Projective Ecologies
Edited by Chris Reed and Nina-Marie Lister. Actar and Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2014.

A Natural History of English Gardening: 1650 to 1800
By Mark Laird. The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2015.
It?s easy to think of the design professions as never changing in their scope and in their responsibilities, but two recent books put that timelessness in question.
The first is an anthology based on a research initiative from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and its Department of Landscape Architecture. Projective Ecologies examines the impact ecological studies are having on the design professions. It includes contributions from many prominent practitioners and academics such as Chris Reed, Ryerson associate professor Nina-Marie Lister, James Corner, Sanford Kwinter and Charles Waldheim. Much of their research reveals how we define terms such as ecology, cultural landscape and landscape architect. There is a general unease about how these terms are used in the evolving field of landscape architecture?a profession that itself questions both the terms ?landscape? and ?architect.? Exploring these shifts in meaning, Kwinter comments that even ?ecology,? deriving from Alexander von Humboldt?s writing in the early 19th century, has never been concretely defined.
While the essays tend to be written in a densely academic style, they are thought-provoking. Using the lens of theory, Projective Ecologies looks at the possible futures and...