Form and Fabric in Landscape Architecture: A Visual Introduction


However, in many vegetated and grassy landscapes, decisions must be made on how to locate paths in relation to spaces. Paths are commonly experienced as edges and boundaries which define space. The landscape architect does not consider the design of paths, spaces and edges separately but as integrated wholes see the sections on Edges, p. Paths as spaces Wide paths — particularly urban streets and promenades — are potentially more than just places of movement and can therefore be designed as spaces that facilitate static o Paths activities.

Busy urban streets are places for sitting, buying selling and performance. Long linear spaces can be designed to function simultaneously as paths and spaces. Existing site forms and uses, geometry, metaphor, symbolism, archetype, vernacular and historic paradigms can all be used to inspire and generate path form. Path forms can also be generated through narrative telling a story through design forms which may draw heavily on metaphor and symbolism.

Axial and meandering path forms thus have different use, character and associations and provide distinct experiences. Path forms strongly influence the character and form of spaces and may often be the dominant form generators for a site. There are many path form variations that combine qualities of the meander and the axis. Designers may also deliberately juxtapose and combine axial and meandering forms for design purposes.

The experience of walking a path can be enlivened and made 92 comfortable for example by controlling views, opening and closing glimpses, protecting from the elements and providing refuge along one edge. A significant dimension of landscape architecture is the opportunity for inventive and subtle topographic path design. As with topographic space design, landscape architects must decide on how much to intervene and change existing topography in path design.

Paths may make small interventions in natural topography and accommodate the lie of the land or require dramatic remodelling of the existing landform. Design decisions are informed by functional and aesthetic considerations already discussed see pp. Over the following pages, examples of topographic path forms are explored that offer distinct landscape experiences.

A ledge path may be as simple as a single step up from the space it surrounds, or as dramatic as a cliff-hugging route. Ledge paths are often desirable or 94 necessary next to seas, rivers, lakes and canals, enabling walks with prospect of water or fishing See also the section on Water paths, p. Pavements with kerbs are ledge paths that protect users from vehicles.

Ledge paths can enclose spaces. Cuttings Cuttings are paths enclosed by landform or retaining walls on both sides. They provide distinct landscape experiences for symbolic, spatial and microclimatic reasons. The microclimate is often still and silent; damp and cool if deep and vegetated; warm and sunny if o Topographic paths o Paths shallow. As hidden places, cuttings encourage exploration but can also be places of fear. In their use, pleasure is derived from the prospect they allow in all directions and the feeling of exposure to wind, sky and sometimes water. Ridge paths can enclose and define space.

Ridge path networks are developed on and are distinctive to wetland landscapes. The constraints of topography offer design opportunities for distinctive journey sequences. Zig-zag paths can integrate stopping platforms for rest and prospect. The potential frustration of repeatedly moving back and forward can be avoided by developing narrative sequences for the path. Ramps should be fully integrated in designs to enable full access to all.

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Steep staircases can be barriers to access but equally can be exciting landscape experiences, depending on context. Landings within staircases are 98 always desirable even in short ones, and vital in long staircases where space allows. Landings and staircases are often threshold spaces see the section on Topographic thresholds, p. Vegetation can be used for surface, and for vertical and overhead enclosure of paths. In this section, examples of paths enclosed in these three planes are explored. The presence of vegetation is reason enough alone for walking; to smell plants and touch leaves, to move from dappled shade to sunlight or be amid the rustle of dry grasses.

Vegetated paths provide highly sensory experiences. In addition, vegetation can play important structural and spatial roles forming paths by emphasising direction, thus separating or integrating paths with adjacent spaces. Roads in particular can be integrated into rural and urban contexts, and environmental effects can be mitigated with vegetation. Vegetation can also play way-marking, sequential, rhythmic and focal roles in paths. Its popularity may be due to the many functions that avenues can perform.

They shade, orient people by emphasising axis, provide transitional edges between road and buildings and can mediate between large and human scales. They provide habitats and play environmental roles in narrow urban spaces. Older avenues give a sense of place and time. Historically and in rural places, avenues also have economic and agricultural functions.

Forest paths Forest paths provide distinctive walking experiences. Dark and gloomy in cloudy weather or animated and dappled in sunlight, forest paths are dynamic. Ground becomes soft, mossy and damp. These paths are strangely silent. As they are walked, tree trunks orbit, slide and o Vegetation paths o Paths migrate from view, grouping behind each other like figures in a crowd. Like cutting paths they provide contrasting walking experiences by enabling people to move between light and dark, warmth and cool, openness and enclosure.

Like avenues, hedges reinforce the direction of paths but if a path curves, it can also obscure a destination. Depending on context, hidden destinations in hedged walks can be threatening or engaging through mystery and seclusion. In less intensely used recreational places it is always desirable if management resources are available and climate allows. Paths can be created simply through grassland by using different mowing regimes. In this section, surfaces as well as enclosing structures are briefly illustrated. The diversity of approaches to landscape and urban design of streets goes beyond the scope of this book.

They are included here as an important path type in cities, with distinct design potential and character. The diversity of approaches to designing the built surface of paths is beyond the scope of this book.

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However, they can also become o Built paths o Paths barriers to many users, especially if they are the only means to travel through or to a place. Lightness through transparency and visually open structures are desirable in temperate climates, while density of structure to provide shade is an important consideration in hot environments. Covered walks are meaningless additions to landscape unless they connect places of destination. Landscape architecture involves the design of linear waterbodies and the design of pathways adjacent to natural or constructed waterbodies.

The following pages briefly illustrate the design considerations and potential of these water paths. Waterside paths are vibrant edge places. They require strong integration with thresholds, edges and sequenced stopping spaces along the path. Paths and people can conflict with wildlife.

Paths can be organised to protect vulnerable landscapes by directing people around sensitive places or over water and back again. Rivers and canals in urban environments o Water paths o Paths Rivers, canals and river corridors act as paths in cities for transport and travel for pleasure and potentially as ecological corridors. They are fundamentally important parts of the urban environment. Considering fully their environmental benefits and problems and recreational potential and implications for design is not possible here. In design they are often therefore integrated with pathways.

Water enhances the pleasure of walking by animating a route. The experience of sequence, variation, repetition and incident are all important qualities in linear waterbodies. Edges 4 In this section, edges are explored as distinct physical components of landscape and also as spatial concepts in design. Edges are interlocking forms or places of transition that enclose and separate different spaces. Thinking about edges as physical and conceptual entities within landscapes provides the opportunity to be integrative, complex, rich and subtle in the design of spatial transitions.

Edges are also considered important spatial concepts because of their potential to support or detract from social activity in public places. The use of topography, vegetation, structures and water to create edges is illustrated.

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They are also important because, as spatial components, they are often neglected or ignored o Edges by designers. In public spaces depending on the cultural context , people frequently choose to sit, wait or occupy edges of spaces rather than positioning themselves more centrally. Designers can also observe this for themselves.

Form and fabric in landscape architecture : a visual introduction

Landscape architecture involves facilitating potential social activities especially sitting with appropriate physical forms, elements and relationships for edges. The design of this physical interface can be thought of as the dual task of architect and landscape architect. Too often architect and landscape architect fail to work together creatively to realise the design potential for this transitional space. For aesthetic and social reasons, strong physical connections between indoors and outdoors — where landscape penetrates buildings and interiors or facades project out into landscape — are often desirable.

Indeed, ownership could be described as the single most influential factor in determining the physical form of landscape spaces. The landscape architect is therefore often faced with the task of indicating the edges of public and private space with form. Transitional edges between public and private landscapes are important for social as well as aesthetic reasons, particularly in residential environments, and designers need to respond to this by providing for the distinct functions of these places.

Ecotones In natural environments, vegetation, soils, climate and topography combine to form distinct landscape types, patterns and habitats. These change over time and space and therefore do not have abrupt physical edges but instead are bound by transitional zones where one landscape gradually becomes another. It is important for designers to understand these ecotones for aesthetic and environmental reasons. They provide visual as well as ecological richness, dynamism and complexity for example in woodland edges or the gradient of a beach.

Cultural meanings of words influence the meanings and experience of landscape forms and vice versa, and edges can therefore have quite specific and varied cultural interpretations by different people. As physical places that cannot be occupied, horizons may connote future aspirations but also loss and separation. Visually complex horizons mesh and link earth and sky.

This visual stitching of earth and sky in design is often more desirable than abrupt separation because it can increase our enjoyment of the sky as part of a landscape. Paths are similarly often either enclosed by an edge or form part of the edge of a space. Foci may be located as visual sequential incidents along edges. Rugged edges are diverse and enclose sub-spaces as part of their form.

Smooth edges are simple, minimal and without sub-spaces. It is often desirable to juxtapose or combine both smooth and rugged edges in the different enclosing planes of a space. Smoothness has value in visual simplicity and continuity. Interlocking edges knit together the fabric of the landscape with overt physical texture. Smooth edges provide minimal visual and physical interlock and can be physical and perceptual barriers. Dramatic or abrupt physical separation between one space and another creates psychological and physical barriers in the landscape. Designing edges as barriers is an important design skill, but it is equally important to ensure that edges do not unintentionally act as barriers.

Edges provide opportunities for diversity and unity in their overall form through use of repeated textures, forms and colours to create rhythms and sequences along their length. These sub-spaces are small and intimate in character and can be adopted by small groups in public places for diverse social activities. Spurred edges can be naturalistic or geometric in form, or be combinations of both. They have the potential for incorporating plants and water.

Mown grass and built banks provide play environments for a wide range of age groups. Banks often become habitats for wild plants through lack of, or different, management approaches. If they are too steep, they can be uncomfortable places to sit for long periods of time. Ditches separate spaces through lower ground.

Often damp, watery and concealed places, they are attractive to children for play, hiding and for wildlife, but are less attractive to adults as places to stay. Ditches often signal their presence in the landscape through the strapped texture of rushes and reeds. These stepped edges often create positive social environments that are adopted by people for sitting, eating and drinking, as well as enabling access to the space they enclose.

Cliffs and chasms are of course barriers to easy movement and can therefore be alienating and disorientating for people. The texture and form of foliage and plants play important visual roles in interlocking and transitional edges. This ecotone incorporates changing species related to shade tolerance and competition.

The forest edge provides distinct habitats for flora and fauna. It is a place of visual richness and complexity for landscape experience. Fruit and birds thrive. It is a sheltered place to look out from and a place to look into dark forest space. The tree canopy demarcates and encloses a floor space below, especially in hot climates.

In temperate climates, avenues can be gloomy, damp and dripping edges. Formal hedges with indented and alcove forms encourage sitting and sheltering uses. Shrubs can be massed to provide niches within indented edges allowing people to sit among the scent, colour and texture of plants. With their associated texture, flowering colour and seasonal change meadow edges can provide dynamic visual counterpoint to simple smooth lawn or paved spaces. Meadow edges provide transitional gradients between lawn and forest or shrub edge.

They can provide a covered edge to important public spaces for people to sit, eat, talk and trade. Columns that enclose spaces have similar functions. The grand scale and vertical form of columns and colonnades provide a permanent and often theatrical character to spaces. They also provide niches for planting, sculpture or water.

Wall structures of this form are inherently very stable and often give the appearance of great permanence regardless of age. The place where land meets water is an important edge that attracts diverse and intense use, which the designer facilitates. Sandy beaches provide important recreational places, particularly for children.

Promenade describes a long broad edge for recreation and social activity; walking, talking, skating, exercising, taking in views of the sea and sky, and beach recreation. The design of seaside promenades is strongly constrained by local climate. Wetlands and marginal water places Wetlands on the edges of lakes and rivers provide important habitats for plants and wildlife.

The definition here includes landmarks but is not limited to referring to these. Foci describes both forms and places in the landscape that attract people or are visually dominant and distinctive — differentiated from their context. They are given attention in this section as important components of landscape design that affect the use and experience of landscapes. They have important relationships to spaces and paths in particular.

A framework for understanding the role of foci is given and examples of the use of topography, vegetation, structures and water to form foci are illustrated. As the definitions of the term suggest, foci mark places of cultural significance, help people to orient themselves and attract people as places of differentiation.

They have a very strong relationship with paths especially axial paths as goals. At a distance, foci draw the eye and inspire movement towards them. Natural foci such as single large statuesque old trees or rocky tors can take on cultural and spiritual significance and become places of pilgrimage, celebration and ceremony. Paths are then constructed to enable journeys to these foci. Foci may be created as destinations formed at the end of a path but also as sequential markers along a path.

They are often artworks or artefacts and therefore places for cultural and social events. Memorial sites and forms are also gathering places, as are places or forms considered to have spiritual significance. Centrality is an important theme in landscape architecture and can either be used or questioned. Centrality can suggest unity, self or hierarchy, symmetry and stasis.

Off-centre focal forms contribute to a different spatial sense, less hierarchical and more dynamic. For example, light marble sculptures are foci in dark green hedge niches and can be grouped into rhythmic sequences. As single forms on an edge, foci can be places to stop and sit, or may mark a gateway or threshold through to another space. Focal forms such as posts may be arranged to form a permeable edge and may also function as informal seating or waiting places anchors. If providing some distinctive or differentiated form or experience, spaces can act as foci in the landscape.

Examples of focal spaces are oases, glades or plateaus. In addition to its cultural and aesthetic intentions, sculpture may also provide orientation functions. Buildings play a central role as foci and landmarks in the landscape, especially if they are single isolated structures in natural, rural or predominantly vegetated environments. They therefore play important roles in helping people to find their way about and in the creation of mental maps of places. Foci also help people to better judge distance.

An important design task is to consider the scale of a focus in relation to its context and function. However, there are contexts in which a landscape form might exert a powerful attraction for people but be relatively inconspicuous. Examples of hidden foci include springs, hollows and subterranean tombs. In design, the creation and use of foci may often be as a counterpoint to dominant space characteristics.

In this way a flat smooth space may contain a contrasting strongly vertical focus with coarse texture. Smooth in rough places; rough in smooth; dark and light; bright and dull; warm and cool — these are all potential contrasting qualities between foci and their context. Vertical forms contrast with the prevailing and relative horizontal nature of many landscapes.

Islands are focal as relatively vertical forms within the flat plane of the sea, as are mounds and mounts in flat places see Foci — Topographic, p. In strongly vertical landscapes such as mountainous places, foci may contrast with forms of flatness or horizontality, or forms of even greater verticality. Equally, a form isolated from other forms can take on the visual and experiential functions of a focus.

The eye is drawn by their contrast with lower-lying topography and vertical emphasis. They can be used in design to attract users to a place. They can o Topographic foci o Foci be endpoints to journeys, central points or places to climb and overlook landscape and its activities. Bowls or craters provide distinctive microclimate and form in contrast to surrounding land. Natural topographic depressions may be modified for focal cultural functions such as theatre or the siting of sculpture.

Points and spurs o Topographic foci o Foci Spurs or spits of land attract people to journey out along their length to an endpoint. They can be constructed in places to provide walks and prospect over landscape and to form edges while providing distinctive focal endpoints in the form of buildings, spaces or sculptures.

Natural spurs are forms of inspiration for design. Glades contrast with the surrounding forest canopy and are also focal because they attract people. In contrast to the massing of plants as structural enclosing elements, focal vegetation treats plants as individual specimens. Specimen trees are selected for their intrinsic aesthetic qualities to be viewed in isolation or from a distance. Single trees conserved from rural landscapes, very old trees and distinctive urban trees can have tremendous presence.

People often develop strong attachments to trees of age and they therefore become or continue to be focal forms. They can be used to dramatise and accentuate high ground as silhouettes forming dark patterns against the sky. Tree rings become focal spaces enticing people to enter. In hot open spaces, tree groups are focal shady oases. Topiary forms may be contrasted with the texture and colour of other plants.

Topiary depicting other forms birds, vessels may attract because the care involved in clipping over time encapsulated in the form is appealing. Topiary forms on parterres punctuate the floor plane and draw the eye across it. Different types of built foci are illustrated on the following pages. They can contrast with or accentuate topography and can also dominate high places. They are commonly endpoints to axes of paths, water, vegetation, or terraces. Landscape and architecture can suffer when buildings are created as focal forms in inappropriate contexts.

Follies, theatrical structures and remnants Closely related to both sculpture and focal buildings, the concept of follies in the landscape remains appealing. However, follies also often require functions beyond the purely visual. Sculpture Sculpture often plays a focal role in the landscape.

Art attracts visitors so that any kind of sculpture becomes focal.

Sculpture can also be sited at places that are already focal. Land and environmental art can make o Built foci o Foci spaces or places that become focal. Focal sculptures may be permanent and built, or they may be temporary or dynamic using, for example, lighting technology or landscape elements of water, vegetation or climate. Fountains can also express power and wealth and control over natural environments.

In contemporary o Water foci o Foci urban environments, it is often inappropriate to create fountains that cannot be interacted with. In urban contexts their sound and the cooling properties of water can improve local microclimate, and thus attract people. Waterfalls are gathering places to stop, enjoy and picnic.

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Form and Fabric in Landscape Architecture provides an original, visual approach to the study of landscape architecture by creating a spatial morphology based. Form and Fabric in Landscape Architecture and millions of other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Foundations of Landscape Architecture: Integrating Form and Space Using. Catherine Dee is Senior Lecturer in Landscape Design, Department of Landscape, University of Sheffield.

Drinking water in focal places is a rare but desirable experience. Thresholds 6 Thresholds are spatial components of the landscape which provide for integrated, subtle and complex transitions through the landscape. Thresholds are included in this book because, like edges, their potential and necessity in design are often overlooked. In this section, the concept of thresholds is defined and illustrated examples are given of the use of topography, vegetation, structures and water in their formation.

They are places in which people wait, rest, anticipate, arrive and leave, greet, contemplate, o Thresholds change — they are places in which to acclimatise or prepare. A threshold can often provide visual and physical integration of the landscape if it possesses qualities of both the spaces it connects — the environment that is being left behind as well as the place being entered. Gateways may be actual gated or symbolic and mark the transition from one type of landscape or space to another. They signal arrival and, for this reason, can become focal places, particularly if the gateway structure has popular cultural meanings.

Gateway structures may be architectural buildings , sculptural, topographic or formed on a smaller scale with vegetation. These important spaces are often neglected by both architect and landscape architect, and are commonly either too small or too large and fail to cater for activities associated with arriving and leaving public or private buildings.

If well designed, building entrance places can be important social environments. They also play a significant role in integrating interior with exterior. Plinths, staircases, ramp structures, verandas, colonnade spaces are like edges hybrid architecture and landscape spaces, and should be designed in integrated ways to accommodate social and practical activity as well as cultural expression. From the tiny space associated with bus or tram stops to major exterior spaces associated with railway stations, these threshold places require consideration of all the social and practical functions associated with travel.

Journey thresholds are places to rest, wait, shelter, eat, to greet or say goodbye, to talk or read. Children are particularly important users of small incidental spaces. In design, threshold spaces are often integrated with edges to enable movement across or through the edge to connect spaces on either side.

They visually link one environment with another by connecting the frame with the framed. Earth and sky thresholds may be hilltop or mountain-top spaces, built platform spaces or tree top places. Passing between landforms or walking up and over topography and resting at the top or bottom creates a sense of arrival and separateness. Topography can obscure places beyond and thus create a feeling of anticipation.

Landform can be manipulated naturalistically or geometrically to signal arrival and entry. Landform gateways may also be symbolic, conveying something of the place they mark the entry to. As threshold spaces they should be generously proportioned to enable stopping, sitting and resting.

Landings act as more spacious places within staircases and as thresholds in their own right with similar purposes. Thresholds like these can be ornamented with water, vegetation and sculpture and therefore also become focal places. Trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants can be used to shape and form thresholds. Vegetation can play important structural roles at entrance places for example with symmetrical arrangements or enclosure by hedge forms. Scented plants may be exploited at gateways. Vegetation also plays important sensory roles in places of rest or calm.

Vegetation may be simple and cooling in transitional spaces to contrast with the brightness, complexity, built character and business of adjoining spaces. Or vegetation may make a threshold rich in comparison with its adjoining spaces. Plants are therefore frequently cultivated and trained to form gateways, arches and entrance pergolas. Green gateways herald the transition from street or square to garden or park or mark the transition between one garden space and another. Tree canopies or vegetation trained on pergolas form overhead or complete frames.

Design considerations for the form of built gateways include purpose, appropriate scale, context and materials. Materials and forms may be used to calm between or anticipate landscapes beyond. A change in paving can mark a threshold by defining a transitional space. In particular, paving changes in streets can signal building entrance thresholds.

Surface materials within a building can be extended into the landscape at entrance places and vice versa. Terrace spaces can bring inside out and outside in. They provide the opportunity to be simultaneously half on land and half on water.

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The desire to have prospect out over water or to recreate next to water is very strong, and water threshold spaces are therefore important in providing settings for human activities. On a large scale, harbours provide threshold spaces between sea and land. Water in rest and entrance places o Water thresholds o Thresholds Small waterbodies have many qualities that are desirable in threshold environments particularly in entrance and rest places.

Water can simultaneously calm and animate. It can suggest the promise of larger waterbodies beyond the threshold or be associated with symbolic or actual cleansing. It can make a place very light, or alternatively damp and cool in contrast to adjoining places, or provide drinking water. Crossing over a waterbody to enter a place marks a transition. It explores the potential in design to provide distinct experiences through attention to detail.

While previous sections have explored form and fabric at a larger or intermediate scale, this one considers surfaces, textures, light, ornament, furniture and colour at a small scale. This section is therefore not concerned with detailing in the sense of the design of landscape to implementation level. The aim is to evoke the sensory characteristics of landscape. As we get closer to landscape elements they create different impressions, and our appreciation of them changes.

Being able to touch, manipulate and interact with the landscape at an immediate scale is a very important part of landscape experience and appreciation. Children have a particularly close physical relationship with landscape surfaces and elements, not only because they are closer to the ground but because they investigate and learn about environments by touching and tasting. Detailed design and the senses Design thinking at a detailed level can be enhanced by considering all the sensory experiences: Sight is dominant in design thinking and we tend to underestimate the strength of influence of other senses on our experience of landscape.

Scents, tastes, sounds and tactile experiences all strongly influence how we feel about and use o Detail places. The non-visual senses are also dominant in evoking memories and associations, whether pleasurable or otherwise. Stimulation of different senses also affects social activity in public places. Pattern, texture, colour and light can be considered as primary abstract elements of design. Learning to manipulate and integrate these elements or qualities is an important part of design. On the following pages each of the elements is defined and some of their potential in design is summarised and illustrated.

Patterns enable people to identify or create order. They are visually rewarding in simultaneously possessing diversity and unity. Design generation of patterns in landscape architecture is influenced by geometry, natural forms and processes, together with patterns of use for example, agricultural patterns or social patterns of use. Texture o Detail Texture animates landscapes and enables people to connect what they see with their sense of touch.

As with pattern, texture provides unity and diversity in the surface of forms. Texture can be manipulated in scale from coarse to fine and be used in juxtaposition or in gradients from rough to smooth. Texture is intimately related to light and changes in light. Climatic considerations are essential when designing with colour. The designer considers palettes, how many different sorts of green there are, seasonal colour, strong and muted tones, drabness, garishness. The designer manipulates colour relationships. At night, inventive lighting can enliven places. During the day, climate and its effects on light should be studied, particularly when design forms are transposed from different parts of the world with different climates.

Furniture such as seating, bollards, lighting and litter bins can either clutter or unify designed places. Designing furniture specific to a site or context is desirable in providing distinct identity to places but is expensive. Seating should be provided everywhere in the landscape that people wait, meet, stay or socialise. One aim of seating design, particularly in public squares, is often to integrate it with other elements to avoid the forlorn appearance of many empty seats when not in use.

Sitting in the landscape enables more intimate contact with a place, especially through touch, because it provides the opportunity to pause and rest. Muted colours and texture in particular are paradoxically soft and hard because of the way light falls on them. The surface of rocks illustrates their formation process, for example, as seen in the sedimentary layers of sandstone. Rock therefore gives an intriguing sense of both permanence and change. Feeling rock is like touching the bones of the earth. Running sand through fingers makes us acutely aware of time and process, or it can just feel pleasant.

Rock is hard underfoot. Sand and earth are giving. Stone surfaces clatter with hard-soled boots and hoofs. Stone and earth are sound barriers. Rock and earth smell when damp, but not so much when dry unless dust is raised. Earth smells are very distinctive and rely on close contact with ground.

Humus-rich soils have sweet rich scents. The smell of damp stone can be either attractive or unattractive. Plants change in habit, texture and form over time as they grow and change according to season in temperate climates. Plants are also dynamic in character as they move in the wind. Plants are exploited for their particular visual qualities, dense twiggy form, arching slender growth, scarlet stems or icy blossom. Robust landscapes regenerate easily when people are allowed to pick plants. Designers should play with touch, creating thorny, spiky, feathered, sappy, glossy, waxy combinations.

Sounds are heightened through closed eyes. Birds and cicadas sing from trees. All parts of a plant smell. We are keenly tuned to this in an evolutionary way. Plant scents vary, acrid to sweet, sickly, fruity, musky. People touch plants to emit their scent more strongly. To prevent the unintentional vandalism of plants or because maintenance requirements are too onerous? The enormous pleasure of eating from and in the landscape means that edible plants should always be a consideration in design.

Encourage touching to extend appreciation and connectedness to place. Exploit the tactile properties of materials. Concrete is unforgiving to the touch. Stone is less so although perhaps only through association. Glass is cool, slippery, shiny. Stainless steels are icy. Structures can resonate through movement in wind or from objects projected against them.

Structures reflect Many structures have little scent. Smells are dispersed in landscape. New timber and certain woods can scent the air. Tar and bitumen, hot pavements and rusting metal have distinctive redolence. Extremes of dark and light can be manipulated. Textural extremes of movement and stillness dramatise. Rhythm, ripple and the flash of dragonflies animate. Still water is a mirror to sky, plants, people and birds. The roar and splash of fast-moving water exhilarates and masks other sounds in cities.

Bird sounds echo over water surfaces. People love to make sound with water. Ice reverberates to stones skimmed on frozen lakes or crackles underfoot in glassy puddles. Touch o Water detail o Detail Water cools on touch. Assume that people will want to touch with hands and bare feet or bathe. Allow for wading against the drag of rushing water or being drenched by fountains. Rain on the face need not be unpleasant. Allow for dangling feet, sliding on slippery green stones and drying feet in sun on rocks. The salt of sea air, stagnancy or freshness. Mist and rain make landscape smell very different to sunny weather.

Water changes the taste of air. Being able to drink from water in landscapes is too rare a pleasure. The bibliography below lists only literature cited. The further reading list below is comprised of books which have most informed Form and Fabric in Landscape Architecture but are not specifically referenced in the bibliography.

Responsive Environments, London, Architectural Press, The Experience of Nature: The Image of the City, Cambridge Mass. Further reading Alexander, C. The following list indicates the sources and authors of photographs and plans on which drawings have been based. The authors of paintings and other artworks on which drawings have been based are indicated in the hand-written captions for the illustrations.

Dethier, Down to Earth: Mud Architecture, London, Thames and Hudson, , p. Landscape of Man, London, Thames and Hudson, , p. Street and Square, 2nd edition, Oxford, Architectural Press, , p. Landscape of Man, London, Thames and Hudson, , pp. Architecture and Water, London, Architectural Press, , p.

Crowe, Sylvia and Mitchell, M. Photograph by Dave Paterson in J. Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond: Andreas Feininger, Morgan and Morgan, , p. Adams, Ansel and Newhall, Nancy. Photograph by Norman F. Dodge Corporation, , p. Form and fabric in landscape architecture: Architecture, Form, Space and Order. Form, Space, and Order. Landscape Architecture Magazine Best Practice in Detailing.

The Fundamentals of Landscape Architecture. Dictionary of Landscape Architecture and Construction. Form, Space, and Order, 3rd Edition. Ecology, Community and Delight: Sources of Values in Landscape Architecture. Understanding Architecture Through Drawing. Virtuality and the Art of Exhibition. The Crucible of Language. Teaching Art and Design New Directions in Ceramics.

Craft Perception and Practice. New Pop-Up Paper Projects. Early Humans and Their World. The New Learning Environments. The Less Is More Garden. Places of the Soul. Remote Performances in Nature and Architecture. Basics Landscape Architecture The Objects of Experience. Animal Housing and Human—Animal Relations. Transforming Parks and Protected Areas. Art in the Primary School. Elements of Visual Design in the Landscape. Professional Practice for Landscape Architects. Introduction to Residential Layout. Field Sketching and the Experience of Landscape. Women, Modernity, and Landscape Architecture.

Ecology and the Architectural Imagination. The Routledge Companion to Landscape Studies. Pattern, Perception and Process. Art in the Early Years. How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long. The title should be at least 4 characters long. Your display name should be at least 2 characters long. At Kobo, we try to ensure that published reviews do not contain rude or profane language, spoilers, or any of our reviewer's personal information. You submitted the following rating and review.