Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A timely new strategy for landscape design in urban environments



Diana Balmori, an innovative and influential landscape architect in the field of urban design, makes the case for landscape as an art in her timely and provocative manifesto. This book presents Balmori's most complete vision yet of the theory and practice of urban landscape design as a discipline that combines the science of ecology with the formal aspects of aesthetics. Here, Balmori advocates a new formal language that reflects a philosophical shift in our traditional understanding of nature, along with "realignments" in how humans relate to nature and live in our world today, changes that will shape the livable city of the future.

A Landscape Manifesto includes discussions of urban ecology, environmental conservation, and environmentally beneficial building techniques. Projects by Balmori Associates, which include the Memphis Riverfront and a port area newly reclaimed by the Guggenheim Bilbao, illuminate Balmori's innovations. Featuring an introduction by Michel Conan, one of landscape architecture's most respected historians, Balmori's book heralds a significant development in the literature of landscape architecture.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The premise of A Landscape Manifesto is, at its simplest, that humans cannot re-create but only reproduce nature. Noted landscape and urban designer Balmori (Yale Univ.) attempts to address how this premise manifests through 25 theses. Although they provide an uneven mix of ideas, the underlying principle is that landscape architecture is not about making a nature that is pure and apart from people. Rather, landscape architecture is about situating people, their structures, and their cities in a dynamic reinterpretation of nature that addresses its needs, the needs of human engagement in nature, and the simple fact of change. In particular, to fail to engage people in designed nature and to try too hard to reproduce untrammeled nature leads to an abstraction people cannot connect to and have no investment in. The book is well bound, but some of the images are of very poor quality, as if someone took an image he found on the Web and blew it up to fill a page. Still, the design shortcomings are offset by solid points and ideas presented on future directions for landscape architecture. Summing Up: Recommended. Academic, professional, and public libraries, all levels. P. L. Kantor Southern Vermont College

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Diana Balmori was born in Gijón, Spain on June 4, 1932. She studied architecture at the National University of Tucumán in Argentina, but failed to receive a degree when the government expelled her entire class because of a student protest. She emigrated to the United States in 1952 with her husband. She received a doctorate in urban history at U.C.L.A. in 1973.

In 1980, she joined her husband's firm, César Pelli and Associates, where she created a department of landscape architecture and worked with him on several projects including the Winter Garden Atrium in the World Financial Center in Manhattan. She was a landscape architect whose ecologically sensitive designs integrated buildings and the natural environment. In 1990, she founded Balmori Associates. The firm worked on numerous projects including transforming the old industrial port of Bilbao, Spain, into a park system; the Gwynns Falls Trail in Baltimore; a trail system in Cedar Lake Park in Minneapolis; and South Korea's new administrative capital, Sejong City.

Her first book, Beatrix Farrand's American Landscapes, written with Diane Kostial McGuire and Eleanor McPeck, was published in 1985. Her other books include Redesigning the American Lawn: A Search for Environmental Harmony written with F. Herbert Bormann and Gordon T. Geballe, Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture written with Joel Sanders, and A Landscape Manifesto. She died from lung cancer on November 14, 2016 at the age of 84.

(Bowker Author Biography)