an essential read for people interested in environmental research and studies.
Berger is a professor in landscape architecture and urban design; he taught various subjects in different academic locations, including MIT and Harvard. He worked on several projects in Europe and USA focused on wetland reconstruction and solving fuel environmental problem in relation to gas emission in suburban America and finding an alternative solution for automobile transport. The work he conducted is research base work in many fields: landscape architecture, urbanism, infrastructure (landscape), wetland reclamation, and water development. He initiated a new approach named “systemic design” routed to the founders of the ecosystem design and systems theory in Germany by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in the 1940s.
Its apparent from the book title the focus of the book is to introduce the new approach he named “systemic design” to most earth, water, and air engineering and planning projects. From looking into the projects he introduced in his book, the reader can estimate and conclude that these projects are mainly concerned with reclamation of water surfaces, whether it is polluted or abundant for building new settlements. These projects are subject to applying his approach to a system of layers in resolving environment problems and to study the interaction of several embedded forces. The book is most useful for people specialized in environmental studies, geological studies, ecosystems studies, and landscape and water engineering.
The book introduces the new approach by various projects throughout the book content. The book is hardly 24 pages of descriptive text to the projects under study and research; most of the book is detailed info graphs and project location photos. In many areas of the world building, urban projects and even planning projects take into consideration the various forces intervention of any building creation, urban project or development plan. It is a common approach to deal with every design project from different perspectives and to study and analyze the other disciplines involved influence to achieve successful outcomes. The book in its limited pages does not introduce the intended theme the author is willing to provide to the target audience.
Alan Berger dives in the book content without a clear message to the reader about his design, flow, ideas, method , and theory he plan to introduce to his readers the known ones and the unknown ones. I might say that this is the first book I read that comes without an introduction since the first book I read when I was in the secondary school written by George Orwell, “the animal farm”. The author declares that there is a huge gap in academic study and future prediction about environmental problems and academic studies are slowly developed. Then he goes directly to introduce his firm P-REX and the mutation of research into practice before he starts laying out his firm’s projects.
Continue reading: http://husamtalib.com/systemic-design-can-change-the world/
Husam in his 25 years in architectural and urban design practice experience has helped several international firms in the Middle East achieve success by meeting project’s planned goals and reduced projects budgets without quality tradeoff.
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