Visionary Landscapes

Japanese gardens are found throughout the world today—their unique forms now considered a universal art form. This stunning Japanese gardening book examines the work of five leading landscape architects in North America who are exploring the extraordinary power of Japanese-style garden design to create an immersive experience promoting personal and social well-being. Master garden designers Hoichi Kurisu, Takeo Uesugi, David Slawson, Shin Abe and Marc Keane have each interpreted the style and meaning of the Japanese garden in unique ways in their innovative designs for private, commercial and public spaces. Several recent Japanese-style gardens by each designer are featured in this book with detailed descriptions and sumptuous color photos. Hoichi Kurisu—transformative spaces for spiritual and physical equilibrium. Takeo Uesugi—bright, flowing gardens that evoke joyful living. David Slawson—evocations of native place that fuse with the surrounding landscape. Shin Abe—dynamically balanced "visual stories" that produce meaning and comfort. Marc Keane—reflections on human connections with nature through the art of gardens. Also included are essays on the designers and mini-essays by them about gardens in Japan which have most inspired their work, as well as commentaries by patrons and visitors to their North American gardens. The book focuses on recently-created gardens to suggest how the art form is currently evolving, and to understand how Japanese garden design principles and practices are being adapted to suit the needs and ways of people living and working outside Japan today.

This is the first book on the widely celebrated filmmaker Nina Danino. Visionary Landscapes includes detailed documentation and analysis of Danino's seminal films, such as First Memory, 1980, a haunting re-visiting of a strange and isolated childhood, Close to Home, 1985, an implicitly political narrative on Danino's personal journey and Stabat Mater, 1990, one of the most important expressions of the British avant garde. Danino's in-depth exploration of the religious experience, a theme that permeates the majority of her films, is unlike that of any other artist. In these works, she skillfully subverts a strictly Catholic interpretation by her use of close-up shots to suggest a narrative of sexual ecstasy. Essays on cinema, sound and the sacred are accompanied by striking images from her films. The book also closely examines the relationship between image and sound, exploring Danino's collaborations with New York vocalist Shelley Hirsch, Russian diva Sainkho Namtchylak and English soprano Catherine Bott. 120 colour & b/w illustrations

The American landscape painter George Inness (1825-1894) was one of the most thoughtful and inventive artists of his generation. George Inness and the Visionary Landscape presents both a concise overview of Inness's life and work and a focused examination of his philosophical and religious preoccupations. It shows how Inness, inspired by the ideas of the scientist-mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (1688- 1772), devised a new artistic vocabulary to convey his understanding of the personal visionary experience. Moreover, it reveals commonalities between Inness's prescient work and efforts by the psychologist- philosopher William James (1842-1910) to validate mystical states of mind. It explains for the first time how Inness treated landscape painting as a form of philosophical inquiry that could communicate his holistic belief in the unity of nature and spirit.

In Poets, Saints, and Visionaries of the Great Schism, Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski looks beyond the political and ecclesiastical storm and finds an outpouring of artistic, literary, and visionary responses to one of the great calamities of the late Middle Ages.

Landscape architecture is one of the key professions dedicated to making cities hospitable and healthy places to live, work and play, while respecting and enhancing the natural environments and landscapes we inhabit. This edited collection presents current writing about the pivotal roles that landscape architects play in addressing some of the most pressing problems facing the planet, its environments and its populations through their research, analysis and speculative practice. The book has assembled current writings on recent research structured around five major themes: governance, power and partnership; infrastructure, systems and performance; environment, resilience and climate change; people, place and design; and culture, heritage and identity. As a collection, the chapters demonstrate the diversity of themes and topics that are expanding the scholarly body of knowledge for the discipline and its relevance to the practice of landscape architecture. The contributors to this book are academic researchers and practitioners from the discipline of landscape architecture. The chapters draw on their research, teaching and experience as well as analysis of project examples. Fifty-two contributors from the United Stsates, United Kingdom, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Malaysia, Spain, Colombia, Australia, New Zealand and Canada discuss a diverse range of contemporary themes in urban landscape architecture. Collectively, the contributors demonstrate the breadth of experience, shared concerns and distinct issues that challenge urban landscape architecture and cities in the 21st century.

Capitalizing on forty years of intensive ecological studies, this anthology presents a collection of widely dispersed major publications on theoretical and practical Mediterranean, global environmental and landscape issues. Each chapter features a comprehensive study of ecological and landscape issues, synthesized in the introduction, and woven with autobiographical experiences. The concluding chapter calls for a transdisciplinary shift in all environmental scientific fields and particularly in landscape and restoration ecology, to cope with the complex, closely interwoven ecological, socio-economical, political and cultural crises facing human society during the present crucial transition from the industrial to the post-industrial, global information age. Updating and broadening the scope of the groundbreaking Springer book on Landscape Theory and Applications by the author and Lieberman (1994), this is a unique transdisciplinary attempt based on advanced systems complexity theories, which link the natural and human sciences.