New VIEW Covers More Ground
New VIEW Covers More Ground
The LALH annual magazine, VIEW, landed on subscribers’ doorsteps in early July, and readers are already sending compliments. “SUPERLATIVE does not suffice,” a reader in Mississippi writes. “Best VIEW ever? Best VIEW yet?”This year’s issue not only contains more pages with elegant images and articles by practitioners as well as historians, it also covers the landscape from a higher altitude. Several articles offer a large-scale, transnational perspective on communities new and old, on a vast urban park system, on entire cities—planning, in a word.
Two new LALH books ground this issue’s planning theme: Community by Design, a study of the Olmsted firm’s impact on the Boston suburb of Brookline, and The Best Planned City in the World, a history of the Olmsted and Vaux park system in Buffalo. Both titles came out this year, prompting reflections on more contemporary trends and projects.
For instance, the New Urbanist town of Seaside, Florida, already offers practical lessons for planners, writes one of its creators, Andrés Duany. LALH author Christopher Vernon teases out the utopian ideas that inspired Walter and Marion Griffin’s plan for the capital city of Canberra, Australia, in the early twentieth century.
And Patrick M. Condon, a planner and landscape architect in British Columbia, offers a vision of the “streetcar city” of the future, anchored in the era before cars permanently changed the American landscape.
Click here to order a copy of the 2013 issue, or join LALH and receive VIEW as a membership benefit.
