This Landscape Architecture Research Guide features key resources that you will need for your research and/or teaching. Please let me know if you have any questions or need research help! You can email me, below, or schedule a research consultation at the link in my profile (where my photo is located).
- Ann Holderfield, Art & Architecture Librarian, kaholde@clemson.edu
Nature-Based Design in Landscape Architecture by
Nature-Based Design in Landscape Architecture showcases a range of built works designed by landscape architects from many countries of the world representing diverse environmental regions and uses. These projects demonstrate the transformative potential of a nature-based approach to landscape architecture. The nature-based design approach supports and encourages natural regeneration with a view to promoting sustainable environments, preserving natural resources, and mitigating the impacts of climate change and development. The projects selected for this book demonstrate the potential of nature-based landscape design to support healthy, natural and managed ecosystems, sequester carbon, and support the recovery of biodiversity. In addition to examples of design-led environmental interventions, Nature-Based Design in Landscape Architecture, the book, also demonstrates the potential for nature-based design to improve people's relationship with their surroundings by encouraging them to be active participants in their communities. As such, each project featured in the book promotes a discussion around future scenarios in which landscape architects can and will be engaged, from minimizing environmental impact through sustainable design to fostering social justice through community engagement. This book will be a welcome supplement for undergraduate landscape architecture, survey or design studio courses, and may also be used at the master's degree level either as part of a landscape architecture survey seminar or early design studio.
Contemporary Landscape Performance Methods and Techniques by
This book defines, illustrates, applies, and explores current and future tools and methods for measuring landscape performance using the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center (HANC) as a case site, providing the most extensive, comprehensive description and application of existing landscape performance tools in the current literature to date. Landscape performance is a measure of the effectiveness with which landscape solutions fulfill their intended purpose and contribute to sustainability. The design of the HANC is a prime case for measuring landscape performance as the site has undergone a pervasive transformation of its 65-acre core as an initial phase of improvements. The massive six-year effort has reconfigured arrival, circulation, and parking, developed new educational facilities, constructed a network of walks and trails, and established sustainable ecologies of prairie, savannah, riparian woods, and upland woods across the northern half of its property. This book uses landscape performance as an integral method of not only blending science into the design process but using scientific outputs as the rationale for design-decision-making. Through this, the book showcases a multitude of proven quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods which can be applied to other designs and plans, calculating their specific impacts on the HANC, and guiding readers through how to use each tool through an applied process. This book provides a comprehensive set of tools and approaches to measuring landscape performance that could be used as a guide for other projects to replicate or expand upon. The book helps move the design professions beyond simple stereotypes of simple beauty of form, showcasing and describing how the design professions (primarily landscape architecture) are an extremely scientific and evidence-based industry.
Representing Landscapes: Visualizing Climate Action by
This book provides an in-depth overview of graphic and visual communication styles for conveying climate change and climate action within the landscape architectural profession and in academia. The book features visualizations of climate adaptation and resilience, developed by award-winning landscape architects and academics from Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Italy, France, Finland, South Africa, Singapore, and China. Representing Landscapes: Visualizing Climate Action illustrates the imaginative ways in which climate action and climate resilient concepts are visually presented, communicated, and perceived. The book will be especially valuable for students and practitioners in landscape architecture, urban planning, and related fields to understand how to visually capture climate change issues and design solutions, and to deliver this message to the public.
Urban Soundscapes by
Sound and listening are intrinsically linked to how we experience and engage with places and communities. This guide puts forward a new conceptual framework of embodied affectivity that emphasises listening in urban research and design and advances new ways of knowing and making. The guide invites landscape architects and urban designers to become soundscape architects and offers practical advice on sound and listening applicable to each stage of a design project: from reading the environment to intervening on it. Urban Soundscapes foregrounds listening as an affective mediator between subjects and multispecies environments, and a vehicle to think and conceptualise environmental research and design beyond prevailing visual and human-centred modes. The guide expands landscape architects' and urban designers' tools and skills to assess existing soundscapes, predict how those soundscapes will be altered through their designs, consider sound as a creative and active part of the design process and envisage how users might perceive and be affected by those soundscapes as they evolve in time. The volume sits in the interface of research and practice and interweaves theoretical, methodological and creative contributions from acoustic ecology, ecoacoustics, bioacoustics and sound art. Each of the design stages is illustrated through project examples that demonstrate the many advantages of incorporating attentive listening and sound into Landscape Architecture and Urban Design Practice. This book shows how incorporating listening and sounding as part of the design process promotes slow and subtle ways of practice, adds social and ecological value through the reduction of noise pollution and by monitoring the health of habitats, and enables the design of soundscapes that complement the character and design intent of a scheme and elicit joy and wonder. The book will be of interest to practitioners and academics in landscape architecture, and other design and spatial fields such as urban design, architecture, geography and engineering, who play a primary role in the composition of the soundscape.
Teaching Landscape History by
Landscape history is changing in content and style to address the issues of today. Experienced teachers and authors on the history of gardens and landscapes come together in this new volume to share ideas on the future of teaching history in departments of landscape architecture, archaeology, geography and allied subjects. Design history remains important, but this volume brings to the fore the increasing importance of environmental history, economic history, landscape history, cultural landscapes, environmental justice and decolonisation, ideas of sustainability and climate change amelioration, which may all be useful in serving the needs of a widening range of students in an increasingly complex world. The main themes include: what history should we narrate in the education of landscape architects? how can we recognise counter-narratives and our own bias? how should we engage the students in the history of their chosen profession? how can designers and researchers be persuaded of the relevance of history teaching to theory and practice? and what resources do we need to develop teaching of landscape histories? This book will be of interest to anyone teaching courses on landscape architecture, urban design, horticulture, garden design, architectural history, cultural geography and more.
