The Language of Landscape

Anne Whiston Spirn

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English

Yale University Press
11 May 2000

Landscape art & architecture; Semiotics & semiology; Garden design & planning

This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape. Anne Whiston Spirn, author of the award-winning The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, argues that the language of landscape exists with its own syntax, grammar, and metaphors, and that we imperil ourselves by failing to learn to read and speak this language. To understand the meanings of landscape, our habitat, is to see the world differently and to enable ourselves to avoid profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes.

Offering examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes. She discusses the thought of renowned landscape authors-Thomas Jefferson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Law Olmsted, Lawrence Halprin-and of less well known pioneers, including Australian architect Glenn Murcutt and Danish landscape artist C. Th. Sørensen. She discusses instances of great landscape designers using landscape fluently, masterfully, and sometimes cynically. And, in a probing analysis of the many meanings of landscape, Spirn shows how one person's ideal landscape may be another's nightmare, how Utopian landscapes can be dark. There is danger when we lose the connection between a place and our understanding of it, Spirn warns, and she calls for change in the way we shape our environment, based on the notions of nature as a set of ideas and landscape as the expression of action and ideas in place.

By: Anne Whiston Spirn
Imprint: Yale University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 2mm
Weight: 476g
ISBN: 9780300082944
ISBN 10: 0300082940
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 11 May 2000
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational , A / AS level , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Anne Whiston Spirn is professor of landscape architecture and regional planning and director of the Urban Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews for The Language of Landscape

Landscape speaks to us. But how? Anne Spirn's superb and unique achievement is to spell out the 'how' so that we can better understand landscape's variant dialects its distinctive personalities and respond intelligently, with appropriate emotion. Yi-Fu Tuan, emeritus professor of geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison Anne Whiston Spirn brings to her reading of landscapes the eye of an artist, the mind of a scholar, and the pen of a gifted writer. There are a few books that have the power to change the way one sees the world. This is one of them. William Cronon, author of Changes in the Land Spirn has thought deeply about landscape and human responses to it. Her new book...offers a myriad of stimulating impressions and suggestions and pursues a wide array of intellectual issues...All will appreciate Spirn's sensitive eye and her vivid descriptions. Choice