Christophe Girot

Last year, when I wrote a forthcoming book on modern landscape design, one of the most helpful resources was Christophe Girot's The Course of Landscape Architecture, a large-format book that covered the subject from prehistory to the present. Though not exhaustive, Girot's critical takes on the projects in the book got me excited for this collection of essays edited by the Swiss landscape architect and professor with art historian Dora Imhof. The seventeen essays, composed into three sections (landscape reframed, landscape composed, landscape rethought), "look at the profession of landscape architecture as it reacts to new challenges posed by both societal and environmental change and considers new fields of action." It does this with some heavy-hitting contributors: James Corner, Adriaan Geuze, Girot himself, David Leatherbarrow, Saskia Sassen, Charles Waldheim, Kongjian Yu, and numerous others. It's a diverse collection that is deep and thought-provoking but will also, as the editors admit, "raise more questions than it will bring answers."… (meer)

In the middle of 2016, when I was writing a book on landscape design, I picked up a bunch of books on landscape architecture, most of them focusing on modern landscapes. This book by ETH professor Christophe Girot was one of the few I bought that spans centuries -- millennia even -- beyond our last. Girot wrote a very ambitious book that is clearly geared to students ("course" is in its title, after all) but should be appealing to professionals and others interested in landscape architecture. He tackles thousands of years of humans shaping the natural world in twelve roughly chronological yet thematic chapters, from "Roots" to "Topology." Each chapter has a consistent format, with Girot's text focused on the cultural aspects of landscape production; plenty of photos accompanied by engaging and critical captions; and a case study, often an unexpected subject, documented through photos as well as 3d modeling that depict how the landscape was manipulated. Therefore, the book can be read as one of these three strands (I found the captions most interesting), by intertwining them, or by focusing on a particular chapter. Whichever tactic, Girot's mix of history, analysis and criticism gives readers plenty of ammunition for reconsidering the cultural landscapes around them and even creating new ones.… (meer)