Envisioning Landscapes: The Transformative Environments of OJB

Parks designed by the Office of James Burnett, a landscape architecture firm, take center stage in this beautiful monograph. Founded in 1989, the firm’s philosophy, as critic Christopher Hawthorne writes in his foreword, is that “a landscape project in contemporary America begins with the need to transform or repair.” It is also, writes Peter Walker, “perhaps the most difficult of the environmental arts because it relies on living material, and is, therefore, dependent on the designer’s power of prediction.” A wide range of the firm’s projects are featured: in Texas, there’s Dallas’s Klyde Warren Park, a deck park built over one of the city’s busiest freeways; and Houston’s Levy Park with its 150-foot-long tree house. Three projects in Oklahoma City combine streetlights, botanical gardens, and a performance pavilion, and in Palm Springs, Calif., the firm collaborated with architect Frederick Fisher to restore the Annenberg family compound. Accompanying each of the highlighted projects are lists of plantings used and sustainability features integrated, making the compendium useful as a teaching tool as well as a beautiful art book. For fans of green architecture, this is a no-brainer. (Sept.)