« Older Entries

Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods (Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture// Papers)

The study of garden history has grown rapidly over the last twenty years. This collection of essays explores the issues, methods, and approaches that students in landscape architecture have developed during that period to cope with the expanding subject of gardens and their history. The volume will serve as a bench mark in the field, with its range of approaches and wealth of illustrative material.

Each contributor focuses upon a specific piece of his or her research, and uses this as a basis to discuss the wider implications of the study of gardens within such contexts as botanical, horticultural, agrarian, literary, technological, social, culture, political, and art history. The historical and geographical range is also deliberately large: from ancient Greek and Roman gardens, through Islamic and Mughal examples, to nineteenth-century English estates; from India to Surry County, Virginia, from Versailles to Philadelphia.

Certain themes come to dominate the volume: the values of archeology to garden history and conservation; the different or even rival uses of literature, painting, archival, and other documentation; geographical understanding of territory; above all, the rich resources of gardens for historical study and the importance of landscape architectural history in its own right as a major contributor to humanistic knowledge.


Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods (Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture// Papers)

Tags:

Grounds for Review: The Garden Festival in Urban Planning and Design

Garden Festivals are more than temporary horticultural expositions. Complex and phased, these projects have additional significance as planning stratagems, reclamation projects, public art venues, and precursors of new urban parks. Nevertheless, their impact on the urban landscape has been understated or overlooked. Their scope extends well beyond that implied by the term ‘garden festival’. Typically exceeding 50 hectares, they stimulate development and steer site design through a unique merger of domestic garden culture with a large-scale urban project.

A general discussion of the origins, formative elements and chronology of the generic event followed by cross-cultural reviews and analyses of numerous recent festivals and their site legacies form the core of this first comprehensive book on the subject.

Although not an historical treatment, this study builds on historical knowledge. Since their inception with the 1951 Hannover Bundesgartenschau festivals progressed from traditional concepts of exhibition and park design to amplify impulses of the wider culture. Recent installations have been responsive to the ascendance of open space as a critical planning element while forthcoming events now develop in the midst of a trend towards the holistic initiatives of urban landscape planning, giving them a renewed relevance for urban design.

The author explored over fifteen festival sites and documents this study using government reports, interview transcripts, thematic maps, master plans, and other primary source material. The text is richly supplemented with over 140 images and tables. This should prove a useful reference for students, professionals and educators, or indeed anyone, with an interest in the urban public realm.


Grounds for Review: The Garden Festival in Urban Planning and Design

Tags:

Connecticut Valley Vernacular: The Vanishing Landscape and Architecture of the New England Tobacco Fields

“Little by little the gap grows larger and larger between people and their roots. Western life now plays out far from its origins in nature and history. Think of this essay as a pause in that on-rushing existence.”—From the Introduction

A traveler along the banks of the Connecticut River will be struck by the number of long low sheds rising from the fields as if they are an extension of the landscape. A building type shaped by necessity that grows more beautiful with use and age, these are tobacco curing sheds, mute witnesses to a slowly vanishing agricultural tradition and a thriving economic boom of the last hundred and fifty years.

Surprisingly, the Connecticut River valley was once a major producer of cigar leaf tobacco. One of the plants whose cultivation was learned from the native Americans, tobacco was the main crop of many old Yankee farmers and, after them, the Slavic newcomers. The need to season the “Indian weede” gave rise to the structure of the drying barns, a vernacular style unique to its time and place. Just as a picture can throw light on an entire world, so can these drying sheds open a window on a way of life that is fast receding.

James F. O’Gorman reads through oral histories, newspaper reports, and the terse factual writing of agricultural diaries to bring to life the risks and rewards of living close to the seasons, at the mercy of rainfall and sunshine. He has collected an array of vintage and newly commissioned photos of the work of growing tobacco, from de facto portraits of anonymous laborers to images of the sheds themselves, with all their ventilating doors open, welcoming the air. In this beautifully crafted book, O’Gorman treats both the people and the sheds with the respect and admiration their precarious presence requires.

An inquiry that becomes an elegy for a way of life that is part of our rural heritage, Connecticut Valley Vernacular is an appreciative glance back by one of our premier architectural historians.


Connecticut Valley Vernacular: The Vanishing Landscape and Architecture of the New England Tobacco Fields

Tags: