Book description
"Twenty-eight years ago I went to England for a three-month
visit and rest. What I found changed my life."
So begins this memoir by one of America's best-known landscape
architects, Laurie Olin. Raised in a frontier town in Alaska, trained
in Seattle and New York, Olin found himself dissatisfied with his job
as an urban architect and accepted an invitation to England to take a
respite from work. What he found, in abundance, was the serendipity of
a human environment built over time to respond to the land's own
character and to the people who lived and worked there. For Olin, the
English countryside was a palimpsest of the most eloquent and moving
sort, yet whose manifestation was of ordinary buildings meant to
shelter their inhabitants and further their work.
With evocative language and exquisite line drawings, the author
takes us back to his introduction to the scenes of English country
towns, their ancient universities, meandering waterways, and dramatic
cloudscapes racing in from the Atlantic. He limns the geologic
histories found within the rock, the near-forgotten histories of
place-names, and the recent histories of train lines and auto routes.
Comparing the growth of building in the English countryside, Olin
draws some sobering conclusions about our modern lifestyle and its
increasing separation from the landscape.
As much a plea for saving the modern American landscape as it is
a passionate exploration of what makes the English landscape so
characteristically English, Across the Open Field is "an
affectionate ramble through real places of lasting worth."
"These essays and the beautiful line drawings that illustrate
this sumptuous work are a richly satisfying entity. . . . Across the
open Field bids fair to become a classic."-Journal of the New
England Garden History Society
Laurie Olin is Principal of Olin Partnership and Practice Professor
of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of
Pennsylvania. In addition to his extensive work on landscape projects,
including Bryant Park in New York City and the Getty Center Gardens in
Los Angeles, Olin has written frequently on the history and theory of
landscape architecture for various professional journals, for which he
won the Bradford Williams Medal in 1991. He is a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences and is an Honorary Member of the American
Institute of Architects. He is a coauthor of La Foce: A Garden and
Landscape in Tuscany and Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, also
published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
