Julia Czerniak

Many internationally known landscape architecture and architecture firms—including SnØhetta, BIG, Scape, and Weiss/Manfredi—have originated from design-competition wins. The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture, written by award-winning landscape architecture educators Katya Crawford and Kathleen Kambic, is the first book devoted to helping professional and academic design studios comprehensively plan for successful entries. Divided into five sections, the book provides an overview of the history and development of modern design competitions; includes interviews with world-renowned architects and designers, including Julie Bargman, Henri Bava, Elaine Molinar, Michelle Delk, and Kate Orff; offers a pedagogical approach to competition studio as part of a college curriculum; serves as a guide for entering design competitions; showcases award-winning designs from landscape architecture faculty and students and subsequent built projects from landscape architecture practitioners; reflects on future directions of landscape architecture design competitions; and provides resources for finding competitions. A wealth of lively graphics, including site plans, sketches, and color photographs, accompany the text. Crawford and Kambic's history and analysis of the modern landscape architecture design competition shines a spotlight on the critical role these events play for practitioners, educators, and students and highlights how they shape and give identity to the cities in which we live.

Mise-en-Scène is an immersive exploration of the social lives of urban landscapes - the actors and actions that compose the daily theatre of urban life. Conceived as a unique collaboration between an urbanist, Chris Reed, and a photographer, Mike Belleme, the book combines photo essays, original maps and drawings, newly commissioned essays, excerpts from historical writings, and interviews with residents. The result is a rigorous and artful examination of the social, cultural, environmental, and economic challenges of life in American cities today. Richly illustrated and designed to appeal to a broad audience of architects, designers, photographers, and general public interested in the contemporary city, the book is centred around seven visual case studies depicting life in seven American cities: Los Angeles, Galveston, St. Louis, Green Bay, Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Boston. Each case study combines black-and-white photography - taken from street level, often in intimate detail - with annotations and drawings that highlight urban forms. An inherent interconnectedness across geographies, scales, and situations emerges throughout the book. Reed and Belleme demonstrate how a celebratory moment can be felt equally in Green Bay’s compact downtown or amidst the chaos and sprawl of Los Angeles, and how while the tensions present in the redevelopment of previously inundated waterfronts in Boston or Galveston can be understood in parallel with an urgent set of conversations on race and identity in St. Louis. Six essays by a diverse and interdisciplinary group of contributors prompt further reflection on the visual case studies. Chris Reed writes on the social lives of cities, designer Sara Zewde on the image of the city, artist De Nichols about social equity and identity, ecologist Nina-Marie Lister on the climate imperative, curator Mimi Zeiger on cities and culture, and architect Julia Czerniak on design practice. Through this thoughtful exploration of everyday moments and the urbanism that supports them, Reed and Belleme present new opportunities for creating direct interaction between citizens and propose an ecological and social focus for city-building around a concept of common ground.