The Inspired Landscape: Twenty-One Leading Landscape Architects Explore the Creative Process by Susan Cohen
Timber Press, 2015
Hardcover, 268 pages

The Making of Place: Modern and Contemporary Gardens by John Dixon Hunt
Reaktion Books, 2015
Hardcover, 288 pages

Recently I received review copies of a couple books on landscape architecture: one geared to contemporary practices and the other an overview of modern and contemporary gardens. It seems appropriate to review these together, though I can't place one above the other ? both are highly recommended.

Susan Cohen is a landscape architect based in Greenwich, Connecticut, and coordinator of the Landscape Design Program at the New York Botanical Garden; the former has given her firsthand experience with the process of designing and realizing landscape designs, while the latter has exposed her to many of the biggest names in the profession. Both inform her book The Inspired Landscape, which collects 22 projects by 21 landscape architects to, as the subtitle makes clear, "explore the creative process" of designing landscapes. Each architect's work is explored through one case study, but in the case of Kongjian Yu of China's Turenscape, Cohen "could not resist using two projects that were very different from each other but both inspired by his farming childhood," as she told me in a short interview at World-Architects.
The list of architects is an impressive one: James Burnett, Gilles Clément, Gary Hil...