Accidental Landscapes

Engaging essays that roam across uncertain territory, in search of sunken forests, unclassifiable islands, inflammable skies, plagiarized tabernacles, and other phenomena missing from architectural history. This collection by “architectural history's most beguiling essayist” (as Reinhold Martin calls the author in the book's foreword) illuminates the unfamiliar, the arcane, the obscure—phenomena largely missing from architectural and landscape history. These essays by Edward Eigen do not walk in a straight line, but roam across uncertain territory, discovering sunken forests, unclassifiable islands, inflammable skies, unvisited shores, plagiarized tabernacles. Taken together, these texts offer a group portrait of how certain things fall apart. We read about the statistical investigation of lightning strikes in France by the author-astronomer Camille Flammarion, which leads Eigen to reflect also on Foucault, Hamlet, and the role of the anecdote in architectural history. We learn about, among other things, Olmsted's role in transforming landscape gardening into landscape architecture; the connections among hedging, hedge funds, the High Line, and GPS bandwidth; timber-frame roofs and (spider) web-based learning; the archives of the Houses of Parliament through flood and fire; and what the 1898 disappearance and reappearance of the Trenton, New Jersey architect William W. Slack might tell us about the conflict between “the migratory impulse” and “love of home.” Eigen compares his essays to the “gathering up of seeds that fell by the wayside.” The seedlings that result create in the reader's imagination a dazzling display of the particular, the contingent, the incidental, and the singular, all in search of a narrative.

Light not only catches the eye, it can transform your work into something truly magical. With four inspiring projects to get you started, world-renowned quilt artist Gloria Loughman shows you how to bring light into your quilts to set a mood. You'll learn how to create your own landscape quilt with her easy-to-master techniques, including fusible tiling, invisible machine appliqué, free-motion stitching, plus fabric dyeing and painting. She also shares the important design principles behind perspective, composition, colour, and focal points.

Textile Landscapes demonstrates how to develop your approach to textile art with a focus on using found objects and paint and stitch on cloth and paper. Cas explains how to exploit the contrast between the hands-on textural quality of working with fabrics and threads and the spontaneity and movement of brush marks to lend a painterly quality to your work. She begins with the basics – keeping a sketchbook to generate ideas, painting and stitching on cloth and on paper and working digitally; Inspiring Landscapes looks at natural and urban space, the changing seasons and great landscapes as well as intimate spaces and travel diaries; Painting and Marking with Cloth explains the practical aspects of painting and dyeing cloth and how to make connections between paint, print, dye, stencil and stitch; Stitch-scapes looks at the different forms of landscape, experimenting with photographs and prints and how to translate those images using ink, stitch, abstract and collage techniques and then at how to transform the image using digital techniques; On Closer Inspection covers using elements and details from landscape and the environment as found objects and for research; finally People and Place explores the relationship we have with the outdoors and the built environment, as well as personal interpretations of place. The book includes artworks by the author that explore the UK, USA, Europe and Australia, as well as works by other internationally renowned textile artists. A creative guide ideal for textile artists of all levels – students, teachers and practising artists and makers – to make unique and beautiful work inspired by the world around us.

Accidental Wilderness showcases how the removal of city rubble and its displacement can result in new urban parklands with significant ecological importance for the health of the city and its residents.

Wes Anderson's beloved films announce themselves through a singular aesthetic - one that seems too vivid, unique, and meticulously constructed to possibly be real. Not so - in Accidentally Wes Anderson, Wally Koval collects the world's most Anderson-like sites in all their faded grandeur and pop-pastel colours, telling the story behind each stranger than-fiction-location. Based on the viral online phenomenon and community of the same name, Accidentally Wes Anderson celebrates the unique aesthetic that millions of Anderson fans love - capturing the symmetrical, the atypical, the unexpected, the vibrantly patterned, and distinctively coloured in arresting photographs from around the world. Authorised by Wes Anderson himself, and appealing to the millions who love his films, this book is also for fans of Cabin Porn and Van Life - and avid travellers and aspiring adventurers of all kinds.

Landscape and Infrastructure examines the relationships between landscape painting and landscape design from the seventeenth century to the present, and contemporary infrastructure projects around the globe. These seemingly disparate subjects are united by a shared concern for the pastoral middle ground; a traditionally productive landscape. By focusing an art-historical lens on pre-industrial productive systems and the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the pastoral landscape tradition, we can gain a better understanding of how to weave new approaches to productive infrastructure systems (such as power generation, water filtration and food production) into our contemporary landscapes. With rising demand for clean energy, clean water, and locally-grown food, this study offers a historical perspective on how such systems can be integrated into our suburban and urban areas. Vestigial elements of the pastoral tradition have long held aesthetic sway in our suburbs, cities and national parks, both in Britain and America. Now, as new energy and water related projects encroach on these spaces, remnants of the pastoral play a crucial role in convincing neighborhood residents, municipal leaders, and energy companies or water authorities of the benefits of a neighboring infrastructure. This book investigates the history of that tradition and highlights the advantages it brings as we re-imagine infrastructure in the twenty-first century.