Reading List for an LA Nerd

[Jonathan Smith, RLA]

Anyone read any good design/landscape architecture books lately?

Or any good recommendations?

[Trace One]

I love that book – Italian Gardens of the renaissance! Beautiful watercolor renderings..Now THAT is an art I would like to master..

[Boilerplater]

Currently reading “Retrofitting Suburbia” and finding it quite interesting and well-researched. If you have more of a planning bent and are into how we can make our suburbs more walkable and sustainable, you’ll find it to be a good read. If you’re more into garden design and plants, not so much. It has lots of case studies and hard numbers data on the projects that remind you of how developers need to look at real estate, how projects have to be anaylzed for profitability and so forth.

[Jonathan Smith, RLA]

I’ll look for it , thanks Henry. Read his collaboration on Garrett Ekbo with Dorothee Imbert and enjoyed it. What a guy!

[Tanya Olson]

A little tangental – “The Aesthetics of Ruins” by Robert Ginsberg – reading it in google books as the paper copy is somewhere between $99 and $500 (!) Lovely writing……..
“In a ruin we are reborn as experiencers. We are not the receivers of what has been planned and neatly packaged for us. Intact architecture often habituates us to passivity, including our deliberate movements. Architecture takes us in, in more ways than one. It has been crafted to guide us, even when we are inattentive. No sure guide exists in the ruin. Craft has given ground to the force of chance. The packaging is shattered, the planning blown away.”

I love this concept about the flip side / negative side of what we do ‘habituating us to passivity’…way to turn the box inside out, Robert!

[Boilerplater]

That’s a well-articulated bit that suggests just what it is that appeals to me about poking around ruins. I’ve been known to go on long hikes and dodge security to get to them!

[Author]

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