Shaping An American Landscape

A rich portrait of a major figure in American art & architecture & his role in shaping American cultural identity.

A generous selection of illustrations, together with a list of surviving landscape sites accessible to the public, brings both the subjects and their art to life.

Shaping the Postwar Landscape is the latest contribution to the Cultural Landscape Foundation's well-known reference project, Pioneers of American Landscape Design, the first volume of which appeared nearly a quarter of a century ago. The present collection features profiles of seventy-two important figures, including landscape architects, architects, planners, artists, horticulturists, and educators. The volume focuses principally on individuals whose careers reached their height during the period between the end of World War II and the American Bicentennial. In that postwar era, landscape architects played an important part in the revitalization of American cities, introducing new typologies for public spaces in the civic realm. Among these were parks that capped freeways, plazas and gardens atop buildings, promenades on revitalized waterfronts, "vest pocket" parks on tiny urban plots and derelict sites, and pedestrian-friendly downtown malls. Practitioners were also active on the new suburban frontier, their influence extending as far as Levittown and mobile-home communities. They created new outdoor living environments tailored to the California climate, and their work shaped landscaped in the American South, East, West, and Heartland. At a time when interest in midcentury architecture is flourishing, Shaping the Postwar Landscape offers a substantial parallel contribution to the field of landscape studies. It belongs not only on the bookshelves of serious students and scholars but in the office of every landscape architect sensitive to significant works of the recent past.

As showcases for dramatic changes in garden style and new technology, world's fairs offered leading landscape designers and nurserymen the chance to tempt visitors to try new garden trends in backyards across the nation. From horticultural innovations to new landscape styles, the wonders displayed at these fairs had a distinct influence on America's largest urban parks. In World's Fair Gardens, Cathy Jean Maloney offers a lavishly illustrated exploration of the gardens and grounds of America's nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century world's fairs. Maloney describes the landscapes of nine of America's great fairs from the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia to the 1940 World's Fair of Tomorrow in New York, many of whose legacies are still evident. The fairs also created an arena for intense competition among nations. Foreign plant introductions included English rhododendrons in Philadelphia, Mexican cacti in New Orleans, and Japanese gardens at nearly all the fairs, a feat considering the formidable challenge of shipping live plants great distances in those times. Maloney also explores innovations from the "glazeless putty system" greenhouse in 1884 and cold storage systems in 1904 to modernistic glass fences in 1940. Complete with more than 50 color and 70 black-and-white illustrations, World's Fair Gardens will appeal to historians, gardeners, urban planners, landscape architects, public park advocates, preservationists, and anyone interested in the history of these global festivals. Supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts

Looks at the ways Americans have altered the landscape from the arrival of early Spanish settlers to the beginning of the country's rapid urbanization

The only compact yet comprehensive survey of environmental and cultural forces that have shaped the visual character and geographical diversity of the settled American landscape. The book examines the large-scale historical influences that have molded the varied human adaptation of the continent’s physical topography to its needs over more than 500 years. It presents a synoptic view of myriad historical processes working together or in conflict, and illustrates them through their survival in or disappearance from the everyday landscapes of today.

The Description for this book, The Crowning of the American Landscape: Eight Great Spaces and Their Buildings, will be forthcoming.

Shaping Terrain shows how the physical landscape and local ecology have influenced human settlement and built form in Latin America since pre-Columbian times. Most urban centers and capitals of Latin American countries are situated on or near dramatically varied terrain, and this book explores the interplay between built works and their geographies in various cities including Bogotá, Caracas, Mendoza, Mexico D. F., Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile, and Valparaíso. The multi-national contributors to Shaping Terrain have a broad range of professional experience as urbanists, historians, and architects, and many are globally renowned for their design work. They examine how humans negotiate with the existing environment and how the built form expresses that relationship. The result is a wide-ranging representation of the unique legacy of Latin America’s urban heritage, which is a repository of possibilities for future cities.