review - Spacemaker Press

LAND
FORUM
REVIEWS
The FDR Memorial:
Designed by Lawrence Halprin
and
The Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Memorial
Reviewed by Kathy Poole
Shlomo Aronson:
Making Peace with the Land
Reviewed by Mira Engler
Beverly Pepper:
Three Site-Specific Sculptures
Reviewed by Ken Smith
Placing Nature: Culture and
Landscape Ecology
Reviewed by Sharon Collinge
Outside Lies Magic: Regaining
History and Awareness in
Everyday Places
Reviewed by Deborah Ryan
The Lure of the Local:
Senses of Place in a
Multicentered Society
Reviewed by Leah Levy
CLASSIC REVIEW
Bold Romantic Gardens:
The New World Landscapes of
Oehme and van Sweden
Reviewed by Laura Solano
THE CRITICAL REVIEW OF LANDSCAPE ART AND GARDEN DESIGN WINTER 1999
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CONTENTS LAND
FORUM
REVIEWS
3 The FDR Memorial:
Designed by Lawrence Halprin
Text by David Dillon
The Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Memorial
By Lawrence Halprin
Kathy Poole traces two books on making the FDR Memorial, one through the voice of its
designer and the other its political history.
4 Shlomo Aronson:
Making Peace with the Land
Forward by Lawrence Halprin
Through the practice of some thirty years, Mira Engler reviews the first monograph of an
Isreali landscape architect dedicated to landscapes sacred and open.
5 Beverly Pepper:
Three Site-Specific Sculptures
Text by Barbara Rose
Ken Smith reviews the work of an artist whose work is not rooted in academic abstraction.
6 Placing Nature: Culture and
Landscape Ecology
Edited by Joan Nassauer
From an interdisciplinary conversation about the relationship of people and nature,
Sharon Collinge looks for convergence.
7 Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History
and Awareness in Everyday Places
By John R. Stilgoe
Deborah Ryan follows the trail of an explorer into landscapes which without Stilgoe’s
direction might otherwise seem ordinary and mundane.
8 The Lure of the Local:
Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society
By Lucy R. Lippard
In this book about local perception, Leah Levy finds that the power of place is personal,
communal and historical.
CLASSIC REVIEW
9 Bold Romantic Gardens: The New World Landscapes
of Oehme and van Sweden
By Wolfgang Oehme and
James van Sweden with
Susan Rademacher
In this republication of a 1990 book, Laura Solano finds the design work still makes a
compelling case for gardens that infuse the ephemeral and manage the prosaic.
Welcome to LAND FORUM, the review of
books in the field of landscape architecture
and garden design. With this issue
we begin a more frequent, bi-monthly,
publication schedule. LAND FORUM will
continue to focus its reviews on books
about the thoughtful practice of landscape
art and garden design, as well as
to review even more books from an ever
broader range of landscape interests.
Presenting more book reviews will mean
that each review will be more concise in
order to introduce readers to the most
current writing about the broadest range
of work practiced globally.
With this issue, we also announce an
offspring, heavier and more dazzling than
its parent, LAND FORUM International,
a magazine of current ideas in landscape,
architecture and design that will
be published six times a year beginning
in May, 1999. Mindful that there is more
thoughtful work to be presented and
more insightful commentary to be considered,
LAND FORUM International will
provide an intellectual and aesthetic
venue for a larger global community.
Book reviews will continue to be an
important way to communicate the body
of practice and thought, but, in LAND
FORUM International, these reviews
will be expanded into essays that reach
beyond book covers to issues that further
enliven the conversation.
Rants and Raves and our Letters
section will move to LAND FORUM
International where we still encourage
you to share you thoughts about books
and landscapes with us.
LAND FORUM
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Cambridge, MA 02138
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E info@spacemakerpress.com

REVIEW
The FDR Memorial:
Designed by Lawrence Halprin
Text by David Dillon, photographed by Alan Ward
Spacemaker Press, Washington, D.C., 1998
Softcover, 84 pages, color photographs, $29.95
The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial
By Lawrence Halprin
Chronicle: San Francisco, 1997
Color photographs, 148 pages, Softcover $19.95, Hardcover $45.00
By Kathy Poole
From the opening quotes to the last photographs in these two books,
we are led through two extraordinarily different but complementary
stories in understanding the making of a landscape.
Architectural critic David Dillon begins with Roosevelt and
connects FDR and the events of his presidency with the process of
creating the memorial. With elegant dexterity, the text navigates
the mine field of personal agendas, partisan politics, disadvantageous
world events, aesthetic arguments, and public acceptance
battles that continually threatened the memorial’s construction
from its inception, transforming what could have resulted in a
historical recitation of events and people into what reads like a
political thriller. In his narrative of four ‘rooms’ of the memorial,
each of which recall one of FDR’s four terms, Dillon explicates how
a political view—whether from Halprin, Roosevelt, a political action
group, or philosophy of history—shaped the expression. The textual
tour is fulfilled by Alan Ward’s photographs of the built memorial.
Filled with vitality and people, Ward carefully tenders the range of
emotions that Halprin and his collaborators worked to evoke,
assaying Roosevelt’s impact on us collectively as citizens and as
unique individuals. Text and images are deftly intertwined to build
an argument for the memorial’s success in taking an inherently
abstract and formless content—politics—and giving it meaningful
and resonant physical expression.
As the memorial’s primary designer, Lawrence Halprin begins
with his own memories and tells a personal story of constructing
a design—on paper and in the built landscape. Through lucid
text and simple, communicative diagrams, Halprin blends history,
technical data, symbolic intentions, programmatic goals, desires
for emotive responses, and construction details. The result is a
graphic and text argument that is so seamlessly convincing that it
seems “natural,” in terms of fulfilling an essential relation that is
seemingly indisputable. And it is this seeming fullness and comple-
The somber, statesman-like Roosevelt of Neil Estern’s monumental
bronze surveys the memorial and his own presidency.
tion that is problemmatic. When used as a “companion on a tour
of the Memorial” (according to its book jacket), Halprin’s enumerated
histories are so personal and filled with ‘interpretation’
that they leave very little room for visitors’ personal views,
creative imaginations, or alternative historical memories. As a
landscape design education tool, the book is a case study filled
with a range of lessons: technical construction issues; communicating
design ideas to the public; choreographing successful
collaborations with artists. Most importantly, the story demonstrates
how abstract ideas and history are transformed into
physical reality, making a rare and valuable insight into design
process. In this regard, it will surely join Sketchbooks and RSVP
Cycles as a ‘classic’ in landscape design literature.
Both books are insightful accounts of processes that would
otherwise remain opaque. Yet, their greater value is their complement
of one another in communicating design-making to the
public. Halprin says that he wanted the memorial “to be an
experiential history lesson.” What he provides (in both book and
built construction) is just that—a contemporary history lesson for
how to construct a public landscape that is charged with collective
history memory and individual aesthetic experience. Dillon’s
situating of Halprin’s work within the politics that initiated it
reminds us of the necessity for placing our work within larger
conceptual contexts than their immediate physical environments.
In a time when designers all too often bemoan that “The public
doesn’t understand us” or “What we do isn’t valued,” the accounts—as
complements—offer a constructive model for demonstrating
our talent as synthesizers and our work as an art that is not
mere self-indulgence but of cultural significance.
Kathy Poole is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the
University of Virginia.
© ALAN WARD
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REVIEW
Shlomo Aronson:
Making Peace with the Land
Foreward by Lawrence Halprin
Spacemaker Press, Washington, D.C., 1998
Hardcover, 160 pages, color photographs, $45.00
By Mira Engler
Shlomo Aronson: Making Peace with the Land is a good cause
for celebration. The first book dedicated to the work of a single
Israeli landscape architect, clearly the most deserving one,
discloses a previously unknown body of significant work taking
place in a complex and challenging context to a world-wide
audience. Though the landscape of the Holy Land, a setting of
Biblical histories and constant land conflicts, is well known to
millions around the world through picture books and television
coverage, the artistry of landscape architects whose works
continue to shape the land of modern Israel has never before
been appropriately acknowledged and covered.
Aronson’s built landscapes harmoniously resonate with
and reconcile the strenuous landscape; a landscape encumbered
by millennia of cultural depositories, bestowed with
sacredness, saturated with bloodshed, and suppressed by battles.
Aronson’s designs gently mend scars in the landscape, aesthetically
site viewing platforms and weave paths, and craftfully
knit built details and plants with contour lines, agricultural
patterns, rock and human formations.
The book is a portfolio and a retrospect of Shlomo Aronson’s
landscape architecture practice of some thirty years. Twentyseven
projects grouped into seven types—urban, public parks,
national parks and restoration, infrastructure, afforestation,
town planning, and gesture interventions—are accompanied
by three short texts of landscape architects who have known
Aronson.
The Foreward by Lawrence Halprin, Aronson’s mentor,
collaborator, and friend, reiterates Shlomo’s respect and awe
for the landscapes he chose to work within—the sacred and
open rather than the secular and built—that of Jerusalem
rather than Tel Aviv. Peter Jacob’s introduction to the book
sketches Aronson as a master that “weds environmental and
aesthetic literacy with both a pragmatic and symbolic reading
of the landscape.” Jacobs pinpoints Aronson’s guiding tenet, a
search for a sense of peace and quite. And finally, Kenny
Helphand’s insightful essay largely elaborates on this search
for order and calmness in the chaotic and stressful Israeli
landscape. According to Helphand, the key concern of Aronson’s
work is, when and how to introduce the modern as counterpoint
or connective tissue. And while modern needs are well
addressed in Aronson’s work, the design language remains
traditional.
Mira Engler is an associate professor in the department of landscape
architecture at Iowa State University.
Olive trees and Pennisetum grass, with Temple Mount in background in
Beit Shalom Park, Jerusalem.
Bell caves in Beit Guvrin National park.
© SHLOMO ARONSON
© “ALBATROS,” DUBY TAL, MONI HARAMATI

Beverly Pepper: Three Site-Specific Sculptures
Text by Barbara Rose
Spacemaker Press, Washington, D.C., 1998
Softcover, 64 pages, color illustrations, $24.95
By Ken Smith
East face of Cel Caigut.
In the introductory essay for this monograph, art critic Barbara
Rose draws on themes which she argues separate Pepper from
other environment-oriented artists of the period. Rose places
Pepper outside the mainstream of the conceptual and theory
based generation of earth artists and minimalists by making the
distinction that Pepper’s art is not rooted in academic abstraction.
Pepper’s work is described as coming out of the tradition
of sculpture rather than a literalist reaction to the illusionist
tradition of painting, as did minimal art. Her work is positioned
as intuitive and felt as opposed to rational and thought. Esthetically,
Rose argues that Pepper’s origins were not the modernist
flat planes of Cubism, but rather personal, classically inspired
volumetric forms with expressions of opposition, of hollow, void
and solid. Her outsider status is further reinforced by the fact that,
REVIEW
while American, she has lived much of her professional life
outside the United States, primarily in Italy and much of her built
work has been realized in Europe.
This monograph is number six in the “Landmarks” series
published by Spacemaker Press. The focus of this publication is
on three recent large scale site-specific sculptures. Included is a
handsomely illustrated folio section of the three projects in
Barcelona, Spain, Pistoia, Italy and Zurich, Switzerland, all dating
from the late 1980’s to mid 1990’s. The publication concludes
with an interview that fleshes out many of the themes outlined in
the introductory essay, giving this publication the depth and
personality of the artist’s own words.
Ken Smith is a landscape architect practicing in New York City.
5

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REVIEW
Placing Nature:
Culture and Landscape Ecology
Edited by Joan Iverson Nassauer
Island Press, Washington, D.C., 1997
Softcover, 179 pages, b/w photographs, $30.00
By Sharon K. Collinge
Super Mall entrance, Tacoma, Washington.
Prairie, near Warren, South Dakota.
At the core of landscape architecture is the interaction of humans and
nature. We may quibble about whether humans are inextricably linked
with or distinctly separate from nature, but as designers and users of
landscapes, in either case we must address the ethics, aesthetics, and
environmental consequences of our interactions with the living planet
Earth. In Placing Nature: Culture and Landscape Ecology edited by
landscape architect Joan Nassauer, scholars from widely disparate
disciplines boldly converge on such difficult questions as, “What is our
appropriate role in nature?” and “How should we live?” To describe
the mission of this volume as ambitious is indeed an understatement.
Not surprisingly, answers to these rather thorny questions vary
widely, from novelist Jane Smiley’s condemnation of industrial agriculture
to philosopher Marcia Eaton’s cogent explication of the relationship
between aesthetics, knowledge, and ecology. Ecologists Eville
Gorham and Bill Romme provide careful summaries of ecological
impacts of past and present human activity. Conservation biologist Curt
Meine describes our metaphoric imprisonment in the grid of 18th
century land surveys. Geographer Judith Martin and historian Sam
Bass Warner emphasize connections between ecology and design in
urban landscapes, and geographer and landscape architect Deborah
Karasov calls for locally-driven community development. Nassauer
weaves the volume together with her own research on aesthetics and
ecology in residential landcapes, as well as introductory and concluding
chapters emphasizing general questions and themes.
Despite the range of approaches brought to this conversation,
there is much common ground. The writings complement and
strengthen each other with the tone of a group of thoughtful,
compassionate, and intelligent people conversing around a table.
Perhaps most importantly, this collection of essays admonishes
environmental professionals that efforts to meld human activities and
natural processes require a truly integrated approach. No longer can
we expect to resolve these complex issues within the limited realm of
our own disciplines; instead, we must dissolve disciplinary boundaries.
Fortunately, Placing Nature provides fresh perspectives and
novel insights with which to collectively continue this conversation.
Sharon K. Collinge is an assistant professor in the department of biology
and the environmental studies program at the University of Colorado.
© CHRIS FAUST
© CHRIS FAUST

Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History
and Awareness in Everyday Places
By John R. Stilgoe
Walker & Company Press, 1998
Hardcover, 200 pages, no illustrations, $21.00
By Deborah Ryan
In Outside Lies Magic, John Stilgoe traverses territory made
familiar through his previous six books. As he has done in the past,
Stilgoe writes about the common landscape as a place full of
meanings but often long forgotten intention. What makes this
publication unique is Stilgoe’s stated goal to entice the reader into
active and self-directed learning by employing a third person
explorer as a literary device. He then suggests that the landscape
is a place where explorers can postulate a cultural history of a
time and place especially when that history is their own.
In the guise of an explorer, Stilgoe walks and cycles through
ignored if not invisible landscapes speculating on the values that
their intellectual abandonment conveys. He focuses on the ordinary
and the seemingly mundane. . . power lines, strip shopping
centers, interstate highways, road kill, interchanges, main street,
mail boxes and backyard fences. And in doing so, he assembles a
complex quilt of cultural, social, economic and political patterns
that reflect common but often forgotten conditions of our uniquely
American past and present. The observations that Stilgoe draws
from the patterns that he sees are both intriguing and entertaining.
We landscape architects are generally well schooled in reading
the remnant signatures of natural processes on a site. Stilgoe’s
contribution to our profession is in helping us understand cultural
signatures. In Outside Lies Magic, John Stilgoe gives us the tools
and encouragement to read the landscape through yet another
lens, and by doing so, leaves us with the ability to have a more
complete understanding of place.
Deborah E. Ryan is an associate professor of architecture at the
University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the managing principal
of dRa landscape architecture.
Strip shopping.
Fast food.
REVIEW
© JOHN R. STILGOE © JOHN R. STILGOE
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REVIEW
The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place
in a Multicentered Society
By Lucy R. Lippard
New York: The New Press, 1997
Hardcover, 328 pages, b/w and color illustrations, $40.00
By Leah Levy
Lucy Lippard’s The Lure of the Local is a multidimensional
consideration of our contemporary sense of place. Set in the
varied American landscape and reflecting the peripatetic nature
of our history and culture (the multicentered), this is a very
“American” book. Lippard’s insightful and inclusive description
of American locales and our place in them, however, broadens the
concept from a more traditional reading of a predictable community
to a fluid, open analysis of the notion of physical, social, and
cultural belonging. The work moves forward exploring the relationship
between this sense of identity with particular places and
a connection to an expanded society and a larger nature.
The Lure of the Local is a dense treasure of ideas, illuminating
the power of place on our psyches, histories, memories, and
unfolding the realities of how experience and familiarity with
“home” pushes and pulls us throughout our lives. Serving as an
anthology of cultural thought about land/place/home and the
meanings it holds for us, the book is liberally laced with quotes from
diverse sources including Genesis, Estella Conwill Majozo, an
anonymous Vietnamese immigrant, and Robert Smithson, on topics
ranging from public housing to the identifying signs in national parks.
In the way that no experience is a direct route but a series of
perceptions and overlays of the personal, communal, and historical,
Lippard’s book manifests that multileveled process in the book’s
contents, presentation, and design. One layer is Lippard’s own
journal, formatted as an italicized runner at the top of every page,
narrating experiences in her lifetime of summering at the family
home in Maine. Another is the main critical text and commentary
of the book, exploring the landscape and issues of place from
various perspectives (chapter titles include “Around Here”,
“Manipulating Memory”, “Down to Earth: Land Use”, “The Last
Frontiers: City and Suburbs”, among others). A third significant
element is the thread of landscape and place-related works by
contemporary artists that Lippard weaves throughout the volume.
These are illustrated with photographs, and accompanied by
Lippard’s extensive captions discussing the artists, the works and
how they offer new vision to the crucial issues examined.
In the end, The Lure of the Local exemplifies the depth of
complexity the author believes is needed for art to effectively
interact with society. Lippard has created a work that attempts
itself to be what, in conclusion, she calls for stimulating “art
governed by the place ethic” to be: specific to people’s own lived
experiences, collaborative, generous and open-ended, appealing
and memorable, simple and familiar, as well as layered, complex
and unfamiliar, evocative, provocative, and critical.
Leah Levy is an independent art curator in Berkeley, California.
Her most recent book is Kathryn Gustafson: Sculpting the Land.
. . . she calls for stimulating ”art
governed by the place ethic“ . . .
This Houseboat, moored in the Kennebec River, was the summer home
of a nomadic local woman.
Antonio Anaya, Church on the Hill, Galisteo, New Mexico, 1994.
© PETER WOODRUFF
© LUCY R. LIPPARD

CLASSIC REVIEW
Bold Romantic Gardens:
The New World Landscapes of Oehme and van Sweden
By Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden with Susan Rademacher
Spacemaker Press, Washington, D.C., 1997
Softcover, 312 pages, color photographs, $39.95
By Laura Solano
When first published in 1990, Bold Romantic Gardens: The New
World Landscapes of Oehme and van Sweden, became a watershed
work that revealed a new course in late 20th century
American gardening. At a time when the general public’s appetite
for gardening was flourishing and being fed a singular diet of
flowers, and landscape architects continued to distance themselves
from the cliches that tied them solely to gardening, Oehme
and van Sweden were making a compelling case for rediscovering
the power of making landscapes from the whole realm of materials
available. By not limiting the palette of their designs, they
would not limit the range of possible experiences. This lesson
remains potent today and, with the reissue of this book by
Spacemaker Press this year, it deserves a second examination.
Although largely a book about planting, it offers so much
more to contemplate. The authors’ concerns for garden design
extend to infusing the ephemeral, creating romance, challenging
the perceptions of scale, introducing elements of time, transforming
through personal experience, and managing the prosaic.
These were not new ideas about garden design. What made, and
still makes, this discourse engaging is that Oehme and van Sweden
showed us how to do it with grasses, sedges, and perennials in a
style that distinctly pointed to the American psyche—extroverted
yet puritanical, independent yet connected to community, forward-looking
yet deferential to history. Their style is manifestly
bold yet the authors’ work is not solely about a design style but
rather an approach to living with the landscape.
Save for new introductory remarks, this edition is unchanged
from the previous. However, since this was republished in an age
when new and improved often gets undeserved attention, this is
a comforting book to reread. Nonetheless, there is a nagging
desire to see how time has treated Oehme and van Sweden’s work.
New photographs of several projects would add depth to their
theories. We know from introductory remarks that the authors’
thinking has changed but they prefer to keep these reflections to
themselves, content with the stasis achieved nearly ten years ago.
This is a loss but not one so deep that it should discourage a new
generation of devotees. If you do not own this book, add it to your
library. If it is already yours, take it out again and enjoy the visit.
Laura Solano is a senior associate with the landscape architectural
firm of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. She is an instructor at
the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and has taught
courses at the Arnold Arboretum.
A light cover of snow reveals how the dried garden structures the
winter landscape, even in the absence of evergreens.
© CAROLINE SEGUI-KOSAR
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Afterword by I.M. Pei
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Landscape Views #1
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CLASSIC REVIEW
History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape
Reviewed by Ian Firth
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Cover Photo
Reflecting pool at the
FDR Memorial.
Photograph by Alan Ward.