The Virginia Landscape

For generations of Virginians and visitors the landscape of the Old Dominion has represented something unique and symbolic. In conjunction with a landmark exhibition at the Virginia Historical Society, this beautifully produced volume brings together more than 250 paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs depicting the rich and varied history of the state through the eyes of the artists who have painted and photographed it.

Featuring many of the world's most highly acclaimed landscape architects, this book presents 40 of the most recently completed and influential landscape designs. Each project is presented with color photographs, site plans and sections as well as numerous consistently styled construction details. Intended for architects, engineers and landscape architects, the book will also be invaluable for architecture, garden and landscape design students, for whom it will be a resource not only for understanding the work of the best contemporary landscape architects, but also as a tool for their own design work.

An important addition to scholarship of the geography and history of colonial and early America, The Planting of New Virginia, rethinks American history and the evolution of the American landscape in the colonial era.

Collaboration with the greatest botanists of his time, an instinctive humanitarianism, and a natural ingenuity in landscape design combined to make Thomas Jefferson a pioneer in American landscape architecture. Frederick D. Nichols and Ralph E. Griswold, in this close study of Jefferson's many notes, letters, and sketches, present a clear and detailed interpretation of his extraordinary accomplishments in the field. Thomas Jefferson, Landscape Architect investigates the many influences on--and of--the Jeffersonian legacy in architecture. Jefferson's personality, friendships, and convictions, complemented by his extensive reading and travels, clearly influenced his architectural work. His fresh approach to incorporating foreign elements into domestic designs, his revolutionary approach to relating the house to the surrounding land, and his profound influences on the architectural character of the District of Columbia are just a few of Jefferson's contributions to the American landscape. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century maps, plans, and drawings, as well as pictures of the species of trees that Jefferson used for his designs, generously illustrate the engaging narrative in Thomas Jefferson, Landscape Architect.

From its earliest days, the Virginia landscape has elicited dramatically contradictory descriptions. The sixteenth-century poet Michael Drayton exalted the land as "earth's onely paradise," while John Smith, in his reports to England, summarized the area around Jamestown as "a miserie, a ruine, a death, a hell." Drawing upon both familiar history and lesser-known material from deep geological time through the end of the seventeenth century, Stephen Adams focuses on both the physical changes to the land over time and the changes in the way people viewed Virginia. The Best and Worst Country in the World reaches well beyond previous accounts of early American views of the land with the inclusion of fascinating and important pre-1700 sources, Native American perceptions, and prehuman geography and geology. A blend of history, literature, geology, geography, and natural history, enriched by illustrations ranging from a dinosaur footprint to John Smith's famous "Map of Virginia," Adams's work offers an ecocritical exploration of the varied preconceptions that have shaped and colored the human relationship with "the best and worst country in the world"--the early Virginia landscape.

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.

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.

Cars, single-family houses, fallout shelters, air-conditioned malls—these are only some of the many interiors making up the landscape of American suburbia. Indoor America explores the history of suburbanization through the emergence of such spaces in the postwar years, examining their design, use, and representation. By drawing on a wealth of examples ranging from the built environment to popular culture and film, Andrea Vesentini shows how suburban interiors were devised as a continuous cultural landscape of interconnected and self-sufficient escape capsules. The relocation of most everyday practices into indoor spaces has often been overlooked by suburban historiography; Indoor America uncovers this latent history and contrasts it with the dominant reading of suburbanization as pursuit of open space. Americans did not just flee the city by getting out of it—they did so also by getting inside. Vesentini chronicles this inner-directed flight by describing three separate stages. The encapsulation of the automobile fostered the nuclear segregation of the family from the social fabric and served as a blueprint for all other interiors. Introverted design increasingly turned the focus of the house inward. Finally, through interiorization, the exterior was incorporated into the all-encompassing interior landscape of enclosed malls and projects for indoor cities. In a journey that features tailfin cars and World’s Fair model homes, Richard Neutra’s glass walls and sitcom picture windows, Victor Gruen’s Southdale Center and the Minnesota Experimental City, Indoor America takes the reader into the heart and viscera of America’s urban sprawl.