Drawing and Reinventing Landscape

Representation is a hot topic in landscape architecture. While computerization has been a catalyst for change across many fields in design, no other design field has experienced such drastic reinvention as has landscape architecture. As the world urbanizes rapidly and our relationship with nature changes, it is vitally important that landscape designers adopt innovative forms of representation—whether digital, analog, or hybrid.

In this book, author Diana Balmori explores notions of representation in the discipline at large and across time. She takes readers from landscape design's roots in seventeenth-century France and eighteenth-century England through to modern attempts at representation made by contemporary landscape artists.

• Addresses a central topic in the discipline of landscape architecture
• Features historic works and those by leading contemporary practitioners, such as Bernard Lassus, Richard Haag, Stig L Andersson, Lawrence Halprin, and Patricia Johanson
• Written by a renowned practitioner and educator
• Features 150 full-color images

Drawing and Reinventing Landscape, AD Primer is an informative investigation of beauty in landscape design, offering inspiring creative perspectives for students and professionals.

Epigraph 005

Acknowledgements 007

Foreword by Michel Conan 010

Introduction 014

Chapter 1: The Contemporary Reinvention of Landscape Architecture and its Representation 019

Chapter 2: The Pleasure of Drawing 032

Chapter 3: Notebooks, Early Sketches and Late Drawings 041

Chapter 4: Contemporary Landscape Architects and Landscape Artists 076

Landscape Urbanism 078

Bernard Lassus 087

Patricia Johanson 094

Richard Haag (Rich Haag Associates) 100

Stig L Andersson (SLA) 103

Diana Balmori 009 Contents Diana Balmori (Balmori Associates) 114

Lawrence Halprin (Lawrence Halprin and Associates) 107Summary 140

Chapter 5: Historical Issues in Landscape Architecture Representation 146

Drawing and Painting 147

Representation of Representation 152

Representation of Space 159

Integrated Drawings 168

Representation of Time 173

Chapter 6: Contemporary Issues Deriving from Change 181

Computing and Hybridising 181

From a Fixed to a Changing Arcadia 183

Project Team Credits 189

Bibliography 192

Index 194

Picture Credits 199

Diana Balmori, FASLA is the founding principal of Balmori Associates Landscape and Urban Design, a New York based experimental design office that explores the line between landscape and architecture and between nature and culture. Her practice seeks also to re-enter landscape into the family of the arts with new formal aims. She teaches at Yale School of Architecture.

In landscape architecture, representation has become the subject of contention and much discussion. While computer techniques have been a catalyst for change across the field of design as a whole, nowhere have the conventions of representation been called into question more than in landscape architecture – which in itself is undergoing a process of reinvention. With the onset of rapid urbanisation and our shifting relationship with nature, landscape architecture has proved a potent lens for expressing a wider dialogue taking place in the world. It is, however, only through the introduction of innovative forms of representation – whether digital, analogue or hybrid – that one most vividly sees the emergence of the new.

In this book, Diana Balmori explores notions of representation in the discipline at large and across time. She takes us back to landscape design’s roots in the seventeenth century in France and the eighteenth century in England, when it first grappled with questions of imagined exterior space. She explores the discipline’s relationship to painting and the influence of cartography with its bird's-eye views, topographic sections and perspectives. She highlights how new attempts at representation by modern landscape artists such as Patricia Johanson, Ian Hamilton Finlay and David Hockney continue to wrestle with the depiction of landscape. More specifically, she looks at the work of Bernard Lassus, Richard Haag, Stig L Andersson, Lawrence Halprin and Patricia Johanson, as well as that of some of the most influential landscape urbanists.

The narrative and rich selection of images illustrated here convey Balmori’s deep knowledge and ensuing pleasure and delight in the act of drawing. An inspiring and informative investigation of beauty in all of its forms, this volume provides landscape design students and professionals with creative perspectives on a crucial aspect of the design process.