Title: New Landscape Design Author: Robert Holden Publisher: Architectural Press, 2003 Format: Hardcover (cloth), 192 pages Price: $49.99 Website: www.architecturalpress.com Robert Holden, a landscape architect based in London, and head of the professional postgraduate programs at the University of Greenwich, has put together a highly visual and intelligently written book focusing mostly on landscape design since 1995. The book is organized around five theme designs: postindustrial; pattern-making; minimalism; allegory and meaning; and ecological diversity. The author has worked for large practices in England, but has also worked on projects in Spain, the Middle East, France and The Netherlands. In his introduction, he notes that he has worked on designs for projects ?EUR??,,????'??for up to 10 years without a tree being planted or a hole being dug.?EUR??,,????'?? Some projects, he notes, can ?EUR??,,????'??involve lifelong commitment.?EUR??,,????'?? He includes such projects in this book, what he calls a Gesamtkunstwerk (a total work of art), made possible only by patronage on an ?EUR??,,????'??almost eighteenth-century scale.?EUR??,,????'?? While the author asserts the book is not about garden design, it does include considerable green projects: Fernando Caruncho?EUR??,,????'???s landscape garden of cypress and olive trees enclosed by wheat fields in Ampurdan, Catalonia, Spain; parks in Berlin and Val de Loire, France; gardens within the Tokyo National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation; park, wetland, wood, river and garden elements at Insel Hombroich in Neuss, Germany; the Campus Green in Cincinnati; the Barcelona Botanic Garden; a state park in Aquacalientes, Mexico; the greening of Denmark?EUR??,,????'???s main island, Zealand; a garden at the Water Pollution Control Laboratory in Portland, Oregon; and four green designs in the U.K.: the National Botanic Garden, Wales; the Earth Centre in Yorkshire; the ?EUR??,,????'??global garden?EUR??,,????'?? in Cornwall; and the University of Nottingham Jubilee Campus. Even when the focus is on urban design, many green elements are present. The urban designs include the market place and water steps in Hesse, Germany; the Sony Complex in Berlin; the Kitagata Apartments in Japan; the Agnes Katz Plaza in Pittsburgh; government offices in Japan; NTT Headquarters (Japan); quays in Amsterdam; an impossibly picturesque public square in Copenhagen (Radhusplads); a railway station in The Netherlands; the Jewish Museum in Berlin; the conversion of a historic Liverpool match factory into business units; and the redevelopment of a Berlin plaza. There are unique projects: an open air museum in Greece that was the source of marble quarried for the Parthenon; reclamation of phosphate mined desert land in Israel; converting a grotesquely ugly Berlin freight yard into a lovely public area; the Northam Mulark Aboriginal Community Settlement Project in Western Australia; and the Garden of Australian Dreams (imagine a modern artistic rendering of the ?EUR??,,????'??essence?EUR??,,????'?? of the land down under in a courtyard, museum buildings and a lake). Mr. Holden explains to readers that he has ?EUR??,,????'??kept away from the forms of corporate design that are the norm in Anglo-Saxon countries.?EUR??,,????'?? He inveighs against the tendency in some countries to compartmentalize and narrowly define landscape architecture, as opposed to a more ?EUR??,,????'??all-embracing activity, part art form, part scientific, part totally practical and part political.?EUR??,,????'?? The book is a treat for the eyes. You will see sights never before seen, unless you?EUR??,,????'???ve been to Hedehusene on Zealand Island, Denmark. Here, you will see two ?EUR??,,????'??green?EUR??,,????'?? outhouses in a parking area near the slopes of a ski mountain, decked out with turf roofs and walls.