Customer Reviews

Taking Measures Across the American Landscape

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This book will change the way you look at and think about landscape. Technically, it's a landscape architecture book, and the essays that deal with that subject are excellent. James Corner is one of the best landscape architects/theorists around, and his writing is though-provoking, lucid and enjoyable to read. He draws an wonderful comparison between this work and Le Corbusier's sightseeing flights over North Africa in the 1930's. But without a doubt, the reason to buy this book are the photographs that document the unexpected beauty that arises out of the interaction between man and nature. The incongruities of landscape, juxtaposed against the linear certainty of the Land Ordinance Act grid, farm plots and other common interventions make for stunning photography.

There are also little subplots, such as creative reuses of already built spaces (tennis courts as parking lots & football field yard lines over a baseball diamond), and the similarity of totally unrelated natural forms (who knew that from 7,000 feet, cracked pond ice looks like microscopic images of streptococcal bacteria?).

There are dozens of other little thoughts I could include, and one of most remarkable things about this book is that the photogrpahs allow the reader to draw on his or her own knowledge to make connections and interpertations. There's no right or wrong way to see these things, which makes it universally rewarding and enjoyable.

This is one of the nicest Christmas gifts I ever received. Two guys flew across the United States at low level taking wonderful photographs, many of which are worth framing as art. A geographer's reflection and insights on the frames draw attention to the cultural impact on the landscape of U.S. history, its varied immigrants, the rectangular land survey, and of the Western mathematics embedded in their choices.

No math teacher looking for an exciting resource that supports cross-disciplinary work would find this book except by accident. Nor would those who fly in small planes and want high quality, thoughtful, intellectual books that go beyond coffee-table glamour and reflect in a serious way about the earth beneath. Nor would somebody interested in cultural geography. This is because the cataloging-in-publication information is generic and unimaginative.

This book is incredible, the essays, photography, map drawings and descriptions really changed the way I looked at the world around me. This book was used as our text book for a Senior Project class in design school.

Just brilliant.

A series of photographs and related diagrams & montages about the US landscape - every one worth sitting over and considering in detail

A book I come back to time and time again

I always enjoy graphic design, but this one integrates intelligent visual graphic representation and it portraits site/landscape analysis.
Not your usual blueprint survey, but delightful new way of documentation.

Perceptive and conciousness raising while an aesthetic visual pleasure. An unforgettable book.