Boyd Zenner - Editor

Cartooning the Landscape

Chip Sullivan

One of the singular talents in landscape design, Chip Sullivan has shared his expertise through a seemingly unusual medium that, at second glance, makes perfect sense--the comic strip. For years Sullivan entertained readers of Landscape Architecture Magazine with comic strips that ingeniously illustrated significant concepts and milestones in the creation of our landscapes. These strips gained... read more

Lifeboat

John R. Stilgoe

The fire extinguisher; the airline safety card; the lifeboat. Until September 11, 2001, most Americans paid homage to these appurtenances of disaster with a sidelong glance, if at all. But John Stilgoe has been thinking about lifeboats ever since he listened with his father as the kitchen radio announced that the liner Lakonia had caught fire and sunk in the Atlantic. It was Christmas 1963, an... read more

Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape

John R. Stilgoe

Unlike many United States industries, railroads are intrinsically linked to American soil and particular regions. Yet few Americans pay attention to rail lines, even though millions of them live in an economy and culture "waiting for the train." In Train Time: Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape, John R. Stilgoe picks up where his acclaimed work Metropolitan Cor... read more

Easy On, Easy Off: The Urban Pathology of America's Small Towns

Jack Williams

Life outside our nation’s big cities comprises a remarkably rich aspect of America―culturally, historically, and physically. Because of the way we move through the country, however―on roads built for maximum expediency―most of us are rarely if ever exposed to these small communities, a trend that is moving these towns dangerously far off the maps of commerce and public consciousness. In Easy O... read more

National Park Roads: A Legacy in the American Landscape

Timothy Davis

From Acadia and Great Smoky Mountains to Zion and Mount Rainier, millions of visitors tour America’s national parks. While park roads determine what most visitors see and how they see it, however, few pause to consider when, why, or how the roads they travel on were built. In this extensively researched and richly illustrated book, national parks historian Timothy Davis highlights the unique q... read more

Material Witnesses: Domestic Architecture and Plantation Landscapes in Early Virginia

Camille Wells

The Chesapeake region of eastern Virginia and Maryland offers a wealth of evidence for readers and researchers who want to discover what life was like in early America. In this eagerly anticipated volume, Camille Wells, one of the foremost experts on eighteenth-century Virginia architecture, gathers the discoveries unearthed during a career spent studying the buildings and plantations across t... read more

Florence: A Map of Perceptions

Andrea Ponsi

Many years have passed since architect Andrea Ponsi settled in Florence, and still he feels he does not fully comprehend this mysterious city. The way Florence eludes understanding, however, can be an opportunity--to keep seeking, to keep exploring. Ponsi’s Florence is endlessly suggestive. His tour of the city is one of continually shifting light and perspective, of stunning symmetry and an e... read more

San Francisco: A Map of Perceptions (Page-Barbour Lectures)

Andrea Ponsi

San Francisco is a city designed for artists and wanderers. From North Beach, to Chinatown, to the cold, rough surf of Ocean Beach, to Marin, both visitors and lifelong residents have endless opportunities to explore new neighborhoods, buildings, environments, and cultures just by getting in the car, hopping on a cable car, or by simply walking around the block. In San Francisco: A Map of Perc... read more

Analogy and Design

Andrea Ponsi

Analogical thought is fundamental to creativity. The use of analogy can help to solve problems, make connections between disciplines, and use those relations to form original solutions. In Analogy and Design, Andrea Ponsi considers the role of analogical thought in architectural design. Almost all work in design and architecture is the result of analogical thinking, with respect to systems der... read more

Frank Lloyd Wright: Preservation, Design, and Adding to Iconic Buildings

The buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright are not immune to the social and environmental forces that affect all architecture. Because of the popular recognition and historical significance of his work, however, the stakes are unusually high when his buildings are modified in any way. Any additions or changes must meet the highest standards; how exactly this can be achieved is the debate that fuels t... read more

Looking beyond the Icons: Midcentury Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism

Richard Longstreth

Renowned for his extensive work in architectural history and historic preservation as an educator, scholar, activist, and public lecturer, Richard Longstreth is one of the most important architectural preservationists of the recent past. Looking beyond the Icons offers a generous and diverse selection of his writings over the past twenty-five years. The author explores a variety of topics rela... read more

Indoor America: The Interior Landscape of Postwar Suburbia (Midcentury: Architecture, Landscape, Urbanism, and Design)

Andrea Vesentini

Cars, single-family houses, fallout shelters, air-conditioned malls―these are only some of the many interiors making up the landscape of American suburbia. Indoor America explores the history of suburbanization through the emergence of such spaces in the postwar years, examining their design, use, and representation. By drawing on a wealth of examples ranging from the built environment to popu... read more

Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century

Thaïsa Way

Women have practiced as landscape architects for over a century, since the founding of the practice as a profession in the United States in the 1890s. They came to landscape architecture as gardeners, garden designers, horticulturalists, and fine artists. They simultaneously shaped the profession while reflecting contemporary practice. It is all the more surprising, then, that the history of w... read more

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander: Making the Modern Landscape

Susan Herrington

Cornelia Hahn Oberlander is one of the most important landscape architects of the twentieth century, yet despite her lasting influence, few outside the field know her name. Her work has been instrumental in the development of the late-twentieth-century design ethic, and her early years working with architectural luminaries such as Louis Kahn and Dan Kiley prepared her to bring a truly modern―a... read more

Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America (Midcentury: Architecture, Landscape, Urbanism, and Design)

Avigail Sachs

Winner of the 2019 Award for Excellence from the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural HistoriansMuch of twentieth-century design was animated by the creative tension of its essential duality: is design an art or a science? In the postwar era, American architects sought to calibrate architectural practice to evolving scientific knowledge about humans and environments, thus elevatin... read more

East 40 Degrees: An Interpretive Atlas

Jack Williams

The Appalachian mountain chain once contained the highest and most dramatic mountains on earth. Worn down over time, these mountains still hold some of the most diverse climactic zones and singular geological formations in existence. In East 40 Degrees: An Interpretive Atlas, Jack Williams examines a succession of beautiful but little-known towns along this cordillera (a term descended from th... read more

Detached America: Building Houses in Postwar Suburbia (Midcentury: Architecture, Landscape, Urbanism, and Design)

James A. Jacobs

During the quarter century between 1945 and 1970, Americans crafted a new manner of living that shaped and reshaped how residential builders designed and marketed millions of detached single-family suburban houses. The modest two- and three-bedroom houses built immediately following the war gave way to larger and more sophisticated houses shaped by casual living, which stressed a family's easy... read more

American Autopia: An Intellectual History of the American Roadside at Midcentury (Midcentury: Architecture, Landscape, Urbanism, and Design)

Gabrielle Esperdy

Early to mid-twentieth-century America was the heyday of a car culture that has been called an "automobile utopia." In American Autopia, Gabrielle Esperdy examines how the automobile influenced architectural and urban discourse in the United States from the earliest days of the auto industry to the aftermath of the 1970s oil crisis. Paying particular attention to developments after World War I... read more

Traces of J. B. Jackson: The Man Who Taught Us to See Everyday America (Midcentury: Architecture, Landscape, Urbanism, and Design)

Helen L. Horowitz

J. B. Jackson transformed forever how Americans understand their landscape, a concept he defined as land shaped by human presence. In the first major biography of the greatest pioneer in landscape studies, Helen Horowitz shares with us a man who focused on what he regarded as the essential American landscape, the everyday places of the countryside and city, exploring them as texts that reveal ... read more

Monumental Jesus: Landscapes of Faith and Doubt in Modern America (Midcentury: Architecture, Landscape, Urbanism, and Design)

Margaret M. Grubiak

The American landscape is host to numerous works of religious architecture, sometimes questionable in taste and large, if not titanic, in scale. In her lively study of satire and religious architecture, Margaret Grubiak challenges how we typically view such sites by shifting the focus from believers to doubters, and from producers to consumers. Grubiak considers an array of sacred architectura... read more

Southern Built: American Architecture, Regional Practice

Catherine W. Bishir

A leader in the fields of both regional architectural history and historic preservation, Catherine Bishir has collected essays covering three decades into one volume. Just as the subjects of her studies are at once regional and national, the essays included here seek to think globally while researching locally. What one observes in the architecture of the Upper South happens throughout the nat... read more

Essays in Early American Architectural History: A View from the Chesapeake

Carl R. Lounsbury

The essays in this collection represent the type of research that has reshaped our understanding of early American architecture over the past thirty years. Carl R. Lounsbury, three-time winner of the prestigious Abbott Lowell Cummings Award offered by the Vernacular Architecture Forum, traces the manner in which domestic, ecclesiastical, and public architecture illuminate the dynamics and aspi... read more

Great Road Style: The Decorative Arts Legacy of Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee

Betsy William King Regional Art

Linked historically, culturally, and geographically, the counties that make up southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee are also connected by a shared decorative arts tradition. "Great Road Style," so called because of the region’s historical importance as a stage route connecting the eastern seaboard with the western frontier, is evidenced in distinctive forms of furniture, ceramics, ... read more

Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (Under the Sign of Nature)

Kate Rigby

The calamitous impacts of climate change that are beginning to be felt around the world today expose the inextricability of human and natural histories. Arguing for a more complex account of such calamities, Kate Rigby examines a variety of past disasters, from the Black Death of the Middle Ages to the mega-hurricanes of the twenty-first century, revealing the dynamic interaction of diverse hu... read more

Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature (Under the Sign of Nature)

Christopher Abram

Norse mythology is obsessed with the idea of an onrushing and unstoppable apocalypse: Ragnarok, when the whole of creation will perish in fire, smoke, and darkness and the earth will no longer support the life it once nurtured. Most of the Old Norse texts that preserve the myths of Ragnarok originated in Iceland, a nation whose volcanic activity places it perpetually on the brink of a world-ch... read more

The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf (Under the Sign of Nature)

Jesse Oak Taylor

The smoke-laden fog of London is one of the most vivid elements in English literature, richly suggestive and blurring boundaries between nature and society in compelling ways. In The Sky of Our Manufacture, Jesse Oak Taylor uses the many depictions of the London fog in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novel to explore the emergence of anthropogenic climate change. In the proces... read more

Anthropocene Fictions: The Novel in a Time of Climate Change (Under the Sign of Nature)

Adam Trexler

Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have transformed the Earth’s atmosphere, committing our planet to more extreme weather, rising sea levels, melting polar ice caps, and mass extinction. This period of observable human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems has been called the Anthropocene Age. The anthropogenic climate change that has impacted the Earth has also affected our literature, but cr... read more

New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond (Under the Sign of Nature)

Alicia Carroll

A transatlantic phenomenon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the "New Woman" broke away from many of the constraints of the Victorian era to enjoy a greater freedom of movement in the social, physical, and intellectual realms. As Alicia Carroll reveals, the New Woman also played a significant role in environmental awareness and action.From the Arts and Crafts period, to bef... read more

Building Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning (Under the Sign of Nature)

Julia Daniel

In Building Natures, Julia Daniel establishes the influence of landscape architecture, city planning, and parks management on American poetry to show how modernists engaged with the green worlds and social playgrounds created by these new professions in the early twentieth century. The modern poets who capture these parks in verse explore the aesthetic principles and often failed democratic id... read more

Virginia Climate Fever: How Global Warming Will Transform Our Cities, Shorelines, and Forests

Stephen Nash

Climate disruption is often discussed on a global scale, affording many a degree of detachment from what is happening in their own backyards. Yet the consequences of global warming are of an increasingly acute and serious nature.In Virginia Climate Fever, environmental journalist Stephen Nash brings home the threat of climate change to the state of Virginia. Weaving together a compelling mix o... read more

The Horse in Virginia: An Illustrated History

Julie A. Campbell

Virginia's horse tradition goes back 400 years, to when horses accompanied some of the first settlers in Jamestown. Since then, the state’s special relationship with the horse has never waned. Virginia has been home to some of the most notable breeds in the world―nurturing the Thoroughbred and actually birthing the Quarter Horse―as well as to some of the most famous individual horses, includin... read more

The Imbible: A Cocktail Guide for Beginning and Home Bartenders

Micah LeMon

Micah LeMon had one slight problem when he started bartending nearly twenty years ago: he had no idea what he was doing. Mixology, he came to understand, is based on principles that are indispensable but not widely known. In The Imbible, LeMon shares the knowledge he has gained over two decades, so that even beginning bartenders can execute classic cocktails--and riff on those classics to crea... read more

Virginia Beer: A Guide from Colonial Days to Craft's Golden Age

Lee Graves

The days of choosing between a handful of imports and a convenience store six-pack are long gone. The beer landscape in America has changed dramatically in the twenty-first century, as the nation has experienced an explosion in craft beer brewing and consumption. Nowhere is this truer than in Virginia, where more than two hundred independent breweries create beers of an unprecedented variety a... read more

The University of Virginia: A Pictorial History

Susan Tyler Hitchcock

In the nearly two centuries since the first building’s completion in Thomas Jefferson’s academical village, programs and facilities at the University of Virginia have been continually expanded and updated. This second edition of Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s The University of Virginia: A Pictorial History, first published in 1999 and updated in 2003, traces Mr. Jefferson’s favorite project through a... read more