Hocker: 2005–2020 Landscapes

Thompson (Texas Made/Texas Modern) highlights the collaborative nature of the Hocker landscape design firm in this striking showcase of work blending nature and architecture, sustainable materials, and a contemporary aesthetic. Handsomely illustrated with bold color photography, site drawings, and plans, the arrangement reveals founder David Hocker’s fascination with “the spaces in between, where the building comes alive outside its edge,” creating “the cohesive link between architecture and site.” Hocker employs contemporary abstract design to help bring vintage architecture alive using textural elements like stone, concrete, wood, and steel, such as in the Power Station, a reclaimed Dallas streetcar substation. Hocker’s design elements bring landscapes into harmony with the buildings they surround, and often uses materials to entwine with the environment over time, such as at the Cistercian Abbey, housing a private boys’ school founded by monks in Irving, Tex., where plantings grow to fringe the structure. The firm’s work, Thompson writes, develops “new opportunities to enjoy the landscape” and a fresh look at older properties, as with Forty Five Ten’s McKinney Avenue property in Dallas, where relocation allowed for urban redesign. The volume focuses on craft, and the mechanics of how these structures are made and experienced. This stylish compendium will stand out on the coffee tables and shelves of design-minded readers (Sept.)