The Book Nook Feed

Review: Center 14, On Landscape Urbanism

Jeff Alexander — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:31:42 +0100

Review Forthcoming.

Review: Drosscape. Wasting Land in Urban America

Jeff Alexander — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:53:30 +0100

In Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America, Alan Berger deals with a particularly interesting and relatively recently emergent classification of space in urban areas: Drosscape. Very generally and loosely defined as waste landscapes, Berger begins by describing the process by which these spaces develop and explains why they result from normal, healthy urban growth. Berger draws from some of the texts that are credited with forming the foundation of the emergent field of landscape urbanism such as Lars Lerup's Stim and Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis and Ignasi de Sola-Morales Terrain Vague. ...

Review: Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.

Jeff Alexander — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:57:07 +0100

When you first pick up Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, it's immediately obvious this book is a little different, and not just in the content. The book is very heavy for it's size, and the pages have a texture more like plastic than paper. The reason for this is that the book IS different. It's not made out of paper, rather the synthetic pages are made of plastic resins and inorganic fillers. ...

Review: Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution - and How it can Renew America

Jeff Alexander — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:57:30 +0100

Author of best selling The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, Friedman takes his global expertise and insight to new places with Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape. This particular book has more of an architectural influence on it. However there are notable contributions that focus on landscape.

One such essay is Corner's Landscape Urbanism. Here, Corner presents five themes of landscape urbanism. ...

Review: Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street

Jeff Alexander — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:58:23 +0100

Few projects have such an interesting evolution that results in such a successful solution. The High Line in New York City is just such a project. On the rare instances in which these projects do occur, it's always exciting to see a publication about the project. Designing the High Line: Gansevoort Street to 30th Street is just such a publication. ...

Review: The Landscape Urbanism Reader

Jeff Alexander — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 17:58:42 +0100

The Landscape Urbanism Reader (edited by Charles Waldheim) is a collection of essays from some of the founders and foremost practitioners of the emergent field of landscape urbanism. Being a collection of essays as opposed to a comprehensive manifesto, the book runs the risk of coming across as an incongruous and haphazard pastiche of divergent thoughts. ...