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Environment and Design book displays FY22: March 2022

Women in the Landscape

Women in Landscape Architecture

While many fields struggle to specify feminine contributions, the work of women has always played a fundamental role in American landscape architecture. Women claim responsibility for many landscape types now taken for granted, including community gardens, playgrounds, and streetscapes. This collection of essays by leaders in the discipline addresses the ways that gender has influenced the history, design practice and perception of landscapes. It highlights women's relation to landscape architecture, presents the professional efforts of women in the landscape realm, examines both the perception and experience of landscapes by women, and speculates on ways to re-imagine gender and the landscape.

Ruth Shellhorn

In a career spanning nearly sixty years, Ruth Shellhorn (1909-2006) helped shape Southern California's iconic modernist aesthetic. This is the first full-length treatment of Shellhorn, who created close to four hundred landscape designs, collaborated with some of the region's most celebrated architects, and left her mark on a wide array of places, including college campuses and Disneyland's Main Street. Kelly Comras tells the story of Shellhorn's life and career before focusing on twelve projects that explore her approach to design and aesthetic philosophy in greater detail. The book's project studies include designs for Bullock's department stores and Fashion Square shopping centers; school campuses, including a multiyear master plan for the University of California at Riverside; a major Los Angeles County coastal planning project; the western headquarters for Prudential Insurance; residential estates and gardens; and her collaboration on the original plan for Disneyland. Shellhorn received formal training at Oregon State and Cornell Universities and was influenced by such contemporaries as Florence Yoch, Beatrix Farrand, Welton Becket, and Ralph Dalton Cornell. As president of the Southern California chapter of ASLA, she became a champion of her profession, working tirelessly to achieve state licensure for landscape architects. In her own practice, she collaborated closely with architects to address landscape concerns at the earliest stages of building design, retained long-term control over the maintenance of completed projects, and considered the importance of the region's natural environment at a time of intense development throughout Southern California. Shellhorn set a standard of creativity, productivity, and respect for the native landscape that defused gender stereotypes-and earned her the admiration of landscape designers then and now.

Pamela Burton Landscapes

Pamela Burton begins every garden or landscape project, no matter the size, with a big idea. The idea, according to Burton, "must be simple, harmonious, perceptible and the product of a totality of experience." Following the careful observation of a site's natural forces, she lets her mind wander beyond professional knowledge. For Burton, landscapes are symbolic creationswild spaces in which the journey itself, a sequence of discrete experiences in space and time, is paramount. Her Bonhill Residence, overlooking Los Angeles's west side, was inspired by the elegant gardens of Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, England and is conceived as a series of outdoor "rooms." In her design for the Santa Monica Public Library, Burton created a series of courtyards that weave the interior spaces together, and are integrated with the library as a metaphor for bringing light to the world beneath the surface of the ocean, in the same way that she perceives libraries bringing knowledge to light. Working with Moore, Ruble, Yudell Architects, Burton's landscape designreinforces the library's civic quality. Receptive to the nuances and idiosyncrasies of a site but unafraid to explore the world of ideas, Burton has established herself as a leading figure within the enduring legacy of California modern landscape design. Pamela Burton Landscapes presents nineteen of her built works for public and private clients, with sites ranging from beach to desert and from farm to city block.

A World of Her Own Making

The story of the creation of a remarkable estate in Winston-Salem, North Carolina It was only a few years after marrying tobacco magnate R. J. Reynolds that young Katharine Smith Reynolds (1880-1924) began to plan a new home for her family. Not many young women of the day found themselves with almost unlimited wealth to construct their dream home, but Katharine's sense of purpose for her vast resources was even more unusual. She envisioned the founding of a model community that would emphasize health, modern technology, mixed-crop scientific farming, education, and rural beauty. To realize this dream, she drew on the liveliest and most progressive ideas of her era. Catherine Howett begins her analysis of Katharine's unusual achievement with her childhood in Mount Airy, North Carolina, and the defining southern values that framed her experiences there. Howett follows Katharine through her transformative education at the state Normal School, founded and run by Charles Duncan McIver and his ardently feminist wife, Lula. The values instilled in Katharine during these early years guided her, a new woman of the New South, in all that followed. In 1904, when Katharine embarked on her estate project in Winston (now Winston-Salem), North Carolina, the South was still feeling the effects of the Civil War and a century of single-crop farming. After conducting exhaustive research, which included wide-ranging reading in agricultural journals and trips to other American estates and model farms, she began to lay out her property, Reynolda. Her plan was inspired, in part, by the rural landscapes of England that had captured the imagination of Frederick Law Olmsted. A welcoming bungalow for her family was surrounded by a landscaped park, ser amid thriving farm fields and pastures, with a village of homes and gardens, a church, and a school for farm employees. Beginning in 1915, Katharine was aided by Thomas W. Sears, a highly regarded Philadelphia-based landscape architect. The estate eventually expanded to cover more than 1,000 acres. The process of planning Reynolda paralleled similar efforts in other parts of the United States, as new towns, parks, campuses, and country estates were laid out during the century's first decades.

Discrimination by Design

"A fast-moving, insightful, politically astute and upfront feminist examination of the power struggles involved in building and controlling space." -- Women's Review of Books "A readable account of the force of male dominance in the built environment. . . . Those looking to this book for a clearer vision of the changes that need to be made in the organization and design of housing, work, and public space to foster gender equality will not be disappointed." -- Journal of Planning Education and Research "A pioneering work that will pave new territory not only for feminists but all those who are prepared to rethink environmental and societal issues."

The Influence of Women on the Southern Landscape

The influence of women on the Southern landscape has long been ignored by historians using traditional sources, and like many aspects of historic landscape research, it has been difficult to document. The proceedings of the tenth conference on Restoring Southern Gardens and Landscapes, held in Old Salem in October 1995, bring together for the first time in research on the relationship of women to the landscape of the South. The fifteen essays and two panel summaries in this volume span centuries and cultures--from prehistoric women and horticulture, the backcountry housewife's use of plants, and the life of the plantation mistress, to spirituality and memory in the gardens of modern-day African-American women. 

Graphic Design for Architects

Graphic Design for Architects is a handbook of techniques, explanations and examples of graphic design most relevant to architects. The book covers a variety of scales of graphic design, everything from portfolio design and competition boards, to signage and building super-graphics - to address every phase of architectural production.　 This book combines and expands on information typically found in graphic design, information design, and architectural graphics books. As architectural communication increases to include more territory and components of a project, it is important for designers to be knowledgeable about the various ways in which to communicate visually. For instance, signage should be designed as part of the process - not something added at the end of a project; and the portfolio is a manifestation of how the designer works, not just an application to sell a design sensibility. In thinking about architecture as a systematic and visual project, the graphic design techniques outlined in this book will help architects process, organize and structure their work through the lens of visual communication. Each chapter is titled and organized by common architectural modes of communication and production. The chapters speak to architects by directly addressing projects and topics relevant to their work, while the information inside each chapter presents graphic design methods to achieve the architects' work. In this way, readers don't have to search through graphic design books to figure out what's relevant to them - this book provides a complete reference of graphic techniques and methods most useful to architects in getting their work done.

The Morville Hours

An exquisitely written book about one particular English garden--and about the arc of life. Nobody writes about gardens like the English. And few English writers have ever been as eloquent or astute as Katherine Swift. Some twenty years ago, she and her husband leased a house in the town of Shropshire with a garden that became her passion. Driven to uncover its history, she takes readers on a journey back through time, linking the stories of those who lived in the house and tended the same red soil with her family's own saga. Spanning hundreds of years, The Morville Hours is also deeply personal--a journey through the seasons and also one of self-exploration, of finding one's place in the world and putting down roots. With each chapter bringing to life an hour of the day or night--from the crunch of grass underfoot at midnight on a frosty New Year's Eve to the bloom of blue-black damsons picked on a golden September afternoon--Swift pulls us into her world and, at the same time, expands and illuminates our own. For anyone with a passion for gardens and gardening, The Morville Hours will be unforgettable.

Beatrix Farrand

The only monograph to chronicle the life and work of one of the most important figures in American landscape architecture. Beatrix Farrand, the only female founder of the American Society of Landscape Architects, is one of the most important landscape architects of the early twentieth century. Today the scope of her work and her influence on the profession are widely acknowledged, and her gardens are being studied, restored, and opened to the public. A long-awaited updated edition of the 2009 definitive monograph, Beatrix Farrand: Garden Artist, Landscape Architect chronicles the life and work of one of the most important figures in American landscape architecture.  Born into a prominent New York family (she was Edith Wharton's niece), Farrand designed lavish gardens for the leaders of society, including the Harknesses, the Rockefellers, and the Blisses. Ultimately, her portfolio extended to college and university campuses, including Princeton, Yale, and the University of Chicago, and public gardens, the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden and the Rose Garden at the New York Botanical Garden among them. Her best-known design is the landscape at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., originally a private residence with extensive grounds and now a research center for Harvard University surrounded by a naturalistic park restored and maintained by the National Park Service. Deeply influenced by the English garden designer Gertrude Jekyll, Farrand was known for broad expanses of lawn with deep swaths of borders planted in a subtle palette of foliage and flowers. In her public work, she adapted this design strategy to create paths and plantings that define the character of the space and the hecirculation through it. 

Patricia Johanson and the Re-Invention of Public Environmental Art, 1958-2010

Impeccably researched and richly detailed, this book addresses the issue of translation between visual arts and landscape design in the 50 more years career of Patricia Johanson, an important artist in the second half of the twentieth-century. Examining the artist's search for an "art of the real" as a member of the post-World War II New York art world, and how such pursuit has led her from painting and sculpture to public garden and environmental art, Xin Wu argues for the significance of the process of art creation, challenging the centrality of art objects. This book is an insightful study to confront a crucial question in the history of art through the work of a contemporary artist. It therefore converses with art historians and critics alike, as well as advanced readers of twentieth-century art. Following Johanson's artistic development, from its formation in the 1960s American art scene to the very present day, across the fields of art, architecture, garden, civil engineering and environmental aesthetics, it investigates the process of creation in a transdisciplinary perspective, and reveals a view of art as a domain of exploration of key issues for the contemporary world. The artist's concept of nature is highlighted, and particular impacts of Chinese aesthetics and thought unveiled. Based on extensive analysis of unpublished private archives, Xin Wu offers us the first ever comprehensive scholarly interpretation of Patricia Johanson's oeuvre, including drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations, garden proposals, and built and unbuilt projects in the United States, Brazil, Kenya, and Korea.

Shaping Communities

This volume brings together nineteen essays from an array of academic disciplines -- American studies, folklore, history, architectural history, and architecture -- which are currently contributing to the study of vernacular structures and places. Addressing places as distant from each other as rural Massachusetts and Hawai'i and building types as disparate as Native American houses in Alaska and vacation cottages in Florida, the contributors are unified in their concern with community building and place making. As the editors note, scholarship on vernacular forms once focused rather narrowly on individual buildings and building types -- an emphasis that has since given way to broader explorations. Accordingly, these essays reflect the ever-growing interest of vernacular architecture studies in the role building plays in defining communities, how building shapes the discourse between individuals and the society and culture of which they are a part, and how building conveys a community's sense of itself. The essays are grouped into four sections. In Communities Shaped by Ideals, the contributors examine how the particular ideals and aspirations of a community contribute to the forms its buildings take. The essays in Community Landscapes focus on shared spaces, such as parks and streets, while the essays in Communities Shaped by Race and Ethnicity examine the contributions of specific ethnic groups to building traditions and the impact of architecture on group identity.

Legends in the Garden

If you've ever wondered about the people and places immortalized in plant names, this enlightening and entertaining book will provide some answers. Legends in the Garden introduces 46 people and places some familiar, others unknown associated with popular garden plants. Rosa 'Burbank' honors Luther Burbank, the "plant wizard" of Santa Rosa. John Champneys and Philippe Noisette, key figures in the development of the rose, gave their names to R. 'Champneys' Pink Cluster' and R. 'Blush Noisette'. But who were Nellie Stevens (Ilex 'Nellie Stevens') and Frances Williams (Hosta sieboldiana 'Frances Williams')? This delightful book combines accounts of the lives of these intriguing characters with descriptions of the plants that bear their names and the stories of their chance discoveries or deliberate breeding.

Unbounded Practice

Women have practiced as landscape architects for over a century, since the founding of the practice as a profession in the United States in the 1890s. They came to landscape architecture as gardeners, garden designers, horticulturalists, and fine artists. They simultaneously shaped the profession while reflecting contemporary practice. It is all the more surprising, then, that the history of women in American landscape design has received relatively little attention. Thaisa Way corrects this oversight in ""Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century"". Describing design practice in landscape architecture during the first half of the twentieth century, the book serves as a narrative both of women - such as Beatrix Jones Farrand, Marian Cruger Coffin, Annette Hoyt Flanders, Ellen Biddle Shipman, Martha Brookes Hutcheson, and Marjorie Sewell Cautley - and of the practice as it became a profession.

About the summaries

Summaries attached to these titles have been supplied by the book's publisher, and should be considered advertisements (jacket blurbs), not objective reviews.