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On the long quest towards accomplishing my hopes and dreams for changing the world, I have been painstakingly putting together a reading list of books about urban planning, architecture, green urbanism, urban ecology, and so on. Trying to do this was quite a pain in the ass until I came across this lovely suggested reading list. Thankfully, I’ve actually read some of these books. I post the list here to remind myself that there is work to be done.
From the University of Washington’s Landscape Architecture site:
SUGGESTED READING LIST
The following are “classics” even though some of these are recent books because they are seminal to the profession. Simply, the faculty think all landscape architects should know who these authors are and the basic messages of these books.
Bacon, Edmund. 1974. Design of Cities. Penguin Books, NY.
Hester, Randolph T. Community Design Primer. Ridge Times Press, 1990.
Hough, Michael. 1995. Cities and Natural Process. Routledge Press.
Itten, Johanes. 1975. Design and Form. Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY.
Jackson, J. B. 1994. A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time. Yale University Press. New Haven.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1989 or any edition
Kaplan, Rachel and Stephen Kaplan, The Experience of Nature : A Psychological Perspective, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989.
Kellert, Stephen R. and Edward O. Wilson, The Biophilia Hypothesis, Island Press, Washington, D. C., 1993.
Leopold, Aldo, Sand County Almanac, 1949 or any edition
Marcus, Clare Cooper, House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home, Conari Press, Berkeley, 1995.
McHarg, Ian, Design with Nature, The Natural History Press, New York, 1969. recent paperback editions are ok.
Nabhan, Gary Paul and Stephen Trimble, The Geography of Childhood : Why Children Need Wild Places, Beacon Press, Boston, 1994.
Nash, Roderick, Wilderness and the American Mind, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1973 revised edition.
Spirn, Anne Whiston, Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design, Basic Books, New York, 1984.
Venturi, Robert, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour. Learning from Las Vegas Revised Edition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
These are books every first year BLA and MLA student should try to read as soon as possible.
Appleton, Jay. The Experience of Landscape Revised Edition. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1996.
Anderson, Eugene N, Ecologies of the Heart : Emotion, Belief, and the Environment, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996.
Beardsley, John. Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape. New York, Abbeville Press latest edition
Ching, Francis. 1996 Architecture: Form, Space, and Order. Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY.
Condon, P. M. Ed. 1996. Sustainable Urban Landscapes: The Surrey Design Charrette. University of British Columbia. Vancouver, BC. Canada.
Francis, Mark and Randolph T. Hester, Jr. The Meaning of Gardens. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
Hough, Michael. Out of Place: Restoring Identity to the Regional Landscape. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
Kaplan, R., S. Kaplan and R. Ryan. 1998. With People in Mind: Design and Management of Everyday Nature. Island Press. Washington, DC.
Moore, Charles W., William J. Mitchell and William Turnbull, Jr. The Poetics of Gardens. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.
Nassauer, Joan Iverson, Placing Nature, Culture and Landscape Ecology, Island Press, Washington, D. C. 1997.
Orr, David. Ecological Literacy Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World, SUNY Press 1992
Potteiger, Matthew and Jamie Purinton. Landscape Narratives: Design Practices for Telling Stories. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
Thayer, Robert L., Gray World, Green Heart, Wiley, New York, 1994.
Trieb, M. Ed. 1993. Modern Landscape Architecture: A Critical Review. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA.
Van der Ryn, Sim and Peter Calthorpe. Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities, Suburbs and Towns. San Francisco.
Eager, aggressive students should also try to become familiar with the material in these books as soon as possible
Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous, Pantheon, New York, 1996.
Calthorpe, Peter. 1993. The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream. Princeton Architectural Press, NY.
Creese, Walter L. The Crowning of the American Landscape: Eight Great Spaces and Their Buildings. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, Press, 1985.
Doppelt, B., et. al. 1993. Entering the Watershed: A New Approach to Save America’s River Ecosystems. Island Press. Washington, DC.
Dramstad, W. E. et. al. 1996. Landscape Ecology: Principles in Landscape Architecture and Land Use Planning. Island Press.
Gunderson et al.. Eds. 1995. Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions. Columbia University Press. NY
Harrison, Robert P. Forests The Shadow of Civilization, Chicago U Chicago, Press 1992
Hawken, Paul. 1993. Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability. Harper Collins, NY.
Jacobs, Allan. Great Streets. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993.
Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped. Boston, MA: Bulfinch Press, 1991.
Nabhan, Gary Paul, Cultures of Habitat, Counterpoint, Washington, D.C., 1997
Riley, Ann L., Restoring Streams in Cities : A Guide for Planners, Policy Makers, and Citizens, Island Press, Washington, D.C., 1998.
Sanoff, Henry. Integrating Programming, Evaluation, and Participation in Design. Hong Kong: Avebury, 1992.
Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory. New York, Alfred A Knopf 1995
Thompson, George F. and Frederick R. Steiner, Ecological Design and Planning, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1996.
Stein, C.S. Towards New Towns for America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1957.
Walker P., and M. Simo.1996. The Invisible Garden: The Search for Modernism in the American Landscape. MIT Press. Cambridge
Zeisel, John. Inquiry by Design: Tools for Environment-Behavior Research. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
It is unreasonable for me to buy all of these books. I hope that my student status at SAIC will ease the financial burden since I know that some of these books exist in their library. I also happen to live in the city with the greatest, most expansive architecture and urban design bookstore in the country, Prairie Avenue bookshop. I’ll have to do some price comparing with Amazon before I put any money down. Only time will tell if I am, in fact, both eager and aggressive.
I got super duper promoted at work. The experience that I will gain from this new position is invaluable and it directly relates to the kind of work I want to do for the rest of my life. I would be a fool to pass on the offer. All of that being said, I feel a little weird about not applying to grad school this Winter. I’ve put so much thought into doing the process right and building my portfolio. And that work isn’t lost, it’s just on hold while I work on sustainable transportation issues in the city.
So, now that I have my sweet promotion and am no longer working 50+ hours a week, I am taking a vacation! Patrick and I are taking the Metra to Harvard and then riding our bikes to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. We have a cabin by the lake reserved for the weekend. Glory be.
Wow! UIC has an activist architecture concentration.
“The Activist Practice concentration provides students with the opportunity to make linkages among theory, practice, and social interests, while providing design assistance to Chicago area communities. Students in the Activist Practice concentration will study and engage in architectural research and practices that confront the status quo in support of social justice.”
They must have been reading my mind.
It’s been craft mania around my house lately. I’m working on some hyperbolic hats, tyvek bike panniers, upcycling sweaters into blankets, and making stencils in photoshop. Photoshop is really SLOW on my computer. I think this little iBook G4 needs some more RAM. I have plenty of hard drive space, so getting more RAM should speed things up, right? It’s agonizing to switch between programs, copy and paste big photos, etc. Laying out the portfolio in illustrator will be frustratingly slow as well unless I upgrade.
After talking to the admissions office at UIC, I decided not to re-take the GRE. I think I could hear the woman rolling her eyes over the phone when I asked about GRE scores. She stressed the same thing that every admissions guideline book and everyone on Archinect has: work on your portfolio. It’s safe to say that the portfolio is the most important piece of the application. Sounds good to me. Studying for the GRE is not life-enriching the way that making art is. Thinking about my portfolio and putting together photos of my work has made me see some emerging trends in everything I do. All of my pieces involve plants or recycled trash. Do you know of any website where I can post my portfolio for free?
The whole point of this blog is to keep my various projects focused. Here’s the next big project: Applying to Grad School! It’s a project that has been going on for some time, since I’ve been taking art classes to prepare my portfolio. For the next few months I will put most of my project energy into the Grad school application process.
Now it’s time for me to seriously take the GRE. I took the GRE during my last year at New College, but I didn’t prepare for it except reading over how the test is organized and scored. I’m scheduled to take the GRE at the end of October. I’ve got a little over two months to prepare. No big deal, the GRE isn’t that important for M. Arch. applicants anyway. However, me being the compulsive over-achiever that I am, I want to rip the GRE a new one and this is my chance.
So that I can keep all of this straight, here are the schools I’m applying to, their deadlines and programs:
UIC Feb. 1st Master’s in Architecture- Green Urbanism
IIT Jan 15th Master’s in Landscape Architecture
UC Berkeley Jan. 5th Master’s in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
SAIC Feb 1st Master’s in Architecture
MIT Dec. 15th Master’s in Architecture and Urbanism
RISD ? not yet posted Master’s in Landscape Architecture
Those last two are my dream schools, and the first three are my top choices. SAIC is kind of stuck in there just because it’s a good school and located in Chicago. UIC is definitely my #1 because I could get in-state tuition and it’s Architecture program is one of the best.
When October rolls around, I’m going to try to work less so that I can spend more time pulling my applications together. Whew. I can do this.
We ate at Think, an italian restaurant in Logan Square. We both had delicious arugula salads with dried apples and goat cheese. Man, people and their goat cheese….. I guess I’m not complaining… I’m glad it is so popular because I do love goat cheese. The restaurant wasn’t necessarily awesome. I know, I know. We are food snobs, and we have really high standards. But, if you are going to charge more than $20 for an entree and call yourself a “fine dining establishment”, it needs to be awesome. My dish was pretty tasty, even though it had strange sea creatures in it. Patrick’s dish was not very good. We won’t be going back to Think.
There are restaurants that you will go back to- no matter how expensive they are. We WILL be going back to avec. Holy toledo. That place was so amazing. I don’t think my taste-buds have been the same since.
I had a busy weekend. I went to the final show for the school of architecture at UIC. Oh, it was pretty mind blowing. I swooped in on my own after work and meticulously looked through EVERYTHING there. I was very impressed. They don’t have a landscape architecture program necessarily (they do have the green urbanism concentration), but the program has a wonderful theme of green/eco/urban/sustainability. You can see it in all of the student projects and from reading the facultys’ bios. They are a very cutting edge place, and not nearly as snobby as SAIC. Good lord. The open house for the master’s in architecture program there was obnoxious. I wanted to throw up after the 10th time they called one of their grad students a “wunderkind”. Oh well. Maybe I’ll end up going to grad school there and it will be awesome? It could happen.
Speaking of grad school….Getting my portfolio together is so daunting. For every 10 pieces I do, only one will make it into the portfolio. I suppose that if you can handle gettin in to Architecture school, you can handle being in Architecture school. They prerequisites are intense. I need a design portfolio and relevant professional experience in addition to all of the regular old letters of recommendation, GRE scores, etc. It’s an intense project just to apply. I welcome the challenge.
I have two job interviews this week. It’s so tricky to negotiate your time at work while trying to get a new job. Thank god I have sick time and vacation time. I can just say that I have a doctor’s appointment, and they don’t have to know anything more.
I volunteered at the girls rock! chicago benefit show at Quencher’s. I love Quencher’s. They have so much good beer, free popcorn, and it’s right by my house. What more could you ask for? Then I went dancing at tuman’s. I’m going to go to that place more often. It’s pretty spectacular.
I ate brunch at the hot spot- another super place in my neighborhood. I had eggs bendict with avocado and tomato in place of the bacon- freakin’ delicious!
