Thinking The Contemporary Landscape

Thinking the Contemporary Landscape

On the heels of our groundbreaking books in landscape architecture, James Corner's Recovering Landscape and Charles Waldheim's Landscape Urbanism Reader, comes another essential reader, . Examining our shifting perceptions of nature and place in the context of environmental challenges and how these affect urbanism and architecture, the seventeen essayists in argue for an all-encompassing view of landscape that integrates the scientific, intellectual, aesthetic, and mythic into a new multidisciplinary understanding of the contemporary landscape. A must-read for anyone concerned about the changing nature of our landscape in a time of climate crisis.

Thinking Geometrically

What skills do we need to negotiate the changing technological circumstances of our lives? How should we respond to the changing space of the visual, the technological? We are bombarded with answers to these questions: by media, by government, and by education. For the most part we are told that what we need to do is utilize the latest technologies and develop the newest skills (computer literacy prominent among them). Here, with keen interdisciplinary insight, historical sensitivity, and corporate design experience, John T. Waisanen offers a different kind of argument. He looks to particular skills we might be losing (and might have for some time been losing): drawing in particular; and to the «art» of integrating complex vision, thought and practice, what he calls design - or geometrical thinking. This points to the importance of the arts as a physical practice and to the cultivation of complex vision and thought gained in and through an education where geometry and literature are equally important, where physical intelligence (not just dexterity) and philosophical intelligence are equally important.

Landscape Journal