Landscape Architecture: A Manual of Environmental Planning and Design

by Barry W. Starke, John Ormsbee Simonds

The most comprehensive, current guide to the theory

and practice of landscape architecture

For more than 50 years, this pioneering guide has served as the foremost resource on the principles and practices of landscape architecture. Now, the book has been revised to address the latest developments in the field, providing a comprehensive, current presentation of the profession.

Richly illustrated with more than 400 full-color images, Landscape Architecture, Fifth Edition, explains how to plan and design for the human use of land with the least environmental impact. This updated volume offers new coverage of important topics such as sustainability, climate change, water conservation, land reuse, urban agriculture, stormwater management, low-impact

design, and much more. This definitive reference:

Introduces the fundamentals of site and environmental planning

Describes the planning constraints imposed by the forms, forces, and features of nature and our built environment

Addresses climate and its design implications

Discusses site selection and analysis

Instructs in the planning of workable and well-related use areas

Describes the volumetric shaping of exterior spaces

Explores site-structure relationships and

organization

Applies contemporary thinking in the planning of expressive human habitations and communities

Landscape Architecture, Fifth Edition, preserves

the essential character and timelessness of the original classic while incorporating up-to-date advancements in the profession.

Extensively revised and filled with more than 400 contemporary full-color images, Landscape Architecture, Fifth Edition, remains the quintessential resource on planning for the human use of land in harmony with the environment. The book presents a

systematic approach to the creation of more usable, efficient, and attractive outdoor spaces and places. Teaching diagrams, plans, photographs, and graphics--including the works of many of the world's leading landscape architects and firms--are featured

throughout. This thoroughly modernized classic offers new coverage of:

Sustainability

Climate change and global warming

Water preservation and water rights

Land reuse and brownfield redevelopment

GIS mapping

Invasive species

Urban agriculture and urban forestry

Stormwater management

Low-impact design

Complete streets

New Urbanism, Smart Growth, and Traditional Neighborhood Development

Landscape Architecture, Fifth Edition, addresses every aspect of site and environmental planning, design, and implementation, including:

The most comprehensive, current guide to the theory

and practice of landscape architecture

The human habitat and sustainability

Climate

Water

Land

Vegetation

Genres: Architecture, Landscape Architecture

886 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 1, 1961

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Get past the bluster, and past the pretension. Get past the occasional odd sexist choices portraying women as objects instead of people with their own experiences. What you will find is a book that slowly reveals itself to you. Only at the end will it disclose what it was all about and how it came to the perspective it develops throughout.

This book will seem like it is revealing all of the context at the beginning, and unsubtly so at that: showing the ugliness of much of the built environment and how we can do better if we adopt a planning and design approaches more accommodating and integrated with nature. The first few chapters will seem to supplement this line of development, with chapters devoted to different ecological factors play in design and the basic responses to them.

There then start to be chapters of a different character: for example, chapters regarding the professional processes of planning and preferences between particular patterns of settlement, including specific advice for how to situate natural areas, buildings, plantings, and transportation. There also start to be chapters listing of the various experiences that can be conveyed by design elements. This is what was being set up for: with an understanding of the impact of environmental factors and procedural expectations, the landscape is now a canvas for creating the best and most appropriate experiences of human habitation.

The format of the book is well chosen to convey these effects. There is a column of text on each page, narrow as to be clearly legible, and then a substantial margin given over to quotes, further comments, photographs, but best of all sketches. It is in these sketches that the relationships and experiences are best conveyed. One wishes the book was even more given over to these sketches, and actually that it was all written in the hand of designers. However, as it stands, the format presents itself in a manner serious enough to register as an academic textbook.

Overall, "Landscape Architecture" is a curious book; by turns screed, manual, listing of potential moods, sets of suggestions, essay arguing for particular approaches, giving itself over to these characters in an unsteady sequence. However, despite the occasional strangeness in the progression by which these characteristics are revealed, it wisely saves the perspective that gives it all an explanation to the end, once we've seen what has been laid out, and are prepared to honor that perspective not by stated authority, but by repeated demonstration.

I've always had a certain affection for books that make a statement about a total process; a means of approaching all of one's work in a particular field, and this book is certainly on that shelf.

[Ariful]

good