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Dewey Decimal Number: 712 EAN: 9780300082944 ISBN: 0300082940 Label: Yale University Press Manufacturer: Yale University Press Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 320 Publication Date: May 01, 2000 Publisher: Yale University Press Studio: Yale University Press Editorial Review: Product Description: This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape and thereby to avoid making profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes in landscape design. Using examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Anne Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes and calls for change in the way we shape and respond to them. Amazon.com Review: 'The language of landscape,' writes ecologist Anne Whiston Spirn, 'is our native language.' She elaborates: humans lived in natural landscapes well before they knew how to build houses; knew how to read the movements of clouds and birds well before they developed grammars and symbols. Anyone with a keen sensibility can recover that language, she suggests: 'A person literate in landscape sees significance where an illiterate person notes nothing. Past and future fires, floods, landslides, welcome or warning are visible to those who can read them in tree and slope, boundary and gate.' Spirn goes on to discuss human interactions with the landscape, taking as cases in point such matters as the dolmens of prehistoric Europe, environmentally friendly houses in Denmark and Australia, fountains in Paris, and tree-lined city streets in Philadelphia. Along the way she cites scholars, architects, and artists, learning lessons in how to read place and built form from the likes of Christopher Alexander, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Rachel Carson. She closes with an appeal to landscape architects, builders, and designers to study the natural details of place more closely before they set about changing it: 'In landscapes ... the key is to establish a framework that provides overall structure--a structure not arbitrary but congruent with the deep context of a place, to define a vocabulary of forms that expresses the natural and cultural processes of the place.' --Gregory McNamee Accessories:  see moreRelated Items:      see moreAverage Rating:
 Rating:  - Frustrating... butAnne Whiston Spirn has a lot of truly important and enlightening things to say in "The Language of Landscape". Unfortunately, she makes the reader slog through an indulgent and contrived writing style in order to understand her. At the end of the chapter, "Language of Landscape", she explained how a person fluent in its elements could "read" a landscape, and how this is crucial to understanding the world. Yet she never fully articulates this in the following chapter, "Elements of Landscape and Language", with anything more than impressionistic vignettes of places she has visited. It was not at all what I was expecting, and left me frustrated and wondering what point she was trying (and failing) to make. I soldiered on, and found that there are flashes of clarity, specifically when writing about specific case studies and experiences with students. In these passages, the writing is more direct and very readable. The second half of the book was excellent, especially the study of landscape and memory in Berlin. These passages are what "saved" the book for me, kept me reading, and finally earned it 3 stars. For contrast, I think that JB Jackson does a better job of weaving his theory with his stories and experiences. Beginners to landscape studies may find him more accessable. Spirn's points are there for those who want to dig for them, but sometimes it's unclear if it's worth it. Rating:  - The Nowadays City Health in Urban Processes.The Language of Landscape regads to a very important subject - the new values that has composed the urban drawing - which has contributed a lot for the enviromental health of the nowadays cities. Finding new ways to focus on the physic enviroment of the urban areas, Spirn offers a philosophic and conceptual base for the Urban Drawing, while illustrates, with real examples, the practical application of the theory. It is a good masterpiece, reflecting the result of years of experience in treating the lack of attention with the enviroment nowadays, the lack of comprehension of the natural processes - which has contributed to the physical shapes of the cities, and has invaded virgin areas, as forests, making this areas sterile - the recuperation of landscapes, according to the natural regeneration, and also themes reflecting directly the urban processes, like water, energy, nutritive resources - which are subproducts of the urban draining - and other functions of the urban processes which has not received attention and has contributed a lot for the contamination of the overburden enviroment. It is a good tool for urban planners and enviromental designers, while treating the esthetic values on which the formal landscape of the cities has based-developed. This values have a little connexion to the natural process dinamics and lead to mistaken attitudes, if they are not well known. It is also rich in questions like values enviromental perceptions and how we answer to the enviroment around us , if we can demonstrate that there are ways to adjust the urban landscapes in a very cheaper way, and with much more social value than the tradicional ones. |
Critics and audiences didn't seem too happy with Back to the Future, Part II, the inventive, perhaps too clever sequel. Director Zemeckis and cast bent over backwards to add layers of time-travel complication, and while it surely exercises the brain it isn't necessarily funny in the same way that its predecessor was. It's well worth a visit, though, just to appreciate the imagination that went into it, particularly in a finale that has Marty watching his own actions from the first film. --Tom Keogh
Shot back-to-back with the second chapter in the trilogy, Back to the Future, Part III is less hectic than that film and has the same sweet spirit of the first, albeit in a whole new setting. This time, Marty ends up in the Old West of 1885, trying to prevent the death of mad scientist Christopher Lloyd at the hands of gunman Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson, who had a recurring role as the bully Biff). Director Zemeckis successfully blends exciting special effects with the traditions of a Western and comes up with something original and fun. --Tom Keogh
