Author Archives: Tom Turner

Effective policies re global warming, climate change, urban design, sustainability and landscape architecture

14 Replies
Scotland's Old Red Sandstone was laid down in hot, dry, arid conditions - about 400 million years ago. Homo sapiens evolved about 4 million years ago and is not responsible for this climate change

Scotland's Old Red Sandstone was laid down in hot, dry, arid conditions - about 400 million years ago. Homo sapiens evolved about 4 million years ago and is not responsible for the climate change from hot arid desert to cold wet coast.

The expert science behind the theory of global warming is unimpeachable and unchallengable: thermometers show temperatures are rising and tape measures show glaciers are retreating. But several important questions have uncertain answers:

  1. What percentage of global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels and felling rain forests?
  2. What percentage difference would result from the measures advocated by reasonable scientists?

The answers to these questions would be useful. My guesses are (1) humans have caused only a small percentage of the global warming in the last 20,000 years (2) the measures currently under discussion, though I am in full support of them, would have next-to-no-effect on climate change. If we are serious about doing whatever little we can do to lessen climate change then we should consider the following moderate measures:-

  • Stop world leaders from wasting their time and our money on conferences in Kyoto, Copenhagen etc, or, if this proves difficult, make them spend their time using Copenhagen’s wonderful bicycle network instead of its limousines, its cavernous conference halls and its spikey cocktail bars
  • Ban the consumption of meat
  • Make it illegal to drive children to school – at any time in any country
  • Stop wasting hydrocarobons on road transport and air travel (making every place a holiday destination would help)
  • Stop war and stop making munitions and use the money to build giant solar energy farms in dry deserts
  • Extend Chinese population control policies to Africa, along with its mineral resource policies
  • Use  suburban gardens for home-grown food and vegetables, especially in America and Australia
  • Facilitate voluntary euthanasia
  • Legalize heroin, cannabis, cocaine etc – to get more tax revenue to spend on protecting rain forests – and stop the waste of resources on ineffective drug enforcement policies in rich and in poor countries
  • Vegetate most walls and most roofs in most cities of the future
  • Put 300 mm of insulation in most roofs, floors and walls
  • Train more landscape architects and urban designers
  • Replace the World Bank and the UNDP with Jamie Lerner
  • ‘In the prison of his days teach the free man how to praise’ (W B Yates)

Image courtesy Earthwatcher

Kerb – is landscape architecture dead? – a magazine review

11 Replies

RMIT University in Australia publish the annual publication Kerb and Vol 17 asks the question ‘Is landscape architecture dead?’. It is a good question and a handsome volume with interesting illustrations. But most of the articles in Kerb led me to think that ‘if this is the future of landscape architecture, then it deserves to die’. The images do not have either captions or any discernable relationship with the text. Most of the 26 articles are inconsequential: significant questions are asked; random assertions are made; obscure paragraphs abound eg1 ‘Contemporary landscape architecture has not produced an aesthetic paradigm that describes the vicissitudes surrounding the idea of nature today’ (p 10),  eg2 ‘landscape is not an object. yet this image of landscape is projected upon the world with each project you undertake’ (p.73)  eg3 ‘interpret ‘scape as meaning ‘pretty dress up’. Dig up a Chinese creek bed, polish the booty, and dress up my ‘scape outside the screen door’ (p.92). But I must be wrong: many young Australian landscape architects come to work in London and they have earned a good reputation for Australia’s landscape schools.


Helena Atlee Italian Gardens – book review

4 Replies

The illustrations are excellent but the text is disappointing. Italian gardens suggests a book about the gardens of Italy but as the subtitle – a cultural history reveals it is not a book about garden design.  Design is mentioned but it is not treated systematically. Chapter 2, on Medici gardeners 1518-1550 opens as follows ‘The desire to make gardens is like a hereditary disease’. While not objecting to wit, I do not see this as a useful explanation of  how one of history’s greatest gardening families acquired its passion for gardens. Nor does Atlee give any account of Italy’s Roman gardens, as the title would lead one to expect. A newcomer to the subject might think the first gardens ever made in Italy date from the fourteenth century. Atlee is the author of several travel guides to Italian gardens and this book is more akin to a guide book than a history book.

The cultural history of gardens is an interesting topic but I do not see why it should be detached from the design history of  ‘how and why gardens took their present form’ (see comment on John Dixon Hunt’s use of the term cultural history). One could write cultural histories of furniture, or milk bottles, but they would not serve as  substitutes for design history. So why separate the two approaches to history? My impression is that cultural historians have less appreciation of design than design historians have of culture. They tend to be ‘words people’ instead of ‘word and image’ people – and they don’t seem very good at reading plans. My recommendation to someone taking up garden history is to begin by measuring, drawing, photographing and writing about a single historic garden, including an account of  the cultural context in which it was formed. From the other end of the telescope, I believe designers should have a broad appreciation of the cultural,  technical and artistic context in which they are working.


The Roman Garden – Katherine von Stackelberg – book review

Leave a Reply
Fresco painting of Flora, or Primavera,found in the luxurious resort of Stabiae in the Bay of Naples

Fresco painting of Flora, or Primavera,found in the luxurious resort of Stabiae in the Bay of Naples. von Stackelberg sees the image (p.1) as 'one of the most haunting and popular icons of Roman art. Wearing a yellow robe, seductively slipping off one shoulder, she turns her half-naked back towards the viewer. Her left arm cradles a basket of flowers; her right hand reaches out to pluck a spray of cream-coloured blossoms. Her head is angled so that she almost, but not quite, reveals her profile....Is she in the Elysian Fields, a meadow, a garden?'

Katherine T. von Stackelberg has written a book on The Roman Garden (Routledge 2009). At $100 for 182 pages, the list price seem high. Her work began ‘one spring morning when my mother asked what Roman gardens looked like’. The 16 b&w illustrations do not provide much of an answer. Seeing garden history as a ‘word and image’ subject, I regret that more effort was not put into picture research. The beautiful painting of Flora, right, is discussed on page 1 but it is not reproduced as a plate and there is no reference to the book jacket – on which it appears as a dull  sepia image.

Chapter 1 has some useful information on Roman use of gardens. Chapter 2 opens with the remark that ‘all landscapes are, to a greater or lesser extent, cultural constructions’. Does she mean that the world had no landscapes before Homo sapiens evolved? I don’t think so. The chapter is an unenlightening application of cognitive theory and Bill Hillier’s space syntax theory to gardens. Nor are Foucault and Lefebvre are easy companions for a garden walk. Chapter 3 is about Experiencing the Roman Garden but should perhaps be called ‘How a cultural theorist would experience a Roman garden’. It says little about sights, scents or sounds.  I fear the author’s mother will know little more about ‘Roman gardens looked like’ if and when she reaches the end of her daughter’s book – in fact I would recommend her to begin with the three Case Studies in Chapter 4. I can however recommend this book to people who are interested in the polsemic potential of gardens as a vehicle of communication (p.141).


Set for a King – 200 years of gardening at the Royal Pavilion Brighton – book review

Leave a Reply
Humphry Repton's design for the grounds of the Brighton Pavilion surives and could be an influence on the layout of the gardens

Humphry Repton's design for the grounds of the Brighton Pavilion surives and could be an influence on the layout of the gardens

Written by Mike Jones and published in 2005, this is a beautifully produced book on the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. Jones was head of Conservation and Design in Brighton and has contributed a remarkable set of flower paintings to the book. It gives a full account of the original project and of the restoration project. One could hardly ask for more but, for me, the project raises a question: was the decision to restore the Nash garden design right? John Nash designed the garden but his ‘inspiration’ undoubtedly came from his former partner, Humphry Repton. Repton published a full account of his own garden design ideas and they were much better than Nash’s scheme. So isn’t there a case for implementing Humphry Repton’s design?

A Cultural History of Italian Gardens by John Dixon Hunt – book review

3 Replies

John Dixon Hunt The Italian Garden

John Dixon Hunt The Italian Garden

John Dixon Hunt edited a book on The Italian Garden: art, design and culture (Cambridge University Press, 1996). He is now working with Michael Leslie on a six volume  Cultural History of Gardens (scheduled to be published by Berg Publishers in 2011): The blurb  states that “Michael Leslie is Professor of English at Rhodes College. He was founding co-editor of the Journal of Garden History (now Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes – SHGDL) and Senior Fellow in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks (Harvard). John Dixon Hunt is Professor of Landscape Architecture at University of Pennsylvania. He was previously Director of Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks and is editor of the journal, SHGDL and series editor of the Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture.”

The book on Italian Garden indicates what is meant by the term ‘cultural history’ .  It is the work of  ‘a distinguished group of Italian, American, English and German scholars, with different backgrounds in art history, literature, architecture, planning and cultural history’. I appreciate the study of every aspect of gardens but am most interested in the questions of how and why they were designed, which appears not to be a significant aspect of ‘cultural history’.

The 1996 Italian Garden Chapter of most interest to me is D R Edward Wright’s ‘Some Medici gardens of the Florentine Renaissance: an essay in post-aesthetic interpretation’. He concentrates on the social use of gardens, a topic of much concern to designers but often neglected by garden historians. Wright comments that it is ‘as if human use of planned environments was a mere afterthought to an essentially artistic endeavour’. He distinguishes between the high society uses of the Boboli Garden, the relatively pastoral use of the Villa Castello – as a health resort, and the use of Pratolino as a hunting park. I hope the projected Cultural History of Gardens has more chapters like this and fewer literary canapes than Italian Garden.