay in the landscape architecture practice he founded in 1938. Early projects centered in the area of Arezzo, whose style reflected modern­ized traditional models. In the postwar era the office flourished, producing modern gardens of remarkable design and use of plants. In these works, Porcinai convincingly demonstrated the affinity between historical architecture and landscapes un­compromisingly modern. During his long and productive career he also consulted on autostrada planning, and designed public parks, memorials, and even a Pinocchio theme park-at times collaborating with noted architects such as Renzo Piano, Carlo Scarpa and Oscar Niemeyer. This book, the first English-language study on Pietro Porcinai provides a comprehensive and richly illustrated overview of his life and remarkable achievements.

While we all live our lives in designed landscapes of various types, only on occasion do we consider what these landscapes mean to us and how they have acquired that significance. Can a landscape architect or garden designer imbue new settings with meaning, or does meaning evolve over time, created by those who perceive and use these landscapes? What role does the selection and arrangement of plants and hard materials play in this process and just where does the passage of time enter the equation?These questions collectively provide the core material for Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens, a compendium of four landmark essays written over a period of twenty years by leading scholars in the field of landscape architecture. New commentaries by the authors accompany each of the essays and reflect on the thinking behind them as well as the evolution of the author's thoughts since their original publication.Although the central theme of these writings is landscape architecture broadly taken, the principal subject of several essays and commentaries is the garden, a subject historically plentiful in allusions and metaphors. Meaning in Landscape Architecture and Gardens offers the general reader as well as the professional a rich source of ideas about the designed landscape and the ways by which we perceive, consider, react, and dwell within them – and what they mean to us.The essays have been perennial favorites in landscape courses since their original publication in Landscape Journal. Bringing them together – bolstered by the new commentaries – creates a book valuable to all those creating gardens and landscapes, as well as those teaching and studying these subjects.

This book addresses the question ‘Why draw?’ by examining the various dynamic relationships between media, process, thought and environment. Highly illustrated, the book brings together authors from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and art and demonstrates that designing through drawing is fundamentally different from designing on a screen.

This book addresses the question ‘Why draw?’ by examining the various dynamic relationships between media, process, thought and environment. Highly illustrated, the book brings together authors from the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and art and demonstrates that designing through drawing is fundamentally different from designing on a screen.

Born in Florence in 1910, Pietro Porcinai grew up on the classic grounds of the Villa Gamberaia in Settignano where his father served as head gardener. Although he studied agriculture in college, Porcinai’s true interest lay in the landscape architecture practice he founded in 1938. Early projects centered in the area of Arezzo, whose style reflected modern­ized traditional models. In the postwar era the office flourished, producing modern gardens of remarkable design and use of plants. In these works, Porcinai convincingly demonstrated the affinity between historical architecture and landscapes un­compromisingly modern. During his long and productive career he also consulted on autostrada planning, and designed public parks, memorials, and even a Pinocchio theme park-at times collaborating with noted architects such as Renzo Piano, Carlo Scarpa and Oscar Niemeyer. This book, the first English-language study on Pietro Porcinai provides a comprehensive and richly illustrated overview of his life and remarkable achievements.

Austere Gardens suggests that being open to other ways of observing and sensing can yield new insights and rewards, and that interest is found in places unassuming and overlooked as well as those complex and assertive. Perceiving is only one half of the story, however. Realising places using simple acts and reduced means is the other half. The history of garden-making reveals continued attempts to create an Eden, to surpass our given environment in abundance and delight, and by selected instruments transcend the constraints of site, topography, and climate. The alternative to this garden of inclusion lies in the landscapes of reduction and compression, for example the dry gardens of Japan. These might be termed austere gardens. The word austere, as used in this essay, does not imply asceticism, but merely modesty and restraint. Austere landscapes may first appear devoid of interest if noticed at all. To those who do not look beyond their surfaces, these sites, and the world outside them, usually appear plain and uninteresting, or even lacking of the very properties by which we define a garden.But there are sensual, aesthetic, and even philosophical, pleasures to be gained from these seemingly dull fields should we attempt to appreciate them. These qualities, normally associated with abundance and complexity, may be found in a different way, and at a different level, in austere terrain. Although the subject of the small book is gardens, or more broadly taken, landscapes that may be read as gardens, many of the examples are nonetheless drawn from art and architecture, from history as well as contemporary times. The images that accompany the text tell their own stories, illustrating what can be accomplished using frugal means or through basic acts like digging, piling, planting, cutting, and clearing. In an era where resources appear to be dwindling and populations growing, attitudes that value simplicity and reduction also gain a moral dimension.

Designed for the layman as well as the professional, this concise yet comprehensive guide provides both practical information and theoretical insights into the design of the Japanese garden. Kyoto, the capital of Japan for over one thousand years, possesses a richness of garden art without equal as a living chronicle of Japanese cultural history and environmental design. Following the introductory essays are individual entries for more than 50 temple and palace gardens. The text is augmented by an excellent selection of photographs, historical prints, maps, and colour plates.

The complex story of modern landscape architecture remains to be written, as does its precise definition. Thinking a Modern Landscape Architecture, West & East,written by one of the field's most prolific and insightful authors, provides a rare cross-cultural study that examines the written and design contributions made by two of the movement's most influential early protagonists: Christopher Tunnard (1910-1979) in England - and later the United States, and Sutemi Horiguchi (1896-1984) in Japan.Tunnard's pioneering manifesto, Gardens in the Modern Landscape,first published in 1938, laid out the thinking and provided the direction for a landscape architecture engaged more strongly with contemporary life, adopting ideas from modern art as well as the historical gardens of Japan. Rather than a book, it was the architect Horiguchi's 1934 essay The Garden of Autumn Grasses that initiated a new direction for garden making in Japan, with a considered and artful use of seasonal plants and a stronger connection to the modern architecture it accompanied. Unlike Tunnard, who sought inspiration and sources in contemporary art, Horiguchi looked to the eighteen-century Rimpa School of painting for insights into the composition of the new garden by carefully placing individual plants against a simple background. Although the two theorists-practitioners never met, Tunnard's interest in Japan, and use of Horiguchi's work as illustrations, links them in a shared quest for a landscape architectureappropriate to their times and respective countries.

The first comprehensive study of the milieu, ideas, and designs of Canada’s leading landscape architect.

Planting design is, rather obviously, a complex topic, spanning as it does art, science, social need, and morality - especially during these days of increasing planetary environmental threat. Although certainly not denying the importance of scientifically appropriate practices, the symposium “The Aesthetics of [Contemporary] Planting Design” addressed planting design today, proposing a renewed concern for the cultural and aesthetic aspects of the landscapes that result. This book, which has been developed from the original presentations at the symposium, presents the thoughts of a select international group of landscape architects and historians who discuss the subject of planting design through the lens of their own work as well as the work of others, both contemporary and historical. They suggest that, as in real estate, the most important factor in selecting plants is “location, location, location.” Certainly the Californian situation is far more forgiving than the aridity and other restrictive environmental conditions endemic to the Sonoran desert, or the frost and short growing seasons of Nordic lands that direct Scandinavian landscape architects to rely on native birches, pines, rowan, and moss. Most of us would agree that there are plants sensible for each climatic zone. Addressing environmental conditions is but the first step in the equation, however. There are also the issues of combination and composition.

The Shape of the Land: Topography & Landscape Architecture — the first book to centre on this subject — presents the contributions of 13 well-known practitioners and academics who discuss the forms and ramifications of reconfiguring terrain. The essays range in content from pre-industrial precedents in the work of Humphry Repton to new digital topographic modelling systems without the use of contour lines, the treatment of waste products to the land art of the American Southwest.Practicing landscape architects focusing on the modelling of topography in the works considering both utility and aesthetics. In all, the book reviews the history, reasons, and results of at least three centuries of topographic interventions, while suggesting pathways into the future — as new technology and new necessities increase the functional demands placed upon landscape architects, while at the same time potentially offering new forms of artistic expression.

Poodling is a vernacular approach to pruning shrubbery: a negotiation between gardener and shrub that pits human aesthetic intention against the genetic forces that guide the plant's natural development. Topiary shears shrubs into a singular form geometric or figure; poodling, in contrast, treats each branch individually and shapes its leaves or needles into the forms that remain at their ends.In this informed, if light-hearted, telling of the story, noted landscape historian Marc Treib traces the evolution and characteristics of topiary, espalier, and other forms of plant guidance such as poodling, proposing that what began as functional horticultural practices was transformed into a vehicle for artistic expression. Poodling catalogues the forms of pruning we encounter today and their probable origin in Japan during the 18th century. Noting the parallels, he compares the forms of poodling (vegetal) with those of the canine species poodle (animal), and the manners by which the dog's hair has been clipped. Richly illustrated with photographs by the author taken in many countries over three decades, this is an informative book that everyone can enjoy.

While sculpture remained central to his artistic practice, Isamu Noguchi’s (1904–1988) interests and production spanned an exceptionally broad terrain that included furniture and lamps, stage sets for dance, plazas, courtyards — and gardens. Noguchi made no distinction between design, craft, and the so-called fine arts: in his view all of these could all be considered art should their aesthetic qualities sufficiently transcend those generated by the simple address of need.Although his gardens include several of the twentieth century’s most iconic landscape designs and have received almost universal praise, Noguchi nonetheless occupies a place removed from the normal practice of landscape architecture. As an artist he relied more on intuition - bolstered by focused study where required - than on objective analysis, and he shaped his landscapes as sculpture, with space as their primary vehicle. To Noguchi landscape design was a spatial and formal art, and from his earliest environmental projects to the works of his later maturity, he succeeded in conceiving and constructing a series of remarkable places. In this comprehensive and richly illustrated study of Noguchi's gardens, noted landscape historian Marc Treib describes and critiques projects that date from his early unrealised projects for playgrounds and monuments to a large park in Sapporo, Japan, whose construction was completed only posthumously. The story begins with the discussion of Noguchi sculpture that relate in some way to actual landscapes, then moves to the dance set designs for Martha Graham, finally entering the realm of actual landscapes with his gardens for the Reader's Digest offices in Tokyo and UNESCO House in Paris. Many more projects followed in the United States, Japan, and Israel. Varying in their content and structure, several chapters collectively treat subjects such as landform, water, and the courtyard, while others focus on the major gardens monographically. Accompanied by stunning images from the archives of Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum archives and the author's own photographs, the story of Noguchi's Gardens: Landscape as Sculpture will reward those interested in landscape architecture, art history, garden design, and art more broadly.