The Penn Landscape Architecture Reader 2020


So admist all the Covd-19 chaos there is still a little hope of learning. The Landscape Architecture department put together a light list of readings for quarantine. This was originally released during the extended spring break. I have posted it now as it is a relatively long list and perfect for summer!

  1. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens – Wallace Stevens, Alfred A Knof, 1990
  2. “Frederick Law Olmstead and the Dialectic Landscape” excerpted from The Writing of Robert Smithson, 1979
  3. “Farmland Without Farmers” Wendell Berry, in The Atlantic 2015
  4. “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking” Richard Buchanon, in Design Issues Vol 8, 1992
  5. “Ground Truthing” Tempest Williams, in the Orion Magazine, 2004
  6. Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees, Sonja Dumpelmann, 2019
  7. Landscape and Power: Space, Place, and Landscape 2nd edition, preface, W.J.T. Mitchell, 2002
  8. “Airport, Landscape, Environment” excerpted from Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age, Sonja Dumpelmann, 2016
  9. Women, Modernity, and Landscape Architecture, 2015
    1. “Introduction”, Sonja Dumpelmann, John Beardsley
    2. “Creating New Landscapes for Old Europe: Herta Hammerbacher, Sylvia Crowe, Maria Teresa Parpagliolo” Sonja Dumpelmann
  10. What Is Landscape? (Introduction) 2015, John Stilgoe
  11. Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, 2000
    1. “Ian McHarg. Environmentalism and Landscape Architecture. Ideas and Methods in Context.” Anne Whiston Spirn
  12. “Slow Landscape: A New Erotics of Sustainability” in Harvard Design Magazine vol 31, 2009/2010, Elizabeth Meyer
  13. “Sustaining Beauty. The Performance of Appearance. A Manifesto in 3 parts.” in Journal of Landscape Architecture, 2008, Elizabeth Meyer
  14. Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent (Introduction: River Literacy), 2019, Dilip da Cunha
  15. Ecological Urbanism, 2010, M Mostafavi & G Doherty
    1. “The Sea and Monsoon Within: A Mmbai Manifesto” Anuradha Mathur & Dilip da Cunha
  16. Recovering Landscape, 1999, James Corner (Ed)
    1. “Neigher Wilderness Nor Home: The Indian Maidan” Anuradha Mathur
  17. Design with Nature Now, 2019
    1. “Traverse Before Transect” Anuradha Mathur
    2. “Design with Change” Rob Holmes
  18. “Operational Eidetics: Forging New Landscapes” in Harvad Design Magazine, 1998, James Corner
  19. Ecological Design and Planning, 1997
    1. “Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity” James Corner
  20. The Landscape Imagination: Collected Essays of James Corner (preface) 1990-2010, James Corner
  21. Projective Ecologies, 2014, C Reed and NM Lister
    1. “Ecology and Design: Parallel Genealogies”
  22. “Curious Methods” in Places Journal, 2017, Karen Lutsky and Sean Burkholder
  23. “Methodolatry and the Art of Measure” in Places Journal, 2013, Shannon Mattern
  24. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 2010, Jane Bennett
    1. “Chaper 1: The Force of Things”
    2. “Chapter 2: The Agency of Assemblages”
  25. Autonomous Nature: Problems of Prediction and Control from Ancient Time to the Scientific Revolution, 2016
    1. “Vexing Nature: Francis Bacon and The Origin of Experimentation” Carolyne Merchant
  26. “Interacting with Simulations” in LA+SIMULATION Fall 2016, Eduardo Rico and Enriqueta Llabres Valls
  27. Unearthed: The Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates (introduction), 2013, Karen M’Closkey
  28. Landscape Architecture and Digital Technologies, 2016, Jillian Walliss and Heike Rahmann
  29. “Speaking of Geodesign” in GIS Science 1, 2012, Dana Tomlin
  30. “On the Escape of Tigers: An Ecologic Note” in American Journal of Public Health and the Nation’s Health, 1970 (?), William Haddon
  31. Urban Revisions: Current Projects for the Public Realm, 1994,
    1. “Cannibal City: Los Angeles and the Destruction of Nature” Mike Davis
  32. Letters to the Leader of China: Kongjian Yu and the Future of the Chinese City, 2018, Zhongjie Lin
    1. “When Green was the New Black: What Went Wrong with China’s Eco-city Movement?”
  33. The Latin American Urban Landscape: A Mosaic of Enhanced Influences, 2019, David Gouverneur
  34. Responsive Urbanism in Informal Areas, 2014, David Gouverneur
    1. “The Informal Armature Approach”
  35. Landscape Ecological Urbanism Landscape and Urban Planning, 2011, Frederick Steiner
  36. “Landscape, Public Imagination, and the Green New Deal” in the Landscape Architecture Magazine, 2019, Nicholas Pevzner
  37. “Design and the Green New Deal” in Places Journal, 2019, B. Fleming
  38. “Professional-Managerial Chasm”, 2019, G. Winant
  39. Planning Theory, 2006, Ananya Roy
    1. “Praxis in the Age of Empire”
  40. “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic, 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates
  41. ANY: Architecture New York, 1998, Stan Allen
    1. “Diagrams Matter”
  42. Speculative Everything, 2014, Anthony Dunn and Fiona Raby
  43. “Zone: The Spatial Softwares of Extrastatecraft” in Places Journal, 2012, Keller Easterling
  44. “Junkspace”, 2002, Rem Koolhaas
  45. New Geographies, 2019, Christopher Marcinkoski
    1. “Fallow or Failure? Urbanization in the Age of Speculation”
  46. “Stewardship Now? Reflections on Landscape Architecture’s Raison d’etre in the 21st century” in Landscape Journal, 2015, Richard Weller
  47. “Landscaper Genres: Towards a Taxonomy of Contemporary Landscape Architecture” Landscape Architecture Frontier, 2019, RJ Weller
  48. Human Destiny in the Antrhopocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, 2015, Clive Hamilton
  49. After Nature – A Politics of the Anthropocene, 2015, Jebediah Purdy
    1. “Imagining the Anthropocene”
  50. “Making Kin” Environmental Humanities vol 6, 2015, Donna Haraway
  51. “We are Designing the Planet Whether You Like it or Not” in The Dirt, 2019, Richard Weller
  52.  LA+: https://laplusjournal.com
  53. Scenario Journal: https://scenariojournal.com
  54. “Several Short Sentences About Writing” in Ecotone vol. 7 number 2, 2012,  Verlyn Klinkenborg

Should you read one a day, and only the referenced excerpts, this is roughly two months of reading. Should you delve into the texts a bit more you might find yourself well occupied for several more months. I hope you enjoy this list! If anything is unclear or you need help finding something let me know in the comments and I will do my best to help out. Enjoy!