Central Park in New York City. The Blue
Ridge Parkway winding through Virginia and
North Carolina. These places arc two of the best-
known designed landscapes in America.
What is not generally known is the challenge
these sites posed to their designers. In what is
now Central Park was a blocks-long rubble pile.
Where the Blue Ridge Parkway today skirts the
mountain tops were eroded mountain lands, cut-
over forests and commercialized "scenic" areas.
What exists now--even years after their work
was completed--is so perfectly executed as to be-
lie the genius of the design, thc vision of the land-
scape architects and the work of collaborating
professions and trades that made these projects
possible.
These and many other sites detailed in this
book have become favorite places for people to
gather, to enjoy both actively and passively, to be
"in nature"--that is, in natural settings shaped by
landscape architects.
As with the great plazas and gardens of the Old
World, other designed landscapes in America have
paid less homage to nature and more attention to
the joy of created space. Landscape architects
have designed countless urban plazas, squares and
public spaces that, while obviously designed, are
indeed places for people.
Regardless of whether the ultimate landscape
design is natural or created, perhaps the most in-
teresting aspect of landscape architcctme today is
its diversity: the various sciences that are brought
together, the arts, the variety of "hard" paving
and structural materials and "soft" materials such
as water and plants, the differing,scales of the pal-
ettes on which landscape architects work. This
diversity ranges from planning for regions and
ecosystems to designing a vest-pocket park that
enriches an urban scene. Landscape architects are
trained to manage and coordinate projects that
cross professional lines from infrastructure to ar-
chitecture and crJ,gineering, sociolow to the fine
arts, irrigation to horticulture and biology.
还没人写过短评呢