Tag Archives: landscapes

library

New Books at APL: Landscape Architecture

We received many, many new books this week! Here are two on landscapes:

Clarke, Victoria, ed. The Gardener’s Garden. London: Phaidon, 2014.

TheGardenersGardenThis encyclopedia-esque work is a good starting point for information on  landscape architecture, whether contemporary or historical. The content is arranged geographically and includes gardens as early as the 14th century. Each entry includes location, names of architects/designers, date, size, climate, type/style, and brief description. While plans of the gardens are not included, each site does include representative photographs. There is also a brief glossary. While flipping through I was surprised by what was included or excluded. Madison Cox writes in the prefatory note, “Throughout The Gardener’s Garden, more than 250 examples illustrate the vast wealth of human expression when it comes to the creation and definition of what makes a garden” (pg. 5). Within the glossary “garden” is not included, so it will be left up to the reader to determine how the editors understand garden. Look for this work in our reference collection.

Cílek, Václav. To Breathe with Birds: A Book of Landscapes. Translated by Evan W. Mellander. Photographs by Morna Livingston. Foreward by Laurie Olin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

 To Breathe with Birds is a collection of sixteen essays by Václav Cílek. Laurie Olin writes of Cílek’s approach in the foreward:

...challenging the reader, most likely a postmodern urban dweller, to thinkToBreatheWithBirds with him from within a tree or a stone or small creature. The world he conjures in these essays ranges widely, but most frequently evokes places and things once common in profound ways to people on all continents: mud and dust, clouds of insects, flocks of wild creatures, birds and herds, sunlight, small sounds, myths and darkness, stars and spirits, long walks through fields from town to town on foot in various weather. (Olin, “Foreward,” xi)

library, special collections

New Books at the Architecture and Planning Library: Architecture and Movement

Blundell Jones, Peter and Mark Meagher, ed. Architecture and Movement: The Dynamic Experience of Buildings and Landscapes.  New York: Routledge, 2015.

Too often, the aesthetic is seen as opposed to the useful or purposeful, and yet life is not so easily subdivisible. It is vital to our well-being that we know where we are and where are going, in both an immediate, literal sense and in a long-term, metaphorical sense. How these two are connected, this book will gradually reveal. (pg. 4)

ArchitectureMovement

Peter Blundell Jones and Mark Meagher edit a selection of articles and writings about the experience of moving through and within buildings, cities, and the constructed landscape. The book is divided into four parts: Moving through buildings and landscapes: the designer’s perspective; Movement as experienced by the individual; Movement as social and shared; and The representation of moment.

Some of the articles are excerpts from primary texts like Vitruvius or the Rule of St. Benedict. A translation of Hermann Muthesius’s chapters on approach and circulation from Wie Baue Ich Mein Haus is also included. If you are interested in the complete work or how the reprinted chapters relate to the larger whole, you are in luck. APL has three editions of the Wie Baue Ich Mein Haus in Special Collections.

Muthesius

special collections

Buildings in the Countryside, Durham

County Council of Durham [England]. Buildings in the Countryside: Notes for the Guidance of Developers. 1952.

This might be one of the best introductions, I have read recently:

If we are are justified in refusing to accept the obviously bad architecture we are certainly not justified in hampering architectural progress in any way. If our forebears had taken a negative attitude we might still be building in the Gothic or even Norman styles.

To sum up.

It is impossible to be dogmatic about design. The suggestions in this booklet are not expected or intended to be slavishly copied; rather should they be used as a guide. 

Wherever possible an architect should be employed to design buildings. This booklet is no substitute for his services. (pgs. 2-3)

William A. Geenty, County Planning Officer, issued this booklet arising from a need to address the destruction of the countryside by poorly designed buildings and as an extension of the County Development Plan. The advice is intended to meet “the short-term…problems of the siting and design of buildings in the landscape, village planning, layouts, densities, colliery waste heaps, quarry workings and the like.”  (Foreword)

The council offers a wide range of advice to include village planning, the consideration of landscape, and the design of houses. For example, designers should return to the planning principles of pre-industrial villages in order to achieve successful siting within the landscape. Accordingly to Geenty, “These villages are invariably well sited in relation to the land masses and natural features; they belong to the landscape and enhance its interest.” (pg. 8)  He also advises that skylines be taken into consideration when siting a single or group of houses in the open landscape. He argues that the skyline is often neglected, which results in “a spotty broken effect”. (pg. 17) Finally, extensive discussion is given to the design of houses appropriate for the countryside, to include basic principles such as horizontal masses over vertical or the placement of doors and windows; diagrams and photos of good and bad design; and actual designs submitted to the planning authority with their amendments.

Friday Find!, special collections

Florence Lost

Giovanni Fanelli. Florence Lost: As Seen in the 120 Paintings by Fabio Bortottoni. Translated by Forrest Selvig. Introduction by Italo Calvino, translated by William Weaver. Milan: Franco Maria Ricci, 1985.

The silence entered the city in the early afternoon. It slipped through the turreted, battlemented gates, occupied the loggias arch by arch, flowed along the streets grazing the walls, huddled against the embankments, filled the ramparts.

Italo Calvino’s short essay, “Silence and the City”, is included in the work on the paintings of Fabio Bortottoni (1820-1901). The sentence quoted above opens both the essay and the larger work. After a passage describing the fall of silence across the city, Calvino describes the material of silence.  He writes:

Silence is made of stone; it is something that is inside walls, in building materials. It is the living of a masonry world, all facades, rough and smooth, rusticated, stuccoed. Silence is a solid: it speaks through volumes, edges, outcrops, and niches in the surfaces, through tympana and apses. It expresses itself in the multiple facets of those opaque crystals, the concretions of buildings in the taciturn cities. Those who attempt to make walls talk by sticking written words onto them have missed the whole point of walls: walls express themselves in the long silences of light and shadow that fall on their uniform surfaces, in the blind stare of rows of windows. (pg 14-15)

Through the lens of Calvino, the reader comes to the paintings of Borbottoni. One cannot help but feel that Calvino’s silence has befallen the city of Florence. Borbottoni included figures in many of his paintings; however, it is the mass of the buildings, the light and shadow that dominate the paintings. Even in the busy markets, there is a quietness among the people.

According to Fanelli, Borbottoni hoped to document the lost and changing fabric of the city of Florence with his 120 paintings. Fanelli argues, however, that these images are not accurate representations of the city. Borbottoni used various documents to create paintings for the no longer extant structures. Even with those buildings or parts of the city that he would have known first hand, Borbottoni used artistic license. Fanelli concludes, “Together the pictures in the collection constitute a long tale of lights and shadows.” (pg 19-26)

For those interested in the architecture and the city fabric of Florence, the two volume set would be most useful so long as one follows Fanelli’s cautionary remarks. And for those that are not, Borbottoni’s works are beautiful studies of light, shadow, and silence.