Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn, author of the award-winning The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design , argues that the language of landscape exists with its own syntax, grammar, and metaphors, and that we imperil ourselves by failing to learn to read and speak this language. To understand the meanings of landscape, our habitat, is to see the world differently and to enable ourselves to avoid profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes.

Offering examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes. She discusses the thought of renowned landscape authors--Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, Lawrence Halprin--and of less well known pioneers, including Australian architect Glenn Murcutt and Danish landscape artist C. Th. Sørensen. She discusses instances of great landscape designers using landscape fluently, masterfully, and sometimes cynically. And, in a probing analysis of the many meanings of landscape, Spirn shows how one person's ideal landscape may be another's nightmare, how Utopian landscapes can be dark. There is danger when we lose the connection between a place and our understanding of it, Spirn warns, and she calls for change in the way we shape our environment, based on the notions of nature as a set of ideas and landscape as the expression of action and ideas in place.

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Inspired by Lawrence Halprin and others, Spirn--author of The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (CH, May'84)--has thought deeply about landscape and human responses to it. Her new book, 12 years in the making, offers a myriad of stimulating impressions and suggestions and pursues a wide array of intellectual issues. The ethos is profoundly personal; eclectic scholarly allusions appear alongside the writer's childhood memories, verbatim travel diaries, and accounts of her work as landscape architect and professor (Univ. of Pennsylvania). Grappling with a sprawling definition of landscape ("as small as a garden, as large as a planet"), she takes us to Disneyland, community gardens, Checkpoint Charlie, Japanese temples, and the Danish heath. Some will find the book incautious in its ready conflation of highly divergent disciplines--scholarship and travelogue, landscape studies and autobiography--and they may long for a clear, limited thesis and an excision of vexing wordplay (e.g., "branches where birds nest, flitter, flutter, sweep, chitter, stutter, cheep"). But all will appreciate Spirn's sensitive eye and her vivid descriptions as she tries to "fuse function, feeling, and meaning" in analyzing "the poetics of city and nature." Graduates through professionals. W. B. Maynard; Delaware College of Art and Design

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Anne Whiston Spirn is professor of landscape architecture and regional planning and director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is director of the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, an action-research program integrating research, teaching, and community service, and she chairs the Advisory Council to the Territorial Directorate of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris.