Gareth Doherty

Mohsen Mostafavi

Ecological urbanism

Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) remains one of the leading landscape architects ever. The significance of his landscape design lies in his use of abstract shapes that rarely employ symmetry, and his use of tropical, mainly Brazilian, flora. His distinctive and widely acclaimed work has been featured and referenced in numerous sources, yet few of Burle Marx's own words have been published. This book of previously unpublished lectures fills this void. The lectures, delivered on international speaking tours, address topics such as: "The Garden as an Art in Living," "Gardens and Ecology," and "The Problem of Garden Lighting." Their timely publication helps shed light on Burle Marx's distinctive style and ethos of landscape as a way of life.

Landscape as Art and Urbanism

Roberto Burle Marx Lectures

Color is a ubiquitous yet essential part of the city, creating and shaping urban form. Who can forget the whites of modernist Brasilia? The greens of historic Cairo? The rosy reds of Petra? The terracottas of South America’s shantytowns? The color cacophonies of Times Square and Shinjuku? Colors have a presence over and beyond the objects—buildings, spaces, billboards, artifacts, and people—that make up the city. Not only does color give meaning to cities, cities give meaning to color. Whether carefully coordinated, clashing, or an expression of materials, color is a powerful cultural, economic, and political force in cities. Yet discussions on the city do not usually focus much on color, perhaps because urban colors are too often understood as being beyond any one authority or taste, or are simply dismissed as cosmetic, naïve, or intangible. Volume 3 of New Geographies brings together artists and designers, anthropologists, geographers, historians, and philosophers with the aim of challenging the status quo and exploring the potency, the interaction, and the neglected design possibilities of color at the scale of the city.

Urbanisms of Color

"This highly innovative book is a multidisciplinary study of green and its significance from multiple perspectives: aesthetic, architectural, environmental, political, and social. It is centered on the Kingdom of Bahrain, the smallest and greenest of the Arab states in the Persian Gulf, where green has a long and deep history appearing cooling, productive, and prosperous--and a radical contrast to the hot, hostile desert. As is the case with cities around the world, green is often celebrated as a counter to gray urban environments, yet green has not always been good for cities. To have the color green manifested in arid environments is often in direct conflict with 'green' from an environmental point of view; this paradox is at the heart of the book. Given the resources required to maintain green in arid areas, including cities, the provision of green often bears significant environmental costs. In arid environments such as Bahrain, this contradiction becomes extreme and even unsustainable. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Gareth Doherty explores the landscapes of Bahrain where green represents a plethora of implicit human values and lives in dialectical tension with other culturally and environmentally significant colors and hues. The book's six chapters focus on: Blue, Red, Date-palm Green, Grass Green, Beige, and White. Implicit in his book is the argument that concepts of color and object are mutually defining and thus a discussion about green becomes a discussion about the creation of space and place"--Provided by publisher.

Gareth Doherty

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