Book Tips — Gary Hilderbrand
We asked Gary Hilderbrand (Reed Hilderbrand, Harvard GSD) to suggest three books that are relevant to landscape architects and should be more known in the profession. Here is his proposal:
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1. The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture
by Emanuele Coccia / Polity, 2018
This is a book that you just have to read every couple of months to remind yourself of the richness of a plant’s way of thinking, of the way that plants are structured, and that they have evolved for survival. But how do those evolutionary traits and those means of survival also relate to us conceptually?
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2. Atlas of Novel Tectonics
by Jesse Reiser and Nanako Umemoto / Princeton Architectural Press, 2006
I love this book and return to it regularly for its short and salient reflections on natural history, material science, and culture in relationship to architecture, but by extension to all the design fields. Its literary tone puts me in the mood to write.
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3. The Brown Decades: A study of the arts in America 1865—1895
by Lewis Mumford / Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1931
There is so much to love in this book but by far the most important section to me is Chapter 2, “The Return of the Landscape,” in which Mumford, the great American urbanist, doubles down on the case for Charles William Eliot’s 1990’s assertion that Frederick Law Olmsted had been the most significant of all American artists in the 10th Century. Mumford said that Eliot was not exaggerating when he said the shaping of parks as desperately needed urban reform was the most noteworthy and effective expression we had of the working American democracy. And he goes on to explain why with great eloquence. I read this in my early college years and go back to it regularly for inspiration.
Published on October 15, 2024
