Landscape Architecture: A Manual of Site Planning and Design

by John Ormsbee Simonds

Landscape architecture. A fine hardcover copy. Light shelf wear, small bit of soil on front cover. Tight binding. Clean, unmarked pages. Very good jacket; chipping to top edge; light sunning and soiling. Not ex-library. Indexed. 331pg. Shipped Under 1 kilogram. Architecture; 0070574480. ISBN/ 9780070574489. Inventory 013325.

Genres: Architecture, Landscape Architecture

331 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 1961

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Get past the bluster, and past the pretension. Get past the occasional odd sexist choices portraying women as objects instead of people with their own experiences. What you will find is a book that slowly reveals itself to you. Only at the end will it disclose what it was all about and how it came to the perspective it develops throughout.

This book will seem like it is revealing all of the context at the beginning, and unsubtly so at that: showing the ugliness of much of the built environment and how we can do better if we adopt a planning and design approaches more accommodating and integrated with nature. The first few chapters will seem to supplement this line of development, with chapters devoted to different ecological factors play in design and the basic responses to them.

There then start to be chapters of a different character: for example, chapters regarding the professional processes of planning and preferences between particular patterns of settlement, including specific advice for how to situate natural areas, buildings, plantings, and transportation. There also start to be chapters listing of the various experiences that can be conveyed by design elements. This is what was being set up for: with an understanding of the impact of environmental factors and procedural expectations, the landscape is now a canvas for creating the best and most appropriate experiences of human habitation.

The format of the book is well chosen to convey these effects. There is a column of text on each page, narrow as to be clearly legible, and then a substantial margin given over to quotes, further comments, photographs, but best of all sketches. It is in these sketches that the relationships and experiences are best conveyed. One wishes the book was even more given over to these sketches, and actually that it was all written in the hand of designers. However, as it stands, the format presents itself in a manner serious enough to register as an academic textbook.

Overall, "Landscape Architecture" is a curious book; by turns screed, manual, listing of potential moods, sets of suggestions, essay arguing for particular approaches, giving itself over to these characters in an unsteady sequence. However, despite the occasional strangeness in the progression by which these characteristics are revealed, it wisely saves the perspective that gives it all an explanation to the end, once we've seen what has been laid out, and are prepared to honor that perspective not by stated authority, but by repeated demonstration.

I've always had a certain affection for books that make a statement about a total process; a means of approaching all of one's work in a particular field, and this book is certainly on that shelf.

[Ariful]

good