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A psychologist and landscape designer, Linn was responsible for the grounds of many prominent buildings, such as the Seagram Building in New York. But in the late 1950s, he gave up his lucrative career, rejecting "landscapes of affluence," and dedicated himself to creating community gardens on vacant lots, particularly focusing on blighted areas around New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington, DC. "The garden touches a core of humanness," he once said, and was a better reflection of humanity than war. One of his gardens, in Berkeley, Calif., was featured in the 2004 documentary "A Lot in Common". Linn died February 3 from myelogenous leukemia at his home in Berkeley. He was 81. From This is True for 6 February 2005 Suggestions for further reading:
 By: Scott OgdenLauren Springer Ogden List Price: $34.95 Amazon Price: $23.07 Editorial Review: This book is nothing short of revolutionary. For too long, garden design has given pride of place to architecture, artifice, and arbitrary principles. The results? Soulless landscapes where plants play subordinate roles. With passion and eloquence, Scott Ogden and Lauren Springer Ogden argue that only when plants are given the respect they deserve does a garden become emotionally resonant. Plant-Driven Design shows designers how to work more confidently with plants, and gives gardeners more confidence to design. The Ogdens boldly challenge design orthodoxy and current trends by examining how to marry plantsmanship and design without sacrificing one to the other. Supported by extensive lists of plants adapted to specific purposes and sites, Plant-Driven Design explores how plants interact with place. In addition, the authors' experience gardening and designing in a wide variety of climates gives their perspective a unique depth. In ideas, scope, and detail, this book both embraces and transcends regionality. By reclaiming gardens as a home to plants, this groundbreaking work will restore life-affirming vitality to garden design and profoundly affect how we understand and experience gardens.  By: Robert Pogue Harrison List Price: $24.00 Amazon Price: $16.32 Editorial Review: Humans have long turned to gardens?both real and imaginary?for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh?s garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens. With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur?an; Plato?s Academy and Epicurus?s Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt?all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison?s earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility?and its enduring importance to humanity. "I find myself completely besotted by a new book titled Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, by Robert Pogue Harrison. The author . . . is one of the very best cultural critics at work today. He is a man of deep learning, immense generosity of spirit, passionate curiosity and manifold rhetorical gifts."?Julia Keller, Chicago Tribune "This book is about gardens as a metaphor for the human condition. . . . Harrison draws freely and with brilliance from 5,000 years of Western literature and criticism, including works on philosophy and garden history. . . . He is a careful as well as an inspiring scholar."?Tom Turner, Times Higher Education "When I was a student, my Cambridge supervisor said, in the Olympian tone characteristic of his kind, that the only living literary critics for whom he would sell his shirt were William Empson and G. Wilson Knight. Having spent the subsequent 30 years in the febrile world of academic Lit. Crit. . . . I?m not sure that I?d sell my shirt for any living critic. But if there had to be one, it would unquestionably be Robert Pogue Harrison, whose study Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, published in 1992, has the true quality of literature, not of criticism?it stays with you, like an amiable ghost, long after you read it. ?Though more modest in scope, this new book is similarly destined to become a classic. It has two principal heroes: the ancient philosopher Epicurus . . . and the wonderfully witty Czech writer Karel Capek, apropos of whom it is remarked that, whereas most people believe gardening to be a subset of life, ?gardeners, including Capek, understand that life is a subset of gardening.???Jonathan Bate, The Spectator  By: Hamish Bowles List Price: $75.00 Amazon Price: $47.25 Editorial Review: This unique book of thirty-six spectacular houses and gardens?whose owners come from the worlds of fashion, music, art, and society?draws not only on stories that have appeared in the pages of Vogue and Vogue Living over the past two decades but also on images that have never before been published. Vogue Living: Houses, Gardens, People takes you to these style-makers? private realms around the world, captured by such celebrated photographers as Miles Aldridge, Cecil Beaton, Jonathan Becker, Eric Boman, Oberto Gili, François Halard, Horst P. Horst, Annie Leibovitz, Sheila Metzner, Mario Testino, Tim Walker, and Bruce Weber, among many others. Their dazzling photographs bring to life interiors and exteriors, modern and classical, that are both inspiring and transporting. Writers like Hamish Bowles, Joan Juliet Buck, Dodie Kazanjian, Eve MacSweeney, Julia Reed, Marina Rust, and Vicki Woods take us behind the scenes to give us an intimate view of the owners and how they live.  By: Art Ludwig List Price: $20.95 Amazon Price: $14.25 Editorial Review: Create an Oasis describes how to quickly and easily choose, build, and use a simple greywater system. Some can be completed in an afternoon for under $30.
It also provides complete instructions for more complex installations, how to deal with freezing, flooding, drought, failing septics, low perk soil, non-industrialized world conditions, coordinating a team of professionals to get optimum results on high-end projects, and "radical plumbing" that uses 90% less resources.  By: Michael E. Doyle List Price: $69.95 Amazon Price: $44.07 Editorial Review: The Third Edition of Michael Doyle's classic Color Drawing remains the ultimate up-to-date resource for professionals and students who need to develop and communicate design ideas with clear, attractive, impressive color drawings. Update with over 100 pages, this Third Edition contains an entirely new section focused on state-of-the-art digital techniques to greatly enhance the sophistication of presentation drawings, and offers new and innovative ideas for the reproduction and distribution of finished drawings. Color Drawing, Third Edition Features: * A complete body of illustrated instructions demonstrating drawing development from initial concept through final presentation * Finely honed explanations of each technique and process * Faster and easier ways to create design drawings * Over 100 new pages demonstrating methods for combining hand-drawn and computer-generated drawing techniques Step-by-step, easy-to-follow images will lead you through digital techniques to quickly and easily enhance your presentation drawings. |
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