Black Landscapes Matter

The question "Do black landscapes matter?" cuts deep to the core of American history. From the plantations of slavery to contemporary segregated cities, from freedman villages to northern migrations for freedom, the nation’s landscape bears the detritus of diverse origins. Black landscapes matter because they tell the truth. In this vital new collection, acclaimed landscape designer and public artist Walter Hood assembles a group of notable landscape architecture and planning professionals and scholars to probe how race, memory, and meaning intersect in the American landscape. Essayists examine a variety of U.S. places—ranging from New Orleans and Charlotte to Milwaukee and Detroit—exposing racism endemic in the built environment and acknowledging the widespread erasure of black geographies and cultural landscapes. Through a combination of case studies, critiques, and calls to action, contributors reveal the deficient, normative portrayals of landscape that affect communities of color and question how public design and preservation efforts can support people in these places. In a culture in which historical omissions and specious narratives routinely provoke disinvestment in minority communities, creative solutions by designers, planners, artists, and residents are necessary to activate them in novel ways. Black people have built and shaped the American landscape in ways that can never be fully known. Black Landscapes Matter is a timely and necessary reminder that without recognizing and reconciling these histories and spaces, America’s past and future cannot be understood.

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.

Visualizing Nature brings together contemporary visionaries to share deeply personal essays on nature, ecology, sustainability, climate change, philosophy, and more. Compiled by editor and poet Stuart Kestenbaum, the contributors represent a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, each honoring nature's power to heal, inspire, guide, amaze, and strengthen. Activist Maulian Dana of the Penobscot Nation writes on the intertwining relationship of motherhood and Mother Earth. Biology professor David Haskell tells the story of the resilient bristlecone pine trees, which live to be as old as 2,100 years. Iranian scholar Alireza Taghdarreh speaks to his experience of translating Emerson's "Nature" into Farsi. A previously unpublished 1962 speech by Rachel Carson complements the collection of more than twenty essays, each inviting the reader into a quiet space of reflection with the opportunity to think deeply about how they relate to the natural world.

Codify: Parametric and Computational Design in Landscape Architecture provides a series of essays that explore what it means to use, modify and create computational tools in a contemporary design environment. Landscape architecture has a long history of innovation in the areas of computation and media, particularly in how the discipline represents, analyses, and constructs complex systems. This curated volume spans academic and professional projects to form a snapshot of digital practices that aim to show how computation is a tool that goes beyond methods of representation and media. The book is organized in four sections; syntax, perception, employ, and prospective. The essays are written by leading academics and professionals and the sections examine the role of computational tools in landscape architecture through case studies, historical accounts, theoretical arguments, and nascent propositions.

During a long and distinguished career, John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909-1996) brought about a new understanding and appreciation of the American landscape. Hailed in 1995 by New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp as 'America’s greatest living writer on the forces that have shaped the land this nation occupies,' Jackson founded Landscape Magazine in 1951, taught at Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, and wrote nearly 200 essays and reviews. This appealing anthology of his most important writings on the American landscape, illustrated with his own sketches and photographs, brings together Jackson’s most famous essays, significant but less well known writings, and articles that were originally published unsigned or under various pseudonyms. Jackson also completed a new essay for this volume, 'Places for Fun and Games,' a few months before his death. Focusing not on nature but on landscape - land shaped by human presence - Jackson insists in his writings that the workaday world gives form to the essential American landscape. In the everyday places of the countryside and city, he discerns texts capable of revealing important truths about society and culture, present and past. For this collection Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz provides an introduction that discusses the larger body of Jackson’s writing and locates each of the selected essays within his oeuvre. She also includes a complete bibliography of Jackson’s writings.

Landscapes are forged by many forces and are dynamic, not static. Yet most landscape designs are designed as static; that is, they are designed not to change substantially for 20-50 years. As cities become the dominant living space for humans, allowing non-human forces to contribute to our designs as landscape architects will make for more resilient landscapes and a healthier planet. Making these dynamic landscapes with our non-human partners will require a new landscape esthetic, changing the public perception of "landscape," and changing maintenance practices. Dynamic Geographies seeks to address these perceptions with a series of our projects as examples--one for every of our 20 years in business. The book is divided into three segments of overlapping geographies: visible geographies, layered geographies, and unleashing geographies.

How American architecture can address systemic anti-Black racism: a creative challenge in 10 case studies Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in Americais an urgent call for architects to accept the challenge of reconceiving and reconstructing our built environment rather than continue giving shape to buildings, infrastructure and urban plans that have, for generations, embodied and sustained anti-Black racism in the United States. The architects, designers, artists and writers who were invited to contribute to this book--and to the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art for which it serves as a "field guide"--reimagine the legacies of race-based dispossession in 10 American cities (Atlanta; Brooklyn, New York; Kinloch, Missouri; Los Angeles; Miami; Nashville; New Orleans; Oakland; Pittsburgh; and Syracuse) and celebrate the ways individuals and communities across the country have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance, care and refusal. A broad range of essays by the curators and prominent scholars from diverse fields, as well as a portfolio of new photographs by the artist David Hartt, complement this volume's richly illustrated presentations of the architectural projects at the heart of MoMA's groundbreaking exhibition.

John Stilgoe is just looking around. This is more difficult than it sounds, particularly in our mediated age, when advances in both theory and technology too often seek to replace the visual evidence before our own eyes rather than complement it. We are surrounded by landscapes charged with our past, and yet from our earliest schooldays we are instructed not to stare out the window. Someone who stops to look isn’t only a rarity; he or she is suspect. Landscape and Images records a lifetime spent observing America’s constructed landscapes. Stilgoe’s essays follow the eclectic trains of thought that have resulted from his observation, from the postcard preference for sunsets over sunrises to the concept of "teen geography" to the unwillingness of Americans to walk up and down stairs. In Stilgoe's hands, the subject of jack o’ lanterns becomes an occasion to explore centuries-old concepts of boundaries and trespassing, and to examine why this originally pagan symbol has persisted into our own age. Even something as mundane as putting the cat out before going to bed is traced back to fears of unwatched animals and an untended frontier fireplace. Stilgoe ponders the forgotten connections between politics and painted landscapes and asks why a country whose vast majority lives less than a hundred miles from a coast nonetheless looks to the rural Midwest for the classic image of itself. At times breathtaking in their erudition, the essays collected here are as meticulously researched as they are elegantly written. Stilgoe’s observations speak to specialists—whether they be artists, historians, or environmental designers—as well as to the common reader. Our landscapes constitute a fascinating history of accident and intent. The proof, says Stilgoe, is all around us.