Hasta La Ideas

Working at the interface of landscape and architecture, nature and culture, public and private, Diana Balmori continues to blur the boundaries with innovative green roofs, floating islands, and temporary landscapes that get people talking in more ways than one. In A Landscape Manifesto (Yale University Press), Balmori described her interest in “shaping spaces…not objects within the landscape,” and her new book, Groundwork: Between Landscape and Architecture (Monacelli), presents 25 projects that mark exciting points of innovation along the building/environment continuum. Co-written with architect Joel Sanders, an associate professor at Yale, Groundwork examines how the likes of Zaha Hadid, Snøhetta, and Aranda/Lasch are linking indoors and outdoors, around the world. “Many books about landscape romanticize nature as a universal palliative and bid designers to consult the ‘genius of place.’ This is not one of them,” write Balmori and Sanders in the book’s preface. “Instead it is an appeal to designers to pursue a new approach that overcomes the false dichotomy between architecture and landscape.”

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