1st Edition

Reciprocal Landscapes Stories of Material Movements

By Jane Hutton Copyright 2020
250 Pages 124 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

250 Pages 124 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

How are the far-away, invisible landscapes where materials come from related to the highly visible, urban landscapes where those same materials are installed? Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements traces five everyday landscape construction materials – fertilizer, stone, steel, trees, and wood – from seminal public landscapes in New York City, back to where they came from.... Read more

Introduction

Chapter 1. Inexhaustible Terrain: Guano from the Chincha Islands, Peru to Central Park, 1862

Chapter 2. Range of Motions: Granite from Vinalhaven, Maine to Broadway, 1892

Chapter 3. Rivers of Steel: Steel from Pittsburgh to Riverside Park, 1937

Chapter 4. Breathing with Trees: London Plane Trees from Rikers Island to 7th Avenue, 1959

Chapter 5. Arresting Decay: Tropical Hardwood from Para, Brazil to the High Line, 2009

Epilogue

Biography

Jane Hutton is a landscape architect and teacher whose research looks at the expanded relations of material practice in design, examining linkages between the sources and construction sites of common building materials. Hutton is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo.

"Reciprocal Landscapes shows us what matters about landscape by revealing what matter is doing in it – where it came from, why it was taken, and how it was extracted, worked, fought over, and transported. Original in conception, rigorous in execution, Hutton’s book is nothing less than a brilliant synthesis of materialisms ‘historical’ and ‘new’; an incisive model for the critical analysis of landscape." – Douglas Spencer, Director of Graduate Education and Associate Professor, Iowa State University, USA