This extensive work brings together a quarter century of the work of Marc Treib, taking in the cultural meaning of the designed landscape, the lives and work of the leading names in the field and a remarkable geographical and temporal range.

Marc Treib

These collected works represent twenty-five years of study of the designed landscape which the author here takes to include gardens, cemeteries, plazas and other shared spaces. Asking essential questions about the nature of order and its perception, this book includes in its impressive scope analyses of both historic and modern works with a geographical distribution that extends across Europe, Asia and North America. With unique depth in many areas of study, Treib brings his expertise to bear on a range of inter-related and mutually influential issues within the subject, taking in an assessment of the lives and contributions of a number of leading figures in the field, the contents of a landscape and the meanings ascribed to it, and a theoretical formulation of the ideas from which or by which landscape architecture is produced.

Introduction 1. Reduction, Elaboration and Yugen: The Garden of Saiho-ji (1989) 2. Traces Upon the Land: The Formalistic Landscape (1979) 3. Inflected Landscapes (1984) 4. The Presence of Absence: Places by Extraction (1987) 5. Formal Problems (1998) 6. Must Landscapes Mean? Approaches to Significance in Recent Landscape Architecture (1995) 7. The Content of Landscape Form [The Limits of Formalism] (2001) 8. Evocative Parallels: Japan and Postwar American Landscape Design (2002) 9. The Measure of Wisdom: John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1996) 10. Looking Forward to Nature: Garretty Eckbo, an Appreciation (2000) 11. Postulating a Post-Modern Landscape (1985) 12. Settings and Stray Paths (1998) Afterword