The Language of Landscape

This eloquent and powerful book combines poetry and pragmatism to teach the language of landscape and thereby to avoid making profound aesthetic and environmental mistakes in landscape design. Using examples that range across thousands of years and five continents, Anne Spirn examines urban, rural, and natural landscapes and calls for change in the way we shape and respond to them.

"This remarkable book urges readers to understand the common language of landscape which speaks to all our senses every day. Primitive peoples lived closely within the landscape and instinctively understood that landscape was the source and matrix of their lives. Anne Spirn strives to describe the permutations of this shared language as a resource to enrich modern man`s dialogue with nature as well as with the man made landscape."--Lawrence Halprin, Fellow of the Americna Society of Landscape Architects

"Anne Whiston Spirn brings to her reading of landscapes the eye of an artist, the mind of a scholar, and the pen of a gifted writer. What she has produced is nothing less than a field guide for all who share her belief that the language of landscape is among the richest and most meaningful that any of us can ever hope to understand. The result is a triumph. There are a few books that have the power to change the way one sees the world. This is one of them."--William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Landscape speaks to us. But how? Anne Spirn`s superb and unique achievement is to spell out the "how" so that we can better understand landscape`s variant dialects--its distinctive personalities--and respond intelligently, with appropriate emotion."--Yi-Fu Tuan, emeritus professor of Geography, University of Wisconsin-Madison

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