Reading the American Landscape – serie

Since its genesis in 1980, Crosby Arboretum in southern Mississippi has attracted international recognition for its contributions to architecture, biology, and landscape design. Now owned and operated by Mississippi State University, Crosby is the first fully realised ecologically designed arboretum in the United States and the premier native plant conservatory in the Southeast.Former site director and curator Robert F. Brzuszek provides a detailed survey of the arboretum's origins, planning, construction, and ongoing management. More than just a botanical center, Crosby emerged as one of the first American landscape projects to successfully balance natural habitat and planned design. The book's generous selection of photographs and drawings illustrate the beauty and purpose of the site's components: the award-winning Pinecote Pavilion, designed by architect Fay Jones; a 104-acre focus area that includes the Piney Woods Lake, which displays native water plants in their natural setting; and seven hundred additional acres of savanna, woodland, and aquatic environments that nurture more than 300 species of indigenous trees, shrubs, wildflowers, and grasses. Utilizing the interactions between two opposing natural forces - fire and water - Crosby Arboretum protects the biological diversity indigenous to the Pearl River Drainage Basin, in southern Mississippi and southeastern Louisiana. Brzuszek's inspiring and informative account will help further Crosby's role as a model of sustainable landscape design and management across the country.

The successful realisation of diversity, resilience, usefulness, profitability, or beauty in landscape design requires a firm understanding of the stakeholders' values. This collection, which incorporates a wide variety of geographic locations and cultural perspectives, reinforces the necessity for clear and articulate comprehension of the many factors that guide the design process.As the contributors to this collection reveal, dominant and emerging social, political, philosophical, and economic concerns perpetually assert themselves in designed landscapes, from manifestations of class consciousness in Napa Valley vineyards to recurring themes and conflicts in American commemorative culture as seen in designs for national memorials. One essay demonstrates the lasting impact of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny on the culture and spaces of the Midwest, while another considers the shifting historical narratives that led to the de-domestication and subsequent re-wilding of the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. These eleven essays help foster the ability to conduct a balanced analysis of various value systems and produce a lucid visualization of the necessary tradeoffs. Offering an array of case studies and theoretical arguments, Values in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design encourages professionals and educators to bring self-awareness, precision, and accountability to their consideration of landscape designs.

Charting the Plantation Landscape from Natchez to New Orleans examines the hidden histories behind one of the nineteenth-century South's most famous maps: Norman's Chart of the Lower Mississippi River, created by surveyor Marie Adrien Persac before the Civil War and used for decades to guide the pilots of river vessels. Beyond its purely cartographic function, Persac's map depicted a world of accomplishment, prosperity, and wealth, while concealing the enslaved and exploited laborers whose work powered the plantations Persac drew. In this collection, contributors from a variety of disciplines consider the histories that Persac's map omitted, exploring plantations not as sites of ease and plenty, but as complex legal, political, and medical landscapes.Essays by Laura Ewen Blokker and Suzanne Turner consider the built and designed landscapes of plantations as they were structured by the logics and logistics of both slavery and the effort to present a fa?ºade of serenity and wealth. William Horne and Charles D. Chamberlain III delve into the political activity of former slaves and slaveholders respectively, while Christopher Willoughby explores the ways the plantation health system was defined by the agro-industrial environment. Jochen Wierich examines artistic depictions of plantations from the antebellum years through the twentieth century, and Christopher Morris uses the famed Uncle Sam Plantation to explain how plantations have been memorialized, remembered, and preserved.With keen insight into the human cost of the idealized version of the agrarian South depicted in Persac's map, Charting the Plantation Landscape encourages us to see with new eyes and form new definitions of what constitutes the plantation landscape.

Landscape Fascinations and Provocations reflects and builds on the work of Robert B. Riley (1931–2019), emphasizing his ongoing importance for landscape studies and landscape architecture. The title of the volume represents an attempt to distill Riley's attitude and approach. The book's core consists of fourteen essays—six seminal pieces by Riley alternating with eight new pieces by other authors, each relating to Riley's work in a different way.Riley's singular and important voice survives in his writing: lean, straightforward, erudite, clever, wryly observant, provocative, accessible, and dense. His writings reflect his love of landscapes, his wariness of jargon, and his awareness of academicians' and designers' potential hubris. His essays reveal a lifetime of curious probing and reflection, of serious and critical readings of geographers, anthropologists, psychologists, novelists, and journalists—as well as designers—on landscapes, their design and experience. His subjects include specific North American cultural landscapes; landscapes in literature, memory, and contemporary media; physical landscapes and technology; and the garden, nature, and meaning. Reflecting Riley's eclectic, wide-ranging curiosity and influence, authors of the new essays—Brenda J. Brown, M. Elen Deming, Rosa E. Ficek, Lewis D. Hopkins, Rachel Leibowitz, Achva Benzinberg Stein, Linnaea Tillett, and Vera Vicenzotti—include a cultural anthropologist, a regional planner, a historic preservationist, and a lighting designer as well as landscape architects. The book concludes with short reminiscences, assessments, and appreciations from some of the people who knew Riley (luminaries such as Michael Van Valkenburgh, Randy Hester, John Jakle, and Terry Harkness) and felt his influence as teacher, colleague, editor, mentor, and/or friend. Landscape Fascinations and Provocations demonstrates the ways in which Riley's work continues to provoke others in his field to think and act in directions both new and unexpected.