Spring Special: Modern Landscapes: Transition & Transformation – Three Volume Collection

This award-winning three-volume collection addresses the design/historic preservation divide, recognizing that while change is inevitable, significant works of landscape architecture can be transformed with their design integrity intact. Each book focuses on an important midcentury Modernist project(s), chronicling the planning and design motivations behind the recent work and placing it in its historical context.  

The first volume in the series, Lawrence Halprin's Skyline Park, was written by Ann Komara, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and co-director of the Urban Design Program at the University of Colorado at Denver. The book showcases Halprin’s once acclaimed urban renewal effort for downtown Denver in the 1970s.  

In the second volume, Mellon Square: Discovering a Modern Masterpiece, author Susan M. Rademacher, Parks Curator of the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy, chronicles the planning and design motivations behind the development of Pittsburgh’s Mellon Square, the first Modernist Garden Plaza built over a parking structure in the U.S.  

Finally, Central Park’s Adventure-Style Playgrounds, written by Marie Warsh, director of preservation planning with the Central Park Conservancy, is the third and final volume in this series. This most recent volume documents the design trends, social motivations, and public engagement that made Central Park a kind of laboratory for playground design in the 1960s and 1970s. All three volumes were edited by Charles A. Birnbaum and published by Princeton Press and LSU Press. The first two volumes were the recipient of an ASLA Honor Award in Research and Communications in 2015.

Price: $49.95 plus shipping