Laurie Olin

Artists and designers have recorded places, people, and life in drawings and sketchbooks for centuries. Over the past 50 years, Laurie Olin, one of America’s most distinguished landscape architects, has recorded aspects of life and the environment in Italy: its cities and countryside, streets and cafes, ancient ruins, art, architecture, people, villas, and gardens — civic and domestic, humble to grand, things of interested to his designer’s eye— taking the time to see carefully. Rome in its seasons, agriculture in Umbria and Tuscany, trees, food, and fountains, all are noted over the years in watercolour or pen and ink. Originally made in the personal pleasure of merely being there as well as self-education, this selection from many sketchbooks and drawings is accompanied with introductory notes and remarks for different regions including Rome, Turin, Venice, Tuscany, Umbria, Lazio, Campania, and Sicily.

The Greater Perfection, now with a new foreword by Francis H. Cabot’s daughter, tells the story behind the creation of Les Quatre Vents, one of the world’s most breathtaking gardens. Featured in the 2018 film The Gardener, Les Quatre Vents in Charlevoix County, Quebec, has been acclaimed as the most aesthetically satisfying and horticulturally exciting landscape experience in North America. This twenty-acre garden seamlessly combines traditional and novel elements into a splendid composition, adorned with unexpected touches and perfectly compatible with its natural surroundings. The Greater Perfection, first published in 2001, illustrates the delights, diversions, and surprises that await the garden’s visitors. Francis H. Cabot’s account of the challenges he faced in developing Les Quatre Vents reveals the fascinating process behind the creation of a world-class garden that has become a mecca for horticultural enthusiasts around the globe. Winner of the 2003 Annual Literature Award of the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries and featuring stunning full-color images by five leading garden photographers, The Greater Perfection is one of the most beautiful books on gardens to appear in years. This new printing includes a foreword by Marianne Cabot Welch, Cabot’s daughter, that further contextualizes the gardens and explores how a place rooted in the past can confront the future.

One of the most renowned landscape architects in practice today, Laurie Olin has created designs for the grounds of the Washington Monument, the National Gallery of Art Sculpture Garden, and Bryant Park in New York City. His recent projects include the award-winning landscape for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, Apple Park in Cupertino, and Simon and Helen Director Park in Portland, Oregon. All these and many more iconic works were realized under the auspices of OLIN, the landscape architectural firm he cofounded in 1976. Olin is also a prolific writer, and in this volume a selection of his published work has been assembled for the first time. The collection comprises articles, lectures, and essays spanning a wide array of subjects--from horticulture and education to urban history. Olin's musings on his own creative development, the evolving state of the profession of landscape architecture, and many other topics will interest a wide range of readers. As a young man, Olin studied civil engineering at the University of Alaska and earned a degree in architecture from the University of Washington, where Richard Haag stimulated his interest in landscape and the poet Theodore Roethke encouraged his literary skills. Through a long and distinguished career, he has enlivened the field with his humanistic perspective and his multivalent approach to urban design. The author of several books, including, most recently, France Sketchbooks: The Travel Sketchbooks of Artists and Designers (2020) and Be Seated (2018), Olin is among the profession's most influential voices. A Fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Society of Landscape Architects, he is a recipient of the 1998 Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the 2011 American Society of Landscape Architects Medal. In 2012 Olin received the National Medal of Arts--the highest lifetime achievement award given to an artist by the president.

For centuries artists and designers have recorded places, people, and life in travel sketchbooks. Over a period of fifty years, Laurie Olin, one of America's most distinguished landscape architects, has recorded aspects of France: its cities and countryside, streets and cafés, ancient ruins, vineyards, and parks - from humble to grand, things that interested his designer's eye - taking the time to see things carefully. Paris in its seasons, agriculture in Provence and Bordeaux, trees, dogs, and fountains, all are noted over the years in watercolour or pen and ink. Originally intended for the pleasure of merely being there as well as self-education, this personal selection from his many sketchbooks is accompanied by transcriptions of notes and observations, along with introductory remarks for the different regions included: Paris, Haute Loire, Provence, Haute Provence, Normandy, Aquitaine, and Entre des Meures.

Richard Haag is best known for his rehabilitation of Gas Works Park in Seattle and for a series of remarkable gardens at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island. He reshaped the field of landscape architecture as a designer, teacher, and activist. In 1964, Haag founded the landscape architecture department at the University of Washington, and his innovative work contributed to the increasingly significant design approach known as urban ecological design, which encourages thinking beyond the boundaries of gardens and parks to consider the broader roles that landscapes play within urban ecosystems, such as storm water drainage and wildlife habitat.Gas Works Park is studied in every survey of twentieth-century landscape architecture as a modern work that challenged the tenets of modernism by engaging a toxic site and celebrating an industrial past. Haag's work with ecologists and soil scientists in his landscape remediation and reclamation projects opened new areas of inquiry into the adaptive reuse of post-industrial sites. Thaïsa Way places Haag's work within the context of changes in the practice of landscape architecture over the past five decades in the Pacific Northwest and nationally. The book should be of interest to specialists as well as to readers who are interested in the changes in urban landscapes inspired by Haag's work.Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUBeOCA8-kQ

Laurie Olin shares his insights into seemingly ordinary elements of these places, and how they intersect with our individual lives and experiences. An expert treatise on a niche topic, Olin's analysis of the importance of public seating goes beyond their aesthetic or comfort value. He explores how public seating influences our social conduct, our role as citizens, and our establishment of place and community.

Richard Haag is best known for his rehabilitation of Gas Works Park in Seattle and for a series of remarkable gardens at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island. He reshaped the field of landscape architecture as a designer, teacher, and activist. In 1964, Haag founded the landscape architecture department at the University of Washington, and his innovative work contributed to the increasingly significant design approach known as urban ecological design, which encourages thinking beyond the boundaries of gardens and parks to consider the broader roles that landscapes play within urban ecosystems, such as storm water drainage and wildlife habitat.Gas Works Park is studied in every survey of twentieth-century landscape architecture as a modern work that challenged the tenets of modernism by engaging a toxic site and celebrating an industrial past. Haag's work with ecologists and soil scientists in his landscape remediation and reclamation projects opened new areas of inquiry into the adaptive reuse of post-industrial sites. Thaïsa Way places Haag's work within the context of changes in the practice of landscape architecture over the past five decades in the Pacific Northwest and nationally. The book should be of interest to specialists as well as to readers who are interested in the changes in urban landscapes inspired by Haag's work.Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUBeOCA8-kQ

The Miami estate of Vizcaya, like its palatial contemporaries Biltmore and San Simeon, represents an achievement of the Gilded Age, when country houses and their gardens were a conspicuous measure of personal wealth and power. In Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, a celebrated architecture critic and writer and an award-winning landscape architect explore the little-known story of Vizcaya, an extraordinary national treasure. Witold Rybczynski and Laurie Olin use a rich collection of illustrations, historic photographs, and narrative to document the creation of this stunning house and landscape. Vizcaya was completed in 1916 as the winter retreat of Chicago industrialist James Deering. The cosmopolitan bachelor, who chose Miami for its warm climate, enlisted the guidance of artist Paul Chalfin, with whom he traveled throughout Italy to survey houses and gardens. With the assistance of architect F. Burrall Hoffman, Jr., and garden designer Diego Suarez, the 180-acre site on Biscayne Bay was transformed into a grand estate, complete with lagoons, canals, citrus groves, a farm village, a yacht harbor, and a 40-room Baroque mansion. The lure of this architectural and landscape masterpiece, named for a Spanish Basque province, is undeniable. John Singer Sargent planned a short visit in 1917 but stayed for several months, producing an inspired series of watercolors, many of which are reproduced here for the first time. The book is further enriched by archival material and by the color images of noted photographer Steven Brooke, paying homage to Vizcaya as a lens through which readers learn about architecture, landscape and garden design, interior decoration, and art.

The gardens and estate of La Foce constitute one of the most important and best kept early twentieth-century gardens in Italy. Amid 3,500 acres of farmland in the countryside near Pienza, with sweeping views of the Tuscan landscape, La Foce was the childhood dream garden of the late writer Marchesa Iris Origo. Passionate about the order and symmetry of Florentine gardens, Origo and her husband, Antonio, purchased the dilapidated villa in 1924, soliciting the help of English architect and family friend Cecil Pinsent to reawaken the natural magic of the property. Pinsent designed the structure of simple, elegant, box-edged beds and green enclosures that give shape to the Origos' shrubs, perennials, and vines, and created a garden of soaring cypress walks, native cyclamen, lawns, and wildflower meadows. It is, by all accounts, a remarkable achievement. Today the garden is a place of unusual and striking beauty, a green oasis in the barren Siena countryside. Situated in the Val d'Orcia, a wide valley in southeastern Tuscany that seems to exist on a larger, wilder scale than the rest of the Tuscan landscape, it is run by Benedetta and Donata Origo, and is open to the public one day a week. La Foce: A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany is a contemplative, multifaceted study of the house, gardens, and estate of La Foce. It includes a historical essay and memoir by the daughter of La Foce's creators, Antonio and Iris Origo, along with photographs, sketches, and a critical analysis of the gardens. The volume not only focuses on the beauty of the gardens themselves and their indisputable merit as fascinating works of landscape architecture but also sees them within the context of both the larger Tuscan topography and the wider landscape of geography and history. The book will be a delight to armchair travelers, trade and landscape architects, gardeners, and those interested in Tuscan culture.

In 1930, the Olmsted Brothers and Harland Bartholomew & Associates submitted a report, "Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region", to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. After a day or two of coverage in the newspapers, the report dropped from sight. The plan set out a system of parks and parkways, children's playgrounds, and public beaches. It is a model of ambitious, intelligent, sensitive planning commissioned at a time when land was available, if only the city planners had had the fortitude and vision to act on its recommendations. "Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches" has become a highly valued but difficult-to-find document. In this book, Greg Hise and William Deverell examine the reasons it was called for, analyze why it failed, and open a discussion about the future of urban public space. In addition to their introduction and a facsimile reproduction of the report, Eden by Design includes a dialogue between Hise, Deverell, and widely admired landscape architect Laurie Olin that illuminates the significance of the Olmsted-Bartholomew report and situates it in the history of American landscape planning.