Claude no more.MODERN LANDSCAPE By Michael Spens. London: Phaidon, 2003. [pounds sterling]45 Phaidon has come late in the current race to get this season's big landscape book on the sales shelves. Happily for the author of Modern Landscape, Michael Spens, there is not a lot of visual overlap between this and the current defining text, Robert Holden's New Landscape Design from Lawrence King (reviewed AR March 2004). This book follows the conventional Thames & Hudson formula of introductory text plus detailed case studies. Spens's leading essay is a quick scamper through the century's more interesting high points without, praise be to all the spirits of the Wild Wood, a single mention of Gertrude Jekyll Gertrude Jekyll (November 29, 1843–December 8, 1932), (pronounced JEE-kul, to rhyme with 'treacle') was an influential British garden designer, writer, and artist. She created over 400 gardens in the UK, Europe and the USA and contributed over 1,000 articles to . He says, 'Ultimately ... landscape designers are no longer seeking a Claudian landscape of tranquillity, but one finely balanced between order and chaos. Increasingly we are becoming aware that the order comes from nature, and the chaos from man.' The subsequent case studies include an interesting range of examples from Hans Hollein's Vulcanology Museum, Clermont-Ferrand, through Martha Schwartz's Kitagata Garden City, to George Hargreaves' Olympic Park
An Olympic Park is a venue or group of venues set up when a country hosts the Olympic Games. List of Olympic Parks
Spens's selection of examples is mostly good but in several cases is odd because a small number of them are straight up and down architecture. That is not to make a Landscape Institute-like grump about the absence of foliage or to ignore the interesting possibilities of architecture-landscape fusions such as the boardwalk and grass roof of the Yokohama terminal. It is, however, to wonder how the curving roof of Ted Cullinan's Weald weald n. Chiefly British 1. A woodland. 2. An area of open rolling upland. [From Weald, a once-forested area in southeast England, from Old English and Downland A downland is an area of open chalk hills. This term is especially used to describe the chalk countryside in southern England. Areas of downland are often referred to as Downs. Museum workshops and Wilkinson Eyre's Gateshead Millennium bridge The Gateshead Millennium Bridge is a pedestrian and cycle bridge spanning the River Tyne in England between Gateshead on the south bank, and Newcastle upon Tyne on the north bank. (the former complete with interior photos and neither with any landscape context) might contribute to the landscape debate apart from the fact that they are nice to look at. Maybe the pages for these were dropped in accidentally from another text lying about the office about architecture. There is an architectural book designer's version of James Wines' turd in the plaza, the big 3D artwork dumped in front of a new building to make the latter interesting. In books it is the introduction of a graphic device or trick with lines or shapes (in an otherwise perfectly clearly designed book) which the designer fondly imagines will bestow be·stow tr.v. be·stowed, be·stow·ing, be·stows 1. To present as a gift or an honor; confer: bestowed high praise on the winners. 2. artistic immortality immortality, attribute of deathlessness ascribed to the soul in many religions and philosophies. Forthright belief in immortality of the body is rare. Immortality of the soul is a cardinal tenet of Islam and is held generally in Judaism, although it is not an on him or her. Thames & Hudson, Lawrence King, they all do it. And you really wish they wouldn't. In the case of Modern Landscape the device is a big milky milky (mil´ke) 1. having the appearance of milk; whitish, cloudy, fluid. 2. filled with or consisting of milk or a milklike fluid. square which appears behind the (modestly sized) title text to each scheme. This renders the 32 double page images on which they are plonked only partially readable. Hamish Muir is credited at the back with striving after immortality thus. |
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