Landscape Architecture Manifestos Constructivist Apocalyptic And Optimistic

Landscape architects should be optimistic for the 21st century. With post-Modern and post-Postmodern design methods, we can attain a leading role in the environmental, design and planning professions. This short eBook began with an article for Landscape Architecture Magazine LAM. Bafflingly, it was rejected for being 'rather dated'. The editors obviously know more than we do about their readers' interests. So we regret the US landscape profession's lack of interest in design theory. Understood understood as 'a set of principles for undertaking a task', we believe that design theory lies, or should lie, at the heart of the landscape architecture profession. The Wikipedia article on post-Postmodernism (in 2015) notes that: In 1995, the landscape architect and urban planner Tom Turner issued a book-length call for a post-postmodern turn in urban planning. Turner criticizes the postmodern credo of “anything goes” and suggests that “the built environment professions are witnessing the gradual dawn of a post-Postmodernism that seeks to temper reason with faith.” The book was City as landscape and the design approach has developed since then and is now illustrated with examples from the authors of this eBook.

Featuring 165 expertly reproduced visionary architectural drawings from The Museum of Modern Art's Howard Gilman Archive, this collection brings together a selection of idealized, fantastic and utopian architectural drawings.

The first significant history of human intervention on the landscape since Geoffrey Jellicoe’s Landscape of Man, originally published in 1975 In many ways the history of civilization is a history of humans’ relationship with nature. Starting from the dual inclination to clear land for cultivation and to enclose space for protection—the forest clearing and the walled garden—there emerges a vital and multifaceted narrative that describes our cultural relationship to, and dependence on, the landscape. Christophe Girot sets out to chronicle this history, drawing on all aspects of mankind’s creativity and ingenuity. In twelve chapters, he brings together the key stories that have shaped our man-made landscapes. Each chapter consists of a thematic essay that ties together the central developments, as well as a case study illustrated with specially commissioned photographs and meticulously detailed 3D re–creations showing the featured site in its original context. The result of over two decades of teaching experience and academic research at one of the world’s leading universities, The Course of Landscape Architecture will reach international students and professionals. But its wealth of visual material, the wide range of its cultural references and the beauty of the landscapes it features will attract the interest of all who desire to enrich their understanding of how our landscapes have been formed, and how we relate to them.

How to use design as a tool to create not only things but ideas, to speculate about possible futures. Today designers often focus on making technology easy to use, sexy, and consumable. In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be—to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose “what if” questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want). Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more—about everything—reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

Twenty-one essays examining the relationship of surrealist thought to architectural theory and practice.

Over the summer of 2019, as part of a research fellowship, the UK practice Architects for Social Housing (ASH) took up a month's residency in Vancouver. Drawing on the past five years of practice working with residents of housing estates threatened with demolition, ASH presented their thoughts about the necessity and possibility of a socialist architecture under capitalism. To do so, they looked at the social, environmental, economic and political spheres of architecture, and how they can be reclaimed from the hegemony of neoliberalism in legislation, policy and practice. In a series of four lectures, ASH mapped out the development process from 1) strategy, legislation and policy, to 2) urban design, master-planning and brief development, to 3) project design and the planning process, to 4) procurement and construction, to 5) management and maintenance, and identified the moments of political agency at which the agents for a socialist architecture can intervene in and disrupt the capitalist structure and functioning of this process. In addition, ASH also identified moments that are outside this development process proper, but which can be brought to bear upon it, including the tasks of education, dissemination and agitation for change. In doing so, they have developed a framework for both individual and collective agency that extends far beyond the skills of an architect, and is not limited to either industry professionals or the layman's protest. ASH contends that all of us are potential agents for a socialist architecture; but to be called 'socialist' that agency must go beyond voting and protest - both of which give legitimacy to the illusory 'freedom' of capitalist democracies - to oppositional political practice. For this printed edition of the lectures, ASH has included two additional texts: an introduction, which was originally published in January 2020, following the UK general election; and a postscript, which looks at the ruinous impact of lockdown restrictions on UK housing and how we can respond. In publishing the expanded forms of these lectures, ASH aims to make their contents available not only to people who are threatened by the crisis of housing affordability in the UK, but also to policy-writers looking for alternatives to the selling off of public land and housing to private investors, as well as to architects looking for an alternative to the orthodoxies of contemporary architectural practice.

The far right is back with a vengeance. After several decades at the political margins, far-right politics has again taken center stage. Three of the world’s largest democracies – Brazil, India, and the United States – now have a radical right leader, while far-right parties continue to increase their profile and support within Europe. In this timely book, leading global expert on political extremism Cas Mudde provides a concise overview of the fourth wave of postwar far-right politics, exploring its history, ideology, organization, causes, and consequences, as well as the responses available to civil society, party, and state actors to challenge its ideas and influence. What defines this current far-right renaissance, Mudde argues, is its mainstreaming and normalization within the contemporary political landscape. Challenging orthodox thinking on the relationship between conventional and far-right politics, Mudde offers a complex and insightful picture of one of the key political challenges of our time.

Italy and the UK experienced a radical re-organisation of urban space following the devastation of many towns and cities in the Second World War. The need to rebuild led to an intellectual and cultural exchange between a wave of talented architects, urbanists and architectural historians in the two countries. Post-war Architecture Between Italy and the UK studies this exchange, exploring how the connections and mutual influences contributed to the formation of a distinctive stance towards Internationalism, notwithstanding the countries’ contrasting geographic and climatic conditions, levels of economic and industrial development, and social structures. Topics discussed in the volume include the influence of Italian historic town centres on British modernist and Brutalist architectural approaches to the design of housing and university campuses as public spaces; post-war planning concepts such as the precinct; the tensions between British critics and Italian architects that paved the way for British postmodernism; and the role of architectural education as a melting pot of mutual influence. It draws on a wealth of archival and original materials to present insights into the personal relationships, publications, exhibitions and events that provided the crucible for the dissemination of ideas and typologies across cultural borders. Offering new insights into the transcultural aspects of European architectural history in the post-war years, and its legacy, this volume is vital reading for architectural and urban historians, planners and students, as well as social historians of the European post-war period.