An innovative new look at regional design and planning that merges history, theory, and practice.
“Critical regionalism” is a place-based approach to landscape architecture, architecture, planning, and development that emphasizes and embraces combining local and regional influences—natural and cultural—into the design and planning process. This worldview emphasizes designs that respond to the vernacular and ecological characteristics of a region while also respecting other historic and contemporary influences. In Creative Regionalism: Renewing the Aesthetic Experience of Landscape in Environmental Design and Planning, David Hopman explores how and why this regionalist approach is invaluable to creating viable and sustainable landscapes, buildings, and communities.
Hopman highlights the best regionalist thinking by landscape architects, architects, planners, and educators during the last century and a half. In addition, Hopman’s historical and theoretical expositions are grounded with real examples drawn from scores of 20th- and 21-century designs from around the world. Hopman also explores the regionalist ideas of well-known living designers with interviews, reviews of the literature, philosophical inquiry, and reflection that draws on his three decades as a practicing landscape architect and professor who has studied, tested, and applied the concepts of critical regionalism into innovative landscape designs.
In Creative Regionalism, architects, landscape architects, planners, and developers alike will be shown the effectiveness of a resilient and continuously adaptive design method—a method that acknowledges both regional and global traditions and celebrates the creativity of individual designs that anchor the past with the present. Hopman pays special attention to the importance of creating aesthetic experiences when designing a new landscape or built environment and how experiential aesthetics can guide and inform designers and planners in implementing regionalist ideas. By showing how the experience of a place is reflected in cultural values, personal creativity, ecological tributes, and the poetics of the natural environment where we live, work, and play, Creative Regionalism demonstrates the value of this innovative approach to designing and planning in the modern age.
