Charles Waldheim Boeken

At a time when many of the past decades’ urban renewal projects are facing the wrecking ball, Detroit’s Lafayette Park continues to be a model of urban livability. This in-depth look at the project explores why. Amid the oppressive urban blight of post-World War II Detroit, the Lafayette Park project emerged as a vibrant point of optimism and viability. Planned by Ludwig Hilberseimer, with concrete, glass, and steel buildings designed by Mies van der Rohe, and a park and gardens designed by Alfred Caldwell, this series of subsidized high- and low-rise apartments remains a superb example of an integrated community a half-century after its construction. This latest volume in the CASE series published in collaboration with the Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design examines an often-overlooked paragon of modern architecture’s highest goals. Today, while public housing and other urban renewal projects are being abandoned and even torn down, this volume discusses not only the significance of Lafayette Park’s singular achievement, but also its relevance to the continuing debates about the status of public housing in the contemporary city.

A definitive intellectual history of landscape urbanismIt has become conventional to think of urbanism and landscape as opposing one another-or to think of landscape as merely providing temporary relief from urban life as shaped by buildings and infrastructure. But, driven in part by environmental concerns, landscape has recently emerged as a model and medium for the city, with some theorists arguing that landscape architects are the urbanists of our age. In Landscape as Urbanism, one of the field's pioneers presents a powerful case for rethinking the city through landscape

With populations decentralizing and cities sprawling ever-outward, twenty-first-century urban planners are challenged by the need to organize not just people but space itself. Hence a new architectural discourse has landscape urbanism. In The Landscape Urbanism Reader Charles Waldheim who is at the forefront of this new movement has assembled the definitive collection of essays by many of the field's top practitioners. Fourteen essays written by leading figures across a range of disciplines and from around the world including James Corner, Linda Pollak, Alan Berger, Pierre B langer, Julia Czerniak, and more capture the origins, the contemporary milieu, and the aspirations of this relatively new field. The Landscape Urbanism Reader is an inspiring signal to the future of city making as well as an indispensable reference for students, teachers, architects, and urban planners.

Material gathered from an exhibition at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.