Windows on Central Park

Windows on Central Park
Author: Betsy Pinover Schiff
Publisher: Schiffer Publishing Limited
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 9780764338359

Unique perspectives on New York's 843-acre Central Park viewed exclusively from windows and terraces surrounding it. One hundred forty-three photographs range from intimate fourth-floor scenes to sweeping vistas from 64 stories above the Park. The principal photographer of six books on gardens and landscape architecture, the author concentrates on the landscape of Central Park, revealing its beauty from above during all four seasons, from early morning to night. The photographer's journey took her to more than 100 apartments, offices, hotels, and museums over the course of five years. This book includes quotes by sixteen notable individuals about their experiences of looking down from their windows to the Park, including Giorgio Armani, Candice Bergen, Paul Goldberger, Evelyn Lauder, Donald Trump, and Elie Wiesel. Windows on Central Park will strengthen one's sense of the grandeur and beauty of America's most visited park, and reveal the Park as a towering example of both urban ecology and landscape architecture.

Landscapes Revealed

Landscapes Revealed
Author: Amanda Brend
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2020-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789255090

This volume brings together several years of work devoted to the wider landscape of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site. It documents the results of a programme of geophysical and related survey across an area of c. 285 hectares between Skara Brae on the west Orkney coast and Maeshowe, by the Loch of Stenness. The project has made it possible to talk for the first time about the landscape context of some of the most remarkable and renowned prehistoric monuments in Western Europe. The aims are to synthesise the data from different forms of survey and to document the changing character and development of this landscape over time. The results are genuinely remarkable are presented in a manner which makes the material of interest and value to a relatively wide readership, with an array of images which fully document and interpret the evidence. Survey work at a landscape scale tends to deal with palimpsests. Here descriptive sections are set within a thematic structure designed to explore the changing use and significance of different areas over time. The results shed important new light on the character and extent of known prehistoric sites and ceremonial monuments. But they also document the afterlives of these and other places and their relation to the lived landscapes of the historic and more recent past. In tracing the changing configuration of the World Heritage Area, we can begin appreciate this landscape as an artefact of several millennia of dwelling, working land, attending to wider worlds and to the past itself.

A Landscape History of New England

A Landscape History of New England
Author: Blake A. Harrison
Publisher: Mit Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780262525275

This book takes a view of New England's landscapes that goes beyond picture postcard-ready vistas of white-steepled churches, open pastures, and tree-covered mountains. Its chapters describe, for example, the Native American presence in the Maine Woods; offer a history of agriculture told through stone walls, woodlands, and farm buildings; report on the fragile ecology of tourist-friendly Cape Cod beaches; and reveal the ethnic stereotypes informing Colonial Revivalism. Taken together, they offer a wide-ranging history of New England's diverse landscapes, stretching across two centuries. The book shows that all New England landscapes are the products of human agency as well as nature. The authors trace the roles that work, recreation, historic preservation, conservation, and environmentalism have played in shaping the region, and they highlight the diversity of historical actors who have transformed both its meaning and its physical form. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, including history, geography, environmental studies, literature, art history, and historic preservation, the book provides fresh perspectives on New England's many landscapes: forests, mountains, farms, coasts, industrial areas, villages, towns, and cities. Illustrated, and with many archival photographs, it offers readers a solid historical foundation for understanding the great variety of places that make up New England.

Landscapes of Exclusion

Landscapes of Exclusion
Author: William E O'Brien
Publisher:
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2022-03
Genre:
ISBN: 9781952620355

During the 1930s, the state park movement and the National Park Service expanded public access to scenic American places, especially during the era of the New Deal. However, under severe Jim Crow restrictions in the South, African Americans were routinely and officially denied entrance to these supposedly shared sites. Landscapes of Exclusion presents the first-ever study of segregation in southern state parks, underscoring the profound disparity that persisted for decades in the Jim Crow South.

Landscapes Revealed

Landscapes Revealed
Author: Amanda Brend
Publisher: Oxbow Books
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2020-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789255074

Winner, Current Archaeology 2023 Book of the Year 2023 This volume brings together several years of work devoted to the wider landscape of the Heart of Neolithic Orkney World Heritage Site. It documents the results of a program of geophysical and related survey across an area of c. 285 hectares between Skara Brae on the west Orkney coast and Maeshowe, by the Loch of Stenness. The project has made it possible to talk for the first time about the landscape context of some of the most remarkable and renowned prehistoric monuments in Western Europe. The aims are to synthesize the data from different forms of survey and to document the changing character and development of this landscape over time. The results are genuinely remarkable are presented in a manner which makes the material of interest and value to a relatively wide readership, with an array of images which fully document and interpret the evidence. Survey work at a landscape scale tends to deal with palimpsests. Here descriptive sections are set within a thematic structure designed to explore the changing use and significance of different areas over time. The results shed important new light on the character and extent of known prehistoric sites and ceremonial monuments. But they also document the afterlives of these and other places and their relation to the lived landscapes of the historic and more recent past. In tracing the changing configuration of the World Heritage Area, we can begin appreciate this landscape as an artifact of several millennia of dwelling, working land, attending to wider worlds and to the past itself.

Landscape Design Answer Book

Landscape Design Answer Book
Author: Jane Bath
Publisher:
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2006-09-12
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Writing specifically for new homeowners and those planning renovations, Bath pulls from her twenty-five-plus years of experience helping thousands of clients. Even though Bath faces a wide range of landscape design situations in her work, the solutions to these important landscape problems remain constant. That's why The Landscape Design Answer Book is unique. Bath reduces the subject of landscape design to about three hundred specific design problems (or goals) a homeowner may face--and provides solutions that can be universally applied.

The Cultivated Wilderness

The Cultivated Wilderness
Author: Paul Shepheard
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1997-01-22
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 026231438X

Paul Shepheard's previous book, What is Architecture?, was about making real, material things in the world—landscapes, buildings, and machines. The Cultivated Wilderness is about those landscapes, and about the strategies that govern what we've done in shaping them.In the author's words, this book is about "seeing things that are too big to see." His emphasis on strategy makes landscape fundamental—he says that every architectural move is set in a landscape. Norman England, for example, was constructed as a network of strong points, in a strategy of occupation. The eighteenth-century grid cities of the New World reflect a strategy of reason. Our current strategy is the economic exploitation of the Earth, an intricately woven blanket of commerce that covers up a multitude of other possibilities, many other ways to treat the surface of the globe—some of which are the landscapes revealed in this book.In a series of first-person narratives, reminiscent of his last book, the author pairs six landscapes, in order of descending scale from global to local, from the seven wonders of the ancient world to the condensed destruction of World War I's Western Front. In an engaging style, Shepheard takes the reader on an odyssey through these landscapes, meeting people and seeing places. He states that now, at the end of a century in which the appropriate landscape was sought but never found, the strategy of turning the land to profit is under review—and offers this book as his contribution to that review. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images found in the physical edition.

Environmental Humanities

Environmental Humanities
Author: Sjoerd Kluiving
Publisher:
Total Pages: 108
Release: 2021-04-28
Genre:
ISBN: 9789464270044

There has been an increasing archaeological interest in human-animal-nature relations, where archaeology has shifted from a focus on deciphering meaning, or understanding symbols and the social construction of the landscape to an acknowledgment of how things, places, and the environment contribute with their own agencies to the shaping of relations.This means that the environment cannot be regarded as a blank space that landscape meaning is projected onto. Parallel to this, the field of environmental humanities poses the question of how to work with the intermeshing of humans and their surroundings.To allow the environment back in as an active agent of change, means that landscape archaeology can deal better with issues such as global warming, an escalating loss of biodiversity, as well as increasingly toxic environment. However, this does not leave human agency out of the equation. It is humans who reinforce the environmental challenges of today.The scholarly field of the humanities deal with questions like how is meaning attributed, what cultural factors drive human action, what role is played by ethics, how is landscape experienced emotionally, as well as how concepts derived from art, literature, and history function in such processes of meaning attribution and other cultural processes. This humanities approach is of utmost importance when dealing with climate and environmental challenges ahead and we need a new landscape archaeology that meets these challenges, but also that meets well across disciplinary boundaries. Here inspiration can be found in discussions with scholars in the emerging field of Environmental Humanities.

Black Landscapes Matter

Black Landscapes Matter
Author: Walter Hood
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2020-12-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0813944872

The question "Do black landscapes matter?" cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation’s landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape. Essayists examine a variety of U.S. places—ranging from New Orleans and Charlotte to Milwaukee and Detroit—exposing racism endemic in the built environment and acknowledging the widespread erasure of black geographies and cultural landscapes. Through a combination of case studies, critiques, and calls to action, contributors reveal the deficient, normative portrayals of landscape that affect communities of color and question how public design and preservation efforts can support people in these places. In a culture in which historical omissions and specious narratives routinely provoke disinvestment in minority communities, creative solutions by designers, planners, artists, and residents are necessary to activate them in novel ways. Black people have built and shaped the American landscape in ways that can never be fully known. Black Landscapes Matter is a timely and necessary reminder that without recognizing and reconciling these histories and spaces, America’s past and future cannot be understood.