Landscape Architecture As Storytelling

This book introduces students, practitioners, and laypeople to a comfortable approach to learning landscape architectural design free of design jargon and derived from their existing knowledge. A step-by-step process has readers consider their knowledge of language as metaphorically related to basic design and landscape design. Through information delivery and questioning processes, readers build on what they already know, their tacit understanding of language as applied to problem solving and storytelling. Everyone is a storyteller. Taken one step at a time through a three-tiered analogy of language, basic design, and landscape design, readers learn the makeup and role of such design features as points, lines, planes, volumes and sequential volumetric spaces that make up their worlds. With that, in a sense, new world view, and numerous questions and examples, readers begin to see that they in fact daily read the environments in which they live, work, play, raise families, and grow old. Once they realize how they read their surroundings they are helped to recognize that they can build narratives into their surroundings. At that point the existence of authored landscape narratives finds readers understanding a design process that relies on the designer-as-author, landscape-as-text, and participant, user-as-reader. That process has the reader write a first- or second-person narrative, visually interpret the written narrative into a storyboard, and turn the storyboard into a final design, the physical makeup of which is read by those who participate in it.

"This book introduces students, practitioners, and laypeople to a comfortable approach to learning landscape architectural design free of design jargon and derived from their existing knowledge. A step-by-step process has readers consider their knowledge of language as metaphorically related to basic design and landscape design. Through information delivery and questioning processes, readers build on what they already know, their tacit understanding of language as applied to problem solving and storytelling. Everyone is a storyteller. Taken one step at a time through a three-tiered analogy of language, basic design, and landscape design readers learn the makeup and role of such design features as point, line, plane, volumes and sequential volumetric spaces that make up their worlds. With that, in a sense, new world view, and numerous questions and examples, readers begin to see that they in fact daily read the environments in which they live, work, play, raise families, grow old. Once they realize how they read their surroundings they are helped to recognize that they can build narratives into their surroundings. At that point the existence of authored landscape narratives finds readers understanding a design process that relies on the designer-as-author, landscape-as-text, and participant, user-as-reader. That process has the reader write a first- or second-person narrative, visually interpret the written narrative into a storyboard, and turn the storyboard into a final design, the physical makeup of which is read by those who participate in it"--

This text covers the most popular types of landscapes designed today, from garden and park design, historic preservation and restoration, to community and regional planning.

Landscape architecture and architecture are two fields that exist in close proximity to one another. Some have argued that the two are, in fact, one field. Others maintain that the disciplines are distinct. These designations are a subject of continual debate by theorists and practitioners alike. Here, David Leatherbarrow offers an entirely new way of thinking of architecture and landscape architecture. Moving beyond partisan arguments, he shows how the two disciplines rely upon one another to form a single framework of cultural meaning. Leatherbarrow redefines landscape architecture and architecture as topographical arts, the shared task of which is to accommodate and express the patterns of our lives. Topography, in his view, incorporates terrain, built and unbuilt, but also traces of practical affairs, by means of which culture preserves and renews its typical situations and institutions. This rigorous argument is supported by nearly 100 illustrations, as well as examples of topography from the sixteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, through the heroic period of early modernism, to more recent offerings. A number of these studies revise existing accounts of decisive moments in the history of these disciplines, particularly the birth of the informal garden, the emergence of continuous space in the landscapes and architecture of the modern period, and the new significance of landform or earthwork in contemporary architecture. For readers not directly involved with either of these professions, this book shows how over the centuries our lives have been shaped and enriched by landscape and architecture. Topographical Stories provides a new paradigm for theorizing and practicing landscape and architecture.

Confabulation is a drawing together through storytelling. Fundamental to our perception, memory, and thought is the way we join fractured experiences to construct a narrative. Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture weaves together poetic ideas, objects, and events and returns you to everyday experiences of life through juxtapositions with dreams, fantasies, and hypotheticals. It follows the intellectual and creative framework of architectural cosmopoesis developed and practiced by the distinguished thinker, architect, and professor Dr. Marco Frascari, who thought deeply about the role of storytelling in architecture. Bringing together a collection of 24 essays from a diverse and respected group of scholars, this book presents the convergence of architecture and storytelling across a broad temporal, geographic, and cultural range. Beginning with an introduction framing the topic, the book is organized along a continuous thread structured around four key areas: architecture of stories, stories of architecture, stories of theory and practice of stories. Beautifully illustrated throughout and including a 64-page full colour section, Confabulations is an insightful investigation into architectural narratives.

A groundbreaking history of the development of designed landscapes in Canada.

Basic theoretical texts for landscape architects.

The first book to look architectural narrative in the eye Since the early eighties, many architects have used the term "narrative" to describe their work. To architects the enduring attraction of narrative is that it offers a way of engaging with the way a city feels and works. Rather than reducing architecture to mere style or an overt emphasis on technology, it foregrounds the experiential dimension of architecture. Narrative Architecture explores the potential for narrative as a way of interpreting buildings from ancient history through to the present, deals with architectural background, analysis and practice as well as its future development. Authored by Nigel Coates, a foremost figure in the field of narrative architecture, the book is one of the first to address this subject directly Features architects as diverse as William Kent, Antoni Gaudí, Eero Saarinen, Ettore Sottsass, Superstudio, Rem Koolhaas, and FAT to provide an overview of the work of NATO and Coates, as well as chapters on other contemporary designers Includes over 120 colour photographs Signposting narrative's significance as a design approach that can aid architecture to remain relevant in this complex, multi-disciplinary and multi-everything age, Narrative Architecture is a must-read for anyone with an interest in architectural history and theory.