The Best-Selling Landscape Architecture Books of All Time

This step-by-step guide to producing working graphics is a unique learning tool for landscape architects and designers. It shows how to execute the graphics involved at each stage of landscape design. Throughout the book, the emphasis is on time-saving techniques.

With the role of the landscape architect increasing as it is in importance, this first comprehensive survey of the art and practice of landscape architecture fills a great need. Norman T. Newton has included over 400 illustrations in his book, which conveys a basic understanding of the aims and scope of landscape architecture and offers visual analyses of major historic works, each in the context of its own time. The first third of the study is concerned with landscape architecture in the Western world, mainly Europe, from ancient times to the mid-nineteenth century.

But the major part of the work is devoted to the development of landscape architecture in the century that has passed since it acquired the status of a profession and an independent discipline. Concentrating primarily on the United States, Mr. Newton reviews his subject from its beginnings in colonial days to the work of Olmsted, Vaux, Cleveland, Weidenmann, Eliot, Platt, and the founders of the American Society of Landscape Architects. He discusses the Columbian Exposition of 1893, the "City Beautiful" movement and the growth of city planning, the Country Place Era, town planning in England and America, American national and state parks, parkways, urban open spaces, and recent variations in professional practice. Mr. Newton concludes his book with a timely discussion of the vital role that landscape architecture plays in the conservation of natural resources and in protection of the environment.

"Twenty-eight years ago I went to England for a three-month visit and rest. What I found changed my life.". So begins this memoir by one of America's best-known landscape architects, Laurie Olin. Raised in a frontier town in Alaska, trained in Seattle and New York, Olin found himself dissatisfied with his job as an urban architect and accepted an invitation to England to take a respite from work. What he found, in abundance, was the serendipity of a human environment built over time to respond to the land's own character and to the people who lived and worked there.

For Olin, the English countryside was a palimpsest of the most eloquent and moving sort, yet whose manifestation was of ordinary buildings meant to shelter their inhabitants and further their work. With evocative language and exquisite line drawings, the author takes us back to his introduction to the scenes of English country towns, their ancient universities, meandering waterways, and dramatic cloudscapes racing in from the Atlantic. He limns the geologic histories found within the rock, the near-forgotten histories of place-names, and the recent histories of train lines and auto routes. Comparing the growth of building in the English countryside, Olin draws some sobering conclusions about our modern lifestyle and its increasing separation from the landscape. As much a plea for saving the modern American landscape as it is a passionate exploration of what makes the English landscape so characteristically English, Across the Open Field is "an affectionate ramble through real places of lasting worth.".